wire-quin wrote:
Money losing business's don't work.
This company's problems are rooted in bad management. They operate in markets where their main competitors - Stena Line and DFDS - are much more strategically run, invest a lot more in their operations AND pay their staff more.
P&O Ferries, its investment company ownership, its appalling treatment of UK workers and its obsession with short-termism in an industry which resolutely requires long term investment and vision are the absolute poster boys for so much of Britain's failed capitalism.
When taken over by the Emiratis they could have been classed as a critical piece of our national infrastructure. But they were just another British company sold overseas. Their new owners were looking for a quick buck and a nicely profitable company like this were just the ticket - either to milk for a few years or to pump the profits and sell onwards at a healthy margin. Hence the cuts we've seen that led to them being where they are now - cuts in investment, in maintenance, in service standards, in employee costs. And of course they flagged their ships out after Brexit as did so many shipowners.
But this is an industry which doesn't reward such quick buck-seeking. If you don't invest in new ships you get caught out in high operational costs, compounded if your rivals have super - efficient vessels which meet the latest emissions criteria. And if your service standards drop year after year, if the rust becomes just too obvious, passengers gradually begin to switch to your rivals.
But the cycle of doom at P&O Ferries stretches back long before this latest piece of opportunism. The BBC will tell you that this affects four routes - they do still have a couple more freight only ones. But in the past 25 years this company has closed no less than sixteen yes SIXTEEN other routes. They've cut and cut and cut. Even before this latest sham thousands of British jobs have been lost as this company incompetently failed to do anything right - and as better run, proper shipowning companies moved in with their long-term investments and proper plans for the future.
It's a damning indictment of a country whose economy is littered with big companies like this. Companies who live on a famous trading name but who are now utterly untethered from this country and whose owners owe employees here no loyalty. Those owners are interested only in pumping short term profits to try and sell the company on for more than they bought it. And in certain industries which are natural or factual monopolies or oligopolies we let them do what they like. Drive down standards, slash costs, slash jobs with nothing done because as a country all we now know is the price of everything and the value of nothing.
