IAPH welcomed members to an insightful 2025 Harbor Café kickoff event on 5 February. For those unable to attend the event, a recording can be found here. Following a welcome by IAPH managing director Patrick Verhoeven, IAPH president Jens Meier (CEO, Hamburg Port Authority) offered his opening remarks, speaking to the importance of the Harbor Café concept in sharing knowledge and collaborating among members. Jens welcomed the newly-elected regional vice president for Europe, Jacques Vandermeiren (CEO of Port of Antwerp-Bruges). Jacques spoke about the tasks of addressing port congestion, strengthening digital port security and promoting a global level-played field in order to ensure environmental regulations achieve their intended goals. There followed a conversation between Myriel Newerla, head of the executive board office at HPA and Rolf Schumann, co-CEO of Schwarz Digits (a division of Schwarz Group focused on IT and digitalisation). Rolf shared his insights on fostering organisational cyber security, noting that a single dependency could negatively affect an entire corporate ecosystem and that vulnerabilities needed to be assessed on the basis of relevance and business impact, rather than being dealt with en masse. Following some thoughts from Michael Luguje regional vice president for Africa (and director general of Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority), IAPH communications and strategy director Victor Shieh offered an overview of the planned IAPH – Mercator webinars taking place throughout the year, beginning later this month, as well as plans for hybrid IAPH regional Harbor Cafés covering the six global membership regions. The event rounded off with a presentation of the latest plans for the IAPH 2025 World Ports Conference in Kobe by Patrick Verhoeven. Further details of upcoming Harbor Cafés will be sent to members on a regional basis in the coming months and shared in future issues of IAPH Insider.
