Hapag-Lloyd-COO Maximilian Rothkopf: He controls the sea trade through the crisis

Podcast

“The Zero Hour”
Hapag-Lloyd Manager Maximilian Rothkopf: He controls the world’s sea trade through the crisis

The world’s oceans are the life blood of our economy: 90 percent of the trade run over the oceans. Shipping is, therefore, a good Seismograph for the crisis, depending on how many containers are somewhere loaded and shipped, will also be ordered, produced, and exported. And here the signals are encouraging. “We are seeing more employment for our ships, and almost all of them are in operation,” says Maximilian Rothkopf, the Chief Operation Officer for Hapag-Lloyd, the operational responsibility for the global shipping business, in the Podcast “The Zero hour”. “Even if the crisis is long over.”

The past few months, extremely for the Hamburg-based shipping company is challenging, says Rothkopf. Routes have been merged, changed, or deleted, capacity is shut down. Intermittently, about every tenth container did not ship in the worldwide fleet. “In part, the whole traffic have changed in the streams overnight,” says Rothkopf, who sits with 40 years in the Executive Board of Hapag-Lloyd. The supply but I can always be maintained. “For the wedding of the crisis, the Supply Chain has worked very well: the ports were open, the ships are driven. At the end of the day the products were flows never to stop.”

Surprisingly good Numbers

Hapag-Lloyd is the fifth largest shipping company in the world, and the last German world-class: The Hanseatic taxes 239 container ships that normally travel 600 ports on all continents. The company, whose roots go back to the year 1847, has 11,000 employees in the country and 2000 to the lake in about 130 countries.

The Figures presented Hapag-Lloyd a few days ago, were surprisingly good. The transport volumes have declined, sales remained stable at EUR 6.4 billion. Since the beginning of the year, the earnings before interest and taxes (Ebit) increased, among others thanks to a strict cost-saving measures by nearly a third to € 511 million. In the crisis, Hapag-Lloyd had around 98 percent of its employees in the country in the home office.

You can hear in the new episode of “The Zero hour”, the routes and supply chains, re-sort, why the sailors would temporarily every lunchtime in the ports of the built-in Horn sound – and why some ships no longer sailed in the crisis, through the Suez canal. The Podcast, there are directly Audio Nowin Apple or Spotify or via Google.