Moore Greece, an accounting and consulting firm specialising in the shipping, media and hotel sectors, released the first-ever Moore Maritime Index report on “Shipping trends based on the fleet size” that focuses on studying the possible trends and correlations between operating expenses, net income, vessel age, capacity and fleet size.

The report was based on Moore Maritime Index, an exclusive statistical and analytics tool that collects data from more than 150 management companies and 1,500 vessels globally and was launched last October. Focusing on the dry cargo and tanker shipping sectors, the report aims to identify the possible relationships between fleet size and vessel operational performance.
Key findings:
·        Management companies with large fleets tend to manage younger vessels.
·        Average managed capacity appears to be significantly higher in fleets of more than 20 vessels.
·        Larger fleets tend to be able to earn a higher Time Charter Equivalent (TCE).
·        There is no clear evidence that operating expenses, in total, decrease as fleet size increases although we can observe trends in certain categories.
·        Administrative expenses seem to be higher in fleets of more than 20 vessels.
·        Costs for scaling-up operations do not move in a linear manner.

“The study supports with numbers what we intuitively already know: that fleet size affects financial performance. More interestingly, it also hints that this relationship is not linear, therefore suggesting that there could be an optimal fleet size, for every category.” said Costas Constantinou, Managing Partner at Moore Greece and Global Maritime Leader. “We are very excited and proud for this breakthrough and we will be further researching to establish whether this optimal fleet size can in fact be determined.”
Constantinou continued: “Our report contains reliable data based on specific criteria that we believe are important and also ensure sufficient data depth on which to base our preliminary results. Our aspiration, however, is to act as a business companion, therefore we encourage our members to run their own data queries in MMI and seek information in order to obtain a more accurate view of the subject and gain further insights.”
For more information, the full report “Moore Maritime Index: Shipping trends based on the fleet size” is available here.