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American
President Lines (APL) (Est. 1848) |
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American President Lines (APL) celebrates its 160th Anniversary in 2008. From a first American steamer voyage from New York to the US West Coast during the California Gold Rush of 1849, APL has continued its legacy of being at the forefront of the global shipping industry. This is its history and the foundation of what makes APL an industry leader in container shipping today. Over the course of these 160 years, the business that APL and its predecessors built has touched the lives of millions of people, involved virtually every country in the world, and shaped the future of ocean transport. This organisation has constantly strived to lead the industry through innovation. Beginning with the entrepreneurial spirit of William Henry Aspinwall, the leadership of the company known today as APL has held an unwavering commitment to progress. This visionary approach has bridged geographic gaps and cultural differences in the Pacific, helping to build one of the largest trading areas in the world. Since William Henry Aspinwall launched APL's first predecessor, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, in October 1848, APL has survived numerous business cycles, two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s and other significant challenges, emerging as a consistently profitable, worldwide transport and logistics business dedicated to innovation, superior customer service and on-time reliability. Even the launch of Pacific Mail was prescient. Other steamship companies that connected the US East and West coasts carried passengers and cargo around the tip of South America. Pacific Mail, on the other hand, travelled to the Isthmus of Panama, where cargo was transferred to mules and canoes and carried between the Atlantic and the Pacific before making the remainder of the trip. The pioneering service led to the construction of Aspinwall's Panama Railway in the 1850s, which carried cargo across the isthmus and predated contemporary intermodal transport by nearly a century. In the late 1980s, APL took delivery of the first post-Panamax vessels, the first containerships too wide to use the Panama Canal. Questioned by many, the move signaled APL's commitment to combined ocean-rail-truck transport between Asia and the US Midwest and East Coast. Since then, the company has re-established all-water service through the canal, but APL and many other carriers still rely heavily on intermodal transport across North America. Indeed, APL's early intermodal efforts included the company's pioneering use of double-stack trains in North America in the 1980s. The success of APL's intermodal programme in North America led APL to, in 2007, inaugurate IndiaLinx™, a container train service that serves key freight corridors in India. APL's innovations have only accelerated since merging with the Singapore-based NOL (Neptune Orient Lines) Group in 1997. Since then, APL has emerged as the industry leader in information technology, with numerous breakthroughs including the first service that allowed customers to print bills of landing at multiple remote locations such as banks and freight forwarders. APL's sister business, APL Logistics is a leading provider of global supply chain management services. Recent breakthroughs by APL Logistics have included joining with North American trucking company Con-way to provide the first guaranteed day-definite delivery service for less-than-containerload cargo between Asia and the US. The NOL Group's newest unit is APL Terminals, one of the world's top-10 container terminal operators. Its network of terminals in North America and Asia allows the company to control cargo handling so that containers breeze through shoreside operations and on to their final destinations. Together, they give APL a distinct advantage in providing seamless, on-time transport services. APL's commitment to innovation is an ongoing one. In late 2007, the world’s first ocean-capable 53-foot containers were introduced into regular scheduled services. The new containers bring the efficiency of "big-box" economics to ocean shippers, providing them access to the same financial benefits long available to users of land transport. Also in the second half of 2007, APL launched a groundbreaking new service linking Asia and the US East Coast through the Suez Canal. Today APL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore-based Neptune Orient Lines (NOL), a global transport and logistics company engaged in shipping and related businesses.The Spirit of Exploration (APL in the 19th Century): The spirit of exploration is the desire to reach beyond the horizon and set a course for the future. This philosophy is just as important for APL today as it was in 1848 for the company's predecessor, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. In 1848, as a result of treaties with Mexico and Britain in the 1830s and '40s, the western boundary of the U.S. stretched along the Pacific Coast from Puget Sound to San Diego. According to President Polk, "mail facilities, so indispensable for the diffusion of information and for building together the different portions of our extended Confederacy, should be afforded to our citizens west of the Rocky Mountains." Since the goal was to achieve a fast, reliable means for delivering the mail, the government contract mandated the use of steamships. Steamers were to call on East Coast and Gulf ports in the U.S., then discharge their valuable cargo on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus of Panama. Mules and canoes would then carry the cargo to the Pacific Coast of the Isthmus, where it would be held until the next northbound steamer departed. Despite the arduous route, the plan was far superior to traditional means of transporting cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the U.S. Still, the endeavor involved substantial risk. With a tiny population base of 20,000 scattered over 2,000 miles, the West had no coal, no means for supplying or maintaining steamers, and only rudimentary port facilities. There were many critics who said the venture was doomed to failure. However William Henry Aspinwall persevered and his vessel S.S. California became the first vessel of its kind to arrive in San Francisco after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill. In fact, Aspinwall proved to be a visionary for his time. He immediately took steps to improve on the trans-Panama route. In the early 1850s, he worked to construct a railroad crossing the Isthmus - an idea that was regarded as outlandish in the 19th century - then used it in conjunction with his growing fleet of vessels. The integration of ship and train schedules was a groundbreaking concept at the time, and can be considered an early example of intermodalism in North America. As a result of Aspinwall's forward-thinking style, Pacific Mail's fleet expanded to 23 ships, and the company quickly outpaced its competitors. Until the late 1860s, Pacific Mail and the Panama Railroad were the two most profitable corporations in the U.S., often paying dividends as high as 30 percent. And, for a time, the city in Panama which is now known as Colón was called Aspinwall. At about the same time, Pacific Mail's wisdom was called into question when the company was successful in its bid for the first mail contract to Asia. But on the 1st January 1867, the company's steamer S.S. Colorado sailed from San Francisco for Japan, inaugurating the first regular trans-Pacific service to Yokohama and Hong Kong. For many years following the Civil War, Pacific Mail provided the only service between the United States and the Far East and contributed greatly to the future of trans-Pacific trade. The 20th century brought with it many new opportunities, especially in trans-Pacific trade. Pacific Mail became Dollar Line in 1925, and its new owner, San Francisco lumber tycoon Captain Robert Dollar, embarked on a different kind of exploration. Dollar, a pious Scotsman who had made his fortune in lumber, had entered the shipping business out of sheer exasperation. Erratic shipping schedules had prevented Dollar from delivering his lumber on time, so he purchased his first schooner in 1895 to gain control over the transport of his shipments. Soon, his vessels were transporting lumber to Asia, and he became convinced that the Pacific was destined to become the centre of world trade. After acquiring Pacific Mail, Dollar worked tirelessly to focus the attention of North America's business leaders on emerging markets in Asia - and was even successful in persuading a group of diverse industry leaders to contribute to a booklet he called "Have You Investigated the Oriental Market for Your Product?" He took the idea of global commerce even further by purchasing land and building offices in Asia in the late 1920s, effectively breaking ground on what is now APL's extensive Asia office network. Throughout these years, APL and its predecessors also afforded others the opportunity to explore. From carrying fifty Peruvian gold miners on the California to transporting the thousands of immigrants who followed, the ships belonging to APL and its forebears have been the first step for generations of families seeking a promising future in America. The Age of Innovation (APL in the 20th Century): APL's history of innovation is as multifaceted as it is long, thanks to the strong vision of leaders like Ralph K. Davies and W. Bruce Seaton. Just as the spirit of exploration had been the guiding force behind William Henry Aspinwall and Captain Robert Dollar decades before, the desire to innovate was central to the work of Davies and Seaton - and to the emergence of the company known today as APL. Although the origin of the APL name can be traced to the early 1920s, the company would not be known as American President Lines until an unusual series of events prompted subsequent changes of ownership. The tradition of naming ships after U.S. presidents began in 1923, when Captain Robert Dollar purchased seven “president” ships from the U.S. government. Dollar used these vessels, along with the existing fleet of Dollar Line, to pioneer round-the-world service in 1924. At the same time, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company could count more than 46 steamers in its extensive fleet, but lacked the strong, decisive management of earlier decades. In 1925, Dollar Line acquired Pacific Mail and dominated the marine transport industry until the Great Depression. A harbinger of the enormous changes to come, the two luxurious ocean liners Dollar Line ordered in 1929 - the S.S. President Coolidge and President Hoover - carried less than half the number of passengers they could accommodate on their maiden voyages in 1931. Robert Dollar, then in his late 80s, had begun to rely on his son, Robert Stanley, to manage the company. To the casual observer, the decades-old family business appeared to be running smoothly. But increased government regulation of the shipping industry, rising labour costs, and damaging labour strikes soon put an enormous financial strain on even the most profitable of shipping companies. Dollar Line, in particular, was hit hard. By 1938, the Dollar Line fleet was worth $11 million, but the company's liability was $17 million, and interest on the debt was accumulating at a rate of $80,000 per month. The newly formed U.S. Maritime Commission, headed by the ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy, judged Dollar Line to be unsound. Despite a characteristically tenacious effort on the part of R. Stanley Dollar, the government assumed control of Dollar Line and renamed the company American President Lines, Ltd. By the end of the Second World War, APL’s assets were $40 million - and the company had attracted the interest of Ralph K. Davies. Davies’ success in the volatile California oil business of the 1920s had earned him a reputation as a shrewd businessman. In 1952, he and his investors purchased American President Lines for $18 million. The purchase of American President Lines by Ralph K. Davies signalled the beginning of a new era. His ambitious plans for APL included expansion, modernisation, and a revolutionary concept for a very tradition-bound industry - containerisation. Like many 20th century innovations, containers were born out of a sense of urgency. First used by the U.S. government during the war, they proved the ideal means of quickly and efficiently unloading and distributing supplies, which was of paramount importance at the time. Instead of shipping commodities in bulk, army and navy specialists began to mix cargo by loading freight onto pallets, then loading the pallets into specially constructed "boxes". For the private sector, containers held the promise of secure, dry storage of cargo and controlled climates and added shelf life for perishables. Yet, despite favourable reports about the use of containers, the concept of containerisation seemed far-fetched to all but the most forward-thinking in the early 1950s. For the container to succeed, ships would have to be modified. Likewise, ports and inland transport systems around the world would have to be upgraded to meet a new standard. Industry leaders, as well as customers, were sceptical. Before this advance, cargo was literally manhandled. Cranes with slings unloaded crates onto pallets. Dockers then muscled the crates into place, and forklifts moved the pallets to warehouses. Damage and delays were common. Containerisation changed all that forever. Not surprisingly, APL's management was an early proponent of the container for transporting commodities traditionally shipped in bulk - like lumber and steel. The company soon saw the tremendous potential for the efficiency afforded by this basic tool of trade. In addition, APL was a leader in the research and development of controlled temperature containers. These "reefers" now make it possible to transport goods like climate-sensitive film and perishable seafood all over the world. Today the containerisation revolution has taken over the world and is the dominant form of ocean transport. To assess the world's readiness for containerisation, Davies sent a fact-finding team to 26 major ports in 1958. The report was positive, and Davies began to integrate the container into APL’s operations. By the time of his death in 1971, 58 percent of the shipments handled by the company were containerised. In 1973, APL took delivery of four fully containerised vessels. Six years after Davies' death, W. Bruce Seaton took charge of APL and expanded on the work done during the Davies years. Seaton's period resulted in further significant innovations at APL. Seaton recognised that if APL were to utilize the new container technology fully, it must extend control from the ocean shipment link in the transport process to the domestic or landbridge link within North America. This meant creating a seamless connection between the three modes of surface transport - ship, train, and truck - so that shipments could move with greater speed and reliability than ever before. Known as intermodalism, this expansion on the concept of containerisation would not only bring the transport industry into the present, but would also greatly facilitate future growth.Many consumers are aware that the products they purchase come from other parts of the world, but few realize the role that intermodalism - the seamless movement of containerised goods using different modes of transport like ships, trains, and trucks - plays in the availability of just about everything from jeans to personal computers. It is thought that the impact of intermodalism on the global economy has been greater than that of the U.S. space programme of the 1960s. In just 15 years, intermodalism has had a tremendous impact. In earlier eras, the movement of cargo was a slow, often-delayed process. Today, the world's vast intermodal network supports an environment in which shipments are in almost perpetual motion. The result has been a significant increase in the volume of shipments moving through this efficient system and a world-wide rise in commercial activity. Today's huge container ships are loaded and discharged at state-of-the-art terminals, where thousands of containers of valuable commodities are then efficiently transferred to dockside trains that carry them to myriad inland destinations and ultimately to today's consumers. The containerisation revolution therefore has reached the road haulage and rail industries and the result is intermodal transport via a seamless worldwide network. In a sense, the revolution in cargo handling that began in the 1950s with the advent of the container has come full circle. A simple idea has grown into the complex, worldwide intermodal network delivers the many products we all use nearly every day. To achieve this seamless transport network, Seaton relied on his ability to bring together people from what had traditionally been regarded as separate industries to work on a common goal. He aggressively recruited rail and truck transport experts to work with international shipping specialists at APL. The result was the "stacktrain" an innovation that doubled train capacity by stacking containers, two high, on specially designed rail wagons. With the advent of the stacktrain in 1984, APL introduced the concept of containerisation to the U.S. domestic transport industry. This paved the way for the precise integration of domestic and international shipments and solidified APL's reputation as a market leader in ideas. The Information Technology Age (APL in the 21st Century): In today's globalised and fast paced world of international trade, business is defined and redefined every second via the revolution that is the internet and information technology. This high speed information exchange is in part responsible for today's growth of international trade. If the basic, yet powerful concept of connecting people and products via the physical movement of goods is the hardware of the shipping business, information is the software that makes it run. And it’s the ability to combine assets and ideas - hardware and software - to meet each customer’s transport goals that enables a company to move beyond its history to prosper in the future. Many of the same commodities that appeared on the California’s cargo manifest in 1848 are still shipped today - dress coats, shoes, silk handkerchiefs, English playing cards, cheese, coffee, pineapples, and medicines. But it’s how these items are transported and the information customers receive about their shipments that has changed. Until containerisation was widely accepted, customers sourcing products internationally had to allow more time to bring goods to market. Now, thanks to a more streamlined and dependable intermodal transport network, goods reach market in days - not months. Instead of relying on handwritten bills of landing that arrived weeks after goods were loaded aboard sailing vessels, customers in today's internet age now access up-to-the-minute information on websites like this one. Make no mistake, customers are using this information as never before. They print bills of landing, trace shipments, and get information in real time via today's IT technology. So APL provides customers around the world with container transport services through a network combining high quality intermodal operations with state of the art information technology. As one of the top global container transport companies, APL provides more than 60 weekly services reaching over 25,000 locations in 140 countries. By combining world-class seamless intermodal operations with leading-edge IT and e-commerce capabilities, APL provides you with the full range of transport solutions, including seamless door-to-door services. APL's spirit of innovation lives on! American President Lines (APL) www.apl.com APL Logistics www.apllogistics.com Neptune Orient Lines (NOL) Group www.nol.com.sg |
