More Pinoy seamen eyed for Zeaborn fleet

More Pinoy seamen eyed for Zeaborn fleet
GENIVI FACTAO October 30, 2018 https://www.manilatimes.net/more-pinoy-seamen-eyed-for-zeaborn-fleet/459...

Zeaborn Ship Management, the seventh largest ship management company in the world will be employing more Filipino seafarers, as the company expands its fleet from 150 ships to 250 in the coming years.

Zeaborn managing director Charan Singh said Zeaborn has an expanded global company structure with the recent acquisitions of two -long standing ship management companies; E.R. Schiffahrt and Rickmers Ship management. With the merger, they put up the new company called Zeaborn Marine Services in the Philippines.

“We are now the 7th largest ship management company in the world with more than 150 ships and were hoping to go up to 250 ships in the next couple of years, so we have quite an ambitious growth lines,” Singh told the Manila Times.

Currently, there are 2,800 Filipino seafarers onboard the ships managed by Zeaborn. Of the 2,800 seafarers, half of them are officers.

The number of Filipino seafarers represents about 80 percent of the total number of seafarers onboard Zeaborn ships worldwide.

”Even now, almost 75 to 80 percent of our seafarers come from the Philippines. That’s onboard the 150 ships that we have right now. I expect that proportion to remain the same as we grow. Even when we grow to 200 to 250 ships, we expect that 80 percent of the crewing will be from the Philippines. A lot will be from the Philippines,” he added.

The planned fleet expansion is very vital for the Philippines, as it remains the flag pool for crewing of Zeaborn, according to Zeaborn Senior Vice -President and Managing Director Heiko Nies.

Nies said their target is to mix the crews. The remaining 20 percent of the crew comprised the Eastern Europeans, Myanmar and few Germans.

The demand to man the ships will naturally increase with the planned fleet expansion. Filipino seafarers will be manning dry-bulk carriers and container vessels.

“Training is a very important part to us. So we are very keen always to use the best training centers for the topics. In old training center, you might have some strengths but also some weak points. We try to avoid that by using particular training centers or topics and we choose always the best training center,” Nies said.

“In our crewing we will establish a strong crew training. Joel Abutal will be responsible for training needs for the whole fleet in the future and this means this will be distributed for the Philippines and even for the colleagues in Europe,” Nies said.

Zeaborn has invested in training to be more competitive and to promote the seafaring career among young people.

“We’ll do the sensible training as much as we can based on the company’s criteria which we developed. That will be the backbone of our competence management system. The thing is, we have a multi -cultural crew on board. So we make sure that all of this crew are getting sufficient education and training and they complete the requirements up to the highest standards available in the local sites,” said Joel Abutal, Fleet Competence Manager.

Singh said to be competitive; we need continuous good quality training. He said, seafarers were good as the job they do and when the quality drops, they will look (for seafarers) elsewhere.

“Philippines has done a fantastic job in training, and in keeping up the training standards. We provide additional training to our seafarers to reach our standards. But we also have the base training coming from the Philippine maritime academies. As long as we have good fresh young people, of good intelligence, good loyalty, good dedication to their work. I see that as the biggest challenge,” Singh said.

In terms, of salary, Filipinos receive extremely competitive salary.