Martin Ottaway has been providing vessel appraisal services to various clients in not only the Maritime Industry but also to Financial Institutions, Investment Groups, Governments, Insurance companies and many others for well over a century.
Our in-house vessel appraisal data and resources date back to the late eighteen hundreds with the older data being maintained in journals and hand written ledgers and the newer (1980’s) information in electronic data sheet form.
A typical ship valuation project for Martin Ottaway would be a client requesting the current market value for a maritime asset or asking for the value of a piece of equipment at a date sometime in the past.
However in several recent matters we have been asked to use the appraisal resources we maintain to provide statistical data and trends in ship sales over specific time frames. Not only has this been related to the cost of ships but also to the various vessel characteristics of ships, such as flag, country of construction, classification society and others.
An example of using our resources in this manner, was being asked if there was a historical differential in the expected useful life of a foreign flagged container ship, a US flagged foreign built container ship and a US flagged Jones Act container ship.
The historic data indicated that the average age of a foreign flagged container ships when scrapped is 25 years. By filtering for US-flagged, foreign built container ships, we determined that the average age for these vessels is also 25 years.
Interestingly the average age of Jones Act container ships when scrapped is 30 years when using data from the late 1980s onward. We note that this data has a large range, with some scrapped vessels as old as 45 years. When only data from the 2000s onward is used, the average age increases to 35 years, indicating that Jones Act vessels are being kept in service for longer a time period in recent years.
Martin Ottaway looks forward to providing professional vessel appraisal services to the industry as a whole, be it a normal valuation of a ship or a project that requires a different approach than the typical vessel appraisal.
