The best way to avoid pirates on the open seas? Outrun them, said Seaspan CEO Gerry Wang, speaking to the Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit on Tuesday.

Somali pirates have wrought havoc in recent years, but Wang, who runs container shipper Seaspan, said his ships were too fast and too tall to attract their attention.

While the pirate’s speedboats are thought to top out at 22 knots, Wang said his boats generally speed through the areas patrolled by pirates much faster than that — at speeds of around 29 knots.

On the first day of this year’s Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit, one of the guests told us of the Chinese theory of the word “crisis” — the symbols for which are a combination of “problem” and “opportunity”.

On Tuesday, Vice Chairman John Rice told Reuters that both sides of the equation were in play for GE, but voiced confidence that the company would be able to hit its marks.

General Electric shares have had a tough run in 2009, but Rice’s comments — first reported by Reuters — did seem to turn the tide for GE on Tuesday, which had been lower on the day, but recently were 4 percent higher.

Rice, who runs GE’s Technology Infrastructure group, was one of the featured speakers at this year’s summit, which continues through Thursday in Chicago.

That was the advice from truck manufacturer Navistar International Corp’s CEO Dan Ustian at this week’s Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago.

Ustian said the current slowdown has been worse and deeper than expected — even though the trucking industry had a sense that things were starting to go south as far back as 2007.

Ustian, one of our featured guests on the first day of the summit, told Reuters that the trucking industry is a great place for people to start if they want to get a good read on the economy. Most things that are made in the U.S. get where they’re going with the help of a truck somewhere along the way.

The breadth of the company’s businesses supports his view.

Navistar is a manufacturer of commercial trucks, IC Bus, LLC (IC) brand buses, MaxxForce brand diesel engines, Workhorse Custom Chassis, LLC (WCC) brand chassis for motor homes and step vans, Navistar Defense, LLC military vehicles, and is a provider of service parts for all makes of trucks and trailers. Additionally, it also designs and manufactures diesel engines for pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs.

The Manufacturing and Transportation Summit continues through Thursday in Chicago.

The plans are in.

Now comes the waiting, which, as Tom Petty can tell you, is the hardest part.

Now that General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC have filed their plans of reorganization to the U.S. government and have started what looks like a long and not-painless process to make themselves smaller, more profitable and better suited to the current U.S. demand for new cars.

For Bill Diehl, chief executive of manufacturing consulting firm BBK, one thing that he would not favor would be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by one of the two troubled automakers.

Diehl, speaking at the annual Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit, said it is unclear to him how the automakers would get through what would be a particularly tricky process of trying to reorganize themselves under Chapter 11.

The Reuters Summit program is in its fifth year, and in 2009 will include top-level executives from  industries and sectors including everything from Infrastructure; to Mining; to Investing in India, China, Japan and Russia; to Food and Beverages.

The U.S. government is spending a LOT of money these days.

We generally don’t go for the all-CAPS version of words, but in this case, it seemed appropriate. Every day we’re seeing new multibillion-dollar programs being rolled out of Washington, D.C. for everything from bank bailouts to auto companies programs.

But, according to Wick Moorman, chief executive of Norfolk Southern Corp, much more infrastructure spending still needs to be done for the nation’s railroads.

Moorman said the major companies will do their share, but the Obama Administration will still need to spend more on rails, Moorman said. If it doesn’t, Morman

Moorman was one of our featured guests at Monday’s session of the Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago. The summit runs through Thursday in our Chicago offices and includes guests from throughout the sector.

Trying to game this current recession has been a tricky — and so far, a largely unsuccessful — venture.

Most of us try (at least in the U.S.) to think of it in terms of innings (”If this recession is a baseball game and there are nine innings, where are we?”).

This game looks like it still has a way to go … and it actually doesn’t sound like this is going to be that fun a game at all.

But Bill Phelan, founder and president of PayNet Inc, looks at this cycle a little differently and runs the numbers about where the economy seems to be right now and compares it to the last recession during the end of 2001 into 2002.

PayNet is a company that collects real-time loan information — originations, delinquencies, etc — from more than 200 leading U.S. capex lenders. The company’s proprietary database — updated weekly — is one of the richest and largest collection of commercial loans and leases, encompassing more than 90 million current and historic contracts worth $600 billion.

Phelan was our first guest at Monday’s session of the Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit in Chicago and he provided a good jumping-off point for many of our scheduled guests through the week.

The data is sobering and Phelan suggests that the bottom in this case will be lower than we have seen in some time.

Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation Summit runs through Thursday in our Chicago offices and includes guests from throughout the sector.

It isn’t easy being a manufacturing CEO these days.  
   

Industrial production has plummeted around the world, falling commodity prices are hurting sales of equipment used in mining and oil and gas exploration, and even once-robust emerging markets like China are feeling the squeeze from the recession in developed markets. Another key market, construction, is in its worst decline in generations. 
   

Large U.S. manufacturing companies have responded to the lean times by becoming leaner themselves, in some cases by cutting tens of thousands of jobs. 
   

Yet one of their biggest challenges may be the lack of visibility, what some have described as “blizzard conditions,” which makes planning an already cyclical business especially difficult. 
   

The 2009 Reuters Manufacturing and Transportation summit, held in Chicago February 23-25, will tackle these topics and more. Reuters has invited a group of manufacturing sector CEOs to give their views on what companies do in this environment to protect profits, how to cut costs without cutting too deeply, and the likely impact of the Obama stimulus.

The U.S. is expected to spend an extra $28 billion to upgrade the nation’s bridges and roads and one manufacturer is hopeful some of those dollars will flow their way.

Ruben Ramirez, Reuters, Rock Hill, South Carolina.

SOUNDBITES:

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.

The credit crunch that’s curtailing access to funding for many companies may lead to consolidation among companies that own and operate shipping lines.

Container ships are not cheap, and they take years to build, so investors who order one have to do so well ahead of time. Some have overextended themselves, and may now be ripe takeover candidates.

Seaspan, a company that owns and leases container ships, sees many opportunities for acquisitions in coming months, as smaller operators run into financial problems, its Chief Executive Gerry Wang told the Reuters Manufacturing Summit in Chicago.