SeaFrance deal dooms LD brand

The LD Lines name will disappear from the Channel if its owner, Louis Dreyfus Armateurs (LDA), is successful in a bid to take over SeaFrance.

French shipping giant LDA made an offer for SeaFrance after it said it needed to axe a third of its workforce and cut its fleet of ferries from five to three because of financial difficulties.

LD Lines MD Christophe Santoni told IFW if the bid was successful it would run its cross-Channel services under the SeaFrance banner.

"The idea is to merge the two companies into one on the Channel. But it remains to be seen if we would keep the LD Lines name on the Mediterranean.

"The idea is to create a large company that will have a leading position on the Channel - and it would be one of sufficient size to get through the hard times we are currently experiencing."

He added: "And our offer has the added value of our needing more tonnage to promote new services while SeaFrance has too much capacity on the Calais-Dover route."

Santoni said that by retaining SeaFrance’s vessels and using them on either LD Lines’ Boulogne-Dover, Le Havre-Portsmouth or Le-Havre-Rosslare services, the line would be able to keep the 650 staff SeaFrance plans to make redundant.

He thought SeaFrance’s plan to keep three ships on Calais-Dover was a "good idea", although this was without knowing the ferry operator’s business in detail.

Santoni declined to comment on the value of the offer and said SeaFrance’s owner, French state-owned rail operator SNCF, had yet to respond.

Meanwhile, industry sources have indicated that Veolia Transport - an international company specialising in land and sea transport - could also be interested in taking over SeaFrance, but a spokesman for Veolia refused to comment.

Last month, SeaFrance said it needed to cut staff and capacity because of economic difficulties and a 23% fall in the cross-Channel freight market in January.

The CFDT union, which represents SeaFrance workers, has questioned the company’s figures and said that, depending on its own investigation into the line’s finances, there could be strike action.

The union official claimed that while the global freight market might be down by around 20%, SeaFrance’s volumes had only fallen by 5%.

In 2008, SeaFrance made a loss of €20m (US$25m) compared with a €15m profit in 2007, and said it had been losing €3m a month since October.