HISTORY

THE FAMILY COMPANY, 1891 – 1962 A CHANGE IN DIRECTION, 1962 – 1974

EXPANSION, 1974 - 2005 A NEW GENERATION TAKES OVER, 2005 to the present

The Family Company

When Emil Ipsen founded his forwarding company in 1891 at the age of 38, he already had more than 20 years experience of arranging transport services under his belt. Born and educated in Kiel, he moved to Bremerhaven as a young man on account of the better career opportunities the seaport offered, and this was where he established his company. The new business profited not only from all the national and international contacts Ipsen had acquired over the years, but also from the burgeoning Bremen economy.

The young company’s special areas of expertise were the transport and warehousing of cotton. The business flourished, so additional warehouses had to be purchased in Bremerhaven, and a combined office and residential building was constructed. In 1896, after just five years in business, a branch office was set up in Bremen, a city which at the time was gaining a reputation as an important cotton-trading centre.

The First World War brought this period of growth to a sudden end. A considerable number of employees were called up, as were Emil Ipsen’s two sons, Hans and Emil junior, and the company’s business activities were severely curtailed.

After the end of the war, Hans Ipsen took charge of the company’s Bremen office, while his brother Emil jun. and a certain Dietrich Bockhoop (the young Ipsens’ brother-in-law) oversaw business operations in Bremerhaven. By reactivating old business contacts, and vigorously going out in search of new ones, the second-generation management soon had the company back on its feet. Times, however, had changed, and the Obernstrasse office in Bremen gradually established itself as the company’s new headquarters.

1939 saw two further breaks in the continuity of the company’s development: in February of that year, Emil Ipsen senior died, and then, in September, war broke out. After that, the company’s business activities all but ceased. However, the firm managed to rise once again from the ashes when the war came to an end.

In 1943, Emil Ipsen decided not to exercise his right to acquire a greater holding in the business, and left his brother Hans in charge of the company’s fortunes. Hans Ipsen’s personal integrity, combined with his business acumen, and his outstanding record of public service, had over the years contributed in no small measure to the firm’s outstanding reputation, as became apparent when it celebrated its sixtieth anniversary in 1951. Besides managing his own company, Hans Ipsen also served in a number of honorary positions in Bremen. From 1945 to 1961, for example, he was chairman of the Association of Bremen Forwarding Companies. These were the years of the “Wirtschaftswunder”, and were also a period of rapid expansion for the company, whose workforce grew from 19 to 25 in the four short years between 1951 and 1955.

When Hans Ipsen died on 19 February 1962 at the age of 76, the company’s future lay in the balance. The acquisition of new customers had been neglected for years, and the indebted business was dependent on a faithful group of old clients whose loyalty to the company was based on personal ties. In order to keep her head above water, Hans Ipsen’s widow had no option but to follow the advice of her closest advisers, and transform the family business into a GmbH & Co. KG (i.e. a limited partnership with the GmbH as the general partner).

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A Change in Direction

The newly constituted company was managed by Hans Michaelis, who at this time also became a company partner, and by Hermann Helfers, who for many years had been a senior company manager and authorized company representative (Prokurist). To begin with, the fact that Michaelis’s partnership in Emil Ipsen GmbH & Co. KG was held in trust on behalf of the shipping agency Gebrüder Specht was not made known to anyone at all, either in the company or elsewhere. Gebrüder Specht, a long-established Bremen company, chose to maintain complete secrecy about its relationship with Emil Ipsen in order not to undermine its own commercial claims vis à vis the company, and at the same time to safeguard its own strategic commercial interests. In short, the cooperation between the two transport companies was kept secret to prevent any conflicts of interest from arising.

It was Hermann Ruröde who finally steered the company into calmer waters after his appointment as a managing director in 1965. Ruröde had started his career as a trainee with an international forwarding company called Heinrich Rüppel, and had risen to the rank of department manager. He then joined the Darmstadt company E. Merck, where he also served as a department manager. His next move was back to Bremen, where he worked for the forwarding agency Röhlig & Co. before joining Emil Ipsen as an authorized company representative (Prokurist) and as head of the export department. By this time, he had been in the forwarding business for four decades, and was able to use the contacts he had established over the years to acquire a number of important new customers for the company.

In 1966 Hermann Helfers went into retirement, and in 1969 Hans Michaelis also stepped down. The partnership in Emil Ipsen that Michaelis had held in trust on behalf of Gebrüder Specht were passed on to Ruröde, under whose guidance Emil Ipsen managed to reposition itself successfully in a shipping world that was increasingly coming to be dominated by containerized traffic. Ruröde did much to encourage particularly talented members of staff. One of his protégés was a Prokurist called Klaus Platz who played an important supporting role in the ongoing development of the company. In 1974, Platz succeeded Ruröde as the company’s managing director.

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Expansion

Klaus Platz began his working life as an apprentice with Emil Ipsen. By 1961, he had been awarded Prokura (joint power of company representation), and in 1969 Einzelprokura (authorization to represent the company on his own). By the time he was appointed managing director, he had already been with the company for 20 years. In the following 31 years, he transformed a medium-sized company with branch offices in Bremerhaven and Hamburg, and a staff of 35 at its head office in Bremen, into a dynamic commercial group which, when he retired, had 400 employees on its payroll and subsidiaries in 10 countries.

Klaus Platz’s entrepreneurial flair, his personality, his extraordinary network of business friends in Germany and abroad, and also his loyalty to Emil Ipsen and its principal partner Gebrüder Specht, were the key elements in this period of expansion. He had the luck of the brave and the bold, as well as the advantage of knowing that he could rely on the trust of the company’s partners, on their financial support, and on their international contacts.

The main stages of the company’s expansion under Klaus Platz were as follows:

1977			A forwarding company called cet - Compagnie d’emballage et transport GmbH is set up in Bremen, and a
			branch office is opened in Algiers.
1984			Emil Ipsen opens a branch office in Antwerp.
1985			Gebrüder Specht takes over the packaging company Heinrich Schäding.
1989			Ipsen acquires a majority holding in Fastsped (an airfreight company). Fastsped has operations in Hamburg,
			Hanover und Frankfurt
1992			FastIpsen Bhd is set up in Penang, Malaysia.
1993			FastIpsen Pte. Ltd. is set up in Singapore.
1995			A cet branch office is established in Tunisia.
1997			A cet branch office is established in Casablanca/Morocco.
1998			Ipsen takes over Massilia Transit in Marseilles.

The success achieved by the group in this period of expansion was due in no small measure to the commitment of the workforce, a large proportion of whom still work hard for Emil Ipsen.

On 31.12.2005, after 51 years in the company – and 31 years as its head – Klaus Platz retired as managing director at the age of 69. On 31.12.2007, he relinquished his duties as a company partner, and in so doing completed the final stage of a carefully prepared transition phase which had begun in 1999. The time had now come for a younger generation to take over the management of the group.

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A New Generation and the Restructuring of the Company

The latest chapter in the company’s history was ushered in when Klaus Platz, Hermann Helms and Gebrüder Specht took the decision, as company partners, to reveal the identity of the principal partner, and to appoint Hans-Christian Specht as managing director of Emil Ipsen GmbH & Co. KG.

Shortly after this, Eduard Dubbers-Albrecht was taken on as a partner of Gebrüder Specht GmbH & Co. KG. At present, efforts are being made to extend the activities of all the members of the corporate group. This is a two-track process: on the one hand, organic growth within the existing companies is being vigorously promoted, and on the other, new businesses are being established and acquisitions made:

2003			DWB Distri Warehouse Bremen is taken over. The IPSEN GROUP is set up as the holding company for Emil
			Ipsen, cet, Fastsped, Schäding, PSI, Massilia, FastIpsen and DWB.
2005			A majority holding is acquired in KES Frachtkontor GmbH, which is renamed KES-Distri.
			IPSEN POLSKA is established.
2006			cet Senegal is established.

While all these developments were taking place, it was becoming increasingly clear that the group’s complex structures would have to be tidied up before full advantage could be taken of existing synergy potentials. It was also felt that the group’s market position could be strengthened by imposing a corporate identity on its internal and external activities, and by giving its member companies a unified profile.

Careful preparations for the restructuring of the group were set in place by Hans-Christian Specht und Eduard Dubbers-Albrecht. In March 2007, a meeting under the title “Time for Change” was held in Bremen. It was attended by all of the group’s senior management staff, and marked the beginning of a new era in the company’s history.

Today, IPSEN LOGISTICS is a dynamic, internationally active company with locations in 12 countries, and a well integrated worldwide network of cooperation partners. Its long history, in the course of which it twice managed to recover from the ravages of war, and its record of steady growth testify to a resourcefulness and determination that should stand it in good stead as it continues to develop its commercial activities in the years to come.

The future needs a past!

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