Things are looking especially bright at Idan Ofer’s Eastern Pacific Shipping these days.

Step into its Singapore headquarters, or onboard one of its ships, and you’ll find that the bland corporate office decor and industrial-style crew accommodation have been swept aside in favour of bold, bright living and working spaces.

The company deems the changes necessary to future-proof its workforce. They form part of a broader environmental, social and governance policy that has a strong focus on sustainability.

Entering head office in one of Singapore’s giant office towers, you could think you’d stepped into the premises of a well-funded technology start-up rather than a conservative shipping company.

The walls are lined with colourful art, there are breakout rooms, lounges, phone booths for private conversations and an upmarket coffee-shop dining area. Private offices for senior management have been banished.

Chief executive Cyril Ducau, whose desk is situated amid his team, tells TW+ that the refurbishment, a three-month undertaking during which the staff decamped to a WeWork shared office space, is necessary in tackling what he describes as the industry’s people challenge.

“We have to attract people into shipping, especially if we want smart, ambitious, motivated people. The new generation want more than just a salary,” he says.

Eastern Pacific has not forgotten its seagoing staff in the revamp. They too are seeing their living environment transformed through a series of accommodation refits that began last April with the 11-year-old aframax tanker Marmara Sea.

The initiative started after a visit by Idan Ofer to one of his company’s ships. Unimpressed by the standard bland, basic accommodation, he called in the decorators.

“He walked onboard and realised there had been no improvements since the 1980s. It all looked too industrial, with dark furniture and beige or brown walls,” Ducau explains.

Work began immediately on improving accommodation across the fleet. The ships are being given new decor, artwork and higher-quality furniture. Mess rooms have been opened up so that all crew eat together in one lively space, while state-of-the-art gyms have been installed.

We want a community of people onboard who have a spirit of camaraderie, which was eroding over time

Cyril Ducau

To address the worrying trend of crew members isolating themselves in their cabins, Eastern Pacific has made free wifi available in the refurbished recreation rooms and other common areas. Crew can use wifi in their cabins, but they have to pay for it.

“We want a community of people onboard who have a spirit of camaraderie, which was eroding over time. Not only were the surroundings unfavourable, but crew were also isolating themselves in their cabins with their mobile devices,” Ducau says. “The whole revamp had this in mind — to create pleasant, liveable spaces where crew can gather and form a healthy community.”

Eastern Pacific is spending between $300,000 and $400,000 per ship on accommodation upgrades when vessels are in shipyards for regular dry-docking or scrubber retrofits.

The upgrades are much easier to do at the newbuilding stage, when Ducau describes the cost as marginal.

While the first round of upgrades has been designed in-house, the company is moving into phase two: a professional interior design firm has been employed to come up with designs that will lift the accommodation to the standard of a boutique hotel.

These designs will also form a template for shipyards building new vessels for the company.

TW+ was invited to visit one of the upgraded ships, the 15,052-teu containership CMA CGM Mexico (built 2019), during a call in Singapore.

Its master, Captain Biser Draganov, is especially appreciative of the new fitness facilities and agrees that the improvements are having a positive impact on his crew.

“I have been at sea for a long time. What made a nice ship was air-conditioning and a good cook. But all of this, it just makes the ship 100%. Everyone is smiling, the crew are happy,” he tells TW+.

Ducau adds: “There is a very practical need for this. Creating an environment that allows people to get together in a place in which they feel comfortable increases the quality of their life and the way they work. A happy crew works well together; they communicate. This leads to a safer ship.

“Having this kind of image is helpful for attracting better crews.”

Transparency is the best ESG policy

Eastern Pacific published its environmental, social and governance (ESG) policy last year.

The company began working on its own ESG policy two years ago, dealing with the environment, corporate governance, health & safety and social connectivity. Ducau describes its development as inevitable.

“Big corporate clients, charterers, oil majors and our banks have started asking us to comply with their policies. We thought we should be proactive and have our own ESG policy that puts everything together under one sustainability umbrella,” he says.

“We had been doing a lot of things on an ad-hoc basis, without a framework around it. We decided that we needed to do something about that.”

This month, the company released details of its emissions. It outperformed the industry average in terms of limiting greenhouse gas output in 2019. It published its annual efficiency ratio, a figure based on the amount of emissions emitted by an individual ship versus its deadweight and the distance it travelled.

Publishing such figures is rare for a privately owned company operating in a notoriously secretive industry, but the decision to go public with the data shows its commitment towards environmental sustainability.

“We have also taken the view that when it comes to future newbuildings, we need to think clean but also practical, which today means only LNG,” Ducau says. “We would like to do it with all ships and will always look at the opportunity to do so, although, with smaller ships, the economic case for LNG is not always there.”

However, he adds, it is becoming hard not to take the LNG route for big ships.

“On large containerships, the earnings differential could be well over $20,000 per day compared to regular fuel. LNG as a commodity is oversupplied, so the pricing pressure works to our advantage.

“The LNG/oil prices decoupled nicely last year as many gas projects started production. Today, gas prices are low everywhere in the world, while oil prices remain relatively high and more easily affected by geopolitical events.”

Eastern Pacific’s ESG policy includes commitments to emission reductions and green shiprecycling. It has also banned single-use plastic in its offices and onboard ships.

It has even solved one of the biggest contributors of plastic waste on ships — water bottles — by installing drinking fountains and issuing crews with flasks.

TW+

Idan Ofer looks on the bright side