About us

The International Centre for Electronic Navigational Charts (IC-ENC) is the largest regional ENC coordinating centre (RENC) globally, representing over half of the world’s hydrographic offices. We’re a member led organisation which provides cost effective services to ensure their maritime data products are compliant with international standards and uphold the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). We also work to ensure that our members’ ENCs are consistent across the global dataset and readily available for use via approved service providers.

Our technical expertise and deep understanding of our members’ needs underpin the services we provide. We validate our members’ maritime data products to international standards and conduct additional checks to ensure navigators receive consistent chart coverage before they progress through our unrivalled distribution network for supply to international shipping and other maritime users. Members also benefit from production support, distribution and revenue management services.

How is IC-ENC funded?

IC-ENC is a low cost, not for profit organisation which is financed out of ENC sales. IC-ENC's costs are recovered by retaining a 'fixed fee' per sale of each ENC subscription. The 'fixed fee' amount is decided by the Steering Committee, based upon costs and sales forecasts. Once the 'fixed fee' is set for the year ahead, each IC-ENC member is free to set its own wholesale ENC price. This way, IC-ENC members know for certain how much revenue they will receive for each ENC subscription sold. The 'fixed fee' currently stands at US$0.50 for a 12 month subscription, which is reduced pro rata for shorter periods, for example a 3 month subscription is US$0.15.

Why is IC-ENC important?

Each government is now responsible for ENC coverage of the waters under its national jurisdiction. Under the guiding framework of international standards, each office is able to derive its own ENC cell scheme; to define its approach to populating and encoding the ENC data for display; and to determine its methods for distributing the ENC data. IC-ENC's experience from studying and working with ENC data from 50 member producers has shown that many different approaches to scheming, populating, encoding and distributing ENCs have already been adopted by the international HO community. Therefore, close cooperation between the various HOs is essential to the whole ENC concept. This is why IC-ENC focuses on providing coordination and standardisation services at both regional and international levels. By operating within a harmonised quality and distribution framework, IC- ENC members effectively avoid these problems.

Our Co-operation Arrangement (CoA) sets out the principles of operation and governance for IC-ENC and can be downloaded here.