The International Shipping Register of the Autonomous Region of Madeira is the 3rd largest in Europe and the 11th in the world, claimed the President of the Regional Government, Miguel Albuquerque, at the opening of the II Madeira Maritime Week.
During the event that brings together dozens of international experts from the maritime industry, the head of the Madeiran Executive underlined the objective of improving the competitiveness of the International Shipping Register of Madeira (MAR) to attract more ships and make it “one of the most important registers in the world.”
“MAR has been an exceptional success,” he said, recalling that “a few years ago, the registration was nothing with four or five registered ships.” Today, Albuquerque pointed out, MAR has “almost 28 million registered gross tonnage, about 1,300 registered ships, including ships belonging to sizable European shipowners, including large container ships.”
All this creates a network of important businesses and revenues for the Region and, above all, comes to place here in Madeira a diversification of an industry that is very much linked to the Portuguese sea tradition.Â
Now, he stressed, it is important to “continue to improve the competitiveness of MAR” to attract cruise ships and also mega yachts, for this, he said, it is necessary to create laws that reduce bureaucracy, facilitating the registration process: “Therefore, we have to introduce, all the competitiveness so everything is on track to become one of the most important registries in the world. At the moment, we are the 11th. We should never forget that several years ago, we only had four or five ships on our registry; our rise has been exceptional.
Samantha Gannon
info at madeira-weekly.com
