Lloyd's List: The Shipping Podcast

FIGURES from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime suggest the annual global value of laundered money is between $800bn and $2trn, representing between 2% and 5% of global GDP. Much of this money is cleaned through trade-based money laundering, where criminals disguise the proceeds of crime through trade transactions to legitimise their origin. When that money hits a bank account, its links...

Singapore literally would not exist without the shipping industry. In 1819 the East India Company reached agreement with the local ruler to use it as a waystation for vessels carrying opium to China. Five years later, it bought the entire country for cash. Two hundred years later, it would not be much of a stretch to describe it as a powerhouse port with a small southeast Asian city-state attached...

Why is the shadow fleet growing? Why do Chinese owners continue to sail their vessels through the Red Sea? And what happens if the International Maritime Organization does not adopt the Net-Zero Framework next month? In an age where uncertainty is simply part of doing business, Lloyd’s List gathered some of its expert analysts and journalists to brief selected guests on the key issues of the day d...

On the final day of London International Shipping Week, Lloyd’s List reporter Joshua Minchin brings you the key takeaways from the week, alongside senior maritime reporter Greg Miller, maritime risk analyst Tomer Raanan and senior reporter Declan Bush. The three ask whether shipping could suffer from too much inefficiency, or at least the wrong kind anyway, and reflect on the policy uncertainty co...

Does shipping whinge too much? That’s the question Lloyd’s List senior reporter Joshua Minchin is asking on this edition of the daily reaction from London International Shipping Week, joined by editor-in-chief Richard Meade, APAC editor Cichen Shen, and senior risk and compliance analyst Bridget Diakun. Governments around the world, but particularly in the UK, are often criticised for being uninfo...

Day three of London International Shipping Week sees the circus descend on the headquarters of the International Maritime Organization, which is playing host to the week’s headline conference. Lloyd’s List editor-in-chief Richard Meade, who moderated a session on decarbonisation, and senior reporters Joshua Minchin and Declan Bush were joined by Cargill Ocean Transportation president and chair of...

As London International Shipping Week gets off to a frantic start, Lloyd’s List editor-in-chief Richard Meade and reporter Joshua Minchin bring you their highlights from the first two days of the event. Richard assesses London’s role in the shipping industry as the week kicks off, and asks what the UK needs to do to stay relevant in an industry that has moved away from it as the centre of gravity...

THREE hundred years ago, when Lloyd’s List was still a list of ships pinned to a coffee shop wall, London was the epicentre of global trade. It was the hub where the shipowning, the insurance, the finance, the technology and the workforce got business done. And that was the case for centuries. But London is not the epicentre of global trade any more – far from it. As the shipping industry descends...

Shore leave is a fundamental part of life at sea. It has been for centuries. The modern seafarer can spend up to 11 months on board a vessel during a contract, so getting on to dry land whenever possible can be an important form of rest and recuperation. But this custom is under threat. A recent report by the ITF Seafarers’ Trust showed that a quarter of seafarers surveyed said they did not get an...

Every year, Lloyd’s List publishes a list of the world’s Top 100 container ports. And to mark the release of this year’s ranking, we’re taking a deep dive in this week’s episode to understand the key trends seen across the container sector last year, and work out what the rest of the year has in store. In a year defined by disruption, the world’s leading container ports still managed to increase t...

Low Earth orbit connectivity doesn’t occupy the same number of column inches as say Houthi terror in the Red Sea, or the climate regulatory tussles at the IMO, but it has arguably changed shipping just as much, if not more. Vessels that have long relied on dependable, but relatively slow internet connectivity now have access to the kind of upload and download speeds used to create this very podcas...

WHEN an oil tanker can trade internationally and switch between fictional flags and take on digital identities of ghost ships that were scrapped years ago, there is a problem. Not a fictional problem. A real life, tangible problem that relates to a real ship performing really dangerous operations with zero accountability and, apparently, no means to stop it. In the first edition of this podcast, w...

Until fairly recently the government of Malawi were blissfully unaware of the fact that they inadvertently stumbled into a tense political stand-off between Nato and Russia. Ministers in the landlocked capital Lilongwe were understandably surprised to find that they had been enthusiastically registering sanctioned shadow fleet tankers and fixing them up with new identities. They were, initially at...

The EU’s two big green regulations on shipping have had many consequences, whether intended or otherwise. But their original purpose was as a threat. Four years ago the International Maritime Organization had been dragging its feet on agreeing any kind of meaningful limits on CO2 from ships. So Brussels effectively told the regulator: reduce your emissions, or we will. The European Commission exte...

This episode of the Lloyd’s List Podcast was brought to you by Veson. Visit veson.com for more information. MOST end-of-life ships usually meet their demise on the beaches of the Indian subcontinent or Aliaga in Türkiye, with the ship recycling industry not being known for a culture of safety or environmental consciousness. But the long-term efforts of NGOs, regulators, flag states, shipowners and...

This episode of the Lloyd's List Podcast was brought to you by Veson. Visit veson.com for more information. Moored off Yemen’s coast, the FSO Safer is a decaying supertanker that could have spilled more than a million barrels of oil into the Red Sea. The result would have been an environmental, humanitarian and economic catastrophe. But the UN raised over $50 million to buy a replacement tanker an...

This episode of the Lloyd's List Podcast was brought to you by Veson. Visit veson.com for more information. This is a story about a ship that has been used as a floating bomb, as political leverage, as an environmental threat. It’s a story about how the international community was convinced into raising $50m to buy a group designated by the US government as terrorists, a ship, and how that ship is...

Amid all of the seemingly endless ups and downs that have dominated 2025 so far, dry bulk, as it always does, just keeps on going, moving some of the world’s most important commodities across our oceans. At the end of last year, the almost unanimous prediction for 2025 was that the dry bulk market wasn’t set for its best year ever. Market fundamentals looked pretty weak, especially from China, whi...

This episode of The Shipping Podcast is brought to you by Veson AI can provide valuable decision-making support in maritime supply chain management and it is not just a dry academic exercise: in this podcast we hear that we should play with it and have some fun along the way Eric Christofferson is Chief Product Officer at Veson Nautical, which is a provider of maritime data and freight management...

This episode of the Lloyd's List Podcast was brought to you by Veson. Visit veson.com for more information. Every year, Lloyd’s List publishes two sets of market outlooks. One at the end of the year and one mid-way through. Disruption and uncertainty have been synonymous with container shipping in recent years. So far, 2025 has seen more of the same and the only certainty at this stage is that thi...

EVERY year, Lloyd’s List publishes two sets of markets outlooks. One at the end of the year and one mid-way through. Disruption and uncertainty have been synonymous with container shipping in recent years. So far, 2025 has seen more of the same — and, well, the only certainty at this stage is that this is unlikely to change through to December. US trade policies under Trump 2.0 have dominated proc...

This episode of the Lloyd's List Podcast was brought to you by Wirana - visit www.wirana.com/ for more information THERE are tens of thousands of shipowners in the world, but only a handful of them can be properly be classified as major players. Much of the content of Lloyd’s List naturally focuses on the MSCs, Frontlines and Maersk’s of this world, whose fleet lists run to the hundreds. When they...

Who are the winners and losers of shipping’s decarbonised regulatory future? by Lloyd's List

What does China’s unassailable lead in terms of naval power, the wording of recent US statutes and the adaptability of shipping, all have to do with how a chief financial officer eats their breakfast? It’s all about how shipping perceives risk and uncertainty right now. Uncertainty has dominated the shipping industry in the past months. But this narrative that shipowners are paralysed by the geopo...

Efficiency is good business. Forget any lofty notions of environmental altruism for the moment. Burning less fuel, emitting less CO2 that just makes sense financially speaking. Except, that in shipping, inefficiency can often bring opportunity. Arbitrage and trading optionality is often a bigger, more profitable pull away from strict notions of carbon reduction. Emissions regulation is about compl...