P and O group reorganising

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32564, 25 March 1971, Page 3

P and O group reorganising

(N.Z.PA. Staff Correspondent) LONDON, March 24.

The name “New Zealand Shipping Company” will probably disappear within a few years, but no-one knows when, or what the new name will be.

The change will be part of a reorganisation within the P and O group, the parent company of the New Zealand Shipping Company. The streamlining will make some of P and O’s 40,000 employees redundant, and will affect all of its 150 subsidiary companies, most of which will eventually lose their present names. P and O is making the move after a six-month study of the group’s activities by McKinsey and Company, the leading British management consultants.

The main change will be the disbanding of the individual subsidiary company

structure, and its replacement with five working divisions: bulk shipping, general cargo shipping, passenger shipping, special shipping, and European activities and air transport. The number of redundancies is not known, but all will be among the group’s 20,000

shore-based staff, and they will mostly occur in Europe. The group’s chairman (Sir Donald Anderson) said he expected that almost all the redundancies would be met by normal staff turnover and by some early retirements.

He said the changes were needed if P and O was to meet the pressing problem of greatly increased costs.

The new senior executive structure proposed by McKinseys has Sir Donald Anderson as chairman, with two vice-chairmen, of whom one is the previous chairman of the New Zealand Shipping Company (Mr C. A. W. Dawes), who has been chief spokesman for the Conference Lines in recent years. P and O is the world's largest shipping group, with 240 ships, including trawlers, passenger liners, cruise ships, tankers, bulk carriers and container ships. It has revenues of £l9om a year. Its subsidiary, New Zealand Shipping, is one of

four British lines making up the British-New Zealand Shipping Conference.