Time Charter Equivalent
The daily revenue a shipowner actually keeps from a voyage, after paying the costs of running it -- fuel, port fees, canal tolls -- expressed as dollars per ship per day. It exists because shipping revenue arrives in two incompatible forms: a TIME CHARTER, where the customer hires the vessel and pays those voyage costs, and a SPOT voyage, where the owner pays them out of a much larger headline freight rate. Comparing the two gross numbers is meaningless; TCE converts both to the same net daily figure so a quarter, a fleet, or two competitors can be read side by side. It is the single most important number in shipping and it is NOT a GAAP measure, so each owner computes it from its own cost assumptions -- read it per vessel class (a Capesize and a Handysize do not share a market) and never pool classes into one average.
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