Infospectrum Insights

With so many of us working from home, it can be difficult to share best practice amongst colleagues, and we have seen an increase in requests from our users about how best to use Infospectrum's services.  While each client we have uses our products in a different way, we are keen for our clients to get the maximum benefit from the relationship.

Here is a "top five", for starters:

Shipping is a people business. Isn’t it? So, lock down should have been a disaster. So many parts of so many industries have been tested in the recent months of lock down, and shipping does feel that it has had its standard operating models tested considerably, but not necessarily in the ways one might have expected.

Ask any free-market economist’s opinion of cartelisation, and you are likely to receive a frosty and disapproving answer. Cartels exist, so the theory goes, to protect the interests of powerful producers of a commodity, at the expense and detriment of lowly and embattled consumers. It’s a well-known argument, which rests upon assumptions that a cartel manipulates supply in order to support prices for its members, and carves up the market so that end-users are deprived of choice. In short, cartels are bad, bad, bad.

Back in the golden days of working from offices, there was apparently a thing known as “my word is my bond”.

This month we caught up with Luciano Mezzalira, Senior Analyst at Infospectrum’s Oxford office, who has been a mainstay of Infospectrum's Americas team since 2006.

You only have to look at the headlines of the last few weeks to know that the current market conditions represent a perfect storm for those concerned about compliance. How does an industry which has always worked around the edges of the possible (and occasionally the legal) find a way through?

It’s reporting season again, a time when nerds such as ourselves get excited about seeing whether estimations about last year’s performance of the companies we cover were accurate, and finding that extra nugget of information buried in note 148b. However, 2019 has brought with it challenges which may undermine the value of past financials.

This month, we spent some time with Wanting Huang, Senior Analyst at Infospectrum’s Singapore office, who shared what she gets up to on a typical day and why she enjoys being a member of the Infospectrum team.

We've covered the impact of the recent dry bulk market movements on the operating sector in our recent article, but there are some market participants whose model ensures money is made in any market by walking away from commitments.

This month, we spoke with Simon Hasslacher, Senior Analyst at Infospectrum’s Americas office, to learn more about how his shipping career began and what he gets up to outside of work.