NOL GROUP WORKS ON POST-JACOBS PLANS

NOL GROUP WORKS ON POST-JACOBS PLANS    Neptune Orient Lines, the parent company of APL Liner and APL Logistics, has started looking for a successor to former group president and chief executive officer Flemming Jacobs.
   Jacobs, who was also CEO of APL Liner, left    Neptune Orient Lines suddenly in early January, before the end of his contract with the Singapore-based shipping and logistics group.
   “The board of directors has already worked on a search — an international search — for a group CEO,” said Ron Widdows, the acting CEO of APL Liner.
   However, senior executives of the group said that there is no sense of a management crisis at the group. APL Liner has an established management team of senior executives, said Widdows.
   At APL Logistics, Hans Hickler was appointed CEO last October. Both Hickler and Widdows have worked for the APL group for over 20 years.
   The group expects that it will take some time to appoint a new CEO for APL Liner, possibly in the wake of the nomination of the new group CEO of Neptune Orient Lines.
   “This does not affect the way we go about our business,” Widdows said.
   In early January, Neptune Orient Lines announced that an executive committee of the board of directors would meet more frequently to help oversee and guide the business until the appointment of a new group CEO. The board’s executive committee is also engaged in an overview of the group.
   Widdows and Hickler maintained that the APL Liner and APL Logistics businesses will follow their approved business plans for calendar 2003. Those plans anticipate a return to profitability in both businesses this year.
   APL Liner’s volumes for the beginning of 2003 were ahead of targets, and there are “early signs” of increases in freight rates in the transpacific container trade, the company said. Neptune Orient Lines posted a net deficit of $151 million for the first half of 2001, its worst since at least 1998.