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9. June 2020Hapag-Lloyd has been represented in Switzerland with its own subsidiary since 1974 and has been based at the same address near the Basel Rhine port ever since. As part of a new beginning, they have now moved into new office spaces high above Basel in the Messeturm. It’s time to take stock and look ahead.
(Basel) Hapag-Lloyd (Schweiz) AG was founded in 1974 as a subsidiary of Hapag-Lloyd Aktiengesellschaft based in Hamburg. Since then, they have been continuously located at Südquaistrasse 14, close to the Basel Rhine port. Containers, including their own, trucks, and trains from the port railway shaped the view.
Thorben Nibbe, Country Manager Switzerland at Hapag-Lloyd, stated: “As part of the corporate strategy ‘Strategy 2023’ and the global reorganization of Customer Services into so-called ‘Quality Service Centers’, which in Switzerland was associated with the relocation of Customer Services to Hamburg, we felt that the time had come to also make a new spatial statement.” Since then, Switzerland has belonged to the business unit Germany/Central Europe within Hapag-Lloyd, headquartered in Hamburg.
The Messeturm Scored Best in Location Choice
After a thorough evaluation of several potential locations, the decision was ultimately made to choose the Messeturm in Basel, which was for a long time the tallest building in Switzerland. From the new rooms on the 21st floor, there is a wonderful view over Basel all the way to the Vosges in the west and the Black Forest in the north. The Basel Rhine port can also be seen from above this time.
“The exhibition center is located in the center of Basel and yet is extremely well connected. We can reach both train stations (SBB and Badischer Bahnhof) very quickly, have good connections to public transport in Basel, and are on the highway towards Switzerland or Germany in 5 minutes,” explains Nibbe regarding the choice of location. Hardly had the move been completed when Thorben Nibbe became a father of healthy twins (a boy and a girl) on May 21, 2020, and was able to celebrate his 40th birthday on Whit Monday. So, there was plenty of reason to celebrate for Nibbe in a very short time.
Main Business Commodity and Crosstrade
The eighteen employees of Hapag-Lloyd Switzerland can now work in modern and comfortably furnished offices. The activities that remain in Switzerland exclusively involve sales and customer support in the area of Customer Solution / Quality Services. The mainstays of the Swiss company are primarily commodity and crosstrade businesses from customers and industry. “In the commodity business, many containers are moved that never touch Switzerland, but the clients are based in Switzerland. The same applies to crosstrade businesses. The clients include large pharmaceutical, chemical, and food companies, as well as smaller commodity traders, of which there are many in Switzerland. Other orders involve imports and exports to and from Switzerland. The clients there are usually the freight forwarders,” explains Nibbe.
The commodity and crosstrade businesses heavily frequent the regions of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and sub-Saharan Africa. These areas were also identified by the parent company in Hamburg as attractive growth markets during the new Strategy 2023 and fit perfectly into this. The main goods transported here are cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, rubber, and minerals, etc., in the commodity and crosstrade sector. Pharmaceuticals (reefer), chemicals (hazardous goods), as well as high-quality food and project business dominate Swiss exports.
Hapag-Lloyd remains discreet about revenue, profit, and shipment figures for country subsidiaries and refers to the group’s figures:
Not Unaffected by Corona
The Corona pandemic did not leave Hapag-Lloyd in Switzerland unscathed. “Even though we are still looking at a good first quarter in Switzerland despite the Corona crisis, we do see quite significant impacts on transport volumes in the second quarter,” says Nibbe.
Nibbe has worked for Hapag-Lloyd, in addition to training and activities at the headquarters in Hamburg (2000 – 2005), in San Francisco, Montreal, Durban, Shanghai, and Dubai (2005 – 2018). For Switzerland, where he has been active since December 2018, he aims to expand the area of customer seminars and events, alongside the usual revenue and volume targets. “Last year, we started with interactive workshops on reefer and hazardous goods. This was very well received by our customers,” Nibbe looks forward to further events.
A customer event focusing on West Africa also took place last November in Lausanne. Nibbe had previously been on-site in Ghana, Benin, and Ivory Coast with other colleagues from Hapag-Lloyd and wanted to share the experiences with the customers. More events and workshops with customers will follow, including topics such as digitalization, special cargo, and others.
Soon, Hapag-Lloyd will celebrate 50 years in Switzerland, and with the move to the new home, they have clearly communicated that they continue to rely on this location within the group.
Photos: © Loginfo24
Image captions (from top to bottom): Image 1: View from the Basel Wettstein Bridge towards the Messeturm / Image 2: Thorben Nibbe, Country Manager Switzerland of Hapag-Lloyd. In the background, the Basel Rhine port and the foothills of the Black Forest on the horizon / Image 3: Hapag-Lloyd is committed to Switzerland and has manifested this with the move to the new home.
