Solstad Brand Guidelines: A Skudeneshavn Shipowner, Normand Ships & Two Companies

A family shipowner on Karmøy.

Solstad’s roots are in Skudeneshavn, the harbour town on the island of Karmøy whose name still heads the company’s press releases. Norwegian Wikipedia dates the founding of the shipping company to 1964, and the company’s own history names Johannes Solstad as its founder and speaks of more than 60 years of experience in various shipping segments.

The offshore turn came early. Norwegian Wikipedia says the company bought its first four supply ships in 1973, and Solstad’s history describes it as an early actor in the North Sea offshore market, contracting and taking delivery of offshore vessels from the first half of the 1970s. The same history calls the 1980s a decade of crisis, marked by an oversupply of offshore vessels, followed in the 1990s by recovery, a large renewal of the fleet and a new generation of larger, more powerful multipurpose vessels able to carry advanced equipment into deeper and rougher waters.

In 1997, Norwegian Wikipedia says, Solstad Shipping was split off as a separate company and Solstad Offshore was listed on the Oslo stock exchange. In 1999 the company made its first move into construction vessels with the Normand Pioneer, and it has specialised in offshore construction and service vessels since then, the encyclopaedia says. The company says Lars Peder Solstad became chief executive of Solstad Shipping that year, succeeding Johannes Solstad.

Mergers, a new name and back again.

The 2010s brought another oversupply of vessels, and Solstad’s history says the companies in the group needed refinancing late in the decade. As part of that, Solstad issued shares to Aker ASA, which became one of its major owners. Norwegian Wikipedia dates a merger with REM Offshore to 2016 and a merger with Farstad Shipping and Deep Sea Supply to 2017, when the company took the name Solstad Farstad ASA. Store norske leksikon dates that three-way merger to June 2017 and notes that Farstad went back to 1988, when it was founded as Far Shipping after starting supply work for the North Sea oil industry in 1973 through the family firm Sverre Farstad & Co.

Solstad says Hemen Holding also became a large shareholder in the process, alongside Aker and the Solstad family, and that Solstad Farstad became one of the largest offshore-vessel companies in the world. On 1 October 2018 the name changed back to Solstad Offshore ASA. Norwegian Wikipedia gives the fleet as 150 ships in 2018 and describes one of the largest fleets of construction vessels and anchor handling tug supply vessels.

A second refinancing split the group in two. Solstad Maritime ASA was established in January 2024 as part of a refinancing of the Solstad Group that created a shareholder structure separate from Solstad Offshore, Euronext said in a press release of 16 May 2025; the company gives the date as 16 January 2024. The company’s own account is more detailed: on 23 October 2023 Solstad Offshore ASA, Aker Capital AS and AMSC ASA announced an agreement to refinance Solstad Offshore that included setting up Solstad Maritime Holding AS and its subsidiaries, and the refinancing was completed on 16 January 2024. That May day in 2025 was the first on which Solstad Maritime’s shares traded on Euronext Oslo Børs, under the ticker SOMA, and the company raised no new capital in the listing. Euronext described it as the owner of 32 vessels, with its head office in Skudeneshavn and around 1,500 employees in offices in five countries.

Ships, names and specification sheets.

Offshore support vessel operators present themselves first through their ships. A fleet is usually painted in one house scheme, with a strong hull colour such as red, blue or orange, a mark on the funnel and a shared naming prefix, so that a client, a port or another crew can tell whose vessel is working a field. In Norway the prefix habit is easy to see: DOF’s ships sail as Skandi vessels and Solstad’s as Normand vessels.

On the web, the core of most operator sites is the fleet list. Vessels are sorted by type — platform supply vessels that carry cargo, fuel and water out to installations, anchor handling tug supply vessels that tow rigs and set moorings, and construction support vessels with cranes, large decks and remotely operated vehicles — and each ship usually has its own specification sheet listing deck area, crane capacity, berths and equipment, often as a downloadable file.

Beside the fleet sit pages on services. Many operators now describe work for offshore wind as well as for oil and gas, and many offer subsea services such as inspection, repair and maintenance, survey and ROV work, sometimes through a sister company or a subsidiary with its own name. Contract announcements, usually naming the vessel, the client region and the length of the charter, keep those pages moving.

Because many of these companies are listed, the annual report and the quarterly results presentation are part of the identity too, and in a sector shaped by mergers, restructurings and fleet sales, the company story page often carries the history. For a designer, the useful material is consistent: hull colours, funnel marks, vessel names, clear fleet tables and sober corporate typography.

Two companies, one Normand fleet.

Today the Solstad name covers two shipowning companies, Solstad Offshore ASA and Solstad Maritime ASA, with different owners and a shared management function in which ship management services run between the two in both directions, the company says. Solstad Offshore ASA operates 8 vessels and owns 27.3 percent of Solstad Maritime ASA, which operates 32 vessels with a focus on Brazil, the North Sea, South East Asia, Australia and Africa. Solstad Services provides ROVs, surveys and other services, and Solstad Shipping AS, owned by Solstad Maritime, holds the Document of Compliance for all vessels owned or controlled by the Solstad companies.

The fleet carries the Normand prefix. The fleet page on solstad.com sorts vessels by owner group and by type — subsea, renewable and AHTS — and lists ships such as the Normand Pioneer, the anchor handler Normand Ranger and the construction support vessel Normand Maximus, each with its beds, crane capacity and deck area. The site describes work for both oil and gas and renewable energy clients, and tells its own story decade by decade, from the 1960s to the present. It names four core values — safe, reliable, competent and responsible — and says it has offices on four continents, from Brazil to Singapore and Australia as well as Europe.

For a design guide, Solstad shows how a family shipowner can carry one surname and one vessel prefix through mergers, a change of name and back, and a split into two listed companies. Compare DOF, another Norwegian offshore group reorganised in the same years, and Tidewater, the American supply-vessel operator. For this guide we use a fjord blue, a deep red and a pale steel with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Solstad’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.