For our special feature, with close to 100 submissions from all over the GCC and the Middle East, the Logistics News ME team gives you a round-up of the Top 25 CEOs in the Logistics Industry.
Ranking 12 – Christopher Cook, Managing Director at Maersk UAE
Christopher Cook joined Maersk in the UK in 2002 and had the opportunity to grow through commercial leadership roles across the UK, Africa, and Europe and for the last few years in Dubai, UAE.
Christopher’s roles have been commercially orientated and developing a customer focus is one of the other focuses he has brought to the table, mainly how they develop the structures around the customer, engage with them, and develop.
“At Maersk, our people & people development is something we focus on and over the years the company has invested in me and other colleagues. It is something I am very passionate about; I have focused on developing my teams and establishing clear development plans for them to grow further. I also continue to take on mentorship roles for colleagues in different parts of the business to support them with my experiences,” said Christopher.
Maersk globally set a vision to become an integrated container logistics company. This has meant transforming many aspects of their business. The two major ones in the last year for us in UAE were as follows:
In the early part of 2019, this meant bringing together 200 colleagues from two different parts of the business under a single brand, building new capabilities, and unifying under the shared vision. It also required establishing and fitting out new office space to support the business. In 12 months, we have seen our internal engagement scores lifting and customer satisfaction rising.
The second focus was around continuing our digitization journey; wherein we looked at transferring several paper-based payment and booking processes to online platforms. Maersk is at the point where they had achieved around 95% adoption from lows 30s in 2019, and this became a key enabler for ensuring business continuity when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“Our ambitions around digitization continue to play a key priority – during 2020 we have moved a large part of our quotations online. Going into 2021 we will look to expand the service offerings that can be bought through our platforms. We will also launch several new product offerings for air freight and LCL (less than container load) and bringing those to the marketplace will be another key priority for us,” said Christopher.