Becker Marine Systems Brand Guidelines: The Flap-Rudder Firm Willi Becker Began in 1946

A business licence, an aluminium boat and an idea from aircraft flaps.

Becker Marine Systems dates itself to 1946, when Willi Becker, a mechanical engineer from a family of inland-waterway captains, received his business licence, the company’s own history says. English and German Wikipedia give 1946 as the founding year and Hamburg as the place. The company’s timeline adds the detail: Becker first ran a small shipping business, building an aluminium vessel, the Marleen I, around 1950 and moving into tanker work with the fuel company Aral, which asked him to station the boat in Hamburg as a bunker boat.

The rudder grew out of that work. Looking for a more efficient rudder, and taking his cue from the landing flaps of an aircraft, Becker designed the Becker Flap Rudder, a rudder with a hinged flap on its trailing edge, the company says. In 1955 he set up the Willi Becker Engineering Office in Hamburg’s Neustadt district to develop it. The first flap rudder went into an inland tanker, the ATR1, in 1961, a date German Wikipedia also gives, and by 1962, the company says, Becker had turned from ship owner into rudder maker. From 1964 he sold the rudders for inland vessels in the Netherlands, and by 1990, the company says, it had sales partners across Europe and in Asia, the Americas and Australia.

Wikipedia credits the Becker rudder of the 1950s with improving ships’ manoeuvrability and describes how the company adapted the flap design to ever larger vessels. The name Becker Marine Systems itself is recent: the engineering office took it in 2001, when, the company says, it also introduced the logo it uses today.

Nozzles, king supports and partners.

The range widened in the 1970s. In 1972 Becker bought Kort Engineering, which brought specialised nozzles and rudders for ice-going ships and other hard-working vessels, both Wikipedia editions say. In 1977 the company developed the King Support Rudder, with an extended bearing that adapted the Becker rudder to large ocean-going ships, and in 1978 Willi Becker signed a contract with the Japanese propeller maker Nakashima for licensed production of Becker rudders for Japan, the company’s history records.

Partners and acquisitions followed. In 1998 the deck-machinery maker Hatlapa of Uetersen became a joint partner in the business, the company says, and in 2003 Becker acquired Hamworthy Schilling, whose name lives on in the Becker Schilling Rudder. The same year it opened offices in China, South Korea and Singapore and moved its headquarters within Hamburg; in 2004 it introduced a rudder with a twisted leading edge for large, fast ships, according to its timeline. In 2009, English Wikipedia notes, Becker won an order for rudders for six large container ships from the Korean shipbuilder STX.

A later product sits ahead of the propeller. The Becker Mewis Duct is a duct fitted in front of the propeller to improve the flow into it, Wikipedia says; the company and the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) date its launch to 2008, while Wikipedia gives 2009. In September 2022 the DBU announced that its inventors, the naval architect Friedrich Mewis and Becker’s then managing director Dirk Lehmann, would share the German Environmental Prize for the device, presented in Magdeburg on 30 October 2022.

Design and documentation.

Marine equipment makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and operators rather than to the public, and their identities reflect that. Their marks have long histories of their own: Schottel’s square S has been in use since the 1980s, its centenary history says, and Becker Marine Systems introduced its present logo with its new name in 2001, by the company’s account. The palettes in this guide are our own interpretation, in sea-going blues with warm accents, and none is taken from a company’s files.

The products themselves carry much of the visual weight. Thrusters, rudder propellers, rudders, deck machinery and bridge systems appear in this guide only as the companies publish and describe them, and their scale is part of the story: a regional magazine described one Schottel drive in Wismar in 2021 as twelve metres long once assembled.

Products are presented by vessel type as well as by name. Schottel says its RudderPropeller is used in more than 120 vessel types, from harbour tugs to ferries and offshore ships, and Becker presents rudders, nozzles and steering gear as parts of a single manoeuvring system for a given ship. Service matters as much as sale: both companies describe networks of subsidiaries and offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and German Wikipedia lists fourteen Schottel sales and service companies, from Brazil to South Korea.

Newer pages cover data. Schottel lists condition monitoring and data platforms among its products, and Becker sells monitoring systems for steering and rudder bearings. Trade fairs remain a fixed point in the calendar: Becker’s own history records a meeting at Nor-Shipping in Oslo that changed its management in 2001, and in 2022 Schottel’s holding company announced an agreement there, a trade paper reported.

A Hamburg engineering firm in a Japanese group.

Becker has since become part of a Japanese group. In 2021 Nakashima Propeller, its partner since 1978, acquired a stake; the company says the existing shareholders kept their shares, while English and German Wikipedia describe the stake as a majority. Becker Marine Systems GmbH is based in Hamburg and belongs to Nakashima Europe (Germany) GmbH, whose ultimate parent is Nakashima Propeller Co. Ltd. of Okayama, Wikipedia says. In 2023 Becker merged its Singapore office with Nakashima’s regional offices there, the company says. Its subsidiaries are in China, Singapore, South Korea, Norway and the United States, and German Wikipedia notes that the Mewis Duct is made in a company plant in Zhenjiang, China.

The business has also narrowed. Becker moved its headquarters to a new building in Hamburg-Harburg in 2014 and, in 2023, sold its alternative-energies division, which included the LNG Hybrid Barge and LNG PowerPac power units and the Cobra battery system, the company says. In 2024 it launched the Becker Steering Gear and the Becker Daggerboard, which the company describes as an anti-leeway fin for ships with wind-assisted propulsion. Its monitoring products include the Becker Intelligent Monitoring System, introduced in 2011, and a bearing-wear monitor, German Wikipedia records.

Recent orders show that combined approach. In September 2026 Hellenic Shipping News reported that the Spanish yard Astilleros Gondan had chosen Becker to supply the steering gear, a Becker Heracles high-lift flap rudder and an integrated manoeuvring system for two hydrographic research vessels being built for Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency.

For a design guide, Becker Marine Systems shows how one product idea, the flap rudder, can become a family of named systems. Compare Hatlapa, its partner of 1998, and Schottel, another German maker of manoeuvring systems. For this guide we use Elbe night, rudder blue and a flap red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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