AP Møller-Mærsk – D&D-propelled earnings marvel
Moving parts
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By Alex Lennane
Saskia Groen-in’t-Woud, chief executive of the soon-to-be-defunct Damco, has said the move to fold the forwarder into Maersk was “emotionally difficult, but ultimately the right decision”.
Writing on LinkedIn, Ms Groen-in’t-Woud, who has been repeatedly congratulated on her leadership skills, said the move would “speak to the true heart of customer needs and integrator strategy”.
She added that the Damco team had “turned a history of loss-making into profit and value-generation”.
She said: “Making difficult decisions is never easy, and this one was ...
Comment on this article
Borys Pawliw
September 02, 2020 at 10:01 pmI was an employee at Maersk way back in the 1990s and have done consultancy work for them sporadically since then. They do think things through in depth before they act, but there are many schools of thought within the company as to what it should be: high value tailor made solutions with strong interpersonal relationships through to the bleeding edge IT driven McDonalds cookie cutter offering with minimal human contact. Both approaches can succeed, but the scale of opportunity is very different for both and with the approach they have adopted moving forward, they will soon find themselves seeing Amazon and Alibaba more and more as competitors rather than clients. In that situation, I don’t think there’s too much doubt as to where the advantage as to ultimate IT capability, innovation, financial clout and real customer service commitment is.