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The restructuring of shipping and shipbuilding companies in the midst of rapidly shrinking global shipping demand has become a prominent issue in Korea. In shipping finance, loan syndication featuring many creditors surges as the preferred option. However, increasing the numbers of creditors in the syndicate results in two opposite effects. First is the beneficial effect from their enhanced monitoring power. On the other hand, there is the adverse effect resulting from increased difficulty in coordination when syndicate members increase, particularly in bankruptcy. Our aim of this paper is to analyze the role of finance in the shipping and shipbuilder markets, and determine the theoretical optimal number of creditors for the shipping finance syndicate based on Bolton and Scharfstein (1996). The two issues above result from moral hazard and non-verifiability: coordination among many creditors for collection of bonds in case of default, and the enhancement of monitoring private benefit exploitation by the ship-owner during default. Considering the two conflicting forces result from an increase in creditor membership, we draw conclusions on determining the optimal number of creditors by considering trade-offs between these two factors: More creditors are preferred when the monitoring effect dominates. Otherwise, less creditors are preferred.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a real asset management investment appraisal of the performance of containerships as a primary segment within international shipping, to facilitate Islamic equity investment through a shipping fund. The objectives are to evaluate the risks and returns of shipping under the framework of Islamic equity finance, and to analyze the performance of investing in containerships over the long term, to appeal to retail and institutional clients of Malaysian asset management institutions.

Accordingly, the methodology adopts an investment analysis of a full population of historical data over a period of 20 years, to evaluate performance involving a maritime return on investment (MROI), internal rate of return (IRR), net yield and standard deviation measures of risk and return.

The findings reveal that while earnings are volatile in comparison to capital market expectations, unlevered, tax-free returns on containership investments outperform financial and other real assets.

Shipping is a strong growth industry with about 84 per cent of global trade carried out by the international shipping industry. The problem is that many Islamic asset management institutions and investors have essentially no exposure to Islamic investment in international shipping.

However, shipping is a highly capital-intensive industry, and currently 75 per cent of ship lending has been conducted by European banks and financed on a conventional basis. Post-financial crisis, ship owners, ship lenders and shipyards have all been exposed to the impact of over-levered balance sheets and debt finance. There is a demand for alternative sources of finance.

By communicating risk and reward more effectively, retail and institutional investors, as well as Islamic finance institutions, will realize that the social benefit of equity finance on the basis of profit sharing is more efficient at allocating investible resources than debt finance at interest, thereby increasing investment and economic growth.

The significance is that Islamic equity finance, rather than debt at the time-value of money, should enhance the development of international shipping.

The purpose of this study is to identify the critical success factors to international ship finance centre (ISFC) and to understand the reasons behind ship financing decision by shipowners and their views on the potential of Shanghai to become an ISFC in the near future.

Survey questionnaire and follow-up interviews were conducted. The survey of this study was conducted by firstly sending online questionnaire with interview questions via email and then carrying out interview either on telephone or in-person with the interview questions to collect factual data and views from individual interviewees.

This study identified governmental support and stable policy, sound and favourable legal system, advanced maritime cluster and dynamic source of finance as critical success factors which can help Shanghai to evolve into an international maritime centre with dual function as an ISFC which is a synthesis with the maritime sector of an international finance centre.

This paper is known to be the first to link international maritime centre with ISFC.

This paper investigates the announcement effect of shipping sale-and-leaseback (SLB) transactions. As an emerging source of financing, a growing deal of interest has been paid to the SLB. However, little is known about a variety of aspects of SLB transactions in the shipping industry. In this regard, this study examines the stock market reaction to the SLB announcements of shipping firms and their impact on shareholders' wealth.

A sample of 15 shipping SLB deals commenced by publicly listed Korean shipping companies during 2009–2023 are examined in this research. The announcement effect is measured by abnormal returns (AR) of their stocks based on the event study analysis.

It is found that the AR on the shipping SLB announcement date is, on average, −0.84% while there is no statistical significance. However, the results indicate that shareholders of shipping companies engaging in large-sized SLBs can experience positive AR around the announcement date.

This study is the first attempt to investigate the announcement effect of SLB transactions on the shipping industry and their impact on shareholders' wealth. The findings in this research can offer implications for the financing decisions of shipping companies and investment decisions of stock investors.

This study aims to explain the facts about behavioral biases that cannot be explained by rational patterns in ship investments of small-size shipping companies.

A qualitative approach was adopted in this study. The systematic approach of Wolcott (1994) and the action flows proposed by Miles and Huberman (1994) were taken into consideration.

Factors affecting ship investments are classified as ship finance, market timing, ship specifications and profile and business models of ship investors. In addition, behavioral biases that stand out under each theme are explained in the light of behavioral finance literature.

The originality of this study rests on the lack of studies on behavioral aspects of ship investments.

This paper aims to investigate bank credit policies and uncover yacht building finance assessment factors from bank credit policies toward the yacht industry.

This study’s questionnaire attempts to identify survey respondents’ degrees of awareness through difference analysis, and then uses entropy weighting and gray relational analysis to discover priority ranking order of bank credit assessment considerations from the perspective of Taiwan’s banking sector.

The research findings show that yacht builders have to review their ship financing application methods and improve shortcomings to meet banks’ credit granting requirements.

Banks emphasize yacht builders’ repayment ability to protect their depositors and shareholders.

Recently, leasing has been prominent in the press due to the Air Force’s recent ill-fated attempt to obtain the use of Boeing re-fueling tankers. Forgotten is that, in the early 1980’s, a highly controversial Navy long-term leasing program of Maritime Prepositioned Ships had a different result. However, an unintended consequence of the Navy’s success was that future government leases were practically eliminated. This research examines the issues and parties involved in this unprecedented creative and innovative leasing program for ships used by the Navy’s Military Sealift Command. While the analysis concludes that the Navy’s leasing program was successful and cost effective, laws and policies were changed so that long-term leasing is no longer viable for the strategic financing of military requirements. The case is presented here that existing laws and regulations should be reconsidered so that leased military resources can once again be used to provide and maintain national security.

Although female participation in the labour market has increased significantly over the last 50 years, transport remains a male dominated sector and maritime transport in particular appears to lag behind other modes. It is important to recognise that maritime careers struggle to recruit more generally. This chapter considers the gender gap in the maritime industry and asks what would make the maritime industry more attractive to women. It explores the literature through the lenses of career-decision, career decidedness and career self-efficacy in order to present a conceptual model to explain the persistent gap and consider what could be done to address it. Career choices, development and performance are affected by contextual variables, both personal and environmental, which can promote or hinder career development outcomes. In maritime transport, career perception, workplace culture, social capital and development opportunities still play a major part in the decision-making process and deter women from engaging with the maritime profession. This chapter proposes four interventions to effect much-needed change.