Anyone attending the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum in Hamburg would have been immediately struck by how the German shipping industry has changed.
A few years ago, such gatherings were populated by a splattering of KG (limited partnership) managers and tens of shipping bankers.
It is a sign of the times that their numbers were exceeded by ex-shipping bankers in new roles last week — and that is a trend that looks irreversible.
Barely had the cocktail reception ended when Germany’s last state-owned ship financier, Nord/LB, unveiled it too was to close its ship-finance desk.
Tapping into this zeitgeist of German ship finance was Klaus Stoltenberg, the former chairman of Deutsche Bank’s global shipping desk, who now has his own advisory, FRAN Ships.
In an onstage interview with TradeWinds editor-in-chief Julian Bray, Stoltenberg said German shipping banks had made “an incredible adjustment”.
But while those banks once had around $106bn of business, they would struggle to get more than one-third of that in future.
“There’s no doubt we see a massive change in ship finance in Germany,” he said.
Stoltenberg hoped banks would not forget the mistakes of the past and alluded to the disbelief of a younger generation of bankers.
So what happened when the next generation heard stories of how banking was conducted in the past? “They just laugh,” he said.
