Ship management trade association InterManager, with 91 members overseeing 5,000 vessels and 250,000 crew, recently elected its first Filipino President, Philippine Transmarine Carriers, Inc. (PTC) Vice Chairman and CEO Gerardo A. Borromeo.
The international trade association for in-house and third party ship managers' election of its first Asian leader follows other high-profile appointments of Asian executives in the shipping industry.
Since January, Koji Sekimizu has led the International Maritime Organization and in May, Masamichi Morooka took over as chairman of the International Chamber of Shipping.
Borromeo will serve a two-year term of office, succeeding Alastair Evitt, the managing director of Meridian Marine Management.
"Asia now supplies more than half of the world's seafarers and nearly half of the world fleet is under Asian control,"he noted.
His own company, PTC, deploys more than 33,000 seafarers annually and is one of the largest crew management companies in the country.
"We are at an interesting crossroads between ship management and crew management,"he observed. "Ship management is not just about safe shipping, but also about pushing the management capability on board ships."
Hence, developing the young cadet and young executive programme will be among Borromeo's main priorities as the new leader of InterManager.
"To lay the groundwork for the future, we must attract people to a career not just at sea but in shipping. You can build a ship in a year, but it takes 10 years to build a cadet into a master. We need to balance out the cyclicality between building ships and having capable people to manage them,"he elaborated.
Given the economic climate, it will be challenging to push the development of global maritime professionals, Borromeo acknowledged.
"Times are difficult. It's all a question of how we maximize the return on investment in assets and people. We all need to think long term and ship managers must work with owners to allocate resources properly. InterManager will continue to engage with all the necessary stakeholders to ensure the safe operation of ships."
The new association president developed and implemented his PTC Group's strategies in crew management, education and training, medical diagnostics, chartering and logistics as well as agency and freight forwarding, real estate development and international professional placement.
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