OSM Thome Brand Guidelines: Arendal 1989, Singapore 1963 and One Ship Manager in 2023

Two older ship managers, one merged name.

OSM Thome is the product of two older ship managers. OSM Maritime Group was founded in Arendal, Norway, in 1989 by Bjørn Tore Larsen, the company says, and a company announcement of February 2025 still calls him “the founder of OSM.” The Thome Group was founded in Singapore in 1963, according to OSM Thome, which says that Olav Eek Thorstensen joined it as a partner in 1977 and took full ownership in 1999; the same 2025 announcement refers to the Eek Thorstensen family as the people “who established Thome.”

Before the merger, OSM already had an outside investor. Funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management invested in OSM Maritime Group in 2018, according to the 2025 announcement, and Cyprus Shipping News, reporting an interview first given to TradeWinds, later described Oaktree’s holding as a 49% stake.

The two groups agreed to combine at the beginning of 2023, The Maritime Executive reported. In May 2023 MarineLink reported that competition authorities had approved the merger, and that the merged company, OSM Thome, would be headquartered in Arendal and represented in 22 countries. MarineLink gave its size at that point as nearly 450 ships in full ship management, crewing for about 550 more, 2,000 onshore employees and 29,000 seafarers, and named Finn Amund Norbye as chief executive. The company’s own website describes the combination as a merger “activated in 2023.”

MarineLink listed the segments the combined fleet covered as tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, car carriers and offshore vessels, and reported that the integration of the two businesses would now begin.

Ship management, crewing and the services around them.

OSM Thome sells three broad things: ship management, crew management and what it calls marine services. Its ship-management pages are divided by segment — tankers, bulk carriers, offshore vessels and drilling units, offshore wind, and cruise ships, ferries and yachts, the last under the SMG name. Its marine services run from newbuilding supervision, repair, lay-up and ship recycling to catering through OSERV, procurement through Axia Maritime Procurement and a training arm called the Maritime Leaders Academy.

Its footprint is spread across continents. The February 2025 announcement said its largest ship-management units were in Singapore, Norway and Croatia, with crewing offices in the Philippines, China, India, Europe, Oceania and Brazil. The company’s website now speaks of about 31,000 people at sea and onshore and around 1,000 managed vessels, and its November 2025 release gave more than 30,000 seafarers and 1,600 shore-based professionals in more than 20 locations; those are the company’s own figures.

Consolidation continued after the merger. In October 2024 Norway’s Torvald Klaveness group announced the sale of its Klaveness Ship Management business to OSM Thome, The Maritime Executive reported, in an announcement made in October 2024. Klaveness Ship Management was to keep its own identity, and OSM Thome planned an office in Oslo to manage the combination carriers of Klaveness Combination Carriers, which would contract the new owner for that work.

The group does not own ships, its managing director told TradeWinds in an interview republished by Cyprus Shipping News in January 2026; he described ship management as a people-driven business, and said he wanted customers to see the group as a ship manager that brings its crewing and marine services together.

Ship managers and their presentation.

Third-party ship managers sell a service rather than a product. They run vessels that belong to someone else, so their identities have no hull, funnel or cargo of their own to show. Instead they present themselves through the work: technical management, crewing, newbuilding supervision and the training of seafarers. V.Group, for example, describes itself as “an independent service provider, not a ship owner or a manufacturer,” and Anglo-Eastern says it manages vessels on behalf of shipowners, charterers and operators.

Their marks tend to be simple and sit on corporate websites. Blue and teal wordmarks are a familiar sight in the trade, but not a rule: V.Group’s logo files come in green and black versions, and Anglo-Eastern’s header pairs a white wordmark with a golden emblem. Around those marks sit photographs of ships and crews as the companies publish them — a managed vessel at sea, a simulator room, cadets with their teachers or on graduation day.

The websites follow a common plan. There are service pages for technical management and crewing, often split by vessel type, from tankers and bulk carriers to LNG carriers and cruise ships. Training-centre pages show simulators and classrooms; Anglo-Eastern, for instance, runs its own academy and training centres in India and the Philippines. Office maps and location lists stretch across Asia and Europe, and careers-at-sea pages set out cadet programmes and routes to promotion.

This guide looks at how each manager tells that story: who founded it, who owns it, which mergers shaped it, and how it describes its services and its seafarers. Figures for fleets, staff and offices are given as the companies or dated reports state them, and each palette here is an unofficial interpretation, not a brand standard.

New shareholders and a new managing director.

Ownership shifted again in 2025. On 22 February 2025 OSM Thome announced that institutional investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Global Transportation Group would acquire a stake, subject to regulatory approval, and that Oaktree would leave the business entirely. The founding shareholders — Larsen’s OSM Maritime Partners and Skagerak Holding, through which the Eek Thorstensen family holds its stake — were to remain, with Bjørn Tore Larsen as chair of the board. In January 2026 Cyprus Shipping News reported that Oaktree had sold its stake to those investors in February, and the managing director named the J.P. Morgan group among the company’s shareholders.

The leadership changed in November 2025. On 19 November the company announced that Finn Amund Norbye was stepping down as chief executive and moving to a non-executive role as adviser to the board, and that Tommy Olofsen, a 12-year veteran of the company and its chief commercial officer, had become group managing director with immediate effect. The release credited Norbye with leading the merger of OSM Maritime Group and Thome Group.

The double name keeps both histories in view: “OSM” from the Arendal company and “Thome” from the Singapore one, set side by side without a hyphen or an ampersand. The company’s website is osmthome.com, and its job listings run through a separate careers portal on the same domain. Its stated vision is “Leading Excellence at Sea,” and its values page names safety, relationships, transparency and innovation.

For a design guide, OSM Thome shows how a merged service company can carry two founding stories in one plain name. Compare Wilhelmsen Ship Management, another Norwegian name in ship management, and Fleet Management, a ship manager based in Hong Kong. For this guide we use a Skagerrak blue, a fjord slate and a pennant red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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