MAP Insights: Shipping Prepares For A More Competitive World

MAP analysed for industry body Danish Shipping the potentially significant impacts of a fragmenting, competitive and volatile global macro environment for the European and Danish shipping industries.

Shipping companies face a shifting global opportunity and risk set as global goods and capital flows adjust to prioritise resilience over efficiency; government recognition of shipping’s strategic importance raises the prospect of both additional support and new market access restrictions; and more frequent geopolitical shocks and rising tensions increasingly threaten the public good of freedom of navigation. 

Meanwhile, both digital technologies and green fuels create new vectors for competition over the manufacturing, ownership, maintenance and operation of the assets and infrastructure necessary to the transformation of the industry.

Shipping has long been a critical strategic industry. It is now also an industry that is being instrumentalised in new ways as the Trump administration pursues numerous measures intended to reinvigorate US shipbuilding and guard against Chinese national security threats. The US will face extremely high barriers to indigenising commercial ship production at any scale – but the flurry of shipping-related policy proposals early in the Trump administration shows that policymakers are increasingly concerned about Chinese dominance of key industry nodes. Should the US go ahead with levying operators with Chinese ships in their fleets in the coming months, the weaponisation of the industry will be difficult to reverse.