Shipping executives gathering in Hamburg to discuss the multipurpose market delivered near-unanimous optimism, though there were differing perspectives on vessel size, crane capacity, ownership structure and where capital investment is best directed.
Moderator Hannes Hollaender, Managing Partner of Hamburg shipbroker Toepfer Transport GmbH, opened the MPP panel at September’s Xinde Marine Forum by anchoring the discussion in his firm’s Toepfer Multipurpose Index (TMI), which he put at roughly $12,500 a day for a 12,500-dwt F-type vessel. Lucius Bunk, Managing Partner of Auerbach Schifffahrt GmbH & Co. KG, wasted no time branding the index “too low.”
Kuźmicki, Shipping Director at Chipolbrok’s Gdynia office, framed the market’s health around a structural shift in trade flows. Export cargo out of China remains exceptionally strong, he said, driven overwhelmingly by wind turbine components and battery energy storage systems moving to Europe, the Mediterranean, the United States and Canada.
Europe’s own project cargo base, by contrast, has thinned considerably. “I remember the times when we were nominating three liner ships monthly from Hamburg and Antwerp,” he said, recalling the volume of investment goods that once underpinned Chipolbrok’s European liner service. “Nowadays we operate this service with one monthly departure from Europe.” Charter business has picked up some of the slack, and despite the “geopolitical difficulties” of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, the picture remains positive enough to justify a substantial newbuilding program, part of which has already been delivered this year.
A New Generation of Eco Tonnage
Bunk’s bullishness rested on fundamentals rather than headline rates. The MPP fleet carries an average age of 17 to 18 years, he noted, and the sector went through roughly a decade — from 2014 to 2024 — with almost no newbuilding deliveries. That has left the water short of “eco ships” burning 35-40% less fuel than older tonnage, at a time when MPP still lags container shipping in adopting new propulsion technology.
Combine an overaged fleet with tightening supply and rising ton-miles from regional conflict, he argued, and the case for further newbuilding investment writes itself — tonnage also needed to help rebuild regions once conflicts eventually resolve.
Hollaender offered his own reading of the cycle: broadly positive, anchored by wind and renewables demand that holds up even in conservative scenarios, reinforced by AI-driven energy infrastructure spending and continued oil and gas investment. His bigger worry, he said, lies elsewhere in shipping — segments he sees as over-ordered — rather than in MPP, where he estimated the order book at a comparatively modest 12-13% of the existing fleet.
The panel offered differing views on what kind of ship actually wins in that environment — and here the range on stage was extraordinary, running from Stolyarov’s 5,200-dwt parcel tonnage to Kuźmicki’s 60,000-dwt-plus wood-pulp carriers.
Chipolbrok’s answer to Asia’s structural trade imbalance — full ships moving project cargo from Asia to Europe and the U.S., with comparatively little project cargo on the return leg — has been to lean on larger vessels. “We realize that we need bigger ships, like the 60,000-deadweight vessels,” Kuźmicki said, explaining that the extra capacity lets Chipolbrok backhaul dry bulk cargo, 50,000-55,000 tonnes at a time, before repositioning to project-rich regions.
At the same time, the company continues to invest in smaller, 38,000-dwt heavy-lift vessels carrying 700-tonne cranes and 77-meter hatch openings — tonnage he was careful to note doesn’t compete with the smaller operators on the panel. “I would say everyone is doing his own market,” he said.
Bunk argued the market remains large enough for vessels in the 10,000-20,000-dwt range — the space Auerbach and Baosheng occupy — to coexist alongside the 60,000-tonne wood-pulp trade. “There’s certain cargo — often sole cargo, last-in-first-out — where you just need to be at a specific spot, where the 60Ks just cannot compete,” he said, ruling out any move by Auerbach into larger tonnage. “I don’t see a crowd-out effect where the larger you go, the better placed you are.”
VARAMAR’s model, Stolyarov explained, starts from what the customer needs to move at any given moment rather than from a fixed ship type, and that flexibility is easiest to deliver with tonnage in the 5,000-10,000-dwt “sweet spot” — though not exclusively; the company will use anything up to a Handysize or Supramax, occasionally a Panamax, when the cargo calls for it. “It’s much less commoditized compared to the big bulk trades or the container trades,” he said, arguing that price stability in MPP rewards companies combining competitive parceling with technical expertise.
That logic also underpinned VARAMAR’s recently announced move into shipowning, and Stolyarov confirmed the rationale on stage: “We felt that the timing was right to invest in some of the ships that we were comfortable operating, simply because we know many different uses for those types of ships and we have proven able to operate them better than the market.” The operator model remains the core of the business, he stressed — ownership simply gives VARAMAR and its partners “a bit of a backbone” on trades where clients value consistency of tonnage.
Capt. Yang Lei offered the panel’s most distinctly Asian perspective, describing a business that started with small, gearless 2,000-8,000-dwt general cargo vessels before Singapore-based Baosheng moved into 12,000-dwt geared ships and, eventually, its own 14,000-dwt newbuildings when it couldn’t source the tonnage its charterers wanted from the open market.
European operators then began chartering Baosheng vessels for worldwide trading, pushing the company toward a “real” MPP design shaped directly by charterer input. “Some of our European colleagues here today might say it’s not really MPP,” Yang said. “But to us, it’s a big one.” Baosheng’s expansion, he added, is investment-driven rather than speculative: reliable charter commitments, not ambition alone, decide when a new ship gets ordered.
Geopolitics, Cycles and the Order Book
The panel’s discussion of risk turned, inevitably, to geopolitics. Bunk argued that historically, turmoil among major powers has rarely damaged shipping outright and has often driven rates higher, at least temporarily — though he cautioned that the rules-based order underpinning global trade is “under attack” in ways that make medium-term forecasting difficult.
He drew a pointed parallel with 2008, when Capesize bulk rates collapsed from around $200,000 a day to $5,000 in a matter of weeks while MPP rates held up through 2009 and 2010. A reopening of the Red Sea and Suez Canal would absorb some of the fleet’s spare capacity, he said, potentially rebalancing supply and demand — but he does not expect oversupply to become a problem over the next three to five years.
Capt. Yang was unmoved by the prospect of container-ship overcapacity spilling into MPP trades if Suez reopens fully. “I am not afraid,” he said, pointing to roughly decade-long shipping cycles as simply “the real world.” Baosheng’s charter rates, he noted, haven’t run up as dramatically as container rates, leaving it less exposed to a correction; the company’s job, as he put it, is to keep supporting charterers through whatever new routing challenges arise.
Kuźmicki made a similar point about container lines eating into oversized and project cargo: it isn’t new, and container ships still can’t reach the niche ports or handle the complex projects specialized MPP tonnage can. “Shipping reflects the world economy in practice,” he said. “By declaration you cannot change this.”
In shipping, geopolitical risk sometimes carries a personal dimension. Though headquartered in Belgium, VARAMAR retains Ukrainian roots, including an Odesa office scaled back, though not closed, since the war with Russia began. The direct business impact has been limited, Stolyarov said, since the Black Sea was never a defining market for VARAMAR globally — and he remains hopeful postwar reconstruction will generate new project work.
The broader lesson, drawn from his own earlier career at Maersk, was about the pace of change: 15 years ago, he recalled, Russia and Ukraine were both emerging markets on Maersk’s growth agenda; today, Maersk has exited Russia entirely. “We can be absolutely certain that we don’t know what’s going to happen in five years,” he said, citing the on-again, off-again status of Suez, the Strait of Hormuz and the Panama Canal as reasons to favor tonnage that can shift between deep-sea and short-sea trades as routes open and close.
Asked to close with a simple question — should the industry order more ships? — the panel answered almost in unison, with the details doing the real talking. Kuźmicki said Chipolbrok will take delivery of ten vessels across this year and next, growing its owned fleet from 32 to 42 ships against a target of around 50, while continuing to charter in additional tonnage — 16 vessels at present.
Capt. Yang confirmed Baosheng has roughly ten more 14,000-dwt vessels on order, plus around ten more in its newer MPV class, split between owned and joint investment. Bunk was more equivocal, describing “two hearts beating in different directions”: tight tonnage supports strong charter rates, but the market will still need modern replacement ships as older vessels retire. His conclusion was that there remains room for more newbuildings — just not, for Auerbach, above the 20,000-dwt mark.
Editor’s note: Luke King attended the Xinde Marine Forum in Hamburg on September 1, 2026. He is the founder of the Project Cargo Professionals podcast and a contributor to AJOT.
