Season Greetings!
As we wind down 2022, I would like to take the opportunity to thank our customers and the Simwave staff, as well as our participants and partners for an amazing year. Reflecting back, I am struck by the impact that our trainings and our innovative solutions has on our customers. This year proved further, that training and assessments is our core business and that with our focused strategy we have developed a learning ecosystem that offers great added value to maritime organisations.
Review 2022
Looking back to 2022 we do see a few trends:
- Industry Investments: Despite the uncertainty in global markets shipping companies keep on investing in ships, port infrastructures and in technology. This year our applied research team conducted more feasibility studies, delivered more mathematical ship models and carried out different type of port studies. To build a digital twin at an early stage in a project is undoubtedly of great added value. The same counts for mathematical models where shipping companies not only use a model for training or assessments but also for proposed operations with the end client. We expect this trend to continue in 2023.
- Crew Shortage: In all different segments shipping companies are facing crew shortages. Likely this shortage will continue to grow in the coming years and therefore it’s important to invest in training and assessments so that crew members can further develop their skills and increase their knowledge in a faster and more efficient way. With new technology on board and a focus on dropping crew retention rates we need to create resilient seafarers who are fit for duty. For this reason, we continued to invest in our Career Management System with more training, knowledge assessments and competency assessments. In Q3 and Q4 of this year every week we conducted different types of assessments around the world. Through our assessment reports we can easily identify where there is room for improvement and from there create a personal development plan in which the learning developments can be tracked along the way.
- Alternative Fuels: Decarbonising shipping is a priority within the industry. Companies are looking at alternatives as the industry speeds up the transition. We foresee that in the future there will not be one single fuel but a mix of fuels and technologies. This also depends on the type of vessel and trade. In 2022 we saw a sharp increase in different types of high-technical training, not only for LNG & Methanol, but also towards electrification. For the different fuels we have hybrid training solutions including the use of interactive P&ID’s and mock ups.
- Data: Shipping companies tend to have a lot of data available within their organisations. Most data is around the shipping operations and hardware. Actual and usable data of crew seems to be more challenging and that’s one of the reasons our software development team created insights in crew data in order to make the right decisions. Within our career management system, we make all that valuable data available and it can be connected to your crew planning software. We offer our customers instant insight in high potentials, sailing history, assessments, personal development plans and fleet-wide trends.
Our organisation also went through an organic growth where we strengthen our organisation. David Frassetto was appointed as COO, Bash Sarkar as CTO and Ryan Verhagen as CCO. We attracted more specialists then in any other year and our staff grew over 50%. We are happy to see that Simwave seems to be an attractive place to work and we will continue building this culture. It is great to see the different cultures our organisation and also our branch office in Vietnam plays an essential role in fulfilling future demand.
The way forward in 2023
We are currently planning for an exceptional 2023. Putting it simply, we want to continue growing with world-wide customers who understand investing in the human element is essential for safer and environmental-friendly operations.
As a company we will further invest in our Career Management Platform. Every week we will add more training titles online and will continuously add more features, such as a sophisticated appraisal system and more data insights through Business Intelligence dashboards. We will also further expand our partner network with accredited training providers to offer clients specific trainings and assessments on a global scale. Last but not least, we will expand our Centre of Excellence in The Netherlands with new simulators and more classrooms.
I would like to finish by wishing our customers staff, partners, and friends a very happy, healthy and Merry Christmas, and a fulfilling year in 2023.
Marcel Kind
CEO & Founder