2026 18th Annual Capital Link Shipping & Marine Services Forum | Multi- Sector Investing

very good well apparently according to dr martin stopford we're on a sitting on a pile all sitting on a pile of cash so hopefully a lot of our our own money to to turn to turn a little bit towards uh the topic of uh consolidation versus specialization christian uh the shipping industry has for decades you know you come to conferences like this and it's all about consolidation consolidation Yet we see that there is still some fragmentation in the market.

Is it because we haven't consolidated enough? Is it because there's a specific advantage to specialization over consolidation? Or is it horses for courses? I

think consolidation in shipping happens when there is a network effect to capture, right? And container shipping is a fairly good example for that.

If you look back 30 years, the top 10 liner companies had a market share of around 30%.

Fast forward to today, the top 10 liner companies control 85% of the market.

So there's a massive consolidation happening in our sector.

And rightly so, because essentially boxes need a network.

If you don't have these network effects like in most other shipping sectors, obviously there is hardly any consolidation because it's not really needed.

The question is, what does it mean for companies like us? If you are a tonnage provider, you have to adjust to that reality and you have to grow in size as well.

You have to be visible for certain projects.

You have to be the compelling partner for the liner companies, which essentially means that you have to have a very clear, distinct profile in order to be allowed to participate in new building tenders, in retrofits projects together with the liner operators or in package transactions, which usually involve more than two or three ships.

That's also the reason why the average owner of container ships is quite a bit larger than the average owner of dry bike carriers, for example.

And one of the drivers behind all this is obviously that in container shipping, the structure is just different, right? If the market of none of these say big liners needs your vessel, then you're idle.

You cannot buy yourself into employment like what you could do in dry, for example, or find cargo yourself.

You're stuck then.

So there is a degree why it is very, very relevant in some sectors.

And for us at Consultation, I mentioned the numbers is very obvious.

John, your Erasmus does across multi-classes, investments in tonnage across multi-classes.

Is there a benefit to specialisation over working across a kind of more broad-based approach that you think that, you know, the market is trending towards, or is it indeed trending towards a more broad-based approach?

Thanks for the question.

I think I totally agree with what Christine mentioned.

But there's certainly business segments, features differences between container, especially the liner, business which is highly monopolized business so of course the consolidation going on its main purpose behind is really for the market shares and it's not to really kill the competitors but it's really controlling more resources market uh market share not only on the technologies and services but also including terminals all the facilities as part of the whole supply chain values that can somehow influence and unlike like the largest as christian said not only the top 10 even the number one now controlling soon 25 of the whole market on liner business and whole liner market let alone all the terminals and all the related logistics facilities well on the brokers on the others I think will be really very difficult there's no any other bulk owners can really playing a dominating position no any or the top 10 there's they are not there's no maybe no statistics about on that how much market share on the brokers even larger capesize brokers maybe 20 30 years ago that happened once or twice in the market history that capesize owner dominated the market for certain short moment Nowadays it's so much frustrated, even IO business, there are three or four major suppliers of the market now, but still it's relatively fragmented.

It's difficult to say.

In Erasmus Group, our own case, honestly, on a small LPG gas sector that we have invested in over the last five, seven years, We are actually one of the largest owners of the small sectors.

I mean, this coaster fully pressurized LPG gas carriers between 5000 under 75.