Page 81 - ZIM 80

The Pacific Star In Japan
Toward the end of the 1960s Zim went through a series of upheavals and changes in
management. In addition to the blow they took in the wake of the Shalom collision,
Zim’s famous passenger lines were fighting a losing battle in the new era of affordable the most critical decision was to commission container ships especially for the line.
civilian air travel.
By the end of the decade the passenger lines shut down for good, to the great sorrow
of many. The tantalizing splendor of its love boats may have gone, but a grand new
challenge awaited the company. Moshe Kashti, who replaced Meir Giron as CEO in
1970, gave the go-ahead to a project initiated by a few enthusiastic young members
of the company (In Zim they were known as “the doctors.”) with a massive investment
of over 300 million dollars. These “doctors” thought big, and they were about to
change Zim for good.
It had begun almost a decade earlier with the Pacific Star Line: Zim was already an
international company operating ships far from home. In 1961 a line was inaugurated
that would serve the booming commerce between the USA and Japan. Ships such
as the Ampal, Negbah, Deganya, and Tverya crossed the Pacific, providing excellent
service by the standards of the mid-sixties. Zim established a headquarters in Japan,
first in the port city of Kobe and later in Tokyo. They built ships in Japan and set up no experience in operating this type of ship, yet they were charged with crossing two
a maintenance and repair center, with business growing at a steady pace. By the
end of the decade, however, the troubles began: the ships were getting old and the
competition was catching up, offering more regular and frequent service. The line
began to suffer losses.
The Zim management appointed a team, headed by Captain Izzy Edelstein, with Dr.
Yoram Almogi and Avraham Ben-Yehoshua, to address the matter. In 1968 they held
a conference in Japan where the team presented alternatives for the future of the
Pacific Star Line. The findings of the research were clear: containers were the choice
of the future. This was a bold recommendation, if only because another pioneering
experiment in running a container line, that of the Sealand Company, was on the
brink of failure. Some experts believed that container shipping was a bad idea and
that it would not stand the test of time. On the other hand, from the beginning of the
1970s the Japanese establishment had been convinced to create the infrastructure
necessary for a container service and was enthusiastically implementing the idea.
At Zim they were aware of these developments; this doubtless helped them reach
the decision to establish Zim’s container service. The first stage of the project was
to replace the Pacific Star Line ships with a container fleet and all the corollary
infrastructure. An ostensibly modest goal that in reality spelled revolution.
New Ships for a New World
The project team ran into much skepticism, both within the company and beyond.
In the Israeli transportation ministry the containers were dubbed “coffins” and some
questioned the wisdom of establishing an entire infrastructure of facilities and
terminals around them. There were also those who frowned upon a government-
owned company putting its energy into trade that is not related to Israel. An article
on the history of the container service stated: “They started building a new company,
as if there were no board, no worker’s union, no tea ladies, no striking shipyard
workers, no veteran captains.” Many thought that it simply wouldn’t work. But history
was on the side of the young doctors. Zim’s container service – ZCS – was built
upon groundbreaking methods straight from the labs of the Technion and Harvard
University. Unlike the skeptics, there were those old-timers who excitedly joined the
new wave – among them Matty Morgenstern, who had gotten his start as a deck boy
on Zim’s first ship, Kedmah, and who was now appointed director of the container
service. A decade later, he was CEO of an entirely different shipping company: The
new Zim was a leader in carrying cargo in containers, by sea and by land, while the
old Zim was gradually fading away into the history books.
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The program was complex, global in scope, and demanded many strategic
decisions: building a container factory at Kibbutz Giv’at Brenner, procuring chassis
and operational equipment, signing contracts with terminals, establishing a huge
operational, administrative, and commercial network to support the new service. But
Even if there were already container ships working in different places in the world,
Zim was the first to build a series of modern container ships to serve a designated,
meticulously planned line. The ships were built in the Italcantieri shipyards in Genoa.
The first two ships, whose construction was funded in part by Germany, flew a German
flag, and its crew included German officers and Chinese sailors; but immediately
afterwards Zim Haifa and Zim Genoa were built. These ships flew the Israeli flag and
had a 100% Israeli crew. In 1973 two more ships were built, this time in Germany, at
the Bremer Vulcan shipyards – Zim Montreal and Zim Hong Kong – which flew a
Liberian flag and had an Israeli crew. The six ships rounded off Zim’s container fleet,
ZCS, whose new logo was painted conspicuously on the ships and the containers.
The service was later enhanced with the addition of a seventh ship – Zim California.
ZCS’s ships were brand new; for the officers and crews this was a brave new world, but
not always a better one. Modernization did not reach every aspect of the operation.
Stability calculations were still done by hand by the ship’s officers; the officers had
oceans and a route of approximately 65,000 kilometers, one and a half times the earth’s
circumference, on every voyage, and on a strict timetable to boot. Navigation was
done with traditional methods until satellite navigation tools were finally installed
on the ships. In the first years, not all ports had a container terminal. In Hong Kong,
for example, the ships were unloaded using regular cranes – to the pleasure of the
sailors, who enjoyed the longer stay in the port. But soon enough they had to adapt
to a new reality: lightning quick layovers, mostly at a terminal far from the city, as
was becoming the norm in modern shipping.
The years of the establishment of the container service were accompanied by fateful
events for the State of Israel, alongside internal upheavals in the company. In October
1973 Israeli society and resources were mobilized to the Yom Kippur war effort. A
short time later, in March 1974, the sitting CEO Kashti died suddenly; board chairman
Michael Zur was charged with financial crimes and sent to prison; former chief of staff
David Elazer, who had been appointed chairman of the board, also died unexpectedly
in 1976. Throughout all of these upheavals the people at Zim stuck to the task of
establishing and developing the container service, which became the foundation for
Zim’s operations for decades to come. The container revolution changed the face
of shipping and the face of international trade, and Zim played an important and
pioneering role in this revolution.
1981‫ ב־‬,‫ מאניות הדור הראשון‬,‫צים סוואנה‬
The Zim Savannah, from the first generation
of ZCS ships, in 1981
‫ מגיע לנמלי ארה"ב‬ZCS ‫שירות המכולות‬
Zim Container Service reaching the
ports of the United States