Columbia Shipmanagement is plotting its next wave of growth with a new platform for northern European expansion.
The Schoeller Group ship manager has formed CSM Germany and northern Europe to handle its business north of its Cyprus base and the Mediterranean region.
Johann Meyer, the new operation’s managing director, told TradeWinds: “Ship management is the bread and butter, but of course, it’s the complete Columbia Group-wide portfolio.
“We started back three or four months ago with Columbia 2.0, where we audited ourselves and reshuffled everything looking at the next 10 years, looking at the growth of the platform and how we could be more efficient, more effective,” he explained.
This meant focusing on Hamburg being the hub for northern Europe and new representative offices being set up in other countries.
“We have resources here, we have experience here, we have professionals here, but we want to also go closer to the market, closer to the clients,” Meyer said.
The expansion journey has now begun with CSM Norway, which has been incorporated in Oslo.
“Because we have a lot of clients in Norway, that will be the client-facing office. It will stay a representative desk for the moment,” he added. “It is just the first step.”
The idea is to have satellite offices around the Hamburg hub.
These will have one or two people. From there, the base can develop to a branch office or an operational office if the volume of business is coming in, the managing director said.
Adding to the Norwegian venture
Columbia already has a crew supply joint venture in Norway called Stodig Ship Management, formed in 2021 with domestic shipowner Seatrans.
“We are also now basically starting up in Oslo directly. I will be the one leading the office,” Meyer told TradeWinds.
The boss also has a clear idea of how to become established in the long term in northern Europe.
“You have to go the extra mile if you want to succeed with northern European clients. Maybe you have to meet one, two, three times more and you have to be confident and you have to be clear about what you are presenting and what services you are offering,” he said.
“You are screened from top to bottom, so it’s a more challenging, more demanding business. But I would say once you are close with the client it can be a lifetime partnership,” he added.
“That’s my personal experience and that’s why we said we want to have people close to the clients in different offices instead of having different profit centres and trying to compete against each other,” Meyer explained.
Columbia is well known as a tanker manager, but will also be concentrating on deepsea container ships, bulkers and more, including offshore and renewables.
The Hamburg hub is going back to the roots of chairman Heinrich Schoeller in the German city.
And new recruits will depend on new business, Meyer said.
Two weeks is not enough
“What is clearly our vision is that we don’t want to go into Norway, harvest and move out, that’s not our idea,” he told TradeWinds.
“So we want to go in, we want to build up something locally with local people and have a local presence. So it doesn’t make sense for us to just move people from A to B. If we build up something, then we will do it properly, with local resources of course,” Meyer said.
“You have to really build up trust and you will not build up trust just moving in with a piece of luggage for two weeks, having a cup of coffee and a few beers and then moving out again. And it will not work, it will simply not work. So that’s what we said, we want to do it differently actually,” he added.
Potential offices in Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands are also being examined, the managing director said.
