OREANDA-NEWS. June 13, 2012. How do you grow business in a complex market spanning 35 countries in which you are a small player? Damco has a strategy to meet that exact challenge. Last year, Damco decided the time was ripe for a review of how the business was doing in Europe, and especially Germany, where it could do more to boost its position. As a result of the review, Damco has decided to separate European operations into east and west. This will give it a better position to target faster-growing companies in the promising Eastern European markets while leveraging the current economic pain in Western Europe to attract big customers eager for supply chain efficiencies. Damco CEO Rolf Habben-Jansen recently revealed the plan to win by developing more and larger, regular customers in Europe over the next few years as part of a wider goal to double revenue by 2014. "The European markets are complex, large and diverse and in order to be successful in these markets we need to work with quite different strategies between the more mature and the growth markets", Damco CEO Rolf Habben-Jansen says. "We will absorb additional cost in the first two quarters because of the restructuring. This is the right thing to do to position us for the years to come. When the changes are all implemented at the end of the second quarter, Damco will be in a stronger position to address the very different needs of these diverse markets." Two CEOs with responsibilities for East and West Europe now report to Habben-Jansen. Nicholas Kyrzakos, Damco's former Global CFO, will lead Damco's new East Europe region, which includes parts of the Middle East. His first priorities are to set-up a small regional team – consisting of operations, commercial and finance personnel and other open country positions – and develop a sales plan to target the right opportunities in growth markets such as Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Czech Republic. "There is so much opportunity in this region which we have not fully tapped," he says. "Turkey is a country with a vast amount of potential and if you look at countries like the Czech Republic and Poland, and most of Eastern European countries as we have defined it, there is just so much potential." Opportunities within the crisis Flemming Frost will continue as CEO of West Europe Region after formerly heading the entire European operations. The new structure will help him focus on opportunities that lie within Europe's economic woes for an ambitious logistics player like Damco. "With the European economies being flat at best, a large number of customers, both existing and new, have major challenges with their supply chain costs and they will be willing to explore new providers, so it's a big opportunity to develop growth in a market that's generally contracting," he says. "We are a relatively small player so we have time to develop our agenda and see it as a chance to get in front of big customers."