It is 20 years since managing director Kurt Klemme first joined Reederei Nord, after studying law in Heidelberg and Berlin.
He left in 2005 to become managing director of MPC Munchmeyer Petersen Steamship, building up that company’s shipmanagement business. He returned on 1 January 2011 after being asked by the Oldendorff family to assist with Reederei Nord’s transition to the next generation.
As his children were quite young, company founder Klaus Oldendorff passed the business to his wife Christiane, whose great achievement was maintaining the company and handing it on in a healthy state to her children, Klemme says.
Christiane was not a shipping person and relied heavily on support of the management. But she knew things had to change, given the focus on such a cyclical industry, and started diversifying by acquiring real estate.
Klemme remembers Christiane saying her husband gave 98% of his life to shipping but drove around in an old Mercedes (although he also had a sailing yacht).
'Great responsibility'
“This [real estate] has been the best business we have had for the last 10 to 15 years,” Klemme says.
A year before Christiane died in 2014, she passed everything on to her children — Klemme says “very wisely and with great responsibility”.
This [real estate] has been the best business we have had for the last 10 to 15 years
He adds that family owned companies, which comprise the core of German shipping, and generally mid-cap outfits, are typically much healthier than stocklisted firms because they can adapt and adjust better to crises and opportunities.
"That is why they tend to stay longer and be more profitable," he says. "But the big problem is always the transition period.”
'Lived the details'
Klemme remembers Klaus, who moved to Limassol in Cyprus in 1987 — because of “detrimental” high German taxes in force despite the then shipping crisis — and where Reederei Nord Shipmanagement is based, as a very fit man both mentally and physically, keen on sports and sailing, and a non-smoker who drank very little.
He was also someone meticulous about detail. Klemme recollects how, when the company was buying new boilersuits for crew, Klaus wore a pair all weekend, washed them five times and then reported back on what was wrong with them.
“He wanted to be sure the crew got good quality,” Klemme says.
“He really lived the details of the company.”
Klemme spends much of his free time on his family farm, which has been converted into a holiday residential business run by his wife.
The farm, close to the border with Denmark, was originally purchased around 100 years ago by one of Klemme’s ancestors, a naval officer.
Now aged 50, Klemme says he enjoys cycling and sailing with his four children.
