Jarmo Laakso adds weight to Lloyd Werft Board. Yard looks to the Baltic for newbuild processing.
Lloyd Werft Bremerhaven AG has long had the hulls for its new ships built elsewhere. That practice is to continue in future. The series of cruise ships and, for the first time, river cruise vessels ordered by the Genting Group is prompting the yard to look more intently to the East – specifically to the shipyards of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which will now been taken over by the Genting concern. Lloyd Werft has already had some positive experience in this area. In 1999 and 2000 it had the midship section for “Norwegian Majesty” and the hull for the NCL cruise liner “Norwegian Sun” built at the former Aker MTW in Wismar. It’s right there that the Lloyd Werft Board of Directors now wants to establish contact again. It has been strengthened in this task from March 1st by the Finn Jarmo Laakso who has the special job of linking shipyard and shipowner interests. The new Lloyd Werft Group will in future comprise shipyards in Bremerhaven, Wismar, Warnemünde and Stralsund, which together currently employs more than 1,700 employees.
Board member Rüdiger Pallentin says Jarmo Laakso is ideally suited for this new constellation. In future he will be part of the fast-growing shipbuilding concern’s Board leadership quartett alongside Rüdiger Pallentin, Carsten J. Haake and Dirk Petersjohann. A special feature of the job is that Jarmo Laakso has an office at both Lloyd Werft and also at the big modern shipyard in Wismar. The Finn, who brings perfect German and English with him to Lloyd Werft, brings another advantage with him as well. Trained in Finland as a Naval Architect he is not only a shipbuilding engineer but also a mechanical engineer – a combination rarely seen at a German yard and thus particularly prized by Lloyd Werft.
Jarmo Laakso is married with three grown-up daughters and Bremerhaven is not new to him. He joined Schichau-Seebeckwerft in 1995 and gathered early experience with Lloyd Werft on the building of the cruise ships “Costa Victoria” and “Norwegian Sky” before spending six years with Meyer Werft in Papenburg where he was Project Manager on cruise ship newbuildings for Royal Caribbean International. After that he was with Arosa Flussschifffahrten GmbH in Rostock for a few years before finding his way back to Meyer Werft and Papenburg in 2005, but this time as construction supervision head of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. It is the combination of ten years of experience in shipbuilding coupled with a decade of work with a big shipping company that make the Finn so interesting for the future Lloyd Werft Group.
The appointment of Jarmo Laakso is, above all, one designed to expand the newbuilding competence of Lloyd Werft. Because of the giant volume of orders placed for the Genting shipping companies Crystal Cruises, Dream Cruises, Star Cruises and Crystal River Cruises the eyes of those in Bremerhaven are now of necessity on the East. There are large newbuilding capacities there – in Wismar for example, which boasts a 340 metre long and 67 metre wide modern covered building dock.
The number of newbuildings ordered at Lloyd Werft by the Genting concern has grown to ten, and thus to a size which places particular challenges for the shipyard group. The yard has so far enjoyed an excellent reputation internationally, but future challenges in Bremerhaven on the scale now presented by Genting also require corporate answers of a dimension which the yard has not had to confront in the past.
Genting Chairman Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay in Hong Kong gave a clear indication of the way ahead when he said that by buying Lloyd Werft, and now the three Baltic shipyards, Genting wanted to “secure (its) global cruise shipping strategy for the next ten years”. In this, Genting particularly has the fast-growing cruise shipping industry in China in mind and the Genting Chairman recalled that this development had been responsible for taking “shipyard order books for cruise ships to an all time record high”. He also stressed that the acquisition of German shipbuilding locations was “strategically important” and was meant to ensure that the ships on order would be completed “efficiently and on time”. And in this, Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay said he was banking on “the Lloyd Werft tradition of building high value and innovative cruise ships and megayachts”.
The world of Lloyd Werft, with its more than 400 employees, has grown more global as a result of the acquisition of the Wismar, Warnemünde and Stralsund locations” and the yard will, its Board says, actively continue to confront the new challenges. Rüdiger Pallentin said: “Nobody needs to fear for his job. On the contrary: It will in fact be a very special job to get all the work done that lies ahead of us.” His Board colleague, yard financial chief Carsten J. Haake, added that with the expected orders and the new alliance links with Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Lloyd Werft was now part of a globally active concern, which in turn presupposed global thinking and behaviour.
