Solar Solve Marine has traded with 97 countries since its formation 30 years ago but every year we only receive orders from between 35 and 50 different countries. It has taken the whole period since the company began exporting, to Malta initially, to achieve the 97 that we have traded with so far.
At the end of every financial year we list all of the countries we have traded with, in order of sales value and we have just produced the list for last year, 2017. Coincidentally I came across an old copy of Solar Solve’s Newsletter dated February 1998 which listed the TOP TEN countries we traded with during 1996 and 1997.
There were 9 countries that appeared in all 3 lists, even though 21 years have passed and huge changes have occurred within the global marine industry as well as the many shipbuilding and shipowning nations around the world, in the intervening years between 1996 and 2017.
South Korea and the Netherlands vied for first and second place in 1996,1997, 2017 and for all of the years in between. Japan and Singapore have bounced around the table quite a bit as has Australia also.
As each year’s list moves down and the values of the annual turnover with a country gets less, the position in the list becomes far more varied year on year but I suppose it is no surprise that most of the countries are in the list somewhere. Hence the reason why it has taken over 2 decades to get to 97 countries and goodness knows when we will reach the elusive century.
With China, South Korea and Japan continuing to take the lion’s share of the newbuild cake between them nothing much is changing there as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
