INTERVIEW: Shipergy Uses AI to Reshape Trading Model Amid Market Downturn

• Shipergy to refocus commercial efforts on hubs in Singapore, Athens and New York
• CEO Daniel Rose sees risks in bunker trading firms adding headcount while margins remain weak
• Shipergy sees automation as key to enabling growth without adding headcount and costs
• The company is currently selling about 450,000-500,000mt/year of marine fuels

Daniel Rose is the firm's CEO. Image Credit: Daniel Rose / LinkedIn

Marine fuel trading firm Shipergy is deploying AI tools to avoid increasing staff headcount as part of a commercial reorganisation geared at addressing the current market downturn.

The firm is reorganising its commercial efforts around the three hubs of Singapore, Athens and New York, Daniel Rose, CEO of Shipergy, said in an interview with Ship & Bunker.

Michael Stig Nielsen, who was hired as chief commercial officer in February 2025, has stepped down as part of the changes. The role has not been replaced, reflecting a shift towards a more execution-led model supported by automation rather than additional management layers.

Rose himself will remain based in London.

"I'm streamlining the business," Rose said.

"Athens has always been our largest office, and that now becomes our main operational hub, because it also has all of the back-office teams there as well.

"The other offices in Europe are going to become subordinate to Athens, but we're keeping them.

"The important point is that over the last three years, we built a core bunker trading machine that works really well; transaction handling, liquidity, credit compliance, all of that infrastructure is in place and functioning really well, and that core can handle a lot more business than it is at the moment, but I just don't want to add more people and cost to do it."

Tough Market Conditions

Shipergy's reorganisation has been prompted by tough conditions for bunker traders, with Rose taking a dim view of current prospects for the market.

"I've been in this business for a very long time, and I've never seen it being this bad for this long," he said.

"The oil price is very low, which doesn't really help traders like us; the volatility is generally low as well.

"But what's really changed is the way that the market responds to geopolitical events.

"I think that there's been a significant recalibration, because events that would have caused lasting price spikes and volatility a few years ago now get absorbed much more quickly."

Wide-ranging sanctions, in particular on Russia, are also having the effect of reducing the amount of bunker volumes that companies like Shipergy can seek to win.

"Russia, whether we like it or not, is an important country in the maritime space; so much in maritime touches Russia, and companies like us that aren't prepared to operate in compliance grey areas just won't go near it," Rose said.

"So the reality is that the compliant addressable market has shrunk a lot, and that is painful for companies with a strong EU or US nexus.

"There's less business to go around for those of us that are operating properly."

Rose is wary of the expansion that some bunker firms are still engaging in despite the market conditions.

"Despite all this, I still see companies adding commercial headcount all over the world," he said.

"They just keep adding traders and hoping it's going to work out; I don't think it is going to work out.

"I'm seeing a merry-go-round at the moment - larger companies throwing money around, trying to get people in, and then those people not lasting very long.

"I don't think that's a very good way to do business.

"I don't want to keep adding headcount in a bad market, because that impacts our costs.

"We're not shrinking the business, but we are starting to use technology a little bit differently."

Deploying AI for Lower-Cost Expansion

Rose sees the potential for new AI tools to reduce his company's back-office workload, allowing for continued expansion without taking on the cost of new staff.

"To be completely frank, one of my biggest challenges as CEO of a tech-led bunkering company is balancing two things: the reality is that bunkers is a relationship-driven industry, and I need to balance that with the opportunity to manage costs and improve efficiency with technology," he said.

"Because if I were to remove all the staff, I wouldn't have a business, and if I keep adding people to grow the business, we make less money.

"With all of the tech that we're evolving, we're not taking the humans away from our clients or suppliers, we are just simply building tools that make their lives an awful lot easier, and also that make my life much easier as the CEO, meaning that I don't need a middle-management layer of people to manage process and systems.

"I just want to operate leaner, without sacrificing service quality, and recognising the value of the relationships we have in the market."

One of the key tools the firm has developed using AI is a system to match its traders with upcoming stems that the company is likely to be competitive in offering for.

"It is inefficient for bunker traders to go out and just blindly cold-call companies," Rose said.

"Because we have exceptionally good vessel movement data available to us from our shareholder group, we've basically plugged that into some of our own internal systems, and we've built some very smart matching.

"We take vessel movement data covering around 50,000 merchant ships worldwide and match it with our commercial data.

"The result is a dashboard that shows each trader where their clients' vessels are heading, and highlights upcoming stems in ports where we know we perform well."

The aim is not just to reduce workload, but to focus traders' time on the deals Shipergy is most likely to win profitably, rather than spreading effort thinly across low-return opportunities.

Another tool designed to reduce middle-management workload takes data from the company's CRM to produce a report assessing the financial position of Shipergy's overall book of trades.

One of the areas Shipergy has focused on automating is capital efficiency, ensuring that trades are priced appropriately for the cost of funding involved.

"In bunker trading, there's often a timing mismatch between when we pay suppliers and when we're paid by clients," Rose said.

"We've built tools that systematically factor that into pricing, so we're deploying capital in a disciplined and consistent way."

The system analyses trades across the book and highlights where margins may not fully reflect funding costs, allowing adjustments to be made early rather than relying on manual oversight.

Another tool automates the process of compliance checks on ships the company is considering selling to, aligned with the company's internal compliance policy, with the results then checked by head of compliance and credit Chris Morgan to avoid any potential for errors.

"We're deploying a lot more things now, as we go forward, which is exciting for me and hopefully for the rest of the company," Rose said.

"The point is that the core of the company, I've put a lot of effort into getting it running really smoothly, and it is, and now I'm leveraging that with the addition of some really meaningful tools to continue steady growth in the right ways without adding headcount."

Slower Growth on Horizon

Shipergy has expanded rapidly since its launch by shipping firm Signal Group in June 2022.

The company initially primarily handled the bunker bunker requirements of the Signal Maritime pools, but soon rolled out sales to third parties.

"We've grown very steadily since I started the company in 2022; as of today, we're now doing 100 supplies a month," Rose said.

"We've touched more than 250 different companies so far, and our third-party business that we do outside of what we do for our affiliates has become the vast majority of what we do."

The firm is now selling about 450,000-500,000 mt/year of bunker fuel, of which about 8% comes from its affiliate's requirements, up from about 350,000 mt in the 2023-24 financial year. The company reported gross profit of $3.2 million in 2024-25, more than double the $1.56 million seen the previous year.

But the company is not expecting further growth at the same pace in the short term, Rose said.

"I'm not anticipating significant growth from third party trading right now; the margins just aren't there, and I don't see that changing for the next six to 12 months," he said.

"That is what it is, and I'm not going to be playing the game of taking on bigger credit risks or doing business which is in a compliance gray area just to make more money, because it's just not the way we operate."

That said, the company still sees the opportunity to expand, leveraging its technological expertise to find ways of doing so without raising costs.

"It's not a question of whether we can grow from here, because we can; it's more about how we do it," Rose said.

While market conditions remain challenging, Rose argues that the changes put Shipergy in a stronger position for the next cycle, with a trading platform that can scale volume, deploy capital more selectively and support customer-facing technology without materially raising costs.