Captain Ted,
don't get me wrong, I don't want to be all smug here, but I do not understand why you insist to keep commenting on an issue that you apparently do not know much about. What is the point in doing so? Frankly, I cannot follow any of your points. You keep getting the facts wrong and then you draw false conclusions from these 'facts'. Pretty pointless I dare say.
You say: 'Hapag was not in the crisis because of shipping crisis in general but because they took over a few other container companies'. Well, this is evidently wrong. Anyone in the industry will tell you that it is never easy to integrate a large company after an aquisition and merge the operations. Significant costs will commonly occur. However, these are one-off expenses and once the integration is completed, the (now larger) company will permanently benefit from the economies of scale. The acquisition of CP by Hapag-Lloyd fell into a phase of market consolidation and it enabled Hapag-Lloyd to remain the largest player in the Transatlantic market. Though Hapag-Lloyd payed a relatively high (strategic) price for CP ships, the takeover actually helped the carrier in the long run. In fact, the integration of CP ships went much smoother than most people would have thought. At the time, it was actually Maersk Line that struggled more with the integration of P&O Nedlloyd. Maersk lost numerous key accounts during that period. The fact that Hapag-Lloyd did not at all swallow a 'poison pill' with CP is impessively proven by that fact that only a few years after the acquisition NOL-Temasek made a takeover bid for USD 6 to 7 bn. This price was clearly a strategic one or do you think that NOL-Temasek were prepared to pay USD 7 bn for a company that had just successfully ruined itself?
By the way: You confused the Japanese carrier Mitsui (MOL) with the Singaporean NOL-Temasek, which brand their container operations as APL. MOL never made a takeover bid for Hapag-Lloyd to my knowledge.
I don't see what Hapag's history of employing foreign crews on its ships has anything to do with your assumptions on the carrier's quality of management and financial stability. Like every major shipping line, Hapag-Lloyd has to employ multinational crews. At least, the carrier makes much more of an effort than most other lines to have a large share of its vessels under its home flag. All(!) of Hapag-Lloyd's big mainline vessels fly the German flag. Go and have a look how many big MSC ships under Swiss or Italian flag you'll find or show me one (!) big MOL container ship under Japanese flag. So by what standard are you judging?
On your point: 'On the loan guarantees, you are right, but does that not say loud and clear that they would have been history without that and were at that time considered by bank as not "stable " any more to receive cash infusions via credits.'
No, it does not. On the contrary. I thought it was pretty much common ground nowadays that it was not the industrial sector which dragged the 'poor innocent banks and highly responsible investment brokers' into the crisis. Cause and effect actually ran the other way. As we all know today, investment banks, securities traders and stockmarket brokers were at root of the problem since they ingored (and created!) massive risks in order to yield short-term profits. It was the rest of the industry which was then dragged into the abyss. The problem for Hapag-Lloyd and many others was that cargo volumes dwindled during the crisis and the companies incurred heavy losses as a consequence. In urgent need for fresh credit lines, they turned to the financial markets, but the markets had collapsed by then. Bank loans were no longer available. In many cases not because the company asking for a loan was not creditworthy, but because most banks were near-bankrupt themselves! This is (in Hapag-Lloyd's case) where the German government stepped in. After an investigation which found that the carrier was structurally sound, the goverment provided an indemnity bond which helped Hapag to tap fresh funding. As I mentioned earlier, this guarantee was later returned 'untouched'.
It amazes me that your 'free market' point of view has a problem with Hapag-Lloyd receiving a helping hand in form of an indemnity bond (which it then does not have to fall back to), whereas at the same time you do not object NOL-Temasek's (assuming that was whom you meant) takeover attempt for the shipping line. As you might happen to know, the latter is not a private-sector company, but indeed a state-owned Singaporean sovereign wealth fund. Conveniently, the company's CEO is the wife of Singapore's prime minister. So again - by what standard are you judging?
Finally, Hapag-Lloyd was surely not entirely free from blame, but one has to give them credit for being very quick and thourough with the implementation of an emergency plan. The recent profits are a good indicator herefore. My impression is that
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