After five years in the doldrums, is a shipping recovery on the horizon? While the shipping industry is notoriously cyclical, things have improved enough to cause just faint stirrings of hope, according to the Investors Chronicle, a UK publication which offers readers stock market analysis. As Mark Williams, research director at Braemar Seascope, told the publication: “Nobody is feeling irrational exuberance, but there are grounds for some cautious optimism for 2014.” Also, Danish shipping giant AP Møller Maersk said in its second quarter report that it saw touches of sunshine in the previously cloudy skies of the maritime industry. Its container shipping interest, Maersk Line, almost doubled its previous year’s second quarter profits. Group CEO Nils S. Andersen now expects net profit this year to be “significantly” more than the US$461 million of 2012, rather than simply “above” as it had stated before.
