From Breakbulk Asia: 'Life With Legs to It'

SINGAPORE — All the worried talk about the project market lagging the overall economy and thus facing a tough 2010 as other sectors ramp up for recovery may turn out to be just that -- worry.

That's the underlying message emerging from four senior executives who participated in a Breakbulk Executives' Market Outlook panel discussion at The Journal of Commerce's Second Annual Breakbulk Asia Conference in Singapore last week.

"We are seeing activity in a number of sectors, said Mark Garvey, chief operating officer of Foster Wheeler Group Asia. "The entire Asia region is showing signs of life, life with legs to it. We are very bullish (on Asia), and in contrast to Europe and the U.S., we also see South America coming on with commodity-based activity. There are reasons for optimism."

The cargoes moving on the power side are mostly exports from China, Garvey said. Within China, power stations and other power-related work, all "sourced and fabricated within China," are expected to be big movers, Garvey said.

How active other Asian markets are, however, depends on exports from China. "We source from China. That is our outbound lane. We will see a significant ramping up," Garvey said.

2009 was "our best year ever," said Richard Jones, DHL's vice president of global business development for industrial projects. Although the project market lags the overall economy and may sag toward the middle of 2010, "the doom and gloom a lot predicted didn't really happen. We were fairly well-insulated." He said DHL is moving oil and gas, mining and power sector cargo.

Mammoet, the Netherlands-based global heavy-lift specialist, was extremely busy in 2009, working on several big projects, including the Pluto LNG project in Australia, and has been shipping modules from Thailand to Australia, said Denis Brouwer, the company's Malaysia-based regional operations director. He said Mammoet also is shipping modules to the Philippines and to Singapore from Malaysia.

Mammoet last year was working off back orders for projects awarded during 2007 and 2008. "In 2009, there were few new awards. Now we are looking for new contracts, but that does not translate (immediately) into new shipping. We are seeing life and new opportunities in the market now. That gives us a scale, a size and time frame," Brouwer said.