Singapore Maritime Week 2024: Capt. Hari Subramaniam, Shipowners' Club

Yes, there's a lot of common synergy between what the Shipowners' Club does as a P&I club, insuring over 35,000 ships, and the Nautical Institute as a global organization with representation in many countries, mainly for training and development of seafarers. I think the main thing that comes to my mind, and it reverberates quite well, is stakeholder satisfaction. I want to draw the line: it's not customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction means just a show and tell for the customer, but it should be for the entire industry. That's what the club does and that's what the Nautical Institute does. It's all about the whole ecosystem; all the players must benefit from this. So we take a lot of time in research and development, come up with strategies, projects, so that all levels of shipping benefit from the new drive of digitalization, decarbonization, and many new technologies. Not everyone has the funds or access to research, but that's what we should try to do: make it a level playing field for everyone.

I think it's safe to say that definitely we are on the right track from where we were many years ago, with technology, reporting systems, and regulatory instruments coming forward. We can see that claims have two aspects: it could be in numbers or in quantum or impact, how high level or low level. We see more claims now because reporting is more, but we should say that quite a large scale of them are lower-level impact. It's something we're working towards; it won't be perfect. Shipping is such a dynamic industry with so many working parts and external factors that we will have claims. But the key element is the seafarers. While everybody likes to kind of attribute blame to the seafarer element, from where I stand, seafarers do a magnificent job in making sure that it's only 70 or 80%? It could be much more, but the attention paid by seafarers makes a lot of difference. So well done to our seafarers.

That's a good one. What I would like to change definitely is the image of shipping. It's not what it used to be. It was quite a glorious profession, and for many factors, it has come to something where it's not even among the top 10 professions. Many people haven't even heard of shipping as a profession. We need to change that. It's unfortunate we only make the news and headlines when something goes wrong, and that starts everything on a negative note. I think we shouldn't be playing catch-up; it should be the other way around. We need to make the point that shipping is important because during COVID, when everything else was grounded, this was the only lifeline that ensured all of us had our refrigerators stocked up, we could do our shopping, and it was more or less business as usual because our seafarers were sacrificing to make sure we were comfortable. We shouldn't lose sight of that. In fact, we should recognize that we tend to take those things for granted. If somebody goes to a supermarket and picks up a product and says, 'Wow, this is made in the USA' and you're in Singapore, it should occur that it probably had a bit of a journey to make sure you are able to enjoy this product. So spare a thought for the seafarers; that would be the key line.

Yeah, the wish list would be, now with evolving technology in terms of digitalization and decarbonization, there's so much necessity for training. Training has to go to a different level. But the wish list, I would say in one word, would be collaboration. It goes back to the first point of stakeholder satisfaction, where everybody comes together and makes sure that it's available. If it comes down to ammonia training, for example, not everybody has that expertise. Soon it has to be the experts who get together and make sure it comes to everybody else. That's the most important thing. Working together is the way we will be able to tide over this change in the industry at the moment.