（Introduction）
AXSMarine (with its headquarters in Paris) will integrate chartering data with its technology to drive the digitization of “pre-fixing.” Pre-fixing refers to a contract wherein the owner of a vessel or cargo reserves a specific vessel for a defined period, ensuring consistent freight rates and services. With the swift evolution of digital transformation (DX) in market forecasting and chartering activities within the shipping industry, how does AXSMarine plan to enhance its IT solution services for shipping? We sat with Sam Goh, Senior Sales Manager, and Rachel Ang, Accounting Manager, for an interview. (Interviewer: Hirofumi Yamamoto)
■DX for Maritime business
1)Would you explain AXSMarine outline?
“AXSMaritime was founded in the year 2000. What were your objectives when you founded the company, what did you and your team want to achieve?
Pre-fixture (aka ship chartering) activity involves large amounts of information which is traded or exchaned over emails, chats, phone calls and face-to-face. Dynamic information such as cargo and TC orders, open ship positions and port DAs were traditionally manually maintained on excel sheets or recorded by hand. The process was laborious, prone to human errors, and less efficient for collaborative working and it still required a lot of people interaction. Considering time is of the essence in shipping, these processes and workflows had to be improved.”
“During the dotcom boom, it was made clear at that time the world was heading towards a digital era. AXSMarine was formed then to drive the digitalisation of the pre-fixture space by combining technology with our domain expertise in ship chartering and data, we committed ourselves to provide solutions to real problems to make the people driving the pre-fixing process more efficient. AXSMarine objective has always been about connecting the shipping community – in a digital way through our user tool and our data.”
“Our first keystone product powered by our proprietary data was the Drybulk voyage estimator and freight matrix – tools which allowed users to make a quick and accurate assessment of potential voyage businesses. Our voyage estimator tool replaced the traditional time-consuming ways of estimation of inputting data manually into excel or manual calculations.”
“Followed soon-thereafter with tools to automatically store and find open ship positions matching a cargo requirement and a tool to store market orders and find matching ships.
Over the years we have added many user tools to facilitate end-to-end ship chartering workflow. From voyage estimation, AIS data integration and parsing data from emails, to trade flows and analytics, we adopt the latest technology to help our clients make better informed decisions in a timely manner. “
2) Your company has entered into partnerships with Next Voyage partnership in 2023 and Baltic Exchange in 2022.What positive aspects have these partnerships brought to your company?
“The partnership with Baltic Exchange provides their indices within AXSMarine platform, so our mutual clients can benefit from accessing data from a single platform. There are also opportunities which benefit the Baltic Exchange whereby our existing clients can subscribe to Baltic Exchange data directly through AXSMarine. “
“Our investment in NextVoyage is just the first step of collaboration between our companies. We will both maintain independent operations, while working closely to deliver the best-in-class tools and data sets to avoid multiple repetitive workflows that are cost inefficient and error-prone.”
“Our mutual efforts with Nextvoyage will reduce manual actions and corrections, while providing the right data at the right time and in the right context. Informed and real-time decision making will deliver a new competitive edge for our mutual clients across the platforms.”
3) In the area of ship solutions IT there are shipping companies such as Torvald Klaveness, Maersk and various information service providers such as NAPA, Chartworld, Marine Traffic, etc.? What are the most different aspects and strengths of AXSMarine compared to other information service providers?
“In the maritime solutions landscape, AXSMarine caters to the pre-fixture and market intelligence segments where we help revenue-making departments make better decisions. While we do not provide operational solutions to shipping companies, we incorporate operational data into our methodologies which has proven to be very-close-to-actual and reliable. “
“Our strength lies in our laser sharp focus on our core expertise in the pre-fixtures segment. A combination of our strong foundational understanding of the industry and regular conversations with our clients help us develop fit-for-purpose solutions.”
“The shipping cycles are volatile; many companies (both shipping companies and solutions providers) are not able to sustain the extreme cyclicality. AXSMarine has stood the test of time growing our client base organically, and now we employ more than 260 employees and have more than 18,000 users on our platforms. Being committed to our core values, we are always on the lookout for like-minded partners who have similar visions in order to create synergies that value-add to our clients. “
4) Your company already provides CII information for the shipping industry.
What specific solution services can your company provide to decarbonise the shipping industry?
“Actual CO2 emissions and CII calculations are submitted by owners/ managers after the voyages are completed.
AXSMarine helps to decarbonize the shipping industry by enabling chartering managers to select the best ship or cargo that not only makes commercial sense, but also one that best aligns with our clients’ decarbonisation strategy. More specifically, our tools like the Smart Calculator and Voyage Estimator can provide the estimated CO2 emissions of each vessel-and-cargo pair within the chartering workflow. “
“Additionally, our CII and CO2 Emissions tool is a powerful dashboard that sheds light on the global (drybulk) fleet performance on this topic. Users can access how each vessel performed historically, how she compares with other similar vessels (size/ categories/ trading pattern), or the performance of an operator’s fleet etc. We continue to receive resounding interests from our clients simply because the CII and CO2 Emissions tool drills down to the vessels’ performance at the voyage level, which help our clients make preemptive decisions in these intensive and competitive market conditions.”
“While the industry’s requirements evolve and we work on more solutions, we invite both existing and prospective clients to engage with us for a conversation on how AXSMarine can help you navigate through decarbonization in ship chartering. “