While neither affirming or denying an intention to buy Hapag Lloyd, Ron Widdows, recently appointed new chief of Singapore's Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), said he expects another round of consolidation in the container shipping industry.
"Companies in our industry have to be looking at how to improve cost competitiveness and to do that, you have to get sizeably larger," Mr Widdows told London's Financial Times.
Mr Widdows, who has been chief executive of NOL's container shipping line, APL, replaces Thomas Held, who has been NOL's chief executive for 20 months.
While acknowledging his company needs to grow to stay competitive, he declined to be drawn on reports that NOL is raising US$5 billion to $7 billion to bid for the German container shipping line Hapag-Lloyd, owned by Hanover-based travel-transport giant TUI, whose management has been under pressure from its shareholders to sell it.
Said Mr Widdows: "Based on where we are now in our strategic thinking, the largest investments that we will make - whether organically or not - will be around shipping more than logistics or terminals."
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