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20, they ordered 20 of them. I'm just in awe of such a thing, who even gets to make that phone call "Yep, well take 20". I imagine the amount of people involve

20, they ordered 20 of them. I'm just in awe of such a thing, who even gets to make that phone call "Yep, well take 20". I imagine the amount of people involved in such an undertaking dwarfs a few entire industries.

Link- 12y ago
You'd be surprised at how few are the people involved in the decision making process in the Shipping industry.
- kyllo 12y ago
  And also how poor the market intelligence informing their decision making is. After China joined the WTO in 2001 and their exports and exploded, steamship lines extrapolated that growth indefinitely and ordered as many new ships as they could finance. Since it takes about 5 years from order to delivery, a glut of capacity hit at about the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis. So in 2009 all the major steamship lines lost upwards of a billion dollars each. I doubt any of them have made that money back since, and many have been dependent on a series of emergency equity sales and government bailouts.
  - jacksonwds 12y ago
    I don't think these ships run on steam. They use gas turbines, which produce hot air and not steam, which generate electricity which goes into electric motors connected to the propellers.
    - mikeyouse 12y ago
      Ships of this size just use diesel engines. The Triple-E is using a pair of MAN 32MW diesels. http://marine.man.eu/applications/container http://marine.man.eu/applications/container
      - 30thElement 12y ago
        To expand a little, most container ships use bunker crude, which is borderline sludge. It even needs to be heated before being pumped out. But it's cheap and at the size, pressure, and speeds these engines run at they get most of the energy out of just about any fuel.
        orbitingpluto 12y ago
        Obligatory link: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
        saalweachter 12y ago
        An important note: as much sulfuric pollution as all the cars in the world. Which is bad enough, but -- for instance -- cars are (probably) still winning on CO2 emissions. For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
        Already__Taken 12y ago
        And yet seems like such a good candidate for nuclear power use.
        darkmighty 12y ago
        I concur, it's an almost perfect application. So much that most aircraft carriers already use it, not sure what's holding back the private sector (probably safety concerns).
        12y ago
    - kyllo 12y ago
      It's a historical industry term, they used to run on steam, and they're still referred to as steamship lines within the logistics industry today.
funkyy 12y ago
When I was contracting for some undisclosed financial company in Ireland I was doing some work around the building and one evening I was said there will be Director coming from a meeting, so I should be around to open doors for him (I was only in the whole office atm) - the guy was pretty happy about deal so he started talking that he just made a deal for delivery of fleet of lease planes to some airline in EU. When I said the team must be really happy, he answered it is his own project, only few people in office knew about it. This illustrated to me that directors of finance companies can make multi billion deals and yet only few people knew about it... There was no teams working on it, bunch of risk management people trying to figure if this is worth it. Just one guy encouraged by few of his employees...
- notahacker 12y ago
  One of the major reasons why the finance industry works such ridiculously long hours is that small, arguably-understaffed teams are better at keeping secrets and maintaining client relationships and more easily held accountable for their errors. Aircraft leasing is a well-defined, finite market with most of the commonly-leased aircraft types having well-understood risk characteristics, and the lessors can and invariably do buy reputable independent opinions on market lease rates, residual values and empirical data on market activity (they can buy them by contacting me, actually :-) ) In many respects it's more risky to throw a large team at building a model to come up with a contrarian view. Needless to say, the airline will throw far more people at trying to ensure they can keep up with the lease repayments and bills from actually operating the aircraft and there are quite a few lawyers and technical consultants involved in the final signoff and aircraft redelivery. Similarly, some teams involved in supply chain management and business development at Maersk must have spent a vast amount of time figuring out the logistics of filling larger ships in future, which based on how little time the last generation of "biggest ships ever" stayed in service is a much bigger gamble than most airlines will ever make.
- jpatokal 12y ago
  Your finance guy didn't buy the planes though, he just sorted out the way the money is handled for the company that did. Still a pretty big deal, to be sure, but it's not his company that will go bankrupt if the end buyer can't figure out a way to fill up his planes at a profit.
sliverstorm 12y ago
Which is where my brain circles around to the bit, things you could buy instead of whatsapp In this case, 100 of these ships.
- gone35 12y ago
  In fact, at current market caps, you could very well go ahead and buy the whole damn shipyard instead [1]. And its next-door neighbor in Geoje, Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world (even accounting for its recent merger with Samsung Engineering) [2]. With the right multiples, you could even end up with enough chump change to get yourself another Minecraft or something. I have a feeling something is not quite right here. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind-samsung-engineering-idUSKBN0GW11D20140901 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind...
  - pas 12y ago
    Well, you don't get 450 million potential users with a shipyard. Currently users are in high demand, so supply-and-demand, and prices. You know, black magic, they say. If they can monetize 10% of whatsapp users for 100 usd per year, that's 4.5 billion, so that 20 billion will come back soon. Just the .99 USD App Store yearly fee nets them probably enough to run the thing. Also, opportunity cost, grabbing those sweet-sweet innocent users from the table before others, probably worth something too. It's scary how big these numbers are, how little difference we can perceive of them behind our screens. Probably the best way is via images like these: https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&safe=off&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&saf...
    - gone35 12y ago
      Makes total sense. And I'm sure the Rapa Nui down in Easter Island also had some kind of self-consistent story to tell themselves too.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
codeonfire 12y ago
What is amazing is the cost: Just $185 million. A brand new 747 costs $350 million. At the end of the day it does something simple. It holds stuff and floats while engines push it.
- runeks 12y ago
  It's not really fair to compare a ship to an airplane. What happens if all the engines on this ship stall? You wait a week or so before someone arrives with new engines. In a plane you fall down. I imagine this is just a big, hollow piece of steel with propellers in the back and room for as many containers as possible. > Only 15 crew live on the ship when it is at sea, and their living quarters make up the tower that sits under the bridge. Compare this to a 747, which is designed to transport 350 people through the air.
  - khuey 12y ago
    That's the point being made. These are enormously expensive for something conceptually quite simple. A large part of that is probably the sheer size of the triple E. The original 747 is less than a meter longer than the width of the ship. And if you could squeeze the 747 in there (cut off a bit of the nose perhaps) you could fit more than 5 of them wingtip-to-wingtip in the length of the ship.
- lazyant 12y ago
  From what I understand, the low cost of Korean ship builders has pretty much destroyed the shipyard industry in Europe and other places.

Link- 12y ago

You'd be surprised at how few are the people involved in the decision making process in the Shipping industry.

kyllo 12y ago
And also how poor the market intelligence informing their decision making is. After China joined the WTO in 2001 and their exports and exploded, steamship lines extrapolated that growth indefinitely and ordered as many new ships as they could finance. Since it takes about 5 years from order to delivery, a glut of capacity hit at about the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis. So in 2009 all the major steamship lines lost upwards of a billion dollars each. I doubt any of them have made that money back since, and many have been dependent on a series of emergency equity sales and government bailouts.
- jacksonwds 12y ago
  I don't think these ships run on steam. They use gas turbines, which produce hot air and not steam, which generate electricity which goes into electric motors connected to the propellers.
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    Ships of this size just use diesel engines. The Triple-E is using a pair of MAN 32MW diesels. http://marine.man.eu/applications/container http://marine.man.eu/applications/container
    - 30thElement 12y ago
      To expand a little, most container ships use bunker crude, which is borderline sludge. It even needs to be heated before being pumped out. But it's cheap and at the size, pressure, and speeds these engines run at they get most of the energy out of just about any fuel.
      - orbitingpluto 12y ago
        Obligatory link: How 16 ships create as much pollution as all the cars in the world http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
        saalweachter 12y ago
        An important note: as much sulfuric pollution as all the cars in the world. Which is bad enough, but -- for instance -- cars are (probably) still winning on CO2 emissions. For those who don't follow the link, the 16 ships in question burn the sludge that's left over after refining all the cleaner burning bits out of petroleum. So it's not so much a "quantity of fuel burned" problem as it is that they're burning the worst possible thing you can burn, as far as this sort of pollution goes.
        Already__Taken 12y ago
        And yet seems like such a good candidate for nuclear power use.
        darkmighty 12y ago
        I concur, it's an almost perfect application. So much that most aircraft carriers already use it, not sure what's holding back the private sector (probably safety concerns).
        12y ago
  - kyllo 12y ago
    It's a historical industry term, they used to run on steam, and they're still referred to as steamship lines within the logistics industry today.

funkyy 12y ago

When I was contracting for some undisclosed financial company in Ireland I was doing some work around the building and one evening I was said there will be Director coming from a meeting, so I should be around to open doors for him (I was only in the whole office atm) - the guy was pretty happy about deal so he started talking that he just made a deal for delivery of fleet of lease planes to some airline in EU. When I said the team must be really happy, he answered it is his own project, only few people in office knew about it. This illustrated to me that directors of finance companies can make multi billion deals and yet only few people knew about it... There was no teams working on it, bunch of risk management people trying to figure if this is worth it. Just one guy encouraged by few of his employees...

notahacker 12y ago
One of the major reasons why the finance industry works such ridiculously long hours is that small, arguably-understaffed teams are better at keeping secrets and maintaining client relationships and more easily held accountable for their errors. Aircraft leasing is a well-defined, finite market with most of the commonly-leased aircraft types having well-understood risk characteristics, and the lessors can and invariably do buy reputable independent opinions on market lease rates, residual values and empirical data on market activity (they can buy them by contacting me, actually :-) ) In many respects it's more risky to throw a large team at building a model to come up with a contrarian view. Needless to say, the airline will throw far more people at trying to ensure they can keep up with the lease repayments and bills from actually operating the aircraft and there are quite a few lawyers and technical consultants involved in the final signoff and aircraft redelivery. Similarly, some teams involved in supply chain management and business development at Maersk must have spent a vast amount of time figuring out the logistics of filling larger ships in future, which based on how little time the last generation of "biggest ships ever" stayed in service is a much bigger gamble than most airlines will ever make.
jpatokal 12y ago
Your finance guy didn't buy the planes though, he just sorted out the way the money is handled for the company that did. Still a pretty big deal, to be sure, but it's not his company that will go bankrupt if the end buyer can't figure out a way to fill up his planes at a profit.

sliverstorm 12y ago

Which is where my brain circles around to the bit, things you could buy instead of whatsapp In this case, 100 of these ships.

gone35 12y ago
In fact, at current market caps, you could very well go ahead and buy the whole damn shipyard instead [1]. And its next-door neighbor in Geoje, Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world (even accounting for its recent merger with Samsung Engineering) [2]. With the right multiples, you could even end up with enough chump change to get yourself another Minecraft or something. I have a feeling something is not quite right here. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind-samsung-engineering-idUSKBN0GW11D20140901 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind...
- pas 12y ago
  Well, you don't get 450 million potential users with a shipyard. Currently users are in high demand, so supply-and-demand, and prices. You know, black magic, they say. If they can monetize 10% of whatsapp users for 100 usd per year, that's 4.5 billion, so that 20 billion will come back soon. Just the .99 USD App Store yearly fee nets them probably enough to run the thing. Also, opportunity cost, grabbing those sweet-sweet innocent users from the table before others, probably worth something too. It's scary how big these numbers are, how little difference we can perceive of them behind our screens. Probably the best way is via images like these: https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&safe=off&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&saf...
  - gone35 12y ago
    Makes total sense. And I'm sure the Rapa Nui down in Easter Island also had some kind of self-consistent story to tell themselves too.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago

codeonfire 12y ago

What is amazing is the cost: Just $185 million. A brand new 747 costs $350 million. At the end of the day it does something simple. It holds stuff and floats while engines push it.

runeks 12y ago
It's not really fair to compare a ship to an airplane. What happens if all the engines on this ship stall? You wait a week or so before someone arrives with new engines. In a plane you fall down. I imagine this is just a big, hollow piece of steel with propellers in the back and room for as many containers as possible. > Only 15 crew live on the ship when it is at sea, and their living quarters make up the tower that sits under the bridge. Compare this to a 747, which is designed to transport 350 people through the air.
- khuey 12y ago
  That's the point being made. These are enormously expensive for something conceptually quite simple. A large part of that is probably the sheer size of the triple E. The original 747 is less than a meter longer than the width of the ship. And if you could squeeze the 747 in there (cut off a bit of the nose perhaps) you could fit more than 5 of them wingtip-to-wingtip in the length of the ship.
lazyant 12y ago
From what I understand, the low cost of Korean ship builders has pretty much destroyed the shipyard industry in Europe and other places.