Wednesday, February 18, 2009
HSH to shed 1,100 jobs as it quits box financing
Herbert Fromme and Patrick Hagen - Tuesday 17 February 2009
HSH Nordbank, the world’s largest shipping bank, will scrap its container financing business as part of a wide-ranging reduction of activities, which will cost 1,100 of the 4,400 jobs at HSH.
The bank is owned by the states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein amd US-investor JC Flowers, and has a ship financing portfolio of more than €30bn ($37.7bn).
This activity is not on the list of activities to be scrapped and will be continued, spokesman Rune Hoffmann said. He was unable to quantify the volume of the container financing business now to be given up.
“We need to make systematic corrections to our course,” said chief executive Dirk Jens Nonnenmacher, who took over in November 2008. “We are the top address for clients in our home region and for the shipping, transportation and renewable energies sectors.”
The segments to be discontinued include credit investments, the international leveraged buy-out business, real estate in the US, refinancing of leasing activities, conventional energy lending in Europe, corporate business in Asia and Scandinavia and, in the medium-term, real estate in western Europe, energy in the US and commodity trade finance.
All told, HSH Nordbank is set to shrink its balance sheet from €115bn total assets by about half.
HSH announced last Friday that it suffered in 2008 a consolidated net loss of around €2.8bn in 2008, before restructuring costs, taxes and loss participations. The year before, it achieved a profit of €285m.
The 2008 loss is due mainly to high impairments of €1.6bn in the credit investment portfolio. Other writedowns amount to $900m, including the fallout of the Lehman collapse and the Icelandic banking crisis.
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