Gelina Harlaftis

European Family Firms in International Business: British and Greek Tramp-Shipping Firms

This article traces the similar paths and common characteristics of British and Greek tramp-shipping companies over the last 130 years through a comparative and international perspective. Despite the tendency of companies to adopt corporate and managerial forms, British and Greek tramp-shipping firms remained first and foremost family firms. The strength and the viability of these firms were networks, on a local, national and international level – networks whose cohesion was based on trust and a particular business culture that was developed in the maritime regions whence they came, centred on family firms involved in international business.

From Diaspora Traders to Shipping Tycoons: The Vagliano Bros

This study traces the origins of the twentieth-century Greek shipping tycoons and their global business to the nineteenth-century Greek diaspora traders. It examines the distinct characteristics of a diaspora firm, which can be treated partially as a multinational or “free standing firm” with distinctive features. Based in the main European financial centers, diaspora traders were international operators who developed ethnic-religious networks with their own unofficial international market, enabling them to operate independently of the countries or states in which they were established. The Vagliano house is a prime example of a diaspora trading house that transformed itself into a major shipping and ship-management firm, paving the way for the global success of twentieth-century Greek-owned shipping. The Vagliano network integrated the Greek shipping sector into the international shipping production system by creating an institutional framework based on trust that minimized transaction costs and entrepreneurial risk and provided information flow.

International shipping and national economic growth: shipping earnings and the Greek economy in the nineteenth century

In Greece, a small peripheral European economy, the service sector and shipping in particular played a highly important role in nineteenth‐century economic development. Despite its importance, however, the difficulty of calculating the ‘invisible earnings’ from the shipping industrys engagement in international activities has led to its underestimation in most analyses of the countrys economic growth. This article presents the first estimation of Greek shipping income in the nineteenth century. In addition, it examines the shipping industry within the context of Greek development as a whole, highlighting its significant role in the fully marketized and integrated area of the countrys economy in the context of a wider world economy.

The Onassis Global Shipping Business, 1920s–1950s

Aristotle Onassis was a leading figure in creating the new global tanker business in the second half of the twentieth century. This article examines the first thirty years of his career, before he became renowned worldwide, setting his business in the context of global shipping developments. Onassis is the most famous of the shipping tycoons that transformed maritime business in the post–World War II transitional period. He is among those “new men”—Greek, Norwegian, Danish, American, Japanese, or Hong Kong shipowners—who replaced the old order of the traditional British Empire shipowners. These new pioneers established the global shipping business in the era of American dominance.

Shipping Companies, the Economy and the State

What were the relationships among these highly successful, internationally active shipping companies with the Greek economy and the Greek state? The shipping sector has always been the most internationalized branch of the Greek economy and was decisive in its development.41 The peculiarity of the shipping business, participating in the international freight markets, is that its income is produced outside Greece; shipping capital flows into Greece from abroad and has little relation to the productive structures of the country. But public opinion considers the ties of the shipping industry with Greece as close or loose depending on the appearance of the Greek flag on ships and of the rise and fall of foreign exchange from shipping, as this appears in the accounts of the Bank of Greece. Indeed, the fact that a large part of Greek shipping activities is carried out abroad has reinforced the view that shipping has had very little influence on shaping the economic structures of the country. As a consequence of the above, analyses of the economy of Greece refer very little or scarcely at all to shipping.42 However, from its founding, the role of the modern Greek state was crucial to forming the Greek shipping industry. Since the mid-1970s, a series of studies has appeared on the course of Greek shipping and its relations with the Greek state from its founding to the present day (Kremmydas, 1985, Kardasis, 1993, Papathanasopoulos, 1983, Harlaftis, 1996).

Strategies of Greek Shipping Companies

What is it that makes a business successful and allows it to confront the competition in the markets in which it participates? How is the success sustained over time? This chapter presents more systematically the answers to these two questions. It attempts to illuminate the factors that have contributed and still contribute to giving the Greek-owned fleet a competitive advantage, as well as the strategies that maintained and enlarged this advantage. More specifically, the analysis concentrates on those factors which, when combined, enabled businesses to implement successfully a low-cost strategy throughout the postwar period. These factors include the high quality and effectiveness of know-how about managing ships, both at the level of top management and the level of personnel at sea and on land, particular managerial patterns and techniques, innovative applications, flexibility in the choice of flag for ships, and expertise in the buying and selling of ships to make capital gains.

Family Shipping Businesses

This part is mainly based on data drawn from interviews carried out between March and September 2003. Moreover, information has been drawn from the database created for the scope of this book (Pontoporeia, 1945–2000), which includes records of 25,000 Greek-owned ships. Furthermore, information has been drawn from the shipping press of the second half of the 20th century, as well as from books and other published material. For most of the traditional shipowning families data were drawn from the Ploto and Pontoporeia, studies of Greek shipping companies for the period from the end of the 18th century to the eve of the Second World War (Harlaftis et al., 2002; Harlaftis and Vlassopulos, 2004, hereafter referred to in the text as Ploto and Pontoporeia respectively). The research presented in this book covers the period from 1945 until 2003.

Greek-owned Shipping Companies

This chapter examines the structure of Greek-owned shipping and the organization and management of shipping companies. The aim of the analysis is to show the particular characteristics of shipping that to a significant degree determined the patterns of development that shipping companies followed during the second half of the 20th century. The analysis focuses on the size and the family character of these firms, and the business philosophy of Greek shipowners.

International Freight Markets and Greek-Owned Shipping, 1945–2000

The cyclical character of the shipping industry and the intense competition between shipping companies globally over the past few decades have led to changes in the hierarchy of world maritime powers, and to the appearance of new powers and to the shrinking of traditional ones.3 In this restive environment, in which serious and protracted crises in the major freight markets are common, Greek-owned shipping is the only traditional maritime power to have remained not just consistently at the peak of world shipping but to have strengthened its leading position. Its share in world shipping, which was barely 1 per cent in 1947, exploded to 12 per cent in 1970 and soared to 17.4 per cent in 2000.

Greek and British Shipping Companies

The business structure of Greek shipping business, as shaped in the 20th century, has its roots in the last third of the 19th century. Greek shipping businesses developed in parallel with European shipping businesses that participated in international freight markets. The comparative analysis of Greek and British firms at once confirms this fact and points out the international dimension of Greek businesses, which enabled them to utilize their particular characteristics in order to occupy a competitive place in international freight markets.