News
Samskip to move to a new state-of-the-art building in Rotterdam's Old Port area
The Icelandic owned company Samskip is to move its Rotterdam based operations into a new building in Rotterdam's Old Port area. Samskip, as well as Geest North Sea Line, recently merged with Seawheel, will move into this new facility early 2007.
The new office building will host the company's headquarter for international operations; These include shortsea container shipping and Intermodal activities, reefer logistics, forwarding and transport services for bulk and conventional cargo.
Acquired in March 2005 by Samskip, Geest North Sea Line has been taken on responsibility for the group's shortsea services and Intermodal activities including the ones of Seawheel acquired in August of the same year.
Samskip's Reefer logistics activities have been growing too. In June 2005, it acquired a number of seafood-related coldstore companies from the Dutch Kloosterboer Group. The deal involves the two companies working together to create one of Europe's leading specialists in reefer logistics for the seafood industry and other frozen products.
Samskip CEO, Michael F. Hassing, believes the new international HQ building will bring significant benefits:
"For the first time since we acquired Geest, Seawheel, Kloosterboer and Van Dieren Maritime, we will have all of our international activities under one roof. This will aid the communication, coordination and interplay between the various activities of Samskip and improve working relationships overall. It will facilitate further efficiency improvements, further growth and improved customer focus across activities."
The new office building is part of the new DockWorks project in Rotterdam's Waalhaven, a high quality maritime business park being created specifically to provide headquarters accommodation for international shipping companies.
Note to Editors:
Samskip is an international company offering transport by land, sea and air. Founded in Iceland in 1991, its roots date back to the 1940s. Thanks to organic growth and a number of strategic acquisitions, Samskip today operates 50 offices in 22 countries.
Samskip currently employs 1,500 people around the world and generated a turnover over EUR 650 million in 2005.
Between Iceland and the UK/North Continent/Scandinavia, Samskip operates two weekly container services, employing four container vessels ranging from 360 up to 900 TEU capacity;
Samskip also operates a weekly German service connecting Bremen with Lysekil and the Oslofjord.
In the conventional & project cargo transport business, Samskip offers transport of project cargoes, dry and bulk cargoes worldwide. In addition, Samskip operates transport services for bulk and conventional cargo shipments to the Caspian Sea and the Volga river ports.
In the field of Reefer Logistics, Samskip and Silver Sea operate a fleet of modern reefer vessels trading in the North Atlantic, North Sea and Baltic Sea markets. In addition to the reefer conventional transport, Samskip is also one of the major players in the field of reefer container transport and is present in some of the most strategic areas with regards to sea products.
Geest North Sea Line is a Rotterdam-based shortsea operator with an innovative intermodal approach. Its fleet of container ships provides up to daily services between Rotterdam and the UK (Tilbury, Hull, Goole, Blyth and Grangemouth).
The company also operates a weekly service linking Rotterdam, Tilbury and Bilbao in Northern Spain.
To Ireland, Geest operates intermodal routes between Ireland and Continental Europe. It has seven weekly departures.
To Scandinavia, Geest operates a weekly container service linking Terneuzen and Immingham with Wallhamn and Halmstad in Sweden; and a twice weekly Norway service linking Rotterdam and Hamburg with Oslo, Larvik, Brevik, Moss and Fredrikstad;
To the Baltic Sea, Geest offers up to four sailings a week to St Petersburg, Klaipeda and Finnish ports from major North European ports and a weekly sailing to Latvia from the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Through the Estonia Joint Venture TECO Lines AS, four container vessels are operated on weekly services between Estonia, Finland, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
Geest's container pool consists of over 13,000 containers, ranging from 20ft to 45ft pallet-wide high cube including reefer, curtain-siders and flat-racks.
Geest North Sea Line BV is a 33% shareholder in Coolboxx, a specialist transport company focused on moving temperature-controlled cargo via the 45ft container concept.
Geest offers convenient "one stop shopping" services to many of its customers as well as "just-in-time" deliveries and door-to-door operations. It transports cargo deep into Europe including: Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Spain as well as Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and parts of the former Yugoslavia.
