The South Carolina State Ports Authority’s board voted unanimously Tuesday to hire Jim Newsome, president of the American arm of German container line Hapag-Lloyd, as the agency’s next president and CEO.

Newsome, 53, starts Sept. 1, the authority said. He will be only the fifth leader in the authority’s 67-year history.

“Jim was the unanimous pick of both the board and the search committee,” said Bill Stern, the authority’s vice chairman and chairman of the search committee. “The stars have aligned.”

Newsome said he plans to look for new ways to work with customers and others who depend on the port.

“Relationships are critical to a port’s success, and they will be a top priority,” he said in the authority’s announcement.

A shipping line veteran

Newsome has more than 30 years in the shipping business, according to the authority. He is president of Hapag-Lloyd (America) Inc., part of what the authority called the world’s fifth-largest ocean shipping company.

He joined Hapag-Lloyd in 1997 as senior vice president of its Southern Area and became president of its America division in January, The Post and Courier reported. He was the first non-German to head the company’s North American operations, the newspaper reported.

Before that, Newsome spent 10 years with Nedlloyd Lines, where he was executive vice president of the Americas and president of Nedlloyd Lines (USA), and 10 years with Strachan Shipping Co., where he was president of its Hoegh Lines Agencies subsidiary in Jersey City, N.J., the authority said. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in transportation and logistics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The Post and Courier has described him as a Savannah native.

His move had been expected. Earlier this month, The Post and Courier obtained an internal Hapag-Lloyd notice saying Newsome had asked that his contract end Aug. 31 “to pursue an opportunity outside the firm.”

The authority’s announcement did not say what Newsome will be paid. The authority’s last permanent CEO earned $264,000, The Post and Courier reported.

A five-month search

The vote ends a five-month search led by a 13-member committee of business leaders and port stakeholders from around the state. The committee paid the executive search firm Boyden $97,500, considered more than 100 applicants, narrowed the list to seven and interviewed five, The Post and Courier reported this month.

“Jim stood out in a field of highly qualified applicants,” said search committee member David Wilkins, a former U.S. ambassador. “He was the clear first pick.”

Joe Taylor, the state’s secretary of commerce, pointed to Newsome’s background in both operations and sales.

“I believe that he is the right person at the right time to reinvigorate our state’s most important economic driver and take its potential to the next level,” Taylor said.

What he inherits

Newsome replaces John F. Hassell III, a longtime board member who took leave as president of the Maritime Association of South Carolina to run the authority on an interim basis in January. Hassell took over when Bernard S. Groseclose Jr., who had led the agency since 1996, resigned on Jan. 20.

Groseclose resigned during a performance evaluation, shortly after Maersk Line, the port’s top customer, announced plans to pull its services from Charleston by the end of its contract, The Post and Courier reported. The newspaper reported this month that negotiations to keep the rest of Maersk’s business were continuing.

Container traffic has been falling. The port handled about 1.69 million TEUs in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2008, down 10% from the year before, which the authority blamed on a weaker import market and stiff competition from subsidized East Coast ports. A TEU, or 20-foot equivalent unit, is the standard measure of container volume.

The authority has made other moves this spring. In April, it hired Paul McClintock, a former sales executive at MOL (America) Inc., as its first chief commercial officer, in charge of sales and marketing for Charleston and Georgetown. In May, Mediterranean Shipping Co., one of the port’s largest customers, extended its Charleston contract through 2017.

The authority is also pressing ahead with a 280-acre container terminal on the former Navy base in North Charleston. In April, its board awarded a $55 million contract to build a containment wall for the site to a joint venture of Cape Romain Contractors of Wando and Massachusetts-based Cashman. The authority has said the terminal’s first phase, estimated at $550 million, is on schedule to open in 2014, the same year the expanded Panama Canal is due to open. At full build-out, the terminal would raise the port’s container capacity by 1.4 million TEUs.

The authority says port operations support 260,800 jobs in South Carolina.