Founded
in 2019 Su-Nav is headquartered in Chennai, India with another office in
Singapore, and new office opening in Dubai. Su-Nav, CEO, Sachit Sahoonja comes
a lengthy career both at sea and ashore with the world’s largest ship manager
V.Ships before striking out his own with a couple of former colleagues in July
2019.
Taking this step Sahoonja says he believes there was a space
for smaller, alternative manager that would stick to the basics.
The company’s name SuNav reflects this back-to-basics
approach and means good ship in Sanskrit. “We want a good ship and that's all I
think every owner is wanting is just a good ship,” he tells Seatrade Maritime
News in a recent interview.
Despite enduring the difficulties of the pandemic and the
company’s offices being closed for six months early in its existence Su-Nav has
today grown its fleet to 33 ships under management. Something that certainly
marks Su-Nav out from the crowd in the third-party management business is
that it has a policy of having cadets on all the vessels it manages.
It is a common complaint from managers that they want to
have cadets onboard vessels but principals don’t want to pay for having
trainees on their ships, so how has Su-Nav been able to achieve this?
Sahoonja explains that all the ships under its management
have two cadets onboard equating to around 60 – 70 trainees at one time. To
date 75 have completed their training and nine who are now officers on board
its ships and over the next two years the manager will have 60 more junior
officers.
“So, you can imagine we have 60 – 70 cadets all the time on
our ships and these people will come back and work for us,” he explains.
By doing this he says there are trying to provide a future
solution for their owners that they are not hunting in the market for
seafarers.
In terms of persuading owners of the requirement to have
cadets on board the disruption brought about to the crewing sector by the Covid
pandemic and more recently the war in Ukraine helped Su-Nav’s cause in
convincing them that need their own cadets for the future.
“Now the owners are getting used to this idea that anything
can happen. You need your own crew, you need people who have been with you, you
need people who know your culture,” he explains.
As result Su-Nav has been able to convince owners that in
3-year time they will have officers for their ships, and be paying first year
wages, rather than second or third year wages if sourcing crew from the market.
In the longer-term he believes these officers will stay with the company
becoming chief officers and captains.
Sahoonja says that seafarers will be the people who allow
them to continue expanding the company in the future so are most important
building block at this time.
Speaking of expansion Su-Nav plans to have its Dubai office
up and running by the first quarter of this year a location that Sahoonja
believes managers cannot be ignore at this time.
“Whoever was in Singapore and Hong Kong will definitely be
in Dubai as well,” he says.
