In an interview with Economic Times Soren Skou, CEO of Copenhagen-based AP Moller-Maersk, says the company considers India an investment destination, and that the $35 billion shipping conglomerate will invest more in port facilities.
Skou: Globally, we have 30,000 people and a third of our employees are Indians. This is our largest location by far, in terms of number of employees. At least for our business we can say we have seen solid growth. The trade to and from India has grown and we have also been able to grow our market share here for the past few years. So, we see the Indian market quite positively.
Skou: We are doing the same things as your government is doing in terms of digitizing our business model. We enable our customers to do more business online. A large part of that work, given that we have our service centers here, is driven out of India. The ownership of a number of global processes are from India and the teams here are driving the transformation.
On whether doing business in India has eased
Skou: The government has many good things on the agenda in terms of infrastructure. Infrastructure is crucial to our business: not only ports, but also rail and to some degree also road. We serve the Indian market through 14 ports in the country on both coasts. We have 45 inland container depots. So anything that the government does to build better infrastructure is in our view good news.
Core processes are very positive seen from our point of view, not only because it will make our business easier to do but also because it will make India more competitive.
Skou: I do want to highlight that in India, we have a lot of appetite to continue to grow. We are committed to this market and will continue to do so to grow our footprint here: the number of services, the number of ports we call. We are not only looking at mainly container ports but also inland container depots as well. Our long-term plans clearly involve investing in more in these and we would like to build a solid network in India of inland container depots alone.
Skou: More port infrastructure would be helpful. It’s no secret that we have congestion issues in Mumbai: it’s a combination of port infrastructure, better processes and less bureaucracy that needs to be implemented. And digitization of the core processes is important. We are very supportive of the government’s plans around using inland waterways for transportation.
