Kongsberg Digital is pumping more cash into Coach Solutions, the Danish vessel performance firm spun out from shipowner Clipper Group, to boost its position in the market.
The value of the investment has not been revealed but it comes as competition hots up for the wealth of firms offering optimisation, weather routing or fuel reporting services fighting for market share and survival.
Some firms have been acquired by larger companies, such as Coach Solution, which was spun out from Clipper in 2016 and quickly bought by Kongsberg Digital in 2020.
Others have merged, like Coach’s competitor Alpha Ori with Zero North, or been bought in a fire sale, such as Danelec’s acquisition of Nautilus Labs.
Kongsberg Digital vice president of maritime products Anders Bryhni told TradeWinds the investment was about getting a dominant market position quicker.
“It’s mainly a question of speed,” he said, adding that the acquisition of Coach in 2020 was not a pure investment decision but one that would help Kongsberg position its own bank of fleet performance and management software solutions in the mix.
“The question we had to ask ourselves is what kind of timeline we want to make that happen.”
Coach’s origins inside the Danish shipowning group Clipper give the Coach team a unique selling point, according to chief executive Christian Rae Holm.
“We are in the business of voyage optimisation, and also to some extent in performance, that is where we came from, so I think one of our strengths is our fuel modelling,” he said.
“We were one of the first companies to combine proper naval architecture-based fuel models with route optimisation, as we were born and raised in a shipping company before we were acquired by Kongsberg Digital.”
