Columbia Shipmanagement boss Mark O’Neil believes the Covid-19 crisis is a time to forge new working relationships that could last beyond the pandemic.
In March, Columbia revealed it was working with rival shipmanagers to help one another with providing services where they each had capability.
This involved Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, Synergy and Peter Dohle initially, with ADNOC and the d’Amico group following.
O’Neil told TradeWinds that more companies are now involved, without naming names.
“It’s a significant number, but what we didn’t want is for it to become too big and unwieldy and you lose the very purpose of what you were trying to achieve,” he said. “So it’s still under 10, but that’s by choice rather than by design.”
He is sure many other companies would like to get involved, and others in shipping are doing similar things in other partnerships.
“We haven’t got a monopoly on solidarity. I think there’s been a number of really good relationships forged out of that initiative, and who knows, some of these relationships may go on to bigger and better things in the future. You just don’t know. I think it’s nice to see,” he said.
“We made a mistake in 2008 not coming together enough, and I think in this Covid crisis we are seeing a much greater willingness of companies to help each other out and help the crews out.”
The genesis of the idea was Columbia beginning to think about what it would do if travel was shut down globally.
It analysed how it would be able to get technical and marine superintendents out to ships, and wondered how services could be localised.
“We’ve got to take some positive out of this. We don’t want to look at this whole Covid-19 period as a lost time, but to see what can we take out of it,” O’Neil said.
