BigLift Brand Guidelines: Mammoet Shipping of 1973, Spliethoff & the Happy Ships

A sea leg for a Dutch heavy-transport firm.

BigLift Shipping is an Amsterdam heavy-lift shipping company, and its roots are older than its name. The company’s own timeline starts in 1973, when Mammoet Shipping was founded as the “sea leg” of Mammoet Transport, the Dutch heavy-transport business. Dutch Wikipedia gives the same year and traces the present company directly to that shipping arm.

The name has a separate history. According to Dutch Wikipedia, a company called Big Lift was formed in 1972 through the merger of Van der Laan’s Scheepvaart & Handelsmaatschappij and the transport firm Van Twist, and was sold to Mammoet in 1982. When the shipping business later needed a new name, the encyclopaedia says, the choice of BigLift was no coincidence: the older name was already part of the Mammoet story.

Through the 1980s Mammoet Shipping worked in pools with other carriers. The company says that in 1984 Mammoet set up a pool of heavy-lift partners with Project Carriers and Sloman Neptun, at a time when Mammoet Shipping ran a fleet of 16 vessels; that Mitsui O.S.K. Lines joined the Mammoet Heavy Lift Partners pool in 1987; and that West African Shipping joined in 1999 with four “Tra-type” ships. In 1988, its timeline says, Mammoet Shipping became a 50/50 joint venture between Mammoet Transport and Hansa Linie. After the rename the pool idea continued: the company says Cosco Shipping joined the BigLift Shipping Partners pool in 2001.

Spliethoff takes over the ships.

The Amsterdam shipowner Spliethoff, founded in 1921 as a chartering office for Baltic timber, came in during the 1990s. Dutch Wikipedia’s article on Spliethoff says it took a 51 percent majority stake in Mammoet Shipping in December 1994; BigLift’s own timeline describes Mammoet Shipping in 1995 as a 70/30 joint venture between Spliethoff and Mammoet Transport. The two accounts differ on the size of the stake and agree on the direction of travel.

The last step came when Mammoet itself changed hands. BigLift says that in 2000 Nedlloyd, then the parent of Mammoet Transport, sold the whole of Mammoet to Van Seumeren, and that Mammoet Shipping became a full subsidiary of Spliethoff, renamed BigLift Shipping B.V. from 1 January 2001. Dutch Wikipedia dates Van Seumeren’s takeover to 2001 and adds that the shipping business was sold on straight away to the Spliethoff Group, which has owned all of it since, and that it was not allowed to keep the Mammoet name. The heavy-lifting and transport company Mammoet is a separate business.

Inside the group today, BigLift says it handles “all heavy, over-sized and special cargoes” and works closely with its sister company Spliethoff, whose fleet of more than 50 multipurpose vessels is available for large project cargo volumes; the company says all vessels are operated in close cooperation between the two. Dutch Wikipedia lists the group’s other members as Transfennica, Wijnne Barends, Sevenstar Yacht Transport, Bore and ForestWave, and says the group ran about 145 ships in 2026.

How heavy-lift carriers present themselves.

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.

Happy ships, heavy transport and a partner fleet.

BigLift describes its business as the worldwide transport of ro-ro, heavy-lift and project cargoes, with engineered transport solutions for technically and logistically complex projects. Its company profile lists four heavy transport vessels, two MC-Class and two CY-Class, and 21 heavy-lift vessels, including Spliethoff’s P8-Type and P14-Type ships. All of the heavy-lift vessels carry their own cranes, with lifting capacities of up to 2,200 tonnes, the company says, while the heavy transport vessels can take ro-ro cargo units of up to about 16,000 tonnes.

Many of its ships share a word. The timeline lists “Happy R-type” vessels in service from 1998, the Happy Buccaneer’s cranes upgraded from 550 to 700 tonnes in 2006, “Happy D-type” ships from 2011, and the Happy Sky and Happy Star entering service in 2013 and 2014. In 2018 BigLift Barentsz and BigLift Baffin joined the fleet, the pair now called the MC-Class, and in 2019 the first ten Spliethoff P-type vessels were added.

Also in 2019, the company says, BigLift Shipping and the shipowner CY Shipping (Chung Yang Shipping) joined forces in heavy transport. In April 2024 MarineLink reported that the partners had ordered two new heavy transport vessels from Jing Jiang Nanyang Shipbuilding in China, a jointly designed type called the BC-Class: 180 metres long and 43 metres wide, with an unobstructed deck of 43 by 140 metres, loaded over the stern or side by ro-ro or skidding, and not semi-submersible. At that point the four existing heavy transport vessels were commercially operated by BigLift, MarineLink said. In July 2026 the American Journal of Transportation reported the christening of CY Frontier, the first of four BC-Class ships, with BigLift Pioneer due later that year and a joint fleet of eight heavy transport vessels expected by mid-2028.

The website groups project references by market, among them mining, port development, floating equipment and offshore support, and the company publishes a customer magazine, BigNews.

For a design guide, BigLift shows how a company can carry an older lineage under a new name, with a fleet sorted by class and lifting capacity. Compare Spliethoff, its parent, and Mammoet, the transport company whose shipping arm it once was. For this guide we use a deep navy, a signal orange and a pale steel grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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