An Anatomy of Cycles in Shipping Industry, 1946-2020
- 1 Department of Maritime Studies, Faculty of Maritime and Industrial Studies, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece
- 2 Shipping, Transport and Logistics Department, Business College of Athens, Athens, Greece
Abstract
The paper provided a help to shipowners—we believe—by determining the duration of cycles, first historically, since 1741, and par excellence since 1945, to 2020, and then mathematically, using Chaos Theory. It was remarkable to find out that both approaches gave the same outcome: shipping cycles lasted 6 years (rounded). We have also explored the possibility to predict a shipping cycle with reference to previous repeated attempts to forecast freight markets, but in this paper, we wanted to see what to suggest to shipowners, when forecasting is impossible—as is! This is in line with most important Greek shipowners, like Mr. G Procopiou, who suggests to ignore forecasters. The paper, however, showed the important corollary that bad times are longer than good times, helping to avoid fatal mistakes as those committed by Sanko shipping of Japan in 1980s. We showed also the more important corollary for businessmen that technology brought shipping cycles closer! We have re-introduced the concept of Joker, rejecting the theory that shipping is a “poker game”. To predict the coming of a Joker has not been so far achieved, though we have predicted the start of the 2008 depression using Chaos theory… Ten at least Jokers have appeared since 1951, including the 2019 Pandemic.
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