First Interview of Heads of Anglo-Eastern Univan, Post Merger

The new heads of Anglo-Eastern Univan post-merger have given their first interview and shared their plans for future trends and growth opportunities in the ship management industry.

After announcing the merger of Anglo-Eastern Univan group, the new heads gave their first interview and shared their plans for growth and future trends in the ship management industry.  This merger puts the new group as the top of the third party ship management rankings worldwide.  They have around 600 ships and anticipating another 40 set to join the fleet before the end of the year.  The new group has Anglo-Eastern’s Peter Cremers as executive chairman with Bjorn Hojgaard as chief executive.  The group will operate from the current Anglo-Eastern Hong Kong office.

Univan was a brain-child of late Capt Charles Vanderperre, who is revered as a father of ship management.  Vanderperre started his own founding Univan in 1973 after spending a small stretch of time with Wallem Group in the early 1970s.  He died at the age of 87 years and his vision was carried forward by his wife, Kannika Thasak.  She decided to continue to run the Univan brand and gave its responsibility to well-known Hong Kong shipping personality Richard Hext. In turn, he resourced veteran Hojgaard from Singapore’s Thome to take up the CEO role.

 Anglo-Eastern was founded by Belgian executive, Peter Cremers with a degree in Naval Architecture in 1974.  He is not an alien to mergers like Denholm Ship Management taken over in 2001.  He developed the creditability of the group for the first class safety and environmental standards.

Cremers shared that the rationale for pursuing a merger with Univan is to extend the commitment to their shareholders at Kannika.  Hojgaard felt happy in using this opportunity to work with Cremers and his partner Marcel Liedts.  He took pride in adopting the policies of Anglo-Eastern about uncompromising standards and the customer needs.  Despite the augmentation in the size of the new group, Hojgaard is quite confident of offering attention to each client’s needs.  He believes that even the setup will enable them to stay close to the individual ships and customize their services.

Both the parties are very much optimistic about the advantages of size and scale and would lead to the greater consolidation in the ship management sector.  At the same time, the merger can cause potential job replications and extension redundancies.  But the heads of the group feel that the organisations are slim and would retain the total staff within the new group.

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