Newsome primed for new job

For a few minutes between his late-arriving flight into Charleston and the first meeting of lawmakers who plan to oversee his agency, newly hired State Ports Authority chief executive Jim Newsome pushes aside his coffee and pauses to talk.

He wears a charcoal gray pinstripe suit with a red, white and blue tie and a pin with the insignia of his current company, German shipping line Hapag-Lloyd.

He arrives here, in the office he will occupy permanently come Sept. 1, after a corporate headhunter approached him a few months back with a proposition.

"I wasn't looking for a job," says 53-year-old Newsome.

He had, in January, become the first non-German president of the America division at Hapag-Lloyd. In April his responsibilities expanded to include Latin America, too.

At the time the recruiter approached him about the SPA gig, the agency had recently learned its biggest customer, Maersk Line, planned to relocate all of its services to other ports. Volume continued to decline after an already bad previous year, and lawmakers began discussions to restructure the SPA.

But Newsome describes this position as "probably the only job I would leave for."

He grew up along the Savannah waterfront, where his father worked for 24 years as director of operations at the port. Newsome spent childhood Saturdays tagging along with his father, calling it his "mom's respite from me."

Though unusual for the era, his mother worked 45 years for a steel finishing company, until she was 82.

"I guess you could say hard work is in my family," Newsome says.

His father and family friend, Don Welch, a previous SPA chief executive, convinced him to pursue a logistics and transportation degree. He studied at the University of Tennessee, spent summers working with Strachan Shipping Co. and finished his master's degree in business administration at 21.

At 22 he moved "sight unseen" to Houston, and spent the next seven years there working for Strachan. He went on to New York to build up the company in the northeast.

He would devote 30 years to the shipping industry, between Strachan, the company formerly known as Nedlloyd Lines and Hapag-Lloyd.

He calls himself "the most traveled person that's been a lot of places and never seen anything." Newsome lists Hong Kong and Santiago, Chile, among the best places his career has taken him.

Asked about his favorite international cuisine, he said, "I'm not an adventuresome eater. I'm just not that polite about stuff like that."

Newsome plans to run the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta Saturday and enjoys watching the Tennessee Volunteers play football. He reads the Financial Times and, on his recent trip to Charleston, the Ben Stein book "How to Ruin the United States of America" on the Kindle he got for Father's Day.

Did he aspire to head a ports authority? Newsome said he never did much long-term planning, despite his ladder-climbing in transportation and logistics from college on.

He won't list his priorities for the SPA this early but said he hopes to get to know the agency quickly and to promote it as aggressively as possible. Newsome praises the port for its productivity, its continued progress on a new terminal and its deep harbor.

"Deep water is like speed in sports and height in basketball," he said. "It's something you can't coach."

He said the focus on Savannah's strides — the Georgia Ports Authority recently predicted some growth this fiscal year, while the SPA predicts continued decline — is a narrow-minded view.

"It's overly simplistic to think it's just a competition between Savannah and Charleston," he said. "It's the bigger picture that we need to focus on."

Public criticism of the port sometimes surprises Newsome. As a former customer, he said, he sees it differently.

"I left a great job to come here, so that's a testament I believe in it," he said.

And he maintains that the political pressures don't faze him.

"I have a job to do, and it's a job I feel I know how to do," he said. "If we do our job well, that will take care of itself."

Then, just minutes later, he stepped into the SPA's board room and greeted the state lawmakers who came to discuss port oversight.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or abird@postandcourier.com.