Manish Singh from AboutShips casts his eye over the fast-changing shipmanagement sector. Writing for Splash last year I anticipated significant and imminent consolidation within the shipmanagement sector, with 2024 being a year wherein several new partnerships would be forged, and industry market maps re-drawn. The period since that article has already proven to be eventful for the shipmanagement sector. And things may only be warming up. Substantial further consolidation should be expected from shipmanagers over the next 12 to 18 months as several players come together to form larger shipmanagement consortia. This trend should be expected both with in-house owner-managers as well as independent shipmanagers. Not only will consolidation improve scale efficiencies, but importantly it will enable managers to invest in and perform on digitalisation and decarbonisation. With key decarbonisation milestones approaching in 2030, only a handful of shipmanagers appear convincingly prepared for vessels with new fuels and technologies to ensure their safe and efficient operation. Similarly, with fleets digitalising at a faster rate, significant further investment is needed by the shipmanagement industry on cyber and business continuity resilience. OSM and Thome set the tone with a landmark shipmanagement merger in the second half of 2023, creating not only a sizeable shared fleet of technically managed vessels but also creating pole position on crew management globally past prolific crew managers like Marlowe Navigation and Magsaysay group. In recent years OSM and Thome have also diversified into a broad range of marine support services for their own managed vessels as well as third parties. V.Group is entering a new phase under consortium ownership led by STAR Capital with Ackermans & van Haaren that has surprised many industry observers. It will be interesting to see what consolidation backing this consortium brings to V.Group. Whereas V. has lost its distinct lead versus peers with regards to ships under technical management, potentially with the new consortium backing it could gain strides by merging further players, especially from within the heavily fragmented German management firms. With V. now off market, it is likely that maritime strategics as well as large-cap private equity investors will court OSM Thome as another promising platform to accelerate further consolidation in shipmanagement and marine support services. We should not rule out other larger managers, including Anglo-Eastern and Fleet Management, who will also look to drive market consolidation with their close relationships. Anglo-Eastern acquired Euronav’s shipmanagement operations around Easter. Fleet Management on the other hand saw an end of an era with its founding managing director, Kishore Rajvanshy, passing the baton and the parent Caravel group increasingly more active in shaping the next phase of growth for Fleet Management. Synergy Marine was arguably the fastest growing shipmanager in recent years with prolific additions of carveouts and partnerships. But contrary to expectations, this appears to have decelerated following an investment from London-led Searchlight Capital in 2022, who have yet to back significant follow-on mergers or acquisitions. Meanwhile, Synergy Marine’s emergence from the Dali allision incident in the US will have strategic implications not only for itself, but for the wider shipmanagement industry. Other maritime strategics including Wilhel