Karl-Heinz Sager, dead at 79

Karl-Heinz Sager, dead at 79

Sager

   Karl-Heinz Sager, a German shipping executive who followed a career at Hapag-Lloyd and one of its predecessors, North German Lloyd, with the creation of Senator Lines, died April 22 at the age of 79.
   Sager was remembered by former colleagues this week as a key player in the early history of containerization.
   Sager began his career at Bremen-based North German Lloyd, and helped drive the company's decision to launch a joint transatlantic container service with Hamburg-Amerikanische Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft in 1968 and merge with the Hamburg-based company in 1970.
   As a member of the executive board of Hapag-Lloyd he was one of the important personalities in shipping to driving the development of container business, said Rudy Mack, former president of Hapag-Lloyd (America).
   'He was very well known, in Europe, but specifically in North America, where he was very well liked,' he added.
   'As a young executive in the shipping industry, Sager had spent several years with Hapag-Lloyd’s New Orleans-based agent, Biehl and Co., where he became familiar with the American trade and learned the inner workings of the U.S. regulatory system,' said David A. Howard, founder of American Shipper.
   'Sager was deputy chairman of Hapag-Lloyd in the early l970s at a time the U.S. Justice Department was launching its campaign to break up shipping cartels that had dominated the liner shipping industry for the previous 100 years. He was actively involved in efforts to maintain the conference system within the changing U.S. regulatory framework,' Howard said.
   'In 1977 Sager addressed the issues at an American Shipper conference at New York attended by chief executive officers of the world’s largest container shipping companies (familiarly known as the Box Club), all of the U.S. government and regulatory officials involved, labor executives and major shippers, laying the ground for discussion of change which evolved into the Shipping Act of 1984,' Howard explained.
   'Passed over in his hope to become chairman of Hapag-Lloyd, Sager left the company and established Senator Line,' he said.
   'Karl was an innovator first and foremost,' said Edward Kelly, the executive director of the Maritime Association of the Port of New York and New Jersey and former president of Cho Yang (America) Inc., the U.S. arm of the former Korean carrier, that operated a joint service with Senator. 'I think he proved that in the early days of containerization and he definitely proved that in his second career when he got together Senator, DSR and Cho Yang group to create a global network. We created one of the major round-the-world lines.
   'He was a man of action. He was somebody who wanted to get something done. He cut through the detail and all the meetings and discussions,' Kelly recalled.
   'He helped to stand up Senator Line from something that never existed. He patched that together with a very novel arrangement, to pull in the DSR people and then matched up with Cho Yang Line. It created a strange bedfellows scenario — a West German operator, an East German operator and a Korean operator — to create a world-class service, and he did it and it was a wonderful thing to watch because it was creating a major line and service out of nothing.'
   Senator began in 1987 as a subsidiary of the German shipyard Bremer Vulkan, with a 14-day round-the-world service.
   Following the reunification of Germany, it collaborated, later merged with the East German state-owned shipping company Deutsche Seereederei Rostock (DSR) and Cho Yang.
   An 80 percent stake in Senator was later acquired by Korean carrier Hanjin in 1997, and the company continued to operate until 2009.
   Kelly said Sager was also innovative in having Senator, DSR and Cho Yang all use the same Mobile, Ala.-based agency, then Southern Steam, now called Norton Lilly, for their backroom operations, even though they were competing for customers on the joint service.
   Kelly said that led to efficiency and reduced costs, 'so we were able to compete at lower rates so that we were able to be an independent operator.'
   H. W. Thurber, president and chief executive of Norton Lilly, said Sager was a big personality who was able to put Senator together without huge amounts of capital.
   'The charter market was depressed so the German ship owners were eager to supply the ships,' he recalled.
   With Hapag-Lloyd headquartered in Hamburg, the Port of Bremen was willing to help back Senator, and Thurber said Sager was able to find agents throughout the world that would represent the company.
   'He did not have any money, the ships had not come yet — I do not know of another guy who could do what he did,' Thurber said.
   'He was the life of a party. He loved to give speeches. He had a sparkle in his eye, He was a man's man,' recalled Thurber. 'He was a loyal person, and that is why people did what they did for him. Loyalty and trust were big things for him.'
   Sager is survived by his wife Katharina and children Corinna and Eckart. ' Chris Dupin