Overview

This report summarises employment at 8 of the 9 ship brokers that provide prices on which the Baltic Exchange gas indices are derived. Each of the brokers is a member of the Baltic Exchange(Baltic Exchange, 2025). Our primary focus is on the extent to which liquefied petroleum gas is represented within the operations of these firms. And to gauge how each firm and this microcosm of the industry is being represented.

Report method

We first extracted employment data by each of the eight companies that included: Fearnleys, Braemar, Clarksons, Poten & Partners, Steem 1960, Simpson Spence and Young (SSY), Gibson, and, Affinity. The ninth panelist is Hesnes which has 31 staff (25 in Norway and 6 in Singapore) but was unable to identify what aspect of the LPG industry their members were involved with and so have excluded these numbers for now. We identified the names of the brokers, their sector focus and location and combined them into one dataset. And that data set is what we use for this summary report. To this combined dataset we added a field to idenitfy the company for which each employee was identified and a field to identify sectors that matched LPG.

Investigative approach

Step 1: Load the Data

Read first few records from the data file of employee by name, sector and location.

##                  Name    Sector  Location    source LPG_related
## 1   Adrian Wara Betsi       SnP      Oslo fearnleys           0
## 2           Agnes Koh   Support Singapore fearnleys           0
## 3           Aili Zong Fearntank      Oslo fearnleys           0
## 4   Albena Panayotova Fearnbulk     Dubai fearnleys           0
## 5 Aleksander Giertsen  Fearngas      Oslo fearnleys           1
## 6         Alison Tran Fearnbulk Hong Kong fearnleys           0

Step 2: Location Count

Count the number of unique individuals per location:

Employee Counts by Location
Location	Total Employees	LPG Related
London	548	54
Singapore	329	46
Oslo	195	27
Dubai	77	1
Houston	67	10
Athens	58	1
New York	43	0
Shanghai	42	0
Mumbai	32	5
Hamburg	28	0
Varna	25	0
The Netherlands	21	0
Aberdeen	19	0
Perth	19	0
Geneva	17	2
Hong Kong	17	0
Tokyo	17	0
Stamford CT	16	0
Sydney	14	0
Copenhagen	11	2
Madrid	11	0
Alexandria	8	0
Long Island	8	0
Hong Kong S.A.R	7	0
Rio De Janeiro	6	0
Seoul Korea	6	0
São Paulo	6	0
Vancouver	6	0
Genoa	5	0
Kristiansand	5	0
Montevideo	5	0
Seoul	5	0
Beijing	4	0
Cairo	4	0
Connecticut	4	0
Great Yarmouth	4	0
Guangzhou	4	4
Melbourne	4	0
Rio de Janeiro	4	0
Santiago	4	0
Belfast	3	0
Ipswich	3	0
Rotterdam	3	0
Aberdeen CPS	2	0
Bergen	2	1
Brisbane	2	0
California	2	0
Delhi NCR	2	0
Ipswich Sentinel	2	0
Isle of Wight	2	0
Johannesburg	2	0
Liverpool	2	0
Malaysia	2	0
Newcastle	2	0
Osaka	2	0
Stockholm	2	0
Auckland	1	0
Avonmouth	1	0
China	1	0
Denmark	1	0
Edinburgh	1	0
Great Yarmouth Gibb	1	0
Humber	1	0
Ipswich Dock	1	0
Port Said	1	0
Rosyth	1	0
Southampton	1	0
Suez	1	0
Texas	1	0
Tilbury	1	0
UK	1	0
Uppsala	1	0
Zug	1	0
NA	1	0

Insight: For both LPG related sectors and overall ship broking London remains dominant with 548 employees (LPG: 61 or 11% share) followed by Singapore with 329 (LPG 50 or 15%), and, Oslo with 195 employees (LPG: 27 or 14%). As a percentage of total employees Houston stands out with LPG representing 20% of employees.
#### Step 3: Sector Count

Count the number of sectors covered by individuals:

## # A tibble: 133 × 2
##    Sector          Count
##    <chr>           <int>
##  1 Dry Cargo         261
##  2 Sale & Purchase   120
##  3 Tankers           118
##  4 Offshore           72
##  5 Fearnbulk          68
##  6 Derivatives        60
##  7 Port & Agency      44
##  8 Fearntank          43
##  9 Accounts           41
## 10 Gases              37
## # ℹ 123 more rows

Insight: “Dry Cargo”, “Sale & Purchase”, and “Tankers” are significant sectors. There are 13 ways that these 8 firms group and categorize employees in the gas sector. And these include: “Fearngas”, “LPG & Petrochemicals”, “Gases”, “LPG Brokerage”, “LPG Operations”, “LPG Research & Consulting”, “LPG, Ammonia and Petrochemical Gases”, “LPG”, “LPG Coasters / Petrochemicals”, “LPG Product Broking”, “LPG Shipbroking”, “LPG Commercial Analysis”, and, “LPG Products”)

Step 4: Cross-Tabulate

Create a cross-table to see how sectors distribute across locations:

LPG Related Staff by Sector and Location
Sector	London	Oslo	Singapore	Athens	Geneva	Houston	Copenhagen	Dubai	Mumbai	Guangzhou	Bergen	Total
Gases	23	1	9	1	2	1	0	0	0	0	0	37
LPG, Ammonia and Petrochemical Gases	0	15	10	0	0	5	0	0	0	0	1	31
Fearngas	2	11	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	18
LPG Brokerage	6	0	7	0	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	15
LPG Operations	5	0	3	0	0	1	0	0	0	3	0	12
LPG Shipbroking	7	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	10
LPG	2	0	0	0	0	0	2	1	4	0	0	9
LPG Coasters / Petrochemicals	5	0	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	9
LPG Product Broking	3	0	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	5
LPG Research & Consulting	0	0	2	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	4
LPG & Petrochemicals	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
LPG Commercial Analysis	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1
LPG Products	0	0	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1

Insight:

“Gas” activity is shown as focused on Oslo (11) and Singapore (5). London has 2 employees.

Step 5: Visualizations

Visualize location counts and the sector-location relationship:

Insight from Visuals:

The bar plot highlights the focus in London, Singapore, and, Oslo, but also with Houston, Mumbai and, China.
The heatmap shows clusters (e.g., broad mix of sectors in London and Singapore).

References

Baltic Exchange. (2025). Panellists. Baltic Exchange. https://www.balticexchange.com/en/data-services/panellists.html