By Staff Reporter
WINDHOEK
Hangana Seafood has taken steps to ensure the survival and sustainability of both the company and its product.
This involved a change in its approach to fishing, moving away from a value driven to a quality driven strategy as well as a change from a commodity focus to an added value based approach.
They included right skills in management and sufficient training throughout the company to cement the first steps to set Hangana on a new path.
A statement from Ohlthaver and List said fishing companies in the past largely failed to recognise the threats and challenges that emerged with the process of globalisation. Hangana Seafood in Walvis Bay has met the challenges and turned shaky markets and labour unrests into positives, realising the need to know the strengths and weaknesses of its competitors, giving employees the change to share in the company’s turnaround and ensuring it is always a step ahead in terms of customer relations, product quality and supply reliability.
“In order to compete globally, we need to be world class. We have to be on the forefront of certifications needed to support our image to the outside world,” explains managing director Volker Kuntzsch.
“We also need to understand that customer demands are putting increasing pressure on us to prove that our resources are sustainable. Due to globalisation we need to ensure that we maintain a competitive advantage and now seriously need to consider certification of the management of our resources to underline their sustainability,” he said.
Not too long ago the Namibian fishing industry moved into a state of crisis aggravated by soaring crude oil prices, and volatile exchange rates amongst others.
Kuntzsch said the company had to develop a strategy with clear targets, which were communicated to all employees in the company as well as to its creditors to combat the loss of confidence in Hangana Seafood. The overall efficiency of the company also received a face-lift in order to prove that if given the chance, it was possible for Hangana to become a profitable and sustainable business.
The next challenge entailed convincing a financial institution to provide the money to put up an added value factory and bring the strategy to life.
With the new factory that was inaugurated in August 2006, Hangana Seafood is now in a position to develop longer-term relationships with customers for retail products, thereby introducing predictability into its processes and the market.
The company’s product portfolio now enables it to reduce its dependency on traditional hake markets and diversify into alternative markets that demand excellent quality and products that are consumer and not so much wholesale or catering oriented.
In June 2007 Hangana Seafood purchased a 45 metre wet fish trawler, the “Baldur Arna”, that has been catching for the company on a charter base from Benguella Sea Products for the past two years.
Fleet director Hannes Uys said the company continued with the existing major Repair & Maintanance methodology (R&M) that includes major repairs during the dry-docking of its entire fleet every two years.
“A strategic decision was taken some six years ago that the only way that we can ensure our aging fleet’s continuous availability in future was to invest on major R&M onboard our vessels that formed the core of the fleet.”
The costs of such a refit varied from N$1 million to N$4 million per vessel in the past six years. The benefits of many of these major refits in the past are evident when looking at the condition as well as economical life expectancy of the core vessels in Hangana’s fleet today.
In June 2006 Hangana Board of Directors decommissioned the ‘First Lady Kovambo’ and ‘Zamora’???_?_’???_?’???_???