Working together is a leap of faith for future possibilities

Collaboration has become the watchword when it comes to decarbonisation but its benefit can be put at risk if the individual parties are focused on what is in it for them.

Christian Ingerslev, CEO of Maersk Tankers, speaking on the CEO panel at the Accelerating Decarbonisation session at Singapore Maritime Week, noting that the word most commonly heard on such panels is “collaboration”, but threw out the Ask what it really means.

Ingerslev said working with Maersk Tankers does three things, all related to scale.

“In some situations, as a company, we have the right people to drive the scale and drive the agenda. In other situations we are the right people to contribute on a large scale. And in some situations where the right people raise our voices to address issues, the industry matters,” he explained.

However, individual parties cannot work together with the specific goal of winning something for their company.

“I think the biggest risk of working together is that everyone sits down and asks, ‘What’s in it for me?’ But the reality is that there are so many business opportunities and decompensations that you don’t have to worry about them. Working together means taking that leap of faith, stepping forward and not worrying about what happens to you today, but seeing the possibilities that lie ahead in the future.”

Ingerslev said that as a private company owned by the AP Moller Foundation, Maersk Tankers was fortunate not to be judged in the way a publicly traded company might be last quarter, and instead the question is how to be relevant for the next can stay 50 years.

The collaboration also involves sharing data to create the scale required, which Ingerslev noted there was a reluctance. With around 10,000 tankers in the world and the average shipowner owning just 3.8 tankers, he said: “I’m sorry to say that all of our company’s individual data is worthless unless we put it together. It feels a bit like every individual is saying I’m not going to shop on Amazon because then they’ll get my data.

Source: News Network