Chapter 2179 The shipping industry caught off guard
This attitude of the imperial high-level officials directly led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to focus on preventing the possible emergence of great powers in Africa in the future when making specific allocations. As for other things, they generally did not take it into consideration.
The African colonies of European countries have been finalized, and discussions are also ongoing in West Asia and India. It is estimated that they will be finalized in a short time.
This also means that in the next many years, there will be a large-scale migration involving dozens of countries and more than 10 million or more people.
Such a large-scale migration will inevitably bring about huge market demand, and the first one to bear the brunt is the imperial shipping industry!
The huge transportation demand that exploded rapidly in a short period of time caught all the major shipping companies in the empire unprepared!
Even though the major shipping companies in the empire now have many ships, they are still unable to cope with such a large-scale transportation demand that will explode in a short period of time.
In the first half of the year, Pacific Shipping Company just ordered a batch of cheap ships to be deployed in Europe for passenger and freight transportation in order to expand the empire's business share in Europe and West Asia.
But unexpectedly, before these ships could be delivered, news came that the six Ottoman countries were moving to Africa.
The top executives of the Pacific Shipping Company were also well-informed people. Even before the six Ottoman countries officially decided to move to Africa, they had already changed the cheap transport ships they had ordered before and carried out small-scale modifications to better transport immigrants.
After the Six Ottoman Countries officially confirmed the relocation, the Pacific Shipping Company once again put a number of professional immigrant ships that had been used to transport twelve Southeast Asian countries in the early years, and now were converted to passenger transport in Europe, into immigrant transportation again.
At the same time, they also urgently searched for available ships everywhere, including second-hand ships, scrapped ships, and even offshore ships, just to eat the big cake of the six Ottoman countries moving to Africa.
However, although their movements were fast enough, they still did not expect that the upper levels of the empire were faster!
Not long after, news came out that the Tatars had decided to head to the west coast of Africa.
Then came Spain, England, Sweden, Naples and a large number of other countries who all said they wanted to colonize Africa.
These news instantly made the major shipping companies in the Tang Empire excited!
These are all sudden surges in market demand.
But to meet these market demands and make huge profits from them, you must have enough ships!
Although the Tang Empire's ship tonnage was already extremely huge. In the forty-eighth year of Xuanping, it had a total merchant ship tonnage of 14 million tons. However, the empire's huge merchant ship tonnage was almost all to meet its own development needs. Most of them
In fact, they all run within the Western Pacific Ocean.
The routes in the Western Pacific cover East Asia, Beihai Province, the Nanyang Peninsula, Nanyang Islands, and Australia.
This is where most of the empire's population, industrial, commercial, manufacturing and even consumer markets are located. This is the focus of competition for the empire's major shipping companies.
As for trans-American and European routes, although they are also increasing year by year, the total volume is still far from being comparable to the routes in the Western Pacific.
Even the ships on the American and European routes actually provide transportation services for the Tang Dynasty overseas.
How should I put it? Almost all of the 13 million tons of ships provided transportation services for the Tang Dynasty itself, and the transportation ships provided for trade between the Tang Dynasty and indigenous countries were actually very small in tonnage.
Furthermore, the tonnage of ships specifically providing transportation services to indigenous countries is even smaller, and they are all non-standard ships.
For example, Pacific Shipping Company operates a number of passenger routes and cargo routes in Europe specifically for the indigenous market. The ships operating on these routes are all non-standard ships.
What are non-standard ships? They are ships that do not meet the standards of the imperial shipping industry!
For example, passenger ships, the Shipping Department under the Ministry of Transportation of the Tang Empire clearly requires that all types of passenger ships engaged in inland shipping, offshore shipping, and ocean shipping must meet quality standards. They have very strict requirements on ship quality, per capita space, and the number of lifeboats.
requirements.
However, this regulation is only limited to ships that provide passenger transportation services to the people of the Tang Dynasty!
In other words, if the passenger transport business of this ship is only open to the indigenous people, then the empire will not bother to take care of it. Your company can do whatever you want. Of course, there will also be minimum standards. This is to protect Datang.
As for the safety and interests of the crew, as for the interests of indigenous passengers, the big guys at the Ministry of Transport don't even bother to take a look.
This also led to the Tang Empire's shipping companies often setting up passenger routes specifically for indigenous passengers when operating overseas. In order to reduce costs, they naturally used non-standard ships.
The emergence of this non-standard ship is not just a day or two. More than ten years ago, during the migration operation of the Twelve Southeast Asian Countries, the major shipping companies of the Tang Empire specially built a large number of so-called professional immigration ships in order to save costs.
It was specially used to transport indigenous immigrants.
In the actual operation process, not only the profits are huge, but also widely praised by the indigenous people in various countries in Southeast Asia. They believe that the space of this batch of ships is large enough, and the freight is within their affordability. The most important thing is safety.
In the eyes of the people of the Tang Dynasty, these non-standard ships, which only had more than a thousand tons and cut corners during construction, were absolutely not safe. If those shipping companies dared to use such ships to operate routes that provided passenger services to the people of the empire,
You will definitely be fined to the point where you will doubt your life.
However, from the perspective of the indigenous countries, this ship is already very safe.
A thousand-ton iron ship is large enough to resist wind and waves. It also has steam power and can also have strong resistance in storms.
In short, it is much better than their sailing wooden boats!
Therefore, after the migration of this group of non-standard ships to the twelve Southeast Asian countries, they were engaged in the migration of the Kingdom of Denmark. They generally continued to serve in overseas areas such as Europe, specializing in providing transportation services to the indigenous people of various countries.
However, there are not many of these non-standard ships!
Facing the huge transportation needs of African colonization, shipping companies in various places could not find enough ships to operate African routes for a while!
It’s not that they don’t have ships, but these ships are used for other purposes, and most of them are actually cargo ships. Among the cargo ships, there are also a large number of professional cargo ships, such as refrigeration ships, grain ships, coal ships, ore ships, etc.
Oil tankers, as well as new types of cargo ships and container ships that have emerged in recent years.
There are many passenger ships outside the cargo ship, but these passenger ships are also specifically targeted at the people of the empire, and most of them run in the Western Pacific Ocean or global routes.
Besides, can you imagine using a 30,000-ton luxury liner like the Nova to transport a group of indigenous people?
Even if Feng Shipping Company dares to use the luxury liner Star to transport the indigenous people, the indigenous people will not be able to afford it!
Furthermore, a very important point is that although the major shipping companies seem to be making a fortune from the African route, they also know very well that compared to the huge shipping share within the empire, the African route is only a small number, and there is still nothing they can do about it.
Lasted too long.
It is impossible to disrupt the strategic deployment of local business just because of some overseas business. This is putting the cart before the horse.