Maersk Tankers Brand Guidelines: Emma Mærsk in 1928, a 2017 Sale and a New Gas Fleet

Five tankers and a shipping family.

Maersk Tankers dates its business to 1928. The company’s own history starts earlier, with the steamship Laura, which Peter Mærsk Møller bought in 1886, and English Wikipedia’s history of the group records that A.P. Møller, who had founded the Svendborg steamship company with his father in 1904, entered the tanker trade in 1926 by ordering five motor tankers. The first, the Emma Mærsk, was delivered by Burmeister & Wain in Copenhagen in February 1928; a month later the group’s Odense yard delivered its first tanker, the Anna Mærsk. Danish Wikipedia gives 1928 as the year A.P. Møller founded the tanker company.

By 1940, the company says, it had eleven crude carriers in service and was the largest tanker operator in Scandinavia. That year changed the group’s footing. On 8 April 1940, English Wikipedia records, A.P. Møller sent an order known as “Permanent Special Instruction One” to the 36 Mærsk ships at sea: if Denmark were drawn into war, they were to report to the New York office and follow only its instructions. Germany occupied Denmark the next day. Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller, made a partner that month, ran the New York office through the war, and from June 1941, when the United States took control of foreign ships in its ports, the Mærsk fleet served under United States control until the war ended, according to the same source.

After the war the group rebuilt its fleet. In 1954 the turbine tanker Regina Mærsk became the first Mærsk ship with a blue-painted hull, English Wikipedia says; the company’s history today speaks of the blue water that “anchors” its identity.

Product tankers, pools and a sale.

The tanker business widened in the post-war decades. The company says its fleet stood at 31 tankers in 1965, the year its first two product tankers arrived; English Wikipedia names them as Dangulf Mærsk and Svengulf Mærsk, both built at Odense. The first gas tanker, Inge Mærsk, entered service in 1972. In December 1992 the Odense yard delivered the double-hull 300,000-tonne tanker Eleo Mærsk, and in 1999, the company says, Maersk Tankers began running commercial pools, in which ships from several owners trade together.

Danish Wikipedia records that early in 2009 Maersk Tankers bought the Swedish shipping company Broström, after approval from the European Union. In 2014, the company says, it sold its fleet of VLCCs to concentrate on product tankers and launched a strategy built on wider use of digital tools. A trial of two rotor sails on one of its product tankers, with Norsepower, the British Energy Technologies Institute and Shell, is recorded by Danish Wikipedia, citing ShippingWatch in March 2017.

The largest change came in 2017. A.P. Moller – Maersk had chosen in 2016 to separate its oil and gas businesses and concentrate on container shipping and logistics, English Wikipedia says, and on 20 September 2017 gCaptain reported that it had signed a deal to sell Maersk Tankers to APMH Invest, a subsidiary of A.P. Moller Holding, which gCaptain described as the controlling shareholder of the Maersk group and a wholly owned fund set up by its founder. At that point, the report said, Maersk Tankers employed 3,100 people and ran 161 product tankers, 80 of them owned, across the Intermediate, Handy, MR and LR2 segments, and gCaptain called it one of the largest product tanker companies in the world. A.P. Moller Holding also announced a plan to form an ownership consortium with Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and other partners, with itself as majority shareholder. English Wikipedia records that the majority shareholding was sold to A.P. Moller Holding in 2017, and the company’s timeline lists the acquisition in the same year.

How tanker owners present themselves.

Tanker owners rarely sell to the public, so their brands live mostly on corporate websites, in investor material and on the ships themselves. The pattern is consistent across the companies in this series: a short purpose line, a fleet page, an investor section and a sustainability page, set in restrained corporate type and colour. The palettes in these guides, from navy and steel to deep sea greens, are tones of our own choosing rather than any company’s colours.

Photographs do much of the work. Owners publish photographs of their own crude and product tankers, and Ardmore Shipping’s homepage, for example, pairs its values with pictures of named ships from its fleet. The ship names themselves often carry the identity: Ardmore puts its own name on every hull, while Okeanis names its tankers after Greek islands.

The fleet list is the core document. Companies set out their ships by size class, from Medium Range (MR) and Handysize product tankers to Suezmax and VLCC crude carriers, usually with the year built, the shipyard, the deadweight and the flag, and they list newbuildings on order with expected delivery dates. Pages on pools, chartering arms and ship-management partners explain who markets and runs the ships commercially and technically.

Many of these companies are listed, so investor pages sit close to the top of the menu: press releases, quarterly results, presentations, filings with regulators and share data, sometimes for two stock exchanges at once. ESG and sustainability reports, often published once a year and prepared with reference to named reporting frameworks, complete the picture. This guide sets out what each company’s own pages and dated independent sources show about its history, ownership and fleet, and keeps the company’s own claims marked as its own.

A service company, then an owner again.

After the sale the business was reshaped. In September 2021 Ship Technology reported that Synergy Marine, part of Synergy Group, had agreed to buy Maersk Tankers’ entire technical management business, covering 82 ships, with completion expected that November; the company says it then became a service company with commercial management at its core. In 2022 it launched Njord, a technology business it describes as a partner for the green transition. On 8 January 2024 gCaptain reported that Maersk Tankers had completed its purchase of Penfield Marine, a commercial manager founded in 2012 with Panamax/LR1, Aframax/LR2 and Suezmax pools and offices in Connecticut, London and Singapore; the deal closed on 2 January, the combined company would manage about 240 vessels under the Maersk Tankers name, and the headquarters would stay in Copenhagen.

The company is now moving back into owning gas carriers. It says it confirmed in 2023 an order, through an affiliated company, for up to ten very large ammonia carriers, and that in 2026 it took delivery of Jane Mærsk, the first of ten vessels designed to carry LPG and ammonia. A company statement republished by Hellenic Shipping News on 22 October 2026 said the second, Jessie Mærsk, had been named at HD Hyundai Samho in Mokpo, South Korea, and that a retrofit project called RIPPLE had been selected for EU Innovation Fund funding, pending a final grant agreement. Maersk Tankers says it employs about 250 people in Denmark, Singapore, India, the UK and the US, is domiciled in Copenhagen and is part of the A.P. Moller Group, owned by A.P. Moller Holding. It lists its values as constant care, humbleness and uprightness.

The name itself is the strongest asset. The company kept the Maersk word through the 2017 sale, its newest ships carry the family’s Mærsk spelling, and its site is maersktankers.com, while maersk.com belongs to A.P. Moller – Maersk, the container and logistics group it left in 2017. For a design guide, Maersk Tankers shows how a nearly century-old tanker name can be carried into a commercial-management and gas-shipping business without changing it; compare TORM, another Danish tanker company, and Hafnia. For this guide we use deep sea blue, steel and pale sky with a plain modern sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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