Page 1: The TMI

Page 2: The MPP Sandwich

The fleet of multi-purpose vessels has posted a remarkably steady year – a year in which other sectors have performed erratically. Does that bode well for an uptick in MPP business? Or does stability mask inherent weaknesses in the MPP’s position?

There probably isn’t a ship class less defined than that of the multi-purpose fleet that primarily services the breakbulk niche. It’s the ship equivalent of a Swiss Army knife sailing the seas in an era of increasingly specialized vessels.

A wide variety of ship types and sizes compete to handle breakbulk and high and heavy freight. These vessels range from self-sufficient (deck cranes) ships, larger dry bulk carriers, to more exotic vessels like semi-submersible and heavy lift ships, ro-ro vessels, and even containerships.

The TMI

While all the above is true, the MPPs - also known as MPVs (Multipurpose Vessels) - still carry a bulk of the breakbulk cargo as their deck cranes and relatively small size and shallow draft offer flexibility in calls [often by inducement] that’s hard for other vessel types to match.

Still, because it is a sector more defined by what is carried than the vessels themselves, establishing a baseline for an orderly approach to analyzing an inherently messy market isn’t easy.

Yorck Prehm, head of research for Toepfer Transport, a Hamburg, Germany-based shipbroker said in a phone interview with AJOT, “We [Toepher Transport] invented the Toepfer Multipurpose Index [TMI]” to create a tool for analyzing the MPP sector. The shipbroker already had established indexes and reports for other sectors of the market but the MPP is an unusual sector by any measure. The TMI graphically represents the monthly movement in timecharter rates for MPPs.

Prehm was referring to the F-Type MPP vessels that are the linchpin of the index. Overall the TMI uses vessels 12,000-13,000 dwt, full tweendeck, with two cranes of 240-360 mt capacity built between 2004-2012 for the timecharter baseline. Toepfer’s logic in choosing the F-Type class is that this vessel type is deployed by many of MPP shipowners and with more than 80 units in operation – is the “workhorse” according to Prehm - of the 1,000 unit plus MPV fleet. To ensure the index is representative of the MPP sector, the TMI’s timecharter rates are established by a 10-25 member panel composed of MPP Operators, Owners and Shipbrokers.