Crew supplier considers recruitment but seeks full control

Anglo-Eastern Ship Management is considering the mainland, among others, as a new source of crew supply.

Chairman Peter Cremers said the company, which traditionally drew its crew supply from India and the Philippines, wanted a third source because of the difficulties of getting good seafarers.

But Anglo-Eastern is not entirely happy with the mainland as the authorities want shared control of the sailors who are trained.

'We need offices and control over people and not via someone else,' Mr Cremers said.

And even if that problem is resolved, Anglo-Eastern will have to employ some Chinese-speaking staff at its office to communicate with the Chinese seafarers, most of whom cannot speak English.

Ship managers will probably also have to employ a Taiwanese or a mainland ship's captain to cope with the crew.

Anglo-Eastern has a policy of employing an all-Indian or an all-Filipino crew to prevent any communication and other social problems.

In another development, Mr Cremers said Anglo-Eastern had signed a contract with Malaysian International Shipping Corp (MISC) this week to handle its crewing and training programmes.

Mr Cremers, who led a management takeover of MISC from Malaysian-based Konsortium Perkapalan last year, said the crew would be sourced from Manila as Malaysia had a serious shortage of seafarers.

'With the MISC contracts of 25 vessels, Anglo-Eastern will now have 80 ships under its management,' he said, adding that an announcement would be made within the next couple of days about another project.

The main problem of ship managers today was that their customers, who were losing money, were putting pressure on them to reduce management fees, he said.

Mr Cremers said ship managers could not reduce their fees as it was their 'bread and butter'.

Fee reductions can lead to a deterioration of services rendered to the shipowners.

This has forced ship managers to 'educate' shipowners to realise the continued maintenance of a ship, under the supervision of ship managers, could save them huge repair and maintenance bills.

As vice-chairman of the 30-member International Ship Managers Association (ISMA), Mr Cremers said the association wanted to ensure ship managers were working to the highest standards.

Anglo-Eastern, which is involved primarily in providing technical ship management and crewing to third-party shipowners, operates offices in Antwerp, Bombay, Manila, Montreal and Singapore.

He said ISMA had already gained recognition as certain parties in the United States wanted to know if a ship manager was an ISMA member before appointing him to look after their vessels.

Separately, Mr Cremers said while the Hong Kong shipping register was more expensive, compared to the Singapore register, one should consider that a lot of money in Singapore was going to the unions.

In that respect, Hong Kong's crew cost was cheaper than Singapore's by between $30,000 and $40,000, he said.