Another successful Tanker Week at Clarksons

In mid October we welcomed participants to Clarksons’ London headquarters for Tanker Week — our annual five-day programme designed to equip employees and clients with essential knowledge for navigating the global tanker industry.

The course provides participants with a comprehensive understanding of key areas, covering commercial, financial, analytical, and regulatory dimensions of the industry. This year, 17 early-career professionals participated, with 10 joining from Clarksons’ Athens, Delhi, Dubai, Geneva, Houston, London, Rio and Singapore offices and 7 clients traveling from Brazil, Croatia, Dubai, Hong Kong, London and Oman.

Throughout the week, sessions were led by in-house specialists and external industry experts who covered a range of subjects. These included the impact of economic and political events on the tanker market, compliance requirements, sanctions and regulatory frameworks, negotiation and chartering processes, demurrage and claims management, and the green transition.

Highlights:

Day three focused on a hands-on chartering exercise centred on voyage calculation, evaluation, and chartering strategies where four teams competed to cover two cargoes of West Africa crude oil exports whilst securing employment for an owned vessel and four time-chartered vessels. The teams were required to negotiate with four ‘seasoned’ brokers determined to make life difficult! All four teams prepared well and some import lessons were learnt! 

Tanker Week concluded with a ‘Dragons’ Den’ competition. The four teams delivered creative and forward-thinking pitches to the dragons: Course Director, Bob Knight; John Edmondson, Worldscale expert David Insole and Tanker Projects Director, Guy Preece.

With each team having just 10 minutes to persuade the panel to invest in their newco concept, the competing teams focused on various service and product offerings designed to fund the development of a new drydock facility in India, develop a new training app, provide drydock broking services and create a new VLCC tank cleaning service to enhance backhaul utilisation.

As in previous years the competition was tight with just half a point separating the winner from the second placed team. This year’s winners were the Shipingo team who provided a strong business case for investing in the development of a training app including an AI-powered negotiating tool. 

The ‘Jim Gretton memorial trophy’ award for best participant engagement throughout the week was presented to Grazyna Machnik from Unipec UK.

Tanker Training Week stands as a testament to Clarksons’ commitment to professional development — both within our organisation and across the wider industry. We’re committed to empowering the next generation of professionals as they develop industry expertise, build networks, and form lasting connections.