IN PROFILE
One on ONE with Jeremy Nixon The head of Japan’s top containerline joined us on an appropriately thundery afternoon
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t was a suitably stormy afternoon in Singapore when Maritime CEO connected with Jeremy Nixon in early May. The highly approachable and genial CEO of Ocean Network Express (ONE) was happy to take on a whole raft of topics in a quick-fire, nine-minute episode discussing the plight of liner shipping during what would turn out to be among the darkest months for container shipping in the sector’s 64-year history . Nixon discussed how volumes have dropped thanks to the coronavirus and assessed just how bad things could get for liner shipping. Nixon also compared the fallout from today’s pandemic to what happened in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. He recalled the V-shaped recovery back then and the fast inventory recovery five months after Lehman Brothers collapsed. “This situation today will take a longer term recovery,” Nixon said, uncertain whether even after 18
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ISSUE TWO 2020
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The transfer across to home working has been relatively painless
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months if box volumes will have recovered. The ONE boss also discussed digitalisation saying how the pandemic would inevitably make his company review again the way its staff works. “The transfer across to home working has been relatively painless,” Nixon said. Quizzed on whether or not the economic case for the latest slew of record breaking megamax ships was as sound as just a few months
ago, Nixon said: “I think there is still a place for big ships in terms of just the overall economics of running the business. At the end of the day a customer wants a very good price for their container shipping services. As long as we can continue to work in consortia then we can continue to operate big ships but obviously less loops than we did before.” Noticeably all market chatter of ONE ploughing ahead with more giant ship orders have disappeared as Covid-19 has spread. ●
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