When Sulficio Tagud, Jr. was asked why he chose to retain the name Negros Navigation after he had almost single-handedly plucked the floundering company out of stormy waters, his answer was straightforward.
"There is value to the corporate name because it had survived seventy eight years. It has built up equity in the market place," Tagud explains emphatically, the reverence for and silent pride in the iconic shipping firm palpable.
It was only six years since Tagud and his group took over the reins of the company which was then regarded as a basket case. With a tight grip on resources and a no nonsense approach to management, he wrestled with the festering problems, outlined a practical set of priorities and made the employees and stakeholders toe the line with military precision. In as little as three years, they were seeing black.
By 2007, Negros Navigation was making money again and had been consistently profitable since. The citations and awards two years in a row from the local internal revenue district proclaiming NN as the biggest taxpayer in that northern part of the metro say it eloquently. That is by far among the fastest exits from economic rehab by a major company.
Tagud will not trumpet his accomplishments but there is a glint in the eyes of NN oldtimers who doff their hats at the man who was able to provide the employees their first bonuses in decades, restore the company to its former glory and still be able to do the nation extra service by ferrying soldiers to the battlefield or transporting relief goods to a disaster-hit area.
For the longest time, NN had been moving passengers and their cargo. The company pioneered in hauling sugar and the sagadas to and from Negros and Panay islands. It later evolved into a national inter-island ferry and cargo service.
When the Asian economic crisis hurt the industry in 1997, a change in the behavior of customers was observed. Tagud noted that Negros Navigation passage department was struggling through a feast and famine mode of operations, feasting thru only three passenger peak months in a year and grappling through nine months of low passenger volume. However, the cargo section of the business was constant from January to December.
Tagud further probed the operations. "The era of high fuel prices was one compelling reason for a switch to a more stable source of revenue," he thought. He checked other liners and saw that shippers could not rely on many of them because of ill-maintained vessels. If a ship always gets delayed because of breakdowns, a businessman and his cargo will suffer. He needs a reliable shipper with a regular schedule.
"We therefore decided to expand our existing business since we already had the vessels and the capacity. Our schedules were run tightly because we put a premium on maintenance and security." (A quick check of NN’s maritime history shows no major incident of disaster caused by negligence or irresponsibility. A wayward PNOC ship rammed one of its vessels once in a freak accident which investigators blamed on the government fuel tanker.)
The next step Tagud et al took was to reconfigure the cargo capacity of its three Ro-Pax vessels (combination cargo and passengers) with proper oversight and approvals from the Marina and nautical experts. M/S St.Peter, for instance, which before handled only ninety containers was outfitted to accommodate one hundred twenty.
Negros Navigation later acquired five more ships dedicated to cargo so it can literally service the entire breadth of the archipelago with regular schedules.
In no time, the company was able to commit to shippers, transforming their raison d’etre to "customer satisfaction".
Today, with a newly spun-off company simply called NN Freight, Negros Navigation redefined shipping from the traditional pier-to-pier transport to the more trend-setting house to house service. It is able to pick up cargo from a manufacturing center anywhere in the country and deliver the same direct to its plant in a seamless logistical operation. NN’s costs are friendlier and their timetables are more reliable because NN Freight operates as a liner with a fixed route and schedule. (A liner is different from a trumper, which goes only to where a particular cargo is destined. As it were, it would not depart until it has reached full capacity.)
Tagud beams when he lays out his company’s offer of sacrifice: "We inconvenience ourselves to make it convenient for our customers." -Negros Navigation
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