The Baltic Exchange says the production of its freight indexes has largely escaped any disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our business continuity plan was put in place prior to this beginning, so when all the staff were sent home it was pretty seamless,” chief executive Mark Jackson said.
“The panellists themselves all work for quite large shipbroking companies, who themselves had good business continuity plans in place.”
Jackson made the remarks during a presentation on index production as part of the Singapore Exchange (SGX)'s Commodities Unplugged series of webinars.
While there had been no interruption to the provision of “accurate and timely data”, he did admit that the production process did “take a little bit longer”.
He said this mainly revolved around discussions between the Baltic Exchange’s freight team and the various panellists.
“Before the freight team would be able to ring a panellist on a desk, get passed to somebody else or call out to somebody,” he said.
“Now they have to make personal one-to-one calls and that panellist might be busy at the time of they might be on another call.
“The whole process of checking does now take a bit longer, so the team is working longer hours. They are maybe starting the lead times half an hour earlier.”
In mid-March, the Baltic Exchange said it was adjusting working arrangements at its London office to ensure continuity of service in the face of the coronavirus situation in the UK.
The move followed similar precautions that were carried out in the Baltic’s Singapore office, which had been in place since 10 February 2020.
Jackson said one of the concerns had been whether there would be some disruption at ports and the impact that might have on freight index production.
“I think the worry would have been if we had started to see some of the ports closing and therefore some of our routes being affected because the actual trade pattern was being disrupted, but that didn’t actually happen,” he said.
