Denmark: Shipping companies may lose billions

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Monday, 23 February 2009

Many of the customers the Danish shipping companies are sailing for are put under such pressure by the crisis that they have trouble keeping to their contracts. A series of lawsuits are under way and many have already started. "A wide range of the Danish shipping companies are involved in different trials and we hear of exceptionally many examples at the time being", says vice president of Danmarks Rederiforening Jan Fritz Hansen.
Danmarks Redriforening estimates that almost 10 billion DKK of the expected turnout are threatened by the financial crisis.
"About 5-10 percent of the 190 billion DKK are, according to my estimation, at risk and a good guess would be, that almost 10 billion DKK are threatened by opponent risk".
It is something we are very aware of and not something which may tip things over. It doesn't have to mean that the final income will end up under 190 bilion DKK in 2009, even though it seems clear that the very dramatic growth we have seen in the late years is not something we will see this year". says Fritz Hansen.
Norden is one of the shipping companies which has a lot of trials involving costumers running at the moment.
"There are a lot more cases running within our industry than ever before at the moment. We have to show flexibility in the relationship to our costumers, and we are. But one has to remember that when the market was 70,000 Dollar last year we were shipping cargo of up to 25,000 Dollar a day. And we arrived and picked up the cargo on time every time. So we are not asking for much more than for the costumers to return the money we paid then about a year back," says the shipping company's CEO Carsten Mortensen.
The newspaper is experiencing that several other Danish shipping companies are also facing trials against costumers, while others have so far gone unaffected.
"Fortunately, we do not have the same problems and have so far gone free of any serious situations. We have been trying to secure ourselves through the people we do business with. But when one sees how widely the crisis strikes, we are obviously aware of the situation", say Rederiet J. Lauritzens' CEO Torben Janholt.
Source: Maritime Denmark