“No matter what, we’re here for you": Serving our customers safely during Covid-19

Wallenius Wilhelmsen is proud to be a partner with our customers and the essential businesses they operate in. We realise that we are all facing significant challenges in our operations as we continue to navigate this unprecedented event. No one could have predicted the volatility and uncertainty we are now facing together, yet no matter what recovery scenario unfolds, we are here to support you.

As we continue to negotiate the challenges of this pandemic, our priorities remain the same.

Whether our employees are working at our customer sites, in our field operations, on our ships, or remotely at home, we have worked in line with governmental regulations and best practices to ensure the health and safety of our employees, our customers and our business partners. The range of activities includes assurance of proper cleaning of work environments; provision of proper personal protection equipment as well as social distancing within our operations, and more tools to allow for remote work. We continue to enable our employees to do their work as safely as possible and keep our operations running for you.

Throughout the first phase of the pandemic our dedicated teams have worked tirelessly to support customers and maintain constructive and open dialogue concerning your needs. In parallel, these collaborative discussions allowed Wallenius Wilhelmsen to reduce our service levels and adapt to extremely volatile market conditions. We are proud of our global teams and that the strength of our network has enabled us to provide reasonable service levels even during the most challenging times.

Over the past few months we have idled vessels; announced the recycling of some older vessels; temporarily paused projects; sought flexibility from our business partners and unfortunately asked employees to make sacrifices via furloughs and salary reductions.

We are so grateful to our teams for their sacrifice and dedication in helping us maintain our strength and support our customers. Throughout this time, we have done our best to maintain transparency and honesty with employees, customers and suppliers – ensuring everyone understands that our key objectives are to protect our people, our customers, and our business.

Today, we are focused on doing everything we can to maximise our readiness for recovery and leverage the actions we’ve taken to address the upcoming challenges of the ‘new normal’. Over the last few months we have shown our ability to scale and adapt our ocean services to the market as a responsible and reliable partner, and we will continue to do this as we enter the recovery phase. On land, our terminals, vehicle and equipment processing centres and transportation services are operational, and we feel confident in our ability to rapidly scale operations here as well. As we see our customers around the world starting up their operations again, albeit at an initially slower pace, we will continue to constructively engage with you and monitor volumes closely so we can support your needs. Our commitment to customers remains the same. We will be there to get your supply chain back on track.

These unprecedented times also bring new opportunities. They are a chance for us to collaborate even more and find smarter ways of working, to increase value for our businesses and to reduce our impact on the environment, together. Today, we continue to strive to bring our operations back to the “new normal”, leveraging key learnings from recent months, as well as all the safety measures necessary to operate efficiently and effectively. Like many of our customers, in our 158-year history Wallenius Wilhelmsen has endured challenges, and we have persevered through those challenges because of our heritage, a heritage that is rooted in care for our employees, care for our customers, and care for the community and environments we serve. We are committed to that heritage as much today as ever before.

Wishing you all continued health and safety,

Mike.