Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd bosses disagree on structural change

[gentle music] Hello and welcome to this week's Wavelength Podcast.

This is the Maritime News Podcast from the editorial team at TradeWinds, one of the leading industry news outlets.

I'm Craig Eason, and in this week's episode, is it structural change or just market rumblings? Two of the major container lines have reported their earnings for the first half of this year, and the talk turns to potential structural shifts.

Although both bosses, Vincent Clerc from Maersk and Rolf Habben Jansen from Hapag-Lloyd, seem to have differing views on whether this is big change coming or not.

And also we hear from one of the darlings of the shipping digital change, Zero North.

This is the spinoff from Maersk Tankers that secured hefty industrial backers and investment, went on an acquisition spree, but has now launched the first of what it says will be a number of new agentic AI artificial intelligence tools for shipping people.

We hear from Zero North's new boss, Søren Andersen, about the future of digital vessel management and AI.

And we're off to one of the lesser-known corners of the maritime world, Brunei Darussalam on Borneo.

Our correspondent, Ra-ching Ma, was invited to Brunei's capital of Bandar Seri Begawan for a maritime meetup.

Brunei, it's not known as a shipping hub, but it has got aspirations, notably in ship-to-ship transfers [upbeat music]