Genting Hong Kong Reports 2017; Outlines Future Strategy

Double Star Call

Genting Hong Kong has reported a segment loss of $186 million on revenues of $1.1 billion for its cruise operations for the year ended Dec. 31, 2017, compared a loss of $106 million on revenues of $908 million for the previous year. Genting owns and operates Dream Cruises, Crystal Cruises and Star Cruises.

Overall Genting posted a loss of $244 million on revenues of $1.2 billion for 2017, compared a to a loss of $504 million on revenues of $1.0 billion for 2016. This includes profit or loss contributions from its shipyards and joint ventures.

For its cruise operations, Genting said in its year-end report that passenger ticket revenue and onboard revenue increased significantly in 2017 mainly to the full year’s service of the Genting Dream and the Crystal Mozart, as well as the launch of the World Dream. Crystal Bach and Crystal Mahler during the year.

Depreciation of the new Dream and Crystal vessels and start-up costs for the new Crystal river ships resulted in the segment loss, according to Genting.

Shipyard operations also posted a segment loss.

For 2017, passenger ticket revenue was $728.3 million or $197.26 per passenger cruise day. Onboard spending was $287.7 million or $77.92 per passenger day.

For 2016, the passenger ticket revenue was $625.4 million or $213.99 per passenger cruise day. Onboard spending was $96.73.

With Dream and Star operating in Asia, Genting stated that Asia generated approximately 68 percent of its cruise revenues in 2017, 30.4 percent came from Europe and 1.6 percent from “other.” In 2016, Asia generated 56.2 percent of the revenues, Europe 42.3 percent and 1.5 percent came from “other.”

While Dream Cruises improved its occupancies and yields in the Hong Kong/Guangzhou and Singapore markets, the arrival of new ships was said to have had a negative impact on Star, creating downward pressure on occupancies and yields. This situation is expected to improve, however, as other brands are reducing their capacity in the market.

Crystal is also seeing more competition with competing brands launching new ships, according to Genting.

Overall, the three brands had a 77.2 percent occupancy in 2017, compared to 81.7 percent in 2016.

The two-ship Dream Cruises fleet, which launched service with the first ship in 2016, will see two more global-class ships join in 2020 and 2021. Plans call for them to sail from Shanghai and Tianjin during the summer months and Australia, New Zealand, California and the ASEAN region during the winter months. The brand is being tagged as “Asia’s Global Cruise Line” by Genting, which also said it will have the youngest fleet in the world.

Star Cruises will continue to sail from China, Taiwan, Malaysia.

Crystal Cruises two ocean-going ships are being extensively renovated. The river fleet will grow to five vessels in 2018, and the yacht expedition segment will grow from one to two ships, with the introduction of Crystal Endeavor in 2020. Furthermore, Genting said that a new class of ocean ships are being designed for Crystal’s fleet to provide more itineraries and reach better economies of scale.

Dream Cruises to Get 2020 Newbuild, Sail Globally

Global Class Vessel

Big news came from Genting Hong Kong on Thursday morning, which announced that Dream Cruises will get the first Global-class newbuild previously allocated to Star Cruises.

The 5,000-guest, 204,000-ton ship will join the Dream Cruises fleet starting in 2020. Genting Hong Kong has a sister ship set for a 2021 delivery as well, which could also be poised to join Dream Cruises.

Global Class

“After designing the Global Class ships for the last three years and investing over 210 million euros to make MV Werften the-state-of-the-art cruise shipbuilding yard in the last two years, we are very pleased to finally start construction on the first Global cruise ship today,” said Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay, chairman and CEO of Genting. “These ships are not only the largest cruise ships to be built in Germany; they are also the most technologically advanced with artificial intelligence. The Global Class ships will follow the embrace of Asians of artificial intelligence in their daily lives, with facial and voice recognition for most services onboard and robots to perform mundane tasks, allowing the crew to focus on service delivery.”

The ships will be built at MV Werften, which started production on Thursday with the official steel cutting ceremony.

The ship will sail from China during the summer season and will move to Australia or the U.S. during the winter season.

Cruise ship global capacity set to soar

Image result for norwegian bliss
Norwegian Bliss Concept Drawing.

The current unprecedented cruise orderbook represents another 250,000 berths the global cruise fleet in the 10 years from 2015 to 2025 – increasing capacity by a huge 40 per cent.

Seatrade Cruise’s new whitepaper The Future of Cruise Ships added that these figures were set to leap further – as with further orders inevitably being placed for deliveries within the second half of that 10-year span, fleet capacity would probably grow at least 50 per cent and push the global passenger total up from 24 million last year to 30 million by 2022, towards 35 million by 2026 and then 40 million by 2030.

The whitepaper places the orderbook (as of July 2017) at 75 firm ocean-going ship orders and a handful of options with a combined price-tag approaching US$47.6 billion.

It points out that the orderbook is still dominated by the big three in Europe: Fincantieri, Meyer Werft and STX France.

Cruise ship global capacity set to soar

Cruise ship capacity will keep soaring – while the luxury cruise sector’s growth has been boosted
Fincantieri (including Vard) is building 29 of the 75 due for delivery by 2025; Meyer Werft in Germany and Finland is contracted for 17; STX France for 12; and the new grouping owned by Genting Hong Kong, MV Werften, for six. The final 11 are being built by smaller shipyards.

A growing trend singled out by the whitepaper is the luxury/expedition market sector. It said that there have been some signs of increased interest in building and operating ships of a smaller size offering a luxury product on more adventurous itineraries. “This is because these can command much higher prices than either standard luxury cruises or the traditionally more basic expedition vessels,” it said.

Indeed, Seatrade Cruise’s whitepaper shows that there are 30 luxury cruise ships on the global orderbook. Their increase can be traced from none being delivered in 2014, to two last year and this year – rising sharply to six in 2019.