Widdows urges fuel-efficient vessel orders

Widdows

   Rickmers Holding Chief Executive and former NOL President and Chief Executive Officer Ron Widdows said shipping lines need to look squarely at ordering ships with better fuel efficiency in a recent interview with Singapore’s Business Times.
   Widdows, who left Singapore-based NOL last year, downplayed the idea that liner carriers have ordered too many ships.
   “Despite people thinking there are too many assets (ships) already, there will be a need for more,” Widdows said. “The fact that the industry has too many ships is not the issue. It needs different ships. Anything that comes on this year are of the older design and so are much more costly to operate.”
   He said ships ordered two years ago or before came at a time when shipyards were at their busiest and churned out standardized designs that focused on speed, not fuel conservation.”
   “The rate environment is the rate environment – a shipping company can do nothing about that,” he said in the interview. “The cost of fuel and fuel price volatility is another thing they can’t help. What they can help is an asset that uses a lot less fuel. Unfortunately, those animals don’t yet exist in the water. They were just ordered recently and the first ones will start coming on in 2013.”
   He pegged the fuel savings from the more efficient designs at 25 to 40 percent over existing vessels.
   “You now have a strange environment where shipyards will build you the ship you want,” Widdows told the Business Times. “Asset prices are very low, shipyards are not real busy so you can bring ships to market more rapidly than you could before.”