Ioannis Martinos, the Greek shipowner who branched out from his family’s Thenamaris group to develop an online chartering platform, Signal Ocean, is launching the service in Singapore this week in a bid to break into Asia.
The platform, which is already used by operators responsible for 50% of big tanker spot fixtures, according to Martinos, extracts information from fixture reports and tonnage-list emails, and combines it with publicly available data to provide a single commercial view of the market.
Signal Ocean is the product that draws on more than a decade of work.
Product development
After studying mechanical aerospace engineering, Martinos spent about 10 years at Thenamaris before starting to blend his talents and experience to come up with technology that the family tanker-management company wanted.
“We created the platform initially for ourselves,” he told TradeWinds. “And it turns out that what we needed as commercial operators was close to what charterers needed.
“We are not trying to disrupt shipping in the same way Uber tried to disrupt the taxi business.
“People in the shipping industry are allergic to the idea of everyone having the same information, because the way you make your living is finding your niche.”
Signal Ocean does not provide the same market data to its clients, Martinos explained.
“It is more like an engine where everyone can put in their own information and that gets blended with some public information — and helps them get their own view of the world,” Martinos said.
It means owners and charters can operate in the same way as they already do, based on the information they have to hand and their market thinking, he said.
“But by bringing all the data together, it makes decisions much easier to take,” he said.
Posidonia launch
Following an initial launch at Posidonia in the summer, Martinos says about 50 companies — mainly owners and charterers — are already using Signal Ocean.
“Already 50% of large spot-traded tankers are represented by companies using the platform,” he said.
Signal Ocean’s current clients are mainly operators in the aframax, suezmax and VLCC markets. It is also being used by Signal Maritime for an aframax pool venture.
A dry cargo version and system tweaked for brokers are in the development and testing stages.
“If you want to respect the market structure, it makes developing the software at least an order of magnitude more difficult,” Martinos said of developing the systems.
That is why Signal Ocean has taken four years to come to market.
