Teekay director of business development, Matthew Blake, has a strong warning for shipbrokers: shape up or ship out.
Blake - who took part in the tanker panel at the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum held in Singapore - did not hold back in his criticism of tanker chartering brokers.
He says they are claiming credit for driving down spot rates.
Blake suggests that shipowners might show greater interest in fixing out their ships via online trading platforms if they did not feel that brokers were working in the interests of their shipowning clients.
“Unless a broker can prove that they add value to a spot deal there will be a move to online platforms. Recently they haven’t been doing that, at least not consistently,” he said.
Brokers would probably respond to Blake’s claim by suggesting the rampant over-ordering of tanker tonnage by shipowners that has lead to a serious over-capacity problem is greater cause of the dismal spot rates in the VLCC sector.
Other participants on the tanker panel readily admitted that the oversupply of crude tankers, combined with OPEC cuts and the siphoning off of cargoes by new pipelines, with the China-Myanmar pipeline mentioned in particular, had recently dampened the performance of the tanker industry.
Lars Malmbratt, Stena Bulk’s general manager in Singapore suggested that psychology was also playing a strong role.
“”So many ships are coming out of the yards and owners are panicking,” he explained.
Blake himself conceded that what was really needed was for OPEC to flick all of its switches to open.
