I love the container shipping industry and the ways in which it behaves. There is some predictability to it and it provides good material to study business strategies employed in a highly commoditised market. It is not a very adventurous industry.

While everybody watches everybody else, all of them watch the biggest one and try to copy their moves. After the trend-setter moves, the other carriers, more or less, fall in line copying business model modifications of the first mover.

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Posted on - 2019-09-11

When you walk into your doctor's office and they give you bad news about your health, unless your case is terminal, the diagnosis almost always comes with treatment options.

Behind the scenes, central, regional and local government are working on both the "diagnosis" and "treatment" options for climate change. However, working up climate change solutions can involve long lead times. So what ends up happening is that we are being drip-fed the first part of the process – work on the diagnosis – without there having been time to formulate clear treatment options.

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Posted on - 2019-09-10

A fire on a fishing vessel in the Marshall Islands was still spewing smoke nearly 24 hours after it first started, forcing crew to abandon ship on Sunday afternoon. 

Small boats from a fishing tournament rescued the seven crew members who were aboard the Koo's 102 purse seiner with some jumping into the water.

RNZ Pacific's correspondent Giff Johnson said the 62-metre Taiwanese vessel had just dropped off its large fishing nets at a repair yard in Majuro Atoll inside the lagoon.

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Posted on - 2019-09-09