BCG’s international shipping consulting team helps shipping lines and port operators take on new and longtime challenges to emerge leaner, cleaner, and more profitable.
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:
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 BCG, 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.
BCG’s 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.
Developing Sustainable Fuel Production with a Denmark Collaborative. BCG has 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.
Carriers that approach a digital transformation with the right ambition, resources, and scale can achieve a step change in their digital capabilities within 18 months.
When the crisis finally ends, companies’ transportation and logistics’ needs will be forever changed. Through agility and adaptiveness, a transportation and logistics player can enhance its ability to be among the winners in the transformed industry.
Ports must adopt connected technologies that help stakeholders coordinate and collaborate to boost productivity, cut costs, and gain a competitive edge.
The very same obstacles relating to coordination and trust that the technology would help the industry to overcome are impeding blockchain’s adoption.
