Looking Back at 2021

At the Shipping Association Business Outlook Conference 2022, Ms Quah thanked all the key stakeholders and clients of Singapore and the MPA – port operators, companies, associations, unions, international organisations – for keeping Maritime Singapore reliable and resilient. Our port is open 24/7 throughout the pandemic, and we do our best as “catch-up port” that shipping lines could leverage upon to make up for delays elsewhere – PSA taking in more unscheduled calls this year, marine services lining up with more digital interfaces for ships calling on our port.

Singapore continued to score well in our performance - record container throughput of 37.5 million TEUs last year and maintained our position as the world’s top bunkering hub with sales amounting to more than 50 million tonnes including ship to ship LNG bunkering.

Maritime Singapore also continued to fare well in the global rankings - Menon-DNV, Asia Freight, Logistics and Supply Chain award. In the Leading Maritime Cities of the World 2022 report, we moved to 1st in MarineTech, and we will work harder on talent, and maritime services especially finance over the next few years.

Tripartite Partnership between the Government, Industry, and Unions

The Singapore Shipping Association (SSA) has played an instrumental role in galvanizing the industry in our fight against the global pandemic. Caroline spoke about STAR, crew change, Sea-Vax, vaccination of seafarers – these are initiatives where SSA stood out and took the lead especially in the operations. Ms Quah expressed her appreciation and respect for Ms Caroline Yang, SSA President, and Mr Michael Poon, Executive Director, and their teams for taking on these tasks at short notice, for bringing together their members with differing needs and views to move agenda forward, and for being patient with MPA. This is what we have achieved –

• COVID-19 Singapore Crew Change Guidebook which laid out protocols for safe crew changes. More than 220,000 crew changes since March 2020.
• 45 CrewSafe audit programmes that established safe and scalable crew change facilities and procedures – these have served as reference guidelines for member states at the IMO and other international organisations including ITF, IMEC and ICS.
• SAVE - vaccination of maritime frontline workers and seafarers - over 71,700 maritime workers and more than 3,500 non-resident seafarers have been fully vaccinated.

Beyond COVID-19 management measures, SSA and MPA have been close partners on many digital transformation fronts through initiatives such as the Maritime Digitalisation Playbook, Additive Manufacturing, Electronic Bills of Lading, Digital Bunkering and SSA Tech Demo Day. More recently, SSA’s Digital Transformation Committee (DTC) has set up a sub-committee to work with the innovation ecosystem such as PIER71 to support the growth of MarineTech start-ups, and in doing so, help realise our ambition to be the Silicon Valley of MarineTech start-ups.

Collaboration Areas with SSA

Ms Quah commented, “We have proven we can do it even in times of crisis. We can do more.”

Ship finance and arbitration is one such area. MPA will need to work closely together - SSA Ship Finance Committee, SSA Legal Committee to grow the maritime finance and marine insurance sectors. For instance, the Singapore War Risk Mutual (SWRM) has been a result of SSA’s strong support towards the development of marine insurance from Singapore, which has grown from about 140 vessels in 2015 to about 800 vessels in 2021. Looking ahead, MPA hope to enhance SWRM’s value proposition by improving its efficiency through digitalisation and growing our ship finance by riding on the trend towards decarbonisation.

Talent – local seafarers and global talent for our maritime eco-system. This is an area which SMF, MPA, SSA, SMOU, SOS can give it another push – we have a window of opportunity over the next few years. I hope we can seize on this window and give talent effort another push.

Singapore Maritime Week – took place from 4th to 8th April, with the theme “Transformation for Growth”. Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Heng Swee Keat, gave the keynote address at the Singapore Maritime Lecture as part of the Opening Day’s programme. Throughout the week, there were also other events such as MarineTech Conference and Exhibition, Maritime Sustainability Conference, Maritime Services Leaders Forum and Maritime Manpower Forum. Some of the SSA Council Members have shared their insights or moderate panel discussions.

Conclusion

Ms Quah concluded with tripartism. It has been a difficult and intensive period over the past two years. Since Ms Quah took on the CE position, it has been more on crisis and pandemic mode than normal situation mode, paralleled with major transitions in the industry – digitalisation and decarbonisation, on top of supply global supply chain disruptions.

Ms Quah took the opportunity to thank Ms Caroline Yang, Ms Mary Liew, General Secretary, Singapore Maritime Officers’ Union, and Mr Kam Soon Huat, President, Singapore Organisation of Seamen, for their strong leadership, and unwavering support. Ms Quah said, “We thought we have done a lot, yet there are still quite a number more dreams to pursue – future talent and green financing. We want to continue to contribute to global agenda and we will be approaching many of you over the next few months. Please keep your door open and continue to come onboard to support in whatever capacity you have. As the saying goes, in times of crisis we forge friendship – we chip in wherever we can – this is shipping and the community we have in Singapore. Let me thank all of you for your friendship – you know we are in it for the long run, together.”