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By Mike Wackett
Unifeeder is to close several offices in North Europe and transfer staff to three regional centres as it adapts to a future of “fewer, but bigger” customers.
The feeder and shortsea specialist describes the consolidation as “an organisational change of some magnitude” and admitted it would directly affect around 50 jobs.
Unifeeder said today: “Everyone has been offered the opportunity to continue in the new organisational setup, but a few customers and partners will notice replacements of Unifeeder staff in some positions.”
More than 10 Unifeeder offices, including Rotterdam, Felixstowe and Helsinki, will be “converted” into three regional centres – Copenhagen, Hamburg and Gdynia – to oversee the Scandinavia, west and central Europe and Eastern Europe markets.
Unifeeder executives said that its St Petersburg office would remain as a stand alone operation alongside the three regional centres.
The location of the three regions was decided by a desire to be close to its deepsea customers, said Unifeeder. However, it added that to meet the demands of its shortsea business, some country offices would be kept open.
Explaining the restructure today, chief executive Jesper Kristensen said the establishment of the three new regional centres would enable Unifeeder to “face two market trends”.
“One is that the market is consolidating,” he said, “a process that has been underway for a long time, but now becoming very evident.
“Generally, the future will mean fewer, but bigger customers with more diverse requirements and substantial purchasing power.”
Indeed, with the rush of M&A activity in the liner industry over the past two years, Unifeeder’s potential customer base for feeder business would have shrunk dramatically.
Recent consolidation includes Maersk’s takeover of Hamburg Sud and the announced merger of the three Japanese carriers, K Line, MOL and NYK.
The other trend, said Mr Kristensen, was that the procurement of services by ocean carriers had increasingly become more centralised as cost controls were tightened and, as result, carrier branch offices had lost their autonomy to fix feeder shipments.
Mr Kristensen said for many years Unifeeder had considered it an advantage to be present in several countries, but increasingly these smaller units found it “difficult to cope with a new market structure”.
He said feeder volumes had also become more volatile and that agreements and contracts had a tendency to run for longer periods and be more complex.
“Contract negotiations may be underway for a long time, [then] fall into place on a Friday and be expected to be up and running the following Monday,” said Mr Kristensen.
“Together, our colleagues simply have more resources available to rectify a situation, such as unexpected volume changes.”
The new regional centres will report to the chief executive, chief operating officer Annemette Jepsen and deputy chief executive Jesper Bogh Uldjerg.
The Copenhagen regional centre was established in autumn 2016, and it is intended that the centres in Hamburg and Gdynia will be operational within the next few months.
Unifeeder is the biggest feeder operator in Europe with a fleet of around 50 chartered vessels, for a capacity of approximately 55,000 teu, and is ranked 29th in Alphaliner’s league table of global container lines.
This article was corrected on 21 June. The Unifeeder St Petersburg office is not to be closed, but will remain open “alongside the three regional centres”.
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