“ABB VANESSA” V. 049 Took you to Soma, Pacific side of Honshu. The fact that this voyage had to go via Cape of Good Hope was of course responsible that it took a bit longer. Usually we are in about 32/34 days in Japan from the last European port.
We came to Tokyo more than 40 years ago and developed a very successful relation with my good friend and partner Katsumi Tanaka. Already in the 1980s he became our agent, at that time based on smaller tonnage about 6 – 8.000 tons with cranes up to 2 x 80 and then later 2 x 120 tons capacity. In the early 1990s we started to work with SAL and became their agent in Japan, which did last for about 20 years, actually a bit less, but we continued to work with them even when the agency in Japan was taken over by them-selves, resp. “K” Line, who bought SAL in steps 2007 and 2012.
Already from the early 2000s we operated CPC with about 6 charter vessels from Europe to Japan/Korea and vice versa. In 2007 that was the year when “K” Line bought SAL, we established ABB Asia Breakbulk (Singapore) Pte Ltd., in cooperation with Normed Antwerp/Istanbul. Before that we had established Consolidated Pool Carriers (Asia) Co. Ltd.,Tokyo, in partnership with Katsumi Tanaka.
That company is existing now in its 27th year, while the cooperation with Tanaka San has already been going on for 4 decades.
In the meantime Kai Friedrich is now already for more than 20 years in Singapore. In Tokyo we have a team of 6 people. Last year Takeshi Shiragami came back from Hamburg, where he had been working with us for more than 5 years and became a Director to CPC Tokyo.
Recently we have also started our activities in the dry bulk sector, since we have done already with COLI Bulk Carriers GmbH in Hamburg a number of very interesting voyages out of Japan and Far East into the Arab Gulf / Middle East, but mainly to Europe.
OuractivitiesinJapan and Asia are a very important part of the COLI Group, now with offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Singapore, where we started to work from our own office in 1990. The offices in Europe were established as follows:
● 1974 Hamburg and Bremen
● 1977 Antwerp
● 1980 Rotterdam
In the meantime we are also in Hellerup/Copenhagen, Istanbul and with 3 offices in Brazil – Sao Paulo, Itajai and Rio de Janeiro in partnership with Gustavo Murari, whom you have met this week at Breakbulk Europe in Rotterdam.
As from July Alain Akavi and Felix Peinemann will take over, and I am going to semi- retire. Alain and Felix have already for some time been part of the Board of Directors and are the right people to continue COLI’s development.
Herbert Loesing
