Belships Brand Guidelines: Christen Smith’s 1918 Heavy Lifters, Now an Ultramax Fleet

A master mariner who shipped locomotives whole.

Belships traces its start to 1918, when the Norwegian entrepreneur and master mariner Christen Smith invited investors to take shares in Skibsaktieselskabet Christen Smiths Rederi, the company’s history page says; English and Norwegian Wikipedia give the same founder, year and first name. Smith’s idea was the heavy-lift ship. Locomotives and railway cars built in Europe, mainly in Britain, were usually taken apart, shipped in pieces and rebuilt at the far end, the company says, so Smith designed ships with heavy cranes and derricks on deck that could load the largest locomotives in one lift.

The company says the idea was an immediate success and that Smith dominated the heavy-lift trade for more than a decade. His ships took names beginning with Bel, the first two being Belfri and Belgot, and in shipping circles heavy-lift ships came to be called “belships.” Two of the fleet, Belnor and Belpareil, were delivered in 1926 by Armstrong Whitworth of Newcastle upon Tyne, according to warsailors.com, a record of the Norwegian merchant fleet of 1939–1945, which notes that Belpareil had three heavy-lift derricks with a capacity of 100 tons, enough for locomotives, coaches, tugs and barges.

In the 1930s the company was restructured and emerged in 1935 as Belships Company Limited Skibs-A/S; Norwegian Wikipedia dates that company to 7 October 1935, and warsailors.com records both ships passing to it in October 1935. In 1937 a further share issue brought a listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and the brothers Axel, Frithjof and Jørgen Lorentzen became key shareholders and soon took control. The company says the brothers, their children and grandchildren stayed at the helm for the next eighty years.

War, reconstruction and a long change of course.

During the Second World War, the company says, its fleet was in greater demand than ever, carrying heavy military equipment over long distances, and for the duration of the war it was under Allied control. Voyage records gathered by warsailors.com show Belpareil sailing in Allied convoys and on independent passages between June 1940 and August 1945, from Liverpool and the Clyde to Freetown, Cape Town and Suez. The sources used for this guide do not say how the company operated during the occupation of 1940–1945.

The post-war decade was the heyday of the heavy-lift business, the company says, as locomotives and machinery for industry and power plants were shipped to a world being rebuilt. As ordinary liner ships began to carry heavy gear of their own and newly independent countries built more of their own railway equipment, demand fell in the 1960s, and Belships sold its last heavy-lift vessel in 1972. English Wikipedia dates the move from heavy lift to bulk cargo to the 1960s.

The decades that followed brought a run of changes of course, as the company tells it. It tried tankers, dry bulk, refrigerated cargo and car transport; ships contracted just before the shipping crisis of the 1970s were laid up, sold or scrapped. It then concentrated on handysize bulk carriers of 35,000 to 40,000 dwt, buying heavily in the mid-1980s. After the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s it added larger bulk carriers, product tankers and the small Scottish gas tanker company Gibson Gas, and it later bought half of Elkem Chartering. After the financial crisis of 2008 it sold that stake and left every segment except Supramax and Ultramax bulk carriers.

How dry bulk owners present themselves.

Dry bulk shipowners rarely sell to the public, so their identities are made for a small audience: charterers, lenders, shipbrokers, port agents and shareholders. Most present themselves with a short wordmark in a restrained palette, with navy, red and steel blue recurring, and let the ships carry the rest. The photographs on their websites are of their own bulk carriers, at sea and in port, as the companies choose to publish them.

The fleet list is the centre of most of these sites. Ships are grouped by vessel class, from Capesize and Newcastlemax to Kamsarmax, Ultramax and Supramax, with year of build, deadweight, shipyard and flag set out ship by ship. Many owners name their vessels in a single pattern, a prefix or a theme that runs through the whole fleet, so the list itself becomes part of the identity.

Alongside it sit ESG reports, codes of conduct and fleet-renewal pages with newbuildings and their delivery dates; Norwegian owners add a report under the Transparency Act. Investor pages carry quarterly results, annual reports, presentations and a running archive of stock exchange releases, which for a listed owner is often the fullest public record of what the company has done and when.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it was founded, who owns it, which ships it runs and how that has changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Where a company has sold its fleet, been taken private or merged into another, that is stated with its date.

A merger, a buyout and a fleet of one class.

In December 2018 Belships merged with the Lighthouse Group, more than doubling its fleet; the company calls 2018 both its centenary and the end of an era, and English Wikipedia says the Lorentzen family ended its involvement that year. Belships owns 67 percent of the dry bulk operator Norwegian Bulk Carriers, which the company says was founded in 2020 and which The Maritime Executive described in December 2024 as previously known as Lighthouse Navigation. The same report said Belships had decided in 2023 to leave ship management and outsource it to V.Group; the company now names V.Ships in Singapore as its technical and crewing manager.

On 19 December 2024 Belships agreed terms for a voluntary cash offer for all its shares from a company set up by the US investment manager EnTrust Global, and the board unanimously recommended it, The Maritime Executive reported. The company says the offer was completed in the first quarter of 2025 and that, after delisting from the Oslo Stock Exchange, where it had been listed since 1937, Belships is 74.99 percent owned indirectly by EnTrust’s Blue Ocean Funds and 25.01 percent by the German F. Laeisz Group. The fleet is now a single class: the company’s fleet page lists 39 Ultramax bulk carriers with an average age of about four years, including newbuildings, mostly from Imabari, due as late as 2028, with names such as Belnor and Belocean that keep the old prefix.

For a design guide, Belships shows how a century-old shipowner carries its oldest marks forward: the company says the CS initial and anchor once painted on Christen Smith’s funnels are still its logo, and the Bel prefix still names every ship on its fleet list. Compare Golden Ocean, another dry bulk owner, and 2020 Bulkers, a far younger Oslo company. For this guide we use a fjord navy, a funnel red and a deck white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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