One of the best known names in container shipping is readying for a new adventure. Lars Jensen, who heads up consultancy Vespucci Maritime, will be packing his camper van shortly for an epic, 18-month voyage across Africa. Hapag-Lloyd, DSV, and Nexxiot are sponsoring the journey which will see the former Maersk man explore container logistics opportunities across Africa.
The plan is to depart from his native Denmark at the start of July, head down to Algeciras in Spain, and sail across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco and then follow the West African coastline all the way down to South Africa before heading north along East Africa to end in Kenya, visiting a total of 41 countries over 18 months.
Jensen says Africa is poised to add almost a billion people between now and 2050. He made a model late last year, looking at how this growth, combined with a very modest economic growth projection per capita, will result in a situation where Africa in 2050 will be importing as many containers as Europe is today.
“With the current port and inland logistical setup, that cannot be done,” he tells Maritime CEO. “This in turn means there are huge opportunities arising in logistics in the many coming years – but not without challenges.”
With more than 170,000 followers on LinkedIn, Jensen has become one of container shipping’s most high-profile names; his daily posts on the Red Sea shipping crisis, and latterly the Hormuz shutdown, have become essential reading for thousands of people.
His Red Sea updates have now been going for more than 900 days, something he warns should be a cause for some concern related to Hormuz, with no guarantee that this will be over soon, either.
“For those arguing that Hormuz is too important for the global economy to remain closed for a long period, keep in mind that the Suez Canal was closed for eight years from 1967 to 1975,” he points out.
Jensen has been liner shipping’s soothsayer for many years, predicting, for instance, the consolidation in the sector far ahead of anyone else. He admits though, that making predictions in 2026 is far more tricky.
“The challenge is the increasing influence of geopolitics,” he says. “That means decisions are made at a large scale, which are not necessarily rooted in traditional economic rational viewpoints, and this makes predictions tougher.”
Pressed for a big prediction, he tells Maritime CEO that he thinks China will begin the construction of the Nicaragua Canal as an alternative to Panama within the next decade – an infrastructure project that has been mooted repeatedly over the past 20 years.
For anyone interested in following Jensen’s progress on the ground in real-time, his yellow van, Syncro Sally, will be equipped with a tracker provided by Nexxiott.
