The giant container ships that have come to all but define globalization can be as long as three-and-a-half soccer fields (and roughly that long in terms of football pitches if you’re reading this outside the United States).
The latest and greatest of them come with all sorts of new technology for navigation, managing their load and cutting down on fuel costs.
That got us thinking at this year’s Reuters Manufacturing Summit: what kind of technology are shipping companies putting in to repel pirates, who in some widely publicized cases have taken over ships in the seas off Somalia or in the Straits of Malacca, near Indonesia and Malaysia.
We posed the piracy question to Seaspan CEO Gerry Wang. The bottom line: if you’re Captain Hook or Jack Sparrow, don’t try to steal one of these babies.
You’ll be sorry.
Wang was one of the featured speakers at the annual Reuters Manufacturing Summit, which runs through Thursday in our Chicago offices.
