When 20- or 40-foot standard containers no longer meet Hapag-Lloyd’s quality standards, it doesn’t at all mean they’re unusable. On the contrary, Dwight Ricaldi sells decommissioned containers to buyers across the world.
Dwight Ricaldi always has a lot to do on Wednesdays. You see, that’s the day of the week when the Hapag-Lloyd containers that have been taken out of service find new owners. Before that, M&R (“maintenance & repair”) employees around the world report to company headquarters in Hamburg where the containers headed for the second-hand market are located. That can be 50 boxes in a given week, or sometimes even 10 times as many when turnover is heavy.
“These containers either have dents, are warped or have simply gotten a lot of use,” Ricaldi says. “The damages range from ‘reparable’ to ‘total loss.’ The containers are sold ‘as is, where is.’” The people interested in the second-hand containers are located all over the globe, and have already transmitted their bids to Ricaldi beforehand. Then, every week, he announces who won the containers by making the highest bids in the right locations. “Once the containers have been sold, it’s up to the buyer to figure out how the container will get to him,” Ricaldi says.
Ricaldi, who originally comes from Bolivia, has been living in Germany for 40 years. “I came to Hamburg to continue studying engineering because the universities in Bolivia had been closed due to the military coup in 1978,” he recounts. But his brother René, who was already living in Hamburg, had organized an apprenticeship spot for him to become a freight forwarding agent. “I came into contact with the shipping industry for the first time during my apprenticeship,” Ricaldi recounts, “and this world still continues to fascinate me.” In 1985, he started working at Hapag-Lloyd, first as a container dispatcher at the Burchardkai terminal in the Port of Hamburg. In 1990, he switched to marketing for the South America trade. And, beginning in 2009, he worked for a year in the Global Business Support department before taking a year off work.
