Executive Ship Management Brand Guidelines: A Singapore Ship Manager of 1998 and Its Academy

A marine engineer’s own ship manager.

Executive Ship Management, usually shortened to ESM, is a ship manager headquartered in Singapore. The company dates its inception to 1998 and names its founder as B. S. Teeka, its chief executive; the architecture magazine ArchDaily, in a 2013 project listing, gives the client of the company’s training campus in full as Balaji Singh Teeka of Executive Ship Management Pte Ltd.

The company tells his story as an engineer’s one. It says he is a postgraduate of India’s Directorate of Marine Engineering and Training and a mechanical engineering graduate of Ramaiah college in Bangalore, and that he spent more than a decade at sea on cargo ships, first with the Shipping Corporation of India and then with Hong Kong-based Univan Ship Management. He was brought ashore as a technical superintendent and, the company says, later became technical and overall head of the company he worked for. ESM was then set up in Singapore as an independent business, which the company describes as the logical result of that experience.

A second founder sits beside him. ESM names Sikha Singh as a founding partner of the company and its associated group, now deputy chief executive, steering strategy for the wider group. The company says that, under her lead, it was inducted into the Palladium Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for executing strategy in 2012, and that it still runs its planning by the balanced scorecard method.

ESM also describes itself as the starting point of something larger. It calls the ship manager the core establishment and the genesis of the Executive Group of Companies, which it says includes six other marine businesses; the group names on its website include Executive Offshore, Executive Shipping Services, Adhart Shipping and Arc Marine.

Technical, crew and newbuilding work.

ESM describes its services in its own words. Under technical management it says its team is made up of Indian and Japanese engineers, and that it manages chemical, crude and product tankers, bulk carriers, container ships and gas carriers. It reports owners’ information through an in-house web software system it calls Phoenix, which it says gives real-time status on each managed vessel from anywhere.

ESM describes crew management in the most detail. It says its seafarers are recruited and trained in-house, that each officer or rating goes through ship-specific training, and that more than 80 per cent of the officers on its managed ships started as cadets at its own school. It says it follows a one-nationality policy on board each ship, and that its crewing team handles travel, visas, repatriation and wages for crews. Under newbuilding supervision it says more than 65 per cent of its fleet came to it as new deliveries from the yard, and lists work from pre-contract specification and plan approval to sea trials and guarantee claims.

A separate arm handles chartering. ESM says Executive Shipping Services is headquartered in Mumbai, with a network of offices in India, in Houston in the United States and in Tokyo.

ESM says its corporate office is in Singapore and its crewing offices are in seven Indian cities, including Chennai, Cochin, Delhi and Kolkata, as well as in the Philippines and the United Arab Emirates, with representative offices in the Netherlands and Greece; other pages of its website give office counts of eleven and of twelve cities.

The ship manager as a brand.

Third-party ship managers sell a service rather than a product. They run vessels that belong to someone else, so their identities have no hull, funnel or cargo of their own to show. Instead they present themselves through the work: technical management, crewing, newbuilding supervision and the training of seafarers. V.Group, for example, describes itself as “an independent service provider, not a ship owner or a manufacturer,” and Anglo-Eastern says it manages vessels on behalf of shipowners, charterers and operators.

Their marks tend to be simple and sit on corporate websites. Blue and teal wordmarks are a familiar sight in the trade, but not a rule: V.Group’s logo files come in green and black versions, and Anglo-Eastern’s header pairs a white wordmark with a golden emblem. Around those marks sit photographs of ships and crews as the companies publish them — a managed vessel at sea, a simulator room, cadets with their teachers or on graduation day.

The websites follow a common plan. There are service pages for technical management and crewing, often split by vessel type, from tankers and bulk carriers to LNG carriers and cruise ships. Training-centre pages show simulators and classrooms; Anglo-Eastern, for instance, runs its own academy and training centres in India and the Philippines. Office maps and location lists stretch across Asia and Europe, and careers-at-sea pages set out cadet programmes and routes to promotion.

This guide looks at how each manager tells that story: who founded it, who owns it, which mergers shaped it, and how it describes its services and its seafarers. Figures for fleets, staff and offices are given as the companies or dated reports state them, and each palette here is an unofficial interpretation, not a brand standard.

A training campus by CCBA Designs.

The design work connected with ESM that is documented outside the company is a building. The company trains its crews at the Samundra Institute of Maritime Studies, or SIMS, which it describes as its own training centre. The SIMS website says the institute has offered maritime training since 2002, with a post-sea facility in Mumbai and a pre-sea campus in Lonavala, and lists pre-sea courses including the Diploma in Nautical Science, Graduate Marine Engineering, a Bachelor of Technology in Marine Engineering and electro-technical officer training. The Mumbai facility also lists post-sea courses approved by India’s Directorate General of Shipping and offshore courses in dynamic positioning, at basic and advanced levels. ESM adds branches in Chandigarh and Cochin to that list, and says its seven recruiting and training offices in India follow the STCW convention and the ISM Code.

The Lonavala campus is documented outside the company. On 23 January 2013, ArchDaily published it as a project by the Pune practice CCBA Designs, with Christopher Benninger as architect in charge. The listing gives the site area as 21,000 square metres and the completion year as 2007, with Executive Ship Management Pte Ltd as the client. In the text the architects supplied, SIMS is described as established by ESM in Singapore for a new vision of the industry, and the campus as a green one where the full range of pre-sea and post-sea studies can be taught.

ESM ties the two together itself: it says only skilled and trained seafarers from SIMS join the fleet it manages.

For a design guide, Executive Ship Management shows how a ship manager’s identity can rest on a training campus as much as on a name. Compare Univan and Synergy Marine. For this guide we use a Lonavala green, a slate and a warm sandstone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Executive Ship Management’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.