Shipping people: Hamburg Sud’s Johan Bjorksten

Shipping people: Hamburg SudÆs Johan Bjorksten

Johan Bjorksten in his Miami office.

   Hamburg Sud's Capt. Johan Bjorksten has completed many voyages since first going to sea as a boy in his native Finland.
   Bjorksten, who manages the Miami office of Hamburg Sud and oversees a web of Hamburg Sud services throughout the Caribbean Basin, is the son of a ship's captain. Bjorksten's father would sometimes take the entire family — young Johan, his sister and his mother — on voyages when Johan was growing up. By the time he was 15, he had turned 'professional,' starting a three-year stint of entry-level shipboard jobs that would make him eligible to attend the Navigational Academy in Turku, Finland's second-largest city.
   He has since come a long way, figuratively and literally. After years of rigorous training in a system that alternated each year between academy classroom instruction and progressively higher levels of shipboard responsibility, he graduated as a ship's officer in his mid-20s. Bjorksten then started a series of shipboard and onshore management positions that have taken him from Scandinavia to the Middle East, the Mediterranean, South America and, since 1993, his current base in South Florida.
   Bjorksten is known and respected throughout the Caribbean Basin. He spent seven years in Caracas, Venezuela, before moving to Miami. He works not only with the local Hamburg Sud services that sail from Jacksonville and Port Everglades to the Netherlands Antilles and Venezuela, but with the broader Hamburg Sud services from Europe, the U.S. East Coast, and Australia/New Zealand that connect with the Germany-based carrier's Caribbean region hubs.
   In addition, he gets involved in the larger South American market, assisting with Hamburg Sud services that call U.S. ports all along the East Coast and connect with all three coasts of South America. Hamburg Sud's U.S. operations between the U.S. Gulf Coast and South America also overlap with Caribbean Basin operations through calls at the hub of Cartagena, Colombia.
   He also works with industry officials from throughout the Caribbean region as an active member of the Caribbean Shipping Association, chairing the ship owners' group within the CSA General Council leadership body.
   Bjorksten's career has followed an unusually steady arch that has continuous connections from his initial days with Finland Steamship in the Baltic/Mediterranean trade to his current post. He has never moved from one company to an unrelated or competing company. Instead, the ownership and corporate affiliations above him have changed. He has had an inside look at the way the industry evolved as shipping companies have consolidated into fewer ownership groups, and from the days before containerization and computer technology reshaped operations.
   He originally got involved with the Caribbean in 1984, when Finland Steamship joined a carrier consortium that operated a roll-on/roll-off service from the Baltic Sea to the Caribbean. In 1986 the consortium set up headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela, and Bjorksten was placed in charge of that office.
   Meanwhile, multiple carriers participated in the evolving cooperative services between North Europe and the Caribbean, and Bjorksten's parent company was part of a series of partnerships and changes that led to the formation of niche carrier Laser Lines.
   In 1991 Hamburg Sud acquired Laser Lines, and in 1993 the consortium's regional office in Caracas was relocated to Miami, with Bjorksten still at the helm.
   Over the years, Hamburg Sud has come to play an increasingly important role in the Latin American and Caribbean trades from both the United States and Europe. It has acquired several well-known carriers in the Latin America trades, including Brazil's Alianca, the inter-Americas services formerly known as Crowley American Transport, and inter-Americas carrier Columbus Line.
   Bjorksten coordinates the many handoffs involving Hamburg Sud in the crossroads that is the Caribbean.
   Hamburg Sud has a Europe/Caribbean/Central America/West Coast of South America service that calls Caucedo, Dominican Republic; Cartagena, Colombia; and Manzanillo, Panama; as well as ports on the Pacific Coast of Colombia and Peru. It also has a service between North Europe and ports in Trinidad & Tobago, Venezuela, the Netherlands Antilles, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Panama Costa Rica, and Jamaica. The port calls in the Caribbean Basin ports are ultimately under the jurisdiction of the Miami office.
   Similarly, the Miami office has a hand in Hamburg Sud's U.S. East Coast/East Coast of South America services in vessel sharing partnerships known as the Tango and Samba services. The Tango service has a northern terminus of New York-New Jersey, heading down the East Coast and calling Port Everglades and Venezuela before moving to South America. The Samba service has a southernmost U.S. call at Charleston, S.C., and goes directly to Brazil, with limited use for shippers in Florida or the Caribbean Basin.
   Besides dealing with a diverse group of ports and vessel-sharing partners, Bjorksten also works with various niche carriers serving the Caribbean islands. So in addition to the busy traffic between Florida, the Caribbean islands, and South America, he could find himself taking care of a customer, for example, that uses Hamburg Sud's service between Australia/New Zealand/Colombia and the U.S. East Coast. That service has only two calls on the U.S. East Coast ' Savannah, Ga., and Philadelphia — but Bjorksten and his Miami staff may be involved with transshipments from the hub port Cartagena and ports in Mexico, the U.S. Gulf Coast, Port Everglades, and eventually any of the Caribbean islands.
   With such a mix of operations, Bjorksten has friends and regular contacts in many places, with many companies, throughout the Americas and the Caribbean Basin.
   He and his wife, Ulla, who often accompanies him on his travels, as well as his young adult children, Sofie and Carl, have become an interesting international family.
   When you ask Bjorksten about the favorite places in his well-traveled life, he says he does not think of places in and of themselves; he views them in terms of family and life periods.
   'I don't think you can rank different places as favorites,' he says. 'You live in different places at different times of your life, and that's how you remember each place.
   'I lived in Greece when my children were very young, and I think of Greece as the place where they were small. In Caracas, they were starting their real school life, so that was another period.'
   For a short time in between Greece and Venezuela, he was at the parent company's headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. Although Bjorksten is from Finland, he grew up in an ethnic Swedish community there, so Swedish is his mother tongue. That stop, he recalls, was interesting because it was the only time he spoke his mother tongue on a regular basis at work.
   He still speaks Swedish at home, in part to just keep a foothold in his base culture. His wife's mother tongue is Finnish, and Bjorksten is completely fluent in English and Spanish.
   His children, meanwhile, attended college in the United States, with Sofie graduating from the University of Massachusetts and Carl from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Not too surprisingly, she is working as a translator in Boston, while is son is teaching English in Beijing, China, while he is learning Chinese for a year.
   Florida has become something very close to home for him over the last 14 years. Yet Bjorksten said it is his wife, now in real estate, that has served as his center throughout all his travels.
   'She has taken care of the kids and all of us during this gypsy life of ours,' he observed. ' Jim Dow