Cover Story Breakbulk & Project Cargo
That landscape has changed. Consolidation and strategic shifts among established heavy transport providers has reduced the number of globally capable companies competing for project cargo work.
Hennig referred to recent consolidation among global logistics providers and heavy transport and lifting specialists as evidence of that trend.
“ The market changed from having four or five global big players to more local players and less globally available companies,” he said.
Today, some larger asset owners focus their attention on major installation work and the highest-value projects, leaving local transport providers to fill the gaps left in traditional heavy haulage and project logistics markets.
“ The heavy-lift industry used to be more static. The market changed from having four or five global big players to more local players.”
“ Formerly, you would have four to five global asset owners competing for a project,” Hennig said.“ Now you may only have two or three.”
That opens the door for smaller local providers who are offering attractive alternatives or are willing to take on projects that global operators may no longer be interested in.
The result is a market that offers project owners greater diversity of suppliers but also introduces new questions around capability assessment and quality assurance. Rather than relying on a familiar group of established operators with proven engineering departments and long operating histories, cargo owners increasingly need to evaluate a wider range of service providers, Hennig said.
“ The demand for professional transport engineering from clients and their insurance companies is increasing,” he said.“ International standards must be strictly followed and requests for specialized services such as mooring analysis, vessel and voyage specific motion analysis, or professional infrastructure studies are part of the usual workload. And not every subcontractor has the engineering setup to fulfill these requirements.”
That, in turn, has implications for risk management and mitigation.
“ If you ship your cargo with a well-established partner, they have excellent engineering departments, and well- maintained equipment and crews that are part of that system,” he said. Removing one element adds risk and requires more detailed planning and hands-on operational attendance to manage that risk properly.
Double-edged sword
That increased fragmentation in the project cargo sector has been driven in large part by the diversification of manufacturing beyond traditional industrial centers, namely mainland China, and into Southeast Asia, India and other emerging production hubs, John Pittalis, head of marketing and communications at multipurpose ship operator AAL Shipping, told the Journal of Commerce.
Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions, trade restrictions, and the adoption of China-plus-one sourcing strategies have encouraged project stakeholders to broaden their manufacturing footprint and reduce dependence on any single market, Pittalis explained.
“ While this has improved supply chain resilience, it has also created a more complex operating environment involving a wider range of manufacturers, logistics providers, ports and transport interfaces— as well as trade lane focus,” he said.
Pittalis noted that many of the newer manufacturing locations were not historically major exporters of project cargo, resulting in varying levels of heavy-lift infrastructure, specialist equipment availability, and transport expertise across the supply chain.
8 Journal of Commerce | September 2026 www. joc. com