Nordic American Tankers Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Bermuda Company With a Suezmax-Only Fleet

Bermuda on paper, Sandefjord in practice.

Nordic American Tankers was incorporated in Bermuda in 1995, the company says, and in September that year sold shares to the public in the United States and Europe. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol NAT; Norwegian Wikipedia notes that it was first listed on the Oslo Børs before leaving it for New York. Its founder, chairman and chief executive is Herbjørn Hansson, a Norwegian shipping executive whom Norwegian Wikipedia describes as a former finance director of Kosmos.

The company is Bermudian in law and Norwegian in its working base. Its registered office is in Hamilton, Bermuda; its manager, Scandic American Shipping, has a European branch in Sandefjord, on Norway’s south-east coast; and its chartering is handled by NAT Chartering in Oslo, according to its contacts page. On 10 November 2026 the Bermuda newspaper The Royal Gazette described it as a “Bermudian-based” tanker operator.

It began with a single contract. The money from its first offering bought three new Suezmaxes from Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea — Nordic Hawk, Nordic Hunter and Nordic Harrier — which were delivered in the autumn of 1997 and went straight onto seven-year bareboat charters to British Petroleum, the company says. Its bye-laws barred it from buying more ships or doing other business while the BP charters ran. In March 2004 an extraordinary general meeting voted to continue, and when the charters ended in October 2004 the bye-laws were changed and NAT became an active operating company.

One class of ship.

From late 2004 the fleet grew mostly through second-hand purchases. The company’s history runs from the Nordic Voyager, bought in November 2004, to the Nordic Aurora, bought in September 2011, with newbuildings ordered from Samsung along the way. Every ship has been a Suezmax, a mid-sized tanker that can pass through the Suez Canal, as Norwegian Wikipedia puts it, and which the company says can carry up to a million barrels of oil.

That single class is the centre of its pitch. NAT describes itself as having a “Suezmax-only fleet”, says it is the only stock-listed tanker company with one, and says it has one of the largest Suezmax fleets in the world. Norwegian Wikipedia describes the same strategy of a uniform Suezmax fleet from the start. Its fleet page in November 2026 lists 16 Suezmaxes, built between 2005 and 2022 and flagged in the Cayman Islands, Liberia, the Marshall Islands and the Bahamas, plus two newbuildings due in 2028.

Renewal has come in batches. In 2018 it sold ten older ships as it took delivery of three Suezmaxes ordered at Samsung in 2016; it sold one ship late in 2021 and five more in 2022. Its first names came back: two newbuildings ordered in 2020 joined in 2022 as Nordic Harrier and Nordic Hunter, and a 2016-built ship joined in the fourth quarter of 2023 as Nordic Hawk. In the first half of 2025 it sold two ships built in 2003 and 2004 and bought two built in 2016, the Nordic Galaxy and the Nordic Moon.

The next ships are under contract. On 3 November 2025 NAT announced a letter of intent for two Suezmaxes at a South Korean yard for delivery in the second half of 2028. On 16 January 2026 it said the contracts had been signed with Daehan Shipbuilding, and that the sale of two older ships, built in 2004 and 2005, had been completed.

How tanker owners present themselves.

Tanker owners rarely sell to the public, so their brands live mostly on corporate websites, in investor material and on the ships themselves. The pattern is consistent across the companies in this series: a short purpose line, a fleet page, an investor section and a sustainability page, set in restrained corporate type and colour. The palettes in these guides, from navy and steel to deep sea greens, are tones of our own choosing rather than any company’s colours.

Photographs do much of the work. Owners publish photographs of their own crude and product tankers, and Ardmore Shipping’s homepage, for example, pairs its values with pictures of named ships from its fleet. The ship names themselves often carry the identity: Ardmore puts its own name on every hull, while Okeanis names its tankers after Greek islands.

The fleet list is the core document. Companies set out their ships by size class, from Medium Range (MR) and Handysize product tankers to Suezmax and VLCC crude carriers, usually with the year built, the shipyard, the deadweight and the flag, and they list newbuildings on order with expected delivery dates. Pages on pools, chartering arms and ship-management partners explain who markets and runs the ships commercially and technically.

Many of these companies are listed, so investor pages sit close to the top of the menu: press releases, quarterly results, presentations, filings with regulators and share data, sometimes for two stock exchanges at once. ESG and sustainability reports, often published once a year and prepared with reference to named reporting frameworks, complete the picture. This guide sets out what each company’s own pages and dated independent sources show about its history, ownership and fleet, and keeps the company’s own claims marked as its own.

Letters to shareholders.

Dividends are part of how the company presents itself. Its home page says NAT has declared a dividend to its shareholders every quarter since 1997, and its website links to an interview with Hansson on its dividend policy under the heading “King of Dividends.” Its press releases are written as letters, opening “Dear Shareholders and Investors” and signed by Hansson as founder, chairman and CEO. On 9 November 2026 it sent one headed “The tanker bonanza continues”; The Royal Gazette reported it the next day, noting that about half of NAT’s ships were then in the spot market and the rest on charters.

NAT has also sponsored another company. In November 2013 it created Nordic American Offshore, an offshore supply-vessel company, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2014; NAT later sold out of it, the company says, and Norwegian Wikipedia says Hansson chaired it until Scorpio Offshore took control in December 2018.

The naming is consistent. Every ship on its fleet list carries the prefix “Nordic,” from the Nordic Aquarius to the Nordic Zenith, and the website sits at nat.bm, a Bermuda domain built on the three-letter ticker. Its business-model page credits the photograph at its top to Kees Torn, via Wikimedia Commons, under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.

For a design guide, Nordic American Tankers shows how a single ship type and a single repeated prefix can carry an identity. Compare Frontline, another tanker owner that moved to Bermuda in the 1990s, and DHT, which The Royal Gazette also describes as a Bermudian-based tanker operator. For this guide we use a North Sea navy, a fjord blue and a hull red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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