On the first Friday in November, the maritime world is in Hamburg to celebrate the annual Hamburg Shipbrokers’ Dinner, also known as Eisbeinessen. From its humble beginnings in 1948, this event has grown to include a main dinner for up to 4,000 participants and numerous other dinners held elsewhere in the city. With an estimated 10,000 ship brokers, ship agents and other maritime professionals in the Hanseatic city during the days leading up to the Friday night dinners, Hamburg becomes the centre of the maritime world.

FONASBA is been proud to have been a part of this celebration for many years, with General Manager Jonathan Williams attending as a guest of the association and other FONASBA associations being nominated the “partnerland”. In recent years, our members in Turkey, the USA, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Dubai and France have been so honoured.

Similar to many other events in 2020, Eisbeinessen fell victim to the COVID pandemic and the dinner was cancelled. In order to keep sprits up, and to remind the world that Eisbeinessen will be back in 2021 however, Evangelos Efstathiou, CEO of Burmester & Vogel, a freight technology company based in Boston and Hamburg, offered to make a video to celebrate the event. FONASBA was honoured to be invited to participate in the video and it features clips from General Manager Jonathan Williams, Swedish Shipbrokers’ Association Director Berit Blomqvist and Executive Committee members (and Ship Agent Committee Chair and Vice Chair ) Waldemar Rocha jnr., representing Brazil, and Simone Carlini, representing Italy.  As may be expected, Christian Koopman and Dr. Alexander Geisler, Chair and Director of the German shipbrokers’ association, ZVDS, also feature.

FONASBA congratulates Evangelos Efstathiou and the Hamburg Shipbrokers Association on producing such an excellent video, which can be viewed below.