Navigating through uncertainty
During these challenging times, all our colleagues in our different offices have worked seamlessly from home.
We are grateful to our global team afloat and ashore – wherever their desk or station has been on the day - for their professional forbearance to ensure business continuity and the ongoing delivery of clean energy LPG over the last mile for our customers.
We take the health and wellbeing of all our staff extremely seriously, especially our seafarers, and whilst we have been working hard to minimise disruption to crew changes and the operational trading of vessels due to global travel restrictions we have inevitably had to ask many of our colleagues to extend their periods at sea, and at times deviate ships to find the available crew change option.
We are also working closely with flag states and class to ensure compliance with appropriate certification and docking requirements, as well as conducting annual surveys, intermediate surveys and In-Water-surveys either as normal or via remote survey, all of which have been completed satisfactorily notwithstanding the challenges in ensuring yard worker availability and delivery of critical spares. Ultimately we anticipate the overall cost impact from crew change and dockings will lead to a 5-10% increase in OPEX during the pandemic period.
Commercially, our primary trade is the carriage of LPG for residential use, where demand has remained resilient during the pandemic. Strategically, the impact of a simultaneous reduction in oil and gas prices has seen lower than expected LPG exports from the USA, resulting in the anticipated 5% forecast growth in global LPG seaborne trade for the year being revised down to 0.8% growth, lower than a forecast 1.5% growth in the pressurised fleet capacity for the balance of the year. However, the positive fundamentals for supply and demand of LPG remain post Covid-19, and we therefore remain optimistic for 2021 and beyond.