A new generation of blue-blood shipping families are beginning to breathe life back into the German shipping scene.
Heirs to German shipping dynasties stretching back five generations from families such as Schulte, Oetker, Bunnemann and Dohle are stepping up their activities to provide a healthy counterweight to what could have been a dying shipping scene.
Many have returned to their roots, where they are helping to create a new maritime cluster.
“Now there is a growing bunch of people who have all studied or worked outside of Germany but are now coming back, very well-educated young people who are now taking over their family firms,” says Alexander Oetker of AO Shipping, whose younger brother, Konstantin, moved back to Germany from London in 2016.
The return of a handful of younger shipping entrepreneurs is unlikely on its own to return Hamburg to its former glory as a place that rivals other major maritime centres. But paired up with younger generation of families already in Germany — such as those from the Oldendorff, Toepfer, Reith and Hinneberg families — it is providing an ever expanding pool of talent.
Many of the mostly 30 and 40 year olds who have returned after years overseas are today well entrenched in their family’s companies. That includes the likes of Johann and Christoph Schulte at the Schulte Group, or the Bunnemann twins of Nicolaus — who moved his family offices of Atlantic Lloyd from Bremen to Hamburg — and brother Friedrich, who handles the Asiatic Lloyd business in Singapore.
They are being joined by more recent arrivals such as Jan Dohle, son of Jochen Dohle, who returned to the family business in November 2016, initially in its Isle of Man (IOM) office, and later to Hamburg for its insurance and bulk division. In an interview with the firm’s in-house magazine, Dohle said he was “actively supported by his family in what he wanted to do”. He turned to shipping, a business where many of his friends and family worked, after realising how “international, exciting and involving the industry can be”.
Such enthusiasm is common among the younger generation and augurs well for shipowning in Hamburg.
“It could have died a long slow death from the container crisis, but people seemed to stick with it with the next generation,” Konstantin Oetker says. “It has a feeling from 2008 onwards where it was very backward looking — now it’s turning a little bit and is more future aware.”
The cosmopolitan nature of the younger generation set them apart from the more traditional habits of their fathers' generation.
If there is a model for the younger breed, it appears to be Henning Oldendorff, who himself took over his father’s company at a young age and who is reputed to be open to sharing information with them.
But the coming-of-age of young German shipping talent is best measured in the manner that they have worked to distinguish themselves from their parents.
“They didn’t just repeat what the generation before them did — more containerships, more KGs [limited partnerships] — because that was impossible,” one German owner says. “They went down other avenues, and attracted other sources of capital, to build up a cluster here.”
The new generation appears to acknowledge the technological challenges and environmental regulations, as well as the need to attract equity into the maritime cluster. Most important of all, they provide hope for the future of Germany shipowning that some had feared lost.
