Last week NAVTOR had the honour of welcoming the Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry, Iselin Nybø, to our offices in Egersund. NAVTOR CEO Tor Svanes held a company presentation and discussed product and market developments for NAVTOR with the Minister.
Børge Hetland, NAVTOR CCO, briefly demonstrated the NavTracker and NavFleet software, showing a vessel with nearby traffic in real-time, displaying how safety notifications for route deviations, environmental regulations, weather forecasts, piracy threats alert the user on-screen.
“Monitoring the vessels around the world is increasingly done from ashore”, Hetland explained.” Our NavBox onboard is connected to the vessel positioning systems and makes real-time monitoring very simple. If any safety incidents should occur, the involved parties can review the situation in detail to reveal what happened, and use the event as a learning point for future voyages and company guidelines” - he finished.
Environmental Regulations
Environmental regulations were a topic that Minister Nybø followed up on, asking about the upcoming fuel and emission limits for the maritime sector.
“The change towards reducing emissions is becoming apparent across the industry. With new regulations to be implemented in 2024, There is a high demand for better fuel alternatives and smarter ways of operating fleets as we advance”, Tor Svanes explained. “The performance optimisation technology NAVTOR offer can deliver 4-5% reduction in fuel consumption. That amounts to significant savings considering the size and numbers of vessels the modern merchant fleet”, Svanes said.
Minister Nybø was also interested in hearing about NAVTORs experiences regarding Covid-19 and how this has affected everyone in the last 18 months.
Tor Svanes said: “Of course, nothing can replace meeting our customers and colleagues in person, but we managed the initial transition into digital offices very well. On the business side, NAVTOR saw a steady increase in customers and has had significant growth, meeting expectations we had set coming into last year. In the last 12 months, we added 15 new team members and are still actively looking for recruitments in programming and software development roles. To reach our goal of a 50% market share, up from 17% today, we need to find more skilled people to join our team!”
Feedback and Future
The Minister asked Tor Svanes and Børge Hetland if there were any requests or feedback from NAVTOR to the government’s work with businesses that serve customers and operate in markets around the world.
Tor Svanes replied: “Firstly, we would express our gratitude for the support we experience from organisations like Innovasjon Norge and the international network of Norwegian embassy offices. In the Asian market especially, it is beneficial to come from a country with a long maritime history like Norway.”
Asked about future goals for NAVTOR, Tor Svanes emphasised the need to expand our team to allow further growth. “Our sales and technology department operates internationally, but because our software solves complex challenges within a niche in the software market, we see an actual benefit in onboarding with experienced programmers locally. We are also ensuring detailed specifications for all developers, something that is more important today than ever. Our team understands the real-life challenges and tasks solved at sea, and that’s why we often look for people with maritime experience in the process of building up our programming department.”, Svanes said
“- This underlines the importance of education and our ability to build up the right set of skills in the market, to meet the demand for these jobs”, Minister Nybø replied.
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