Oldendorff Carriers is a family owned

shipping Freight transport, also referred as ''Freight Forwarding'', is the physical process of transporting Commodity, commodities and merchandise goods and cargo. The term shipping originally referred to transport by sea but in American English, it h ...

company with headquarters in

Lübeck Lübeck (; Low German also ), officially the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (german: Hansestadt Lübeck), is a city in Northern Germany. With around 217,000 inhabitants, Lübeck is the second-largest city on the German Baltic coast and in the stat ...

Oldendorff Carriers GmbH & Co. KG is the largest German

bulk carrier A bulk carrier or bulker is a merchant ship specially designed to transport unpackaged bulk cargo — such as grains, coal, ore, steel coils, and cement — in its cargo holds. Since the first specialized bulk carrier was built in 1852, econom ...

company. It operates around 700 ships, some chartered, with a carrying capacity of approximately 57 million tonnes.

Company

The Oldendorff fleet makes some 14,000 port calls in 60 countries, carrying about 320 million tons of bulk cargo and bulk goods a year. Growth has been rapid since 2005, when 50 million tons was carried. Oldendorff Carriers is a wholly owned subsidiary of a family holding company, Egon Oldendorff. The headquarters in Lübeck have been on the top floor of the

Radisson Blu Radisson Blu is an international chain of hotels operated by Radisson Hotels. With roots dating back to the 1960s, the Radisson Blu brand name came into existence in 2009 with a rebranding from Radisson SAS. Its hotels are found in major cities, ...

Senator Hotel since 1999. Around 4,000 employees work for the company, including 210 at the company headquarters, nicknamed "The Dorff", and more than 100 in 17 branch offices in Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, Stamford, Singapore, Mumbai, Melbourne, Shanghai, Tokyo, Vancouver, Cape Town,

Santiago Santiago (, ; ), also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile as well as one of the largest cities in the Americas. It is the center of Chile's most densely populated region, the Santiago Metropolitan Region, whose ...

New Amsterdam New Amsterdam ( nl, Nieuw Amsterdam, or ) was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading ''factory'' gave rise ...

Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...

, Hong Kong, Iskenderun and Dubai. The fleet employs well over 2,000 sailors.

History

On 19 February 1921, 21-year-old Egon Oldendorff joined a small shipping company in Hamburg as a partner, where he trained for nine months. The shipping company was renamed Lilienfeld & Oldendorff and taken over by Oldendorff at the end of the year. The company's first ship was an 870-ton steamer, Planet, built in

Rostock Rostock (), officially the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock (german: link=no, Hanse- und Universitätsstadt Rostock), is the largest city in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and lies in the Mecklenburgian part of the state, c ...

in 1881. The company moved to Lübeck in 1925. At the outbreak of

World War 2 World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

, the company owned 13 ships, but only the Gisela Oldendorff and the Nordmark remained after the war. LUISE_OLDENDORFF_&_JEANINE_PARQUI_a_(36520551255)

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The fleet grew rapidly in the early 1950s due to the

Korean War , date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...

. The operation of bulk carriers started in 1958 with the

Baltic Sea The Baltic Sea is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is enclosed by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Sweden and the North and Central European Plain. The sea stretches from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from ...

timber trade. In 1964, Klaus E. Oldendorff, one of the sons of the company's founder, left to start the shipping company Reederei Nord in Hamburg. In 1980, 23-year-old Henning Oldendorff took over as CEO from his 80-year-old father, who died on May 9, 1984, leaving Henning as the majority shareholder. In 1995 Henning founded another shipping company, Concept Carriers, which merged in January 2001 with the main company to form Oldendorff Carriers. Increasingly the company has been buying its ships from Chinese yards, which it has described as a good experience.

Transhipment

Since starting at Iskenderun in 2001, then

Musaffah Port Musaffah Port () is an Abu Dhabi Ports' port located in the industrial town of Musaffah south west of the city of Abu Dhabi. The deepwater Musaffah Port and Musaffah Channel include a general cargo terminal at the northwest corner of the Musaffah ...

's Emirates Steel from 2007, the company has developed schemes to transfer 30 million tons a year of its cargoes out at sea between large ships and barges at eight ports. The company operates 4 transloaders, 4

floating cranes Floating may refer to: * a type of dental work performed on horse teeth * use of an isolation tank * the guitar-playing technique where chords are sustained rather than scratched * ''Floating'' (play), by Hugh Hughes * Floating (psychological phe ...

and 2 transhipment platforms.

Fleet

As at January 2019 the company had 716 ships in service, or under construction, 143 of them owned by the company (OWN) and others as

index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

chartered vessels on floating charter (T/C), or

Bareboat charter A bareboat charter or demise charter is an arrangement for the chartering or hiring of a ship or boat, whereby no crew or provisions are included as part of the agreement; instead, the people who rent the vessel from the owner are responsible f ...

s (B/B). Of those 165 were

Capesize Capesize ships are the largest dry cargo ships with ball mark dimension: about 170,000 DWT (deadweight tonnage) capacity, 290 m long, 45 m beam (wide), 18m draught (under water depth). They are too large to transit the Suez Canal ( Suezmax limi ...

, 206

Panamax Panamax and New Panamax (or Neopanamax) are terms for the size limits for ships travelling through the Panama Canal. The limits and requirements are published by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) in a publication titled "Vessel Requirements". ...

, 178 Supramax, 111

Handysize Handysize is a naval architecture term for smaller bulk carriers or oil tanker with deadweight of up to 50,000 tonnes, although there is no official definition in terms of exact tonnages. Handysize is also sometimes used to refer to the span of ...

and 56 used for transhipment. Total dwt amounted to 60,881,703 and the average age of the fleet was 8 years. The company planned to receive four new ships from Japan's Oshima Shipbuilding in March 2020.

References

{{reflist Shipping companies of Germany Transport companies established in 1921 Dry bulk shipping companies Privately held companies of Germany

Company

History

Transhipment

Fleet

See also

References