Antoine Grisay
The importance of the shipping and trade community
The Baltic Exchange used to the globally recognised meeting place where the maritime and trade community could gather physically to maintain relationships, take the pulse of the market and gather factual tradable information. Nowadays, the Baltic Exchange is still broadly regarded as an index provider for the Forward Freight Agreement market and a pricing reference for time charters and voyage fixtures.
Personal relationships are still a key driver of business even if they no longer benefit from a reference go-to place, information is decentralised and recirculated massively via email, voice and around a cool drink. The industry has generally accepted that trading would involve lots of noise, email spam, inaccurate facts, rumours, unnecessary duplication of circulars, "false" orders, etc. For many players, navigating spot market is very much like a "Bazaar", you enter the market in the morning with an idea, you won't necessarily find what you were looking for, but you might seize another business opportunistically.
There were also many notable attempts to set up pricing screens or even marketplaces that would "cut the middle man, i.e: the brokers. All of these initiatives have failed to date because they ignored the importance of those relationships and the functional of a broker as an intermediary, beyond being "just" an address book and trade journal.
The Shipfix Community, an independent and rewarding solution
Shipfix offers a more attractive data solution to the market by appropriately empowering and rewarding data contributors: we deliver them an otherwise unachievable dashboard of global supply and demand in exchange for their individual contribution to a broader anonymised and aggregated dataset that does not compromise their commercial information. Shipfix is an independent platform, you will find more information about our company, our community and how we protect your data in the Shipfix Support Center.
Our community now counts some of the world's largest operators and brokers but also smaller independent shops between 1-10 staff that are often specialised a various market sub-segments. The trust of our clients and thus the Shipfix Community is a great validation of the business proposition we developed from day 1.
We would love to demonstrate Shipfix to you, tell you more about our data insights and how that changes the game. Contact our team and let's have an open chat.
