Digital chart specialist Chartworld’s recent ECDIS for free initiative is paying off handsomely with the company’s CEO describing uptake as “tremendous”.
Steven Schootbrugge, in conversation with Maritime CEO, explains the rationale for the price change decision.
“We want to provide our services and apply our expertise to the entire range of digital navigation requirements for any shipping company and change the focus of looking at the component parts separately,” Schootbrugge says, adding that ECDIS pricing was getting in the way of that ideal.
“While many people understand what ECDIS is, it was clear that they hadn’t understood the cost of running and owning ECDIS. We wanted to show the hardware is probably the smallest part of the overall cost and remove it from the comparison equation,” Schootbrugge explains.
Chartworld clients can now subscribe to our ‘all-in’ service whereby they get all the hardware, software and data that they require.
“We ensure compatibility, compliance and performance,” Schootbrugge stresses.
More than half of Chartworld’s existing clients have switched to this new concept. Moreover, the company is currently shipping three times as many systems as it did this time last year.