Building the Largest Ship in the World
alastairphilipwiper.com
alastairphilipwiper.com
I'm just in awe of such a thing, who even gets to make that phone call "Yep, well take 20". I imagine the amount of people involved in such an undertaking dwarfs a few entire industries.
After China joined the WTO in 2001 and their exports and exploded, steamship lines extrapolated that growth indefinitely and ordered as many new ships as they could finance. Since it takes about 5 years from order to delivery, a glut of capacity hit at about the same time as the 2008 global financial crisis. So in 2009 all the major steamship lines lost upwards of a billion dollars each. I doubt any of them have made that money back since, and many have been dependent on a series of emergency equity sales and government bailouts.
This illustrated to me that directors of finance companies can make multi billion deals and yet only few people knew about it... There was no teams working on it, bunch of risk management people trying to figure if this is worth it. Just one guy encouraged by few of his employees...
Aircraft leasing is a well-defined, finite market with most of the commonly-leased aircraft types having well-understood risk characteristics, and the lessors can and invariably do buy reputable independent opinions on market lease rates, residual values and empirical data on market activity (they can buy them by contacting me, actually :-) ) In many respects it's more risky to throw a large team at building a model to come up with a contrarian view.
Needless to say, the airline will throw far more people at trying to ensure they can keep up with the lease repayments and bills from actually operating the aircraft and there are quite a few lawyers and technical consultants involved in the final signoff and aircraft redelivery. Similarly, some teams involved in supply chain management and business development at Maersk must have spent a vast amount of time figuring out the logistics of filling larger ships in future, which based on how little time the last generation of "biggest ships ever" stayed in service is a much bigger gamble than most airlines will ever make.
things you could buy instead of whatsapp
In this case, 100 of these ships.
I have a feeling something is not quite right here.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/042660:KS
[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/01/us-samsung-hvy-ind...
If they can monetize 10% of whatsapp users for 100 usd per year, that's 4.5 billion, so that 20 billion will come back soon. Just the .99 USD App Store yearly fee nets them probably enough to run the thing.
Also, opportunity cost, grabbing those sweet-sweet innocent users from the table before others, probably worth something too.
It's scary how big these numbers are, how little difference we can perceive of them behind our screens. Probably the best way is via images like these: https://www.google.com/search?q=hong+kong+protest+phones&saf...
And I'm sure the Rapa Nui down in Easter Island also had some kind of self-consistent story to tell themselves too.
Has any mobile user ever been monetized for $100/year, on any software ever...?
I imagine this is just a big, hollow piece of steel with propellers in the back and room for as many containers as possible.
> Only 15 crew live on the ship when it is at sea, and their living quarters make up the tower that sits under the bridge.
Compare this to a 747, which is designed to transport 350 people through the air.
[1]: http://www.shell.com/global/aboutshell/major-projects-2/prel...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships
Talk about huge!
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f...
Feeling a mountain of metal the size of an apartment block move under you to the tune of a plastic consumer toy that looks like a cheap replica of a fighter jet stick is surprisingly disturbing. I asked them why they used it -- they wanted a mobile wired stick so the guy steering the ship can move to a good position where he can see whatever he's approaching, and for that kind of thing, apparently consumer toys are more reliable than specialist marine equipment. Go figure.
Though the idea of losing my steering on account of a joystick or USB fault ... is a bit terrifying.
If a ship were to crash, can you imagine the headlines or accusations in court?
"Video game controller was used to operate billion-dollar crashed cargo ship"
Knowing that they've built the ship to operate using these devices tells me that they have trust in them.
These ships also have an electronics engineer aboard to take care of such stuff. That's aside from the usual team of marine engineers handling the heavy equipment. In this context, the electronics engineer handles everything from the office equipment to the deck cranes. The engineering team handles the actual engines. They kinda step on each other handling the smaller equipment around the engines (steam plants, pumps, etc -- yes they have steam plants).
And they have excellent machine shops. I expect a consumer joystick to be a) simple to fix and b) cheap and small, so plenty of spares on board.
Source: sailed aboard oil tankers.
http://www.infomarine.net/marine-accidents/119997-27-injured...
I saw a segment on TV with wind turbines from 30 years ago compared to today and they were practically toys compared to the current behemoths.
How do the sides of the ship not collapse before they assemble it in this photo:
http://alastairphilipwiper.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/...
or is that what the pylons on the side are there for?
(I couldn't get to the original; I suppose the site is attracting an entirely deserved flood of attention.)
Note that the US Navy has stopped making nuclear powered cruisers, and only makes nuclear powered submarines & aircraft carriers. They cost massively more than other ships of their size, and only 2 ship yards in the USA can build them.