Henrik Uhd Christensen

Since joining the company in 1992 as a sales trainee, Christensen has played a key role in VIKING’s transformation from a regional life raft business to a global player offering a complete range of safety equipment to the marine and offshore industries. A youthful 42, he became CEO three years ago and has big plans for the Esbjerg, Denmark-based company.

Tell us about VIKING. We have a vision basically to be a one-stop safety shop for the marine community. We want to sell the products and deliver the services. We make inflatable life rafts that can hold up to 150 people and that was actually our original product, back in 1960 when we started. Inflatable rubber rafts for offshore fishermen in the North Sea. We make what we call Personal Protection Equipment, which are products to wear. It could be all kinds of protective suits and life jackets. We make immersion suits for cold water areas that protect you from freezing in zero degree water for up to six hours. We make fire protection suits. We have four manufacturing facilities worldwide, but we don’t manufacture everything ourselves. We go out in the market and find suppliers that deliver products that meet our quality demands. In this way we provide a complete safety package to customers.

What’s your biggest selling product? Life rafts. The inflatable life rafts that you will see in a white container on almost any commercial ship in the world.

Who are your major customers? We divide it up by segment. The largest is cargo. You have 100,000 commercial ships and 80 percent of those ships would be cargo ships – bulk carriers, container vessels, tankers, etc. Even though the value per ship is lower compared to offshore and passenger, this is still the biggest segment for us. It’s also a very global segment where in any country in the world there would be cargo ships, whereas passenger and offshore are more local or regional segments. If you take, for instance, passenger ships, the U.S. is very important and also Europe. But the passenger industry in the Far East is not that big – at least not yet. The same goes for offshore. In the U.S. the Gulf is an important area. In South America you have Brazil and in Europe you have the North Sea, so the three biggest segments would be cargo, passenger, and offshore. Cargo is a very global segment whereas passenger and offshore are very focused on specific areas or countries.

Lifeboats are the one product you don’t make. But you are a huge seller of so-called marine evacuation systems. What are they, and how do they differ from lifeboats? The funny thing is we used to make lifeboats, almost 30 years ago, when it was economical to do so in Denmark. But no more. And in today’s world it’s not really a trade-off between lifeboats and marine evacuation systems. You need both. You need to cover some part of the capacity with lifeboats and another part with evacuation systems, and the reason is the growth in size of ships. The two biggest cruise ships in the world owned by Royal Caribbean have more than 5,000 passengers and 3,000+ crew members, so you have an entity on the sea with more than 8,000 people. With so many people on board you need to find new ways to evacuate because our industry is regulated by SOLAS, which is Safety of Life at Sea, and according to SOLAS you need to evacuate people within 30 minutes from the time the alarm is sounded. That is really a main reason for these evacuation systems coming into the market. You simply cannot evacuate the people within the time you have without rethinking the way you organize evacuation.

How do they work? The evacuation systems use chutes or inflatable slides and have the ability to take people very fast from the deck down to the surface of the water into the life raft and onto another life raft, which is already inflated and away from the ship. You can have a series of rafts all connected to one chute. It’s fast enough that you can take 500 or 600 or even 900 people from the ship down to the surface within half an hour. On a cruise ship you need to evacuate from the sides of the ship, and you may have this image of a cruise ship with 10 or 15, even 20 lifeboats hanging from each side. Each of these lifeboats will have a capacity of 150 people, so if you have 10 of them you would have a capacity of 1,500, and if you have 10 on both sides of the ship you have a capacity of 3,000 people. If you have 20 on each side, which is actually impossible, you would have a capacity of 6,000 people, but still that is not enough to manage the people onboard the big vessels, so you need an additional means of evacuation. In not much more than the space you need for two lifeboats, which can take 300 people, you can fit a marine evacuation system that can take up to 900 people to safety.

How big are the rafts? There are a number of different sizes, but the biggest holds 150 people.

What impact has the Costa Concordia tragedy had on your business? We have been growing for the last eight or nine years. Top line and bottom line. Our expectation this year is to continue that growth. As for Costa Concordia, we are in the safety business and when disasters happen we try to learn from them. There have already been changes in procedures that the cruise lines have adopted, but not yet in products. You can ask yourself did the products perform what they were supposed to do with Costa Concordia, and the answer would seem to be yes. And you can also ask yourself whether the process as a whole was managed in a proper way, and the answer would seem to be no. So we really need to look more closely at the process to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.

VIKING’s innovative Shipowner Agreement has been a big hit with customers. How did you come up with the idea? We tried to learn from other industries and what was happening there, particularly the car industry. It used to be that you would buy a car, pay for service when it was due, and then sell the car. But in recent years it hasn’t been like that. You would typically lease a car and you would have a fixed annual price and included in that price you would also have insurance or, if not insurance, at least annual inspection or service included. As a consumer that’s actually quite nice because then you know exactly what the annual cost will be and you don’t have to worry about a big repair that you didn’t budget for or having to replace the car earlier than originally planned. We applied the same idea to the safety business. There are rules and regulations that require you to inspect your liferafts every year, so basically what we’re offering is, for a five or 10-year period, you can pay a fixed annual amount that includes the right to use the raft, to have it onboard, and to have it serviced. But the service doesn’t have to take place in Miami or Barcelona or Seattle or any one place because we have 270 servicing stations around the world. That’s a real convenience to our customers.

Tell us about yourself. I’ve been running the company since 2010, but I’ve been with the company since 1992. I started as a sales clerk and after three years was sent to Germany to open a new office from scratch. That was in Hamburg. We had five employees. I was 26 at the time and founded the facilities and hired the people and ran the operation for five years. I lived in Germany and German is my best foreign language, better than English. Where I live in Denmark is close to the German border. It’s just one hour away. In our childhood we watched a lot of German television. So we learned a lot of that language without actually realizing it because one day you discover you speak another language because you have been watching too much television. After Germany we went back to Denmark and I launched the first website of the company. Then I was asked to take up the global responsibility of sales and marketing, and that was in 2002, and a couple of years later I was asked to join executive management.

The company is still basically owned by the Sørensen family? It is, yes. Ninety percent of the company.

Has your whole career been at VIKING? Yes, it has. I never did any career planning. When I was finishing my education I applied for two jobs as a trainee. One job was with VIKING and the other with a big Danish company that used to be a player in the marine industry. I was asked to come to a job interview with both of these companies, and before I managed to go to the second one I had a job with VIKING, so that’s how it all started. When you first start out and you have all these new colleagues who have been in the company for a number of years, you never think you will stay in that company forever. But one of my criteria has always been that there needs to be something which you can commit to and engage to. It needs to be interesting and you need to have a challenging job. I never woke up in the morning without somehow looking forward to going to work, so I think that’s what kept me for so many years with VIKING. It’s a company with so many different aspects because we’re globalized and we manufacture products, trade products, service products. We are all over the world and you can find any kind of challenge in a company like that.

In your spare time are you a marathon runner? A swimmer? I like being active but not on a marathon level. It’s more that I prioritize being in good shape which I think is important if you want to succeed, so I run, bicycle, and work out. Since I do work quite a lot, when I do have time off I typically spend it following my sons’ activities, which are mainly sports. So typically on the weekends it’s going to whatever sporting events are scheduled. That’s a good way for me to spend time with the children.

Do you have any heroes or role models? That’s a good question. My inspiration comes from a lot of sources. Business is one. You learn from people like Jack Welch and also from people within your own organization who inspire you and where you learn how to manage a company. Sports are another. There’s a lot of learning and discipline and focus in order to meet a specific objective that could be five or 10 years in the future. If it’s an individual sport, how do you keep motivated? When you’re talking about team sports, you have a lot of trainers and coaches who often would be great managers or leaders in business because they know how to drive, motivate, and inspire a team to deliver results.

Do you see yourself as a coach? It’s more like being a doctor. On Monday you might have to cure one disease and on Tuesday there’s a whole new disease. And no matter what the disease, you also need to understand whether this is a disease I can cure or whether I have to bring in someone else because I don’t have the competence. I think that being a manager or a leader is very much about having that ability to understand and prioritize: What is the best way to find a solution to that task? Then, of course, it’s important to set goals and objectives in support of a mission and to keep your team of people motivated to reach those goals. When you interact in a small organization like I did in Germany, when you operate with just five people, you can influence a lot. And if at the end of the day you cannot bring anybody else to do something, you do it yourself. But when you suddenly have 50 or 100 or, as of today we are almost 1,800 in this company, it’s impossible to participate in or do everything yourself. In order to inspire and motivate other people you need good leaders and good employees under you.

How much time do you spend traveling? Only five percent of our business is in Denmark, so to manage the company from Denmark without having been anywhere else would be a disaster. I need to get around not only to meet employees but also customers. You can do a lot of emailing, but at the end of the day you need to meet, to feel that interaction in person, face-to-face. So you need to travel, and on average I would say I spend 100 days a year on the road.

What is your vision for the company? My vision is for VIKING to be the undisputed leader when it comes to marine safety. And it’s not just about size but also about quality. We want to show that you can grow without jeopardizing quality. This is about saving lives. We have very high standards – in the products we build and in the way we design our services. So the combination of growing a company to be number one in terms of size and volume but also in terms of quality is the goal. 

What’s a typical day like? A typical day would start very early in the morning. I like working in the morning so I start early. At 6:00 a.m. I would start exercising, and I would exercise for three quarters of an hour and I would be in the office at seven. From then until 11:00 a.m. or so I would do emails and desk work, but then I would spend time meeting with people, discussing projects and strategies and just seeing what’s going on. Around four in the afternoon I would be back doing emails and whatever else is on my desk to be taken care of. That would be a day in the office. There are also a lot of days out of the office, and I do enjoy getting out and meeting with customers and companies and seeing how they operate. We have 60 locations and a lot of different ideas on how to operate, and it’s very inspiring to get out there and to talk to people and see local manufacturing, and to have input and participate in local customer meetings and local project meetings to understand what is happening abroad. And really, no two days are alike.