Opened to serve as a critical bridge between the business hours in Asia and International Registries, Inc. (IRI) headquarters, IRI Long Beach has grown in size and services since it opened in 2012.
“We are truly full-service, with a unique role in the network of offices as a critical link in the workday,” said Alison Wilson, IRI’s Senior International Counsel and Head of the Long Beach office. “Our location gives us the ability to service clients in Asia early in their workday, and clients on the United States (US) east coast and Europe after traditional business hours.”
Because of its location, Long Beach is open for several hours each day when all other IRI offices are closed. This has been a significant benefit to clients during the pandemic when many people and offices turned to remote work and non-traditional hours.
When Alison opened the Long Beach office ten years ago she had a small team including one inspector covering the west coast of North America. Today, the office includes three inspectors, strategically placed in Seattle, San Francisco, and Long Beach, as well as employees handling all aspects of operations including legal, corporate, technical, and seafarers’ documentation, among others. This growth reflects the surge of trade and marine traffic between Asia and North America in the last decade.
The Long Beach and Los Angeles port area is the fifth busiest in the world for RMI-flagged vessels. “Our fleet operations team is constantly in demand,” said Alison. As the RMI feet has continued to grow, so have the services in the Long Beach office where they are able to provide greater geographic coverage and a local presence which is a benefit to RMI owners, operators, and local port State control authorities.
With the Registry growing, coupled with increasing trade between Asia and North America, the Long Beach office is on the move.
“Due to the incredible growth of the Registry overall and the Long Beach office specifically, we are currently in the process of finalizing a move to a new, state-of-the-art suite with double the square footage of our current space,” said Alison. “This speaks volumes at a time when many companies are downsizing their offices due to the pandemic. We look forward to the expansion and increasing the size of our team to continue to provide excellent service to our clientele,” concluded Alison.
