“The crisis is just temporary“

According to London-based Clarkson Research, investment in new ships totalled some USD 90 billion last year. Although far less than in the record-setting year of 2007, it is still an enormous sum that shipping companies cannot manage by themselves.
As both equity capital from investors and debt capital from banks are increasingly difficult to obtain, ship financing is one of the main topics at SMM – not only at the SMM Ship Finance Forum, held on Monday on the eve of the trade fair, but also every day on the SMM fairground. “We believe the crisis in the industry to be a temporary phenomenon, as it has always been in the past,“ Ingmar Loges, head of Shipping International at Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank AG, told SMM Daily News. “We remain confident that shipping’s long-term future prospects due to globalisation are intact. Therefore we’re expressly committed to our role as a long-term, reliable partner of the maritime industry.”
At a press conference last week, HSH Nordbank announced that it had no intention of withdrawing from the ship financing business – even if the shipping crisis dragged on and hit the bank harder than expected. “Partly because of the continued high price of oil and weakness of the euro, we believe we won’t see the bottom of the industry cycle for another 12 to 18 months,” Loges remarked. “So we’re less optimistic than at the beginning of the year.” He said he now expected a recovery in cargo rates, time charter rates and ship prices no sooner than the end of 2013.