Minerva Marine Brand Guidelines: An Athens Tanker Manager of 1996 and the Minerva Group

A family-owned tanker manager.

Minerva Marine is an Athens tanker company. Shipping Telegraph, writing in February 2026, described it as a family-owned shipping company founded in Athens and led by Andreas Martinos, and dated Minerva Marine Inc. to 1996, when it was set up in Greece as a ship-management company. The same report gave its core business as tanker operation, with a fleet of around 50 ships across four size classes: VLCCs, Suezmaxes, Aframaxes and MRs.

The name now covers a group rather than one company. Shipping Telegraph dated a sister manager, Minerva Dry Inc., to 2020, set up to manage dry cargo vessels, and put the combined fleet of the two companies at around 70 ships, including tankers, dry cargo ships and container ships. A third name, Minerva Gas, appears beside them in the reports of the Greek business site newmoney, and the group then counted liquefied natural gas carriers in its fleet.

In October 2023 newmoney counted the Minerva group’s fleet at 12 dry bulk carriers, 57 tankers, five LNG carriers with two more under construction, and one container ship. Those numbers move as ships are bought, built and sold, and newmoney has described a strategy of fleet renewal. In December 2025 newmoney reported the sale of an older 48,000-dwt MR2 tanker, the Minerva Lydia, to Chinese buyers, alongside new orders.

The company keeps a low public profile. In September 2026 newmoney noted that Minerva Marine, as a matter of standing practice, does not comment on its commercial transactions, so most of what is known about its ships comes from shipyard filings, broker reports and the Greek maritime press rather than from the company itself.

Tankers first, then gas, bulk and boxes.

Tankers remain the core of the business, and the order book shows the company adding larger ships. In December 2025 newmoney reported that Minerva Marine had ordered an LR2 product tanker for the first time, for delivery in January 2027, at the Chinese yard Hengli Shipbuilding, and described the order as the company’s return to tanker newbuilding after three years.

Two months later the yard’s parent made a further order public. According to Shipping Telegraph in February 2026, Guangdong Songfa Ceramics, the Shanghai-listed owner of Hengli Shipbuilding (Dalian), disclosed in a stock exchange announcement on 7 February that its subsidiary had signed contracts with a company under Minerva Marine for two 158,000-dwt crude oil tankers, a Suezmax size. By September 2026, newmoney reported, the tanker arm was linked to a programme of Aframax and Suezmax newbuildings with deliveries running to 2029.

The group has also moved into container shipping. In October 2023 newmoney reported that Minerva Dry had taken delivery of its first container ship, the Little Emma, an 1,800-TEU vessel built by Jiangsu New Yangzi Shipbuilding and classed by ABS, with a sister ship, the Little Athena, due by the end of that year. In July 2026, the same site reported, Minerva Dry was linked to an order for four 6,000-TEU container ships at Hengli.

On fuels and research, newmoney reported in 2023 that Minerva Gas had joined the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping, a non-profit research centre opened in Copenhagen in 2020, and called it the first Greek-owned shipping company to do so. Minerva Dry was working with Lloyd’s Register, Cargill and the shipyard NACKS on a joint development project, set up in 2022, for a Kamsarmax bulk carrier able to burn methanol and fitted for rotor sails.

Design and documentation.

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 training centre for its own officers.

One of the company’s own institutions is a school rather than a ship. The Athina Maritime Training and Education Centre was founded in Athens on 16 February 2018, newmoney reported in July 2023, to build the knowledge and skills of Minerva’s seafarers. Work on its premises began in April 2018, and the first seminars ran a year later, in May 2019.

The centre occupies about 1,500 square metres, with bridge, engine-room and cargo-handling simulators, ECDIS training, classrooms, two workshops and a data centre, according to the same report. Most of its instructors are serving senior officers of Minerva. It runs more than 20 different seminars and trains more than 900 officers of Minerva Marine, Minerva Gas and Minerva Dry each year. newmoney reported that it is certified by the maritime authorities of Malta as meeting the STCW standards and by DNV under its standards for maritime training.

Its motto, which newmoney credited to Andreas A. Martinos, translates as “Where Seafarers Always Come First.” In 2023 the centre received a Eukrantis award for maritime education, the awards organised by the Greek maritime magazine Naftika Chronika, and the jury praised the design of its training programme.

For a design guide, Minerva Marine shows how a private shipowner that rarely speaks in public can carry its identity through a single name repeated across its ships and its sister companies. Compare Tsakos Energy Navigation and Okeanis, two other Greek tanker owners. For this guide we use an Aegean navy, an olive and a marble stone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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