INTERCARGO released its 2025 Annual Review, presenting key trends and developments that shaped dry bulk operations last year, and mentioning key initiatives that strive to help overcome challenges.
According to John Xylas, INTERCARGO Chair, throughout 2025, the Association’s mission has remained clear: to support members, amplify their voice where it matters most, and continue advancing quality dry bulk shipping worldwide. Their aspiration is clear: to become the most member-focused international maritime association, delivering the services, expertise, and representation that our members genuinely value and rely upon. Looking ahead to 2026, we anticipate another important year for INTERCARGO. The newly endorsed Newbuilding Specification Working Group will begin its work, providing fresh insights and guidance for a rapidly evolving fleet landscape… said Xylas.
In addition, Kostas G. Gkonis, PhD, Secretary General of INTERCARGO, stated that sustainability was the Association’s core priority in 2025, grounded in a strong commitment to safety and seafarer welfare.
Seafarers’ well-being tops the list of our priorities. Ensuring their welfare is imperative for our sector’s future. People remain the cornerstone of organizational success… Gkonis had also previously underscored in an exclusive interview to SAFETY4SEA.
Looking to 2026, he underscored INTERCARGO’s focus on strengthening cooperation across the dry bulk sector, supporting the IMO as the sole global regulator, and advancing clear and fair global solutions, while recognizing dry bulk shipping’s vital role in global trade and reaffirming the goal of a safer, more resilient, and sustainable sector with seafarers at its core.
Investigation of bulk carrier incidents & emphasis on lessons learned
The rigorous process of investigation and reporting ensures that safety performance remains the most critical key performance indicator for the bulk carrier industry and is fundamental to promoting the industry’s overall image.
The ultimate value of these investigations lies in the distillation of actionable “Lessons Learned”. The IMO’s Working Group on Analysis of Marine Safety Investigation Reports plays a pivotal role in this, analyzing casualty data to identify recurring safety issues.
In a significant output from July 2025, the IMO III Sub-Committee approved 36 such lessons that highlight critical areas including collision, fire/explosion, grounding, and enclosed space entry.
Reducing GHG emissions
While fully supporting the ambition of reducing GHG emissions and introducing new technologies and fuels, INTERCARGO stresses that safety must always come first.
Many emerging fuels introduce new risks, and robust international standards are essential to ensure that decarbonization does not compromise the safety of ships, crews, or the environment.
Geopolitical conflicts in the Red Sea and their impact on global shipping
The most severe and destabilizing development is taking place in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, where Houthi forces have escalated beyond piracy into a full-scale maritime war.
Using anti-ship missiles and unmanned sea drones, their attacks aim to destroy commercial vessels, as tragically demonstrated by the sinking of bulk carriers, resulting in unprecedented risks to seafarers’ lives and global trade routes. This has fundamentally altered risk calculations, forcing widespread rerouting of shipping away from the Suez Canal and creating a zone of catastrophic loss rather than criminal ransom.
The sinking of two bulk carriers, i.e., the Magic Seas and the Eternity C, and the killing of at least four people in the Red Sea in 2025 marks a tragic and unacceptable escalation in the Houthi campaign of aggression against international shipping, while the losses of bulk carriers in the Red Sea in 2024, namely the Rubymar, the True Confidence, and the Tutor, still gravely sadden us.
Since its inception in November 2023, this conflict has turned the world’s key shipping lanes into danger zones, claiming the lives of the very seafarers who keep the global economy running.
INTERCARGO calls on all stakeholders to recognize the severity of this crisis.
The lives of civilian seafarers are not collateral damage. The freedom of navigation is not negotiable. The dry bulk sector, as always, stands ready to deliver the world’s essential supplies, but it cannot do so under fire. It is past time for the international community to secure these waters and once again safeguard our seafarers as the key workers they truly are.… INTERCARGO highlights in the publication.
Piracy and armed robbery at sea
Sophisticated and violent criminal networks continue to target vessels far from shore, specifically in the Somali Basin and the Niger Delta, with the primary objective of abducting crew members and holding them for ransom.
The threat of piracy emanating from Somalia, which once dominated the global landscape, remains largely suppressed due to a decade of robust international naval patrols, the widespread adoption of Best Management Practices (BMP) by the shipping industry, and the presence of armed security teams on vessels. However, the underlying capacity and intent of pirate networks ashore have not been entirely eradicated, as evidenced by the five boarding and attacking incidents in November 2025.
The Straits of Singapore and Malacca form a global shipping chokepoint that continues to experience a high frequency of low-level armed robbery incidents. These are typically opportunistic crimes perpetrated by small gangs targeting vessels at anchor or proceeding at slow speed in congested waters.
The perpetrators’ primary goal is the theft of the ships’ stores, spare parts, or crew property, rather than kidnapping for ransom or hijacking the vessel. While these incidents are generally non-violent, crews have been threatened, tied up, or assaulted, underscoring the very real risk to seafarer safety.
The persistent nature of these attacks highlights the critical need for sustained vigilance, including enhanced watchkeeping, strict implementation of anti-piracy measures such as deck lighting and physical barriers, and immediate reporting to the ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre and the Information Fusion Centre (IFC) hosted by the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) to facilitate regional counter-piracy efforts.
Digitalisation & cyber security
To successfully ride this digital wave, the industry will continue to confront several key challenges head-on. These include:
The significant variation in technological maturity between companies and across a globally diverse fleet, which requires scalable and cost-effective solutions.
The pervasive “operational technology” (OT) knowledge gap, i.e., when traditional maritime engineers and crews interact with complex, interconnected navigational and cargo systems, needs to be closed through targeted and continuous cyber awareness training.
The highly fragmented nature of the bulk supply chain, involving numerous charterers, ports, and brokers, creates a complex attack surface where a vulnerability in one actor can compromise all others.
Raising a robust defence against the dominant cyber threats of ransomware, spoofing, and supply chain attacks requires a layered, ‘defence-in-depth’ strategy.
This starts with foundational cyber hygiene: rigorous patch management, network segmentation to separate critical bridge and engine control systems from business networks, and multi-factor authentication.
Furthermore, the IMO’s review of the ISM Code implementation guidelines should prompt the industry to develop and regularly drill incident response plans, ensuring that crews are the first line of defence, not the weakest link.
By systematically building cyber resilience into the fabric of its operations, the bulk carrier industry can secure not only its own assets but also the safety of its crews and the reliability of the global trade it facilitates.… the Association concludes.
