Anglo Eastern is a global organization headquartered in HongKong, inaugurated its new office of area 26000 sqft at Leela Business Park, Andheri (E), Mumbai on 19th July’10. Mr. Marcel Liedts (Group Managing Director) officially inaugurated the new office which was witnessed by senior officials of AESM HongKong and India including Mr. Vijay Gupta (Managing Director), Capt. Pradeep Chawala (Director, QA & Training), Mr. K.N Menon (Director, Group HR – Sea Staff), Capt. Vinay Singh (Director – AESM, India), Mr. Deepak Arora (Fleet Director), Capt. K.N Deboo (Director AEMTC) and many more. The strategic location of the office is advantage to AESM as this can drastically reduce the travel time and cut short the traffic hurdles to travel all the way to international airport for the sea-staff.
Mr. Marcel Liedts (Group Managing Director) spoke to The Marine World in an interview about AESM’s growth and strategies.
We have not seen any downturn till date : Mr. Marcel Liedts
TMW: Please highlight about your major investments in India
Mr. Marcel Liedts : With this huge office, we have one of the biggest ship management office in India excluding our other offices and a training center for value added courses our officers. We have heavily invested in India with a Pre-Sea Training academy at Karjat last year and are presently training about 80 deck cadets and 40 engine cadets.
TMW: Please tell us about Indian seafarers with AESM.
Mr. Marcel Liedts: We are very happy about Indian seafarers. Indian seafarers accounts to almost more than 60% with AESM and remaining 40% are with other nationality. We believe in one nationality one ship. Most of our ships have 100% Indians from top to bottom. We also insist on two cadets per ship. I think every ship owner must provide two slots for trainee cadets per ship, if they want to secure future.
TMW: How has recession effected AESM ?
Mr. Marcel Liedts: We have not seen down turn or recession in shipping till date. I can say that for what concerns our work and number of ships, the economical downturn has not been felt. Moreover we added almost 15-20 ships annually to our fleet. Even during the recession our growth rate was about 10-12%. Our growth rate has not only increased with Indian manning but also with Ukrainian, Filipino and Chinese manning. We have good ship owners who really understand shipping. In some cases owners have their own cargo.
TMW: Is it correct to say AESM is in position to choose the owners ?
Mr. Marcel Liedts: Choose is a very arrogant word and I must not say choose, but it is correct that we regularly refuse the dubious owners. Our growth has more been with our regular owners i.e organic growth. A lot of owners come to us not for just the service we offer, but also for the name we have. We refuse the clients who are not willing to spend money for safety and environmental issues. If our client is willing to go by quality and is at par with our standards then he is most welcome onboard.

TMW: Are you managing any specialized ships ?
Mr. Marcel Liedts: We are presently managing one pipe laying barge in Russia. We are expecting one more by next year.

TMW: What are your retention strategies ?
Mr. Marcel Liedts: Our retention rate is over 92%. We believe in quality and safety. We are very committed to quality, we don’t believe in short-cuts. Even when we send our cadets to other institutes for their pre-sea training, we make sure to deploy one of our master to be there all 12 months. We have many superintendents who have started their career with us as cadets and many sailing officers who are with us for many years. We also encourage family member of our seafarers to join our company.
TMW: What are your comments on continuous rise in wages for officers?
Mr. Marcel Liedts: More and more ships are coming in everyday, we feel that the pressure is back again. More and more owners are looking for Indians, Ukrainians or Chinese, the wages again started moving up. Contracts are getting shorter and shorter and a lot of money is getting into their travelling expenses etc.
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We take care of our people and society - CAPT. VINAY SINGH
Capt. Vinay Singh highlighted the social responsibilities of AESM and said” In India we run NGO called PARIVAR which is being looked after by wives of our officers and office staff. We take initiatives for old age home and other similar things. We also provide some disaster management programs for schools. This NGO is just a year old. We have nearly 10,000 staff in India.
Our social responsibilities is towards all our staff at sea & shore working for us. We take great care of everybody. We are very much responsible for an environmental issue and are very serious about it and we just not only follow MARPOL requirements but do much more than that.
If you see our office staff, you will find almost same people since last 15-20 years. There are many people with our 25 years with this company. Every year we take almost 600 deck cadets and about 200 trainee ratings. We train for every rank from top to bottom.
Our people know we are well looked after and our company is there with us. Anglo Eastern cares for its seafarers. Our seafarers really feel much secured with us. We always believe in taking the correct action.
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Secret of our success is partly Indian seafarers – Capt. Pradeep Chawala
Capt. Pradeep Chawala – Our secret of success is partly Indian seafarers, they are the one who do good job on ships and we get more ships. In order to overcome shortage of seafarers we do our little bit. As a company we are doing what we can to reduce the shortage by training the cadets for our own requirements and our training center is good example. We also train around 8000 people at our andheri training center, we try to work with other companies also and train their seafarers. This improves the standards of Indian seafarers and this improves the total share of Indian seafarers globally. Today Indians have a market share of 12-15 %. But Filipinos are still a way ahead for ratings. Safety issues are added advantage with Filipino ratings. If we improve our safety standards for rating, this will improve our market for ratings. As a company program we are taking children of our own seafarers. Every retiring rating was given a privilege to recommend his son or relative.