Reederei Nord managing director Kurt Klemme is openly critical about international shipmanagement.
The company’s extensive fleet — including VLCCs, aframax crude carriers, product tankers, handysize bulkers and containerships — is all managed in-house on the technical and crewing sides.
In fact, everything from shipbuilding to sale and purchase and chartering is normally handled by the company or with its partners.
“Everything [is] in-house because shipmanagers always take a margin but don’t take care of your ship,” Klemme claims.
“They have a budget and if it is spent by the middle of the quarter they stop spending, regardless of what the ship is. We have a budget as a guideline but if you overspend just call us and you get the money, no problem. We just want to be informed.
“In our company, a superintendent does four to five vessels, whereas if you go to shipmanagers they do six to eight. So they travel less to ships and delegate more to assistants. A back office in the Philippines does all the purchasing.”
Klemme says the cost for managing a vessel in Germany is around $120,000 per year and “if a company says the shipmanagement fee is $80,000, it doesn’t work”.
The only way it does is if the shipmanager, for example, is selling lube oil to the shipowner for more than it pays to the supplier.
“All this side business, that is how they make their money,” Klemme says. “They hide it by saying they have a purchase company and because they are so big you get a volume rebate.
“But if you compare our opex [operating expense] with theirs, we have the same, if not less, but have the better crew with people staying with us [sometimes] their whole life.”
