NAVTOR’s Tor Svanes recognized as smart shipping leader with key industry award

Tor Svanes, the founder and CEO of e-Navigation specialist NAVTOR, has been honoured for his role in enabling the development of ‘smarter shipping’ within the maritime industry. Svanes, who established NAVTOR in 2011 after previously leading both Jeppesen and C-MAP Norway, was revealed as the recipient of the prestigious SMART4SEA Leadership Award last night at a gala awards event at the Yacht Club of Greece in Piraeus.

Svanes has quickly grown NAVTOR into a global leader in e-Navigation, providing an array of innovative digital products and services that tackle industry challenges and deliver powerful business benefits. From its base in Egersund, Norway, NAVTOR has expanded to a network of five further international offices, with around 6000 active subscribers and customers from over 60 countries.

The ambition to enable smarter shipping has been at the heart of its development.

Unlocking smarter shipping

“I’m honoured to receive this award and would like to dedicate it to the NAVTOR team, who have created a unique portfolio of products, and our forward-thinking customers, who have been so open and enthusiastic to embrace our innovations, and the powerful benefits they deliver,” Svanes comments.

He continues: “e-Navigation is about more than digital charts and ECDIS. It’s about connecting ship and shore and seamlessly transferring data – sharing knowledge and optimizing decision making. In that way it is the key to unlocking the full potential of smart shipping: a true enabler for greater efficiency, enhanced safety, reduced costs, diminished environmental impact, and a more sustainable shipping industry. Now that is smart.”

Leading the world 

The annual SMART4SEA Leadership Award recipient is decided by the editorial team at leading industry news platform SMART4SEA, based on both their broad-based knowledge and the feedback they receive from the industry. Its aim is to honour “an individual that provides industry leadership and/or contributes towards smarter shipping.”

Svanes was seen to ‘tick both boxes’ through his role at the vanguard of the development and adoption of e-Navigation. As CEO of NAVTOR he leads a firm that introduced the world’s first type approved Pay As You Sail (PAYS) ENC distribution service, the first digital chart table (NavStation), a unique Passage Planning software module (slashing vessel administration time), and the world’s first type approved ‘cyber secure’ e-Navigation communication gateway (NavBox) for totally secure data transferal between ship and shore, amongst other achievements.

And, according to Svanes, there’s much more to come.

Competitive advantage 

“NAVTOR is on a mission to make maritime as profitable, sustainable, safe and efficient as possible,” he says. “We are using e-Navigation as the foundation to build a raft of products and services that enable smarter shipping; giving our customers a complete operational overview, allowing teams at sea and on shore to work as one, and increasingly automating time intensive tasks for a better use of resources.

“We’re now working with a range of partners across the world to add further services and benefits – finding new solutions and boosting the competitive advantage our global customer base enjoys. We see the potential of e-Navigation and smart shipping as almost limitless. This is a voyage that has only just begun, and NAVTOR is committed to keep leading the way, helping our industry chart a safer, more profitable and smarter way forwards into the future.”

For further details of NAVTOR’s products and services please see: www.navtor.com 

Press contact:

Ine Akselberg Haneferd

Marketing & Communications Manager
Mobile: +47 45 60 28 01
Email: ine.haneferd@navtor.com