Hansa Heavy Lift Brand Guidelines: Beluga’s 2011 Successor, Insolvent in December 2018

A carrier formed from a collapse.

Hansa Heavy Lift was a German heavy-lift shipping company that existed for about seven years. It was set up in 2011 in the aftermath of the collapse of Beluga Shipping, the Bremen heavy-lift carrier: The Loadstar described it in December 2018 as “formed out of the collapse of Beluga Shipping in 2011.” German Wikipedia says the company was founded by the American investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, which had held a stake in the insolvent Beluga group, and that it started with 65 staff.

The fleet came largely from the same source. German Wikipedia says that of the sixteen ships Hansa Heavy Lift started with, seven had belonged to Beluga Chartering or its affiliated companies, and the rest had already been owned directly by Oaktree before the Beluga insolvency. The company specialised in heavy-lift, project and general cargo, German Wikipedia says.

The new carrier began in Bremen, Beluga’s home city, but did not stay. German Wikipedia says it moved its seat to Hamburg at the start of 2012; German Wikipedia gives its legal form as Hansa Heavy Lift GmbH. It also ran offices in Singapore and Houston, according to German Wikipedia.

Ships named HHL after ports.

The most visible part of the Hansa Heavy Lift identity was on the hulls. Its ships carried the prefix HHL followed by the name of a port: trade reports name the HHL Kobe, HHL Lagos, HHL Fremantle, HHL Richards Bay and HHL Tokyo, among others.

The ships were built for heavy cargo. German Wikipedia says that in 2018 the company operated fourteen of its own multipurpose and heavy-lift ships, all with ice class E3 and heavy-lift cranes rated to lift up to 700 tonnes. Baird Maritime gave the HHL Kobe as a ship of 20,100 tonnes deadweight and four of its sisters as ships of 19,450 tonnes.

Trade press recorded the kind of work it did. The Loadstar reported in June 2016 that Hansa Heavy Lift had carried four rubber-tyred gantry cranes, each weighing 132 tonnes, to Egypt for the forwarder deugro, lifting them on and off with the two cranes of the HHL Kobe, which had a combined capacity of up to 800 tonnes. Each crane measured about 29 by 12 by 24 metres, and the paper described Hansa Heavy Lift as a global tramp carrier, meaning a ship operator that sails where cargo takes it rather than on a fixed schedule. In September 2018 Breakbulk.News reported that the HHL Lagos had moved two fully assembled ship-to-shore container cranes for Liebherr Container Cranes from the Port of Cork in Ireland to the Port of Hull. The cranes measured 81.4 by 30.3 by 57.3 metres; they were moved alongside at Cork on self-propelled modular transporters, one was stowed on the hatch covers and one in the hold, and both were set down directly onto the rails at Hull, the report said. Engineers from both companies designed the seafastening and load-spreading structures, and Liebherr described it as the first time fully erected cranes of this kind built in Ireland had been shipped lift-on, lift-off on a heavy-lift vessel.

Design and documentation.

Heavy-lift and project-cargo carriers sell something that is hard to show before it happens: the movement of a single object too large or too heavy for a container. Their websites lean on photographs of their own ships and cargo instead, heavy-lift vessels with paired cranes, decks loaded with modules, port cranes or offshore structures, published by the companies themselves as records of past voyages.

Colour carries much of the identity. Company names are painted large on hulls and crane booms, and across this sector the wordmarks often appear in strong orange, blue or red against white superstructures and dark hulls, so that they read from a quayside or in an aerial photograph. The same few colours then tend to run through the livery, the website and the printed material.

Fleet pages sit at the centre of these sites. Ships are grouped by class and described by crane capacity, deck area and deadweight: Jumbo lists its vessels as K3000, J1800 and H800 classes, and BigLift divides its fleet into heavy-lift types and heavy transport vessels such as the MC-Class. Engineering and transport services, from stowage planning to ship-motion analysis, are presented beside the fleet as a second product.

The rest of a typical site is evidence and reach: project-reference galleries sorted by market, from mining to offshore energy and port development; customer magazines and news of ships on order; and office maps showing sales and agency networks across several continents. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company, its founding, its ownership and its fleet, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

December 2018, and a fleet renamed.

The heavy-lift market was hard on the company. The Loadstar reported that its fleet shrank from 21 vessels in 2015 to 11 by 2018. In December 2018 Hansa Heavy Lift filed for insolvency: The Loadstar reported the filing on 11 December 2018, citing a statement from its key investor, Oaktree, reported by Heavy Lift & Project Forwarding International, which put the failure down to structural challenges in the market. German Wikipedia, citing the Hamburger Abendblatt of 10 December 2018, says the filing followed Oaktree’s decision not to put further money into the company, given the continuing difficult state of the global heavy-lift market.

The company did not come back. Its ships were sold and renamed: Baird Maritime reported in April 2019 that the Amsterdam shipowner Spliethoff had bought five more former HHL ships, renaming the HHL Kobe, HHL Lagos, HHL Fremantle, HHL Richards Bay and HHL Tokyo as Pietersgracht, Pijlgracht, Poolgracht, Pauwgracht and Paleisgracht. Those were the sixth to tenth ships the Spliethoff group had bought from HHL that year, Baird Maritime said. The HHL prefix disappeared from the hulls and Spliethoff’s Amsterdam canal names replaced it.

Hansa Heavy Lift is therefore a closed brand: German Wikipedia describes it in the past tense, as a company that was a heavy-lift carrier based in Hamburg. Its story sits between two others in the sector, Beluga before it and the Spliethoff group after it, and it lasted from 2011 to the insolvency filing of December 2018.

For a design guide, Hansa Heavy Lift shows how a short-lived carrier built a recognisable identity with almost nothing but a three-letter prefix and a list of ports, and how quickly that identity vanishes once the hulls are repainted. Compare Spliethoff, which bought much of its fleet, and SAL Heavy Lift, another heavy-lift carrier from Hamburg. For this guide we use harbour navy, rust and crane grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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