Ship Brokering Services

Bulkargo sits between cargo owners and vessel owners and arranges the contract that moves your shipment. The charter party fixes the freight rate, the laycan, the laytime, the demurrage, the bunker terms, and dozens of operational clauses that quietly decide whether a voyage runs cleanly or turns into a dispute. A broker who treats those clauses as boilerplate costs the cargo owner money on every fixture; a broker who reads them against the cargo, route, and counterparty in front of them protects margin and keeps the supply chain moving.

Our job is to negotiate those terms on your behalf, find the right vessel for the cargo, and stay with the fixture from first inquiry through discharge and demurrage settlement. We do not own vessels and we are not affiliated with an owner. Our commercial interests sit on the same side of the table as the cargo owner, and that independence shapes every recommendation we make.

Bulkargo was founded in 2023 by Carlos, Felipe, and Manuel Alvarez, and combines decades of senior brokerage experience built on the world’s principal dry bulk and tanker desks. Headquartered in Panama City, with regional offices in Cartagena and Bogotá, the firm is structured around four cargo desks: dry cargo, tankers, project cargo and break bulk, and specialised liquid products. We work across voyage, time, COA, spot, consecutive, and bareboat charter structures; the right modality is part of the brief, not a service line.

Every fixture Bulkargo arranges is informed by an active read of the freight market. We track the Baltic Dry Index and its sub-indices on a daily cycle, the Baltic Clean and Dirty Tanker indices (BCTI and BDTI) for the liquids book, sale-and-purchase activity, the orderbook and scrapping pipeline, bunker spreads, port congestion, and the macro inputs (steel output, crude balances, grain stocks, OPEC quotas) that move rates week to week. That market view is part of the brokerage relationship. Clients do not pay for it separately and they do not have to ask for it; it sits behind every recommendation.

Where that intelligence becomes most valuable is in charter strategy: timing a voyage fixture against a softening Capesize curve, locking a period charter ahead of a known tightening, or restructuring a programme between voyage, COA, and time charter as conditions shift. For larger or repeating programmes, we also work on fleet and lane optimisation, selecting the right vessel class, loading window, and modality mix to lower delivered freight cost across the year rather than per stem.

For clients new to bulk shipping (industrials moving into self-contracted freight, traders building out a chartering desk, or finance teams stress-testing freight exposure), we provide market entry guidance: vessel class economics, charter party fundamentals, demurrage exposure, and the operational hand-offs between broker, operator, agent, and master. Existing charterers engage us for charter party and demurrage reviews: pre-fixture clause work to tighten language before commitment, and post-fixture laytime and demurrage assessment when claims are in dispute. For clients who need standalone guidance rather than execution, we accept formal retainer and project-based engagements on the same scope.