Shipping Industry

The perfect storm that has been buffeting the shipping industry—overcapacity, consolidation, stagnating revenues, and declining profitability—is intensifying. Today’s new reality has ratcheted up the existing threats:

• Uncertainty is further hampering demand and escalating trade volatility.
• Digital technology and innovative business models threaten to disrupt the entire shipping industry, and incumbents in particular.
• Climate change, which looms on the horizon, will accelerate these competitive forces and heighten cost pressures.

To ensure their long-term survival, shipping companies must undertake a transformation that digitizes business and fleet operations and prioritizes climate action. Working in partnership with our shipping consultants, they can devise new offerings and new ways of working within and along the transportation and logistics value chain to gain efficiencies, reduce emissions, save costs, and serve new markets and customers.

• Bottom-Line Improvements.Our shipping consultants help companies examine and make investments that will secure them a more financially and environmentally sustainable future. For example, we help analyze the bottom-line impact of scrubbing technologies that bring high-sulfur fuels into compliance with IMO 2020 and of alternative fuels that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Regulatory Requirements. Ports are also under renewed pressure to become carbon-free, reduce noise, and embrace electrification.
• Top-Line Growth. Beyond government regulations, shippers and ports alike face a mandate from customers, many of which seek emissions data as part of their requests for tenders. The companies that deliver environmentally sustainable offerings stand to capture not only new markets and customer segments but price premiums as well.

Our shipping strategy team helps shipping companies and ports transform their organizations to reduce emissions, win on new sustainability metrics, and thrive in this new environment.

Featured Client Work in the Shipping Industry

Developing Sustainable Fuel Production with a Denmark Collaborative. We have joined forces with several Danish transportation and logistics companies, the Danish government, and Danish-based engineering consulting firm COWI in a partnership to develop a new hydrogen and e-fuel production facility in Copenhagen. The facility could deliver more than 250,000 tons of sustainable fuel for buses, trucks, maritime vessels, and airplanes every year.

Building a Predictive Maintenance Capability with a Large International Shipping Company. By installing monitoring sensors in its control systems and engine rooms, the company boosted the reliability of its fleet and cut maintenance costs.

Turning Around a Container Shipper. A container company had consistently been among the least profitable in the industry. We helped implement a transformation program, optimize trade coverage, redesign the sales organization, and identify significant cost-cutting opportunities. By the second year of the effort, the company’s earnings before interest and taxes had risen above the market average.