Company: CMRE-PC
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 20-F
Source: 0001140361-25-005199
Chunk: 92

Company: Costamare Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 20-F
Item: Item 4
Chunk 92
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 or Costamare Services. Further, we are required to indemnify Costamare Shipping and Costamare Services for liabilities incurred by them in performance of the Framework Agreement, separate ship-management agreements, supervision agreements and the Services Agreement respectively, in each case except in instances of gross negligence or willful misconduct on the part of Costamare Shipping or Costamare Services.
 
Competition
 
We operate in markets that are highly competitive and based primarily on supply and demand. Generally, we compete for charters based upon charter rate, customer relationships, operating expertise, professional reputation and vessel specifications, size, age and condition. Competition for providing containership and dry bulk services comes from a number of experienced shipping companies. In addition, in recent years, there have been other entrants in the market, such as leasing companies and private equity firms who have significant capital to invest in vessel ownership, which has provided for additional competition in both sectors.
 

Containership vessels: Participants in the container shipping industry include “liner” shipping companies, who operate container shipping services and own containerships, containership owners, often known as “charter owners”, who own containerships and charter them out to liner companies, and shippers who require the seaborne movement of containerized goods. Historically, a significant share of the world’s containership capacity has been owned by the liner companies, but since the 1990s, there has been a trend for the liner companies to charter-in a larger proportion of the capacity that they operate as a way of retaining some degree of flexibility with regard to capital spending levels over time given the significant costs associated with purchasing vessels.
 
We believe that the containership sector of the international shipping industry is characterized by the significant time required to develop the operating expertise and professional reputation necessary to obtain and retain customers. We believe that our development of a large fleet of containerships with varying TEU capacities has enhanced our relationship with our principal charterers by enabling them to serve the East-West, North-South and Intra-regional trade routes efficiently, while enabling us to operate in the different rate environments prevailing for those routes. We also believe that our focus on customer service and reliability enhances our relationships with our charterers. In the past decade, we have had successful chartering relationships with the majority of the top 20 liner companies by TEU capacity.
 
In the past, we have been able to address the periodic scarcity of secondhand containerships available for acquisition in the open market through the acquisition of containerships mainly from our liner company customers