Monjasa Brand Guidelines: Fredericia’s 2002 Bunker Supplier and Its Monjasa-Named Tankers

Two founders and a small office.

Monjasa is a marine fuel company from Fredericia, in Denmark, founded in 2002. ShippingWatch reported in 2016 that Jan Jacobsen founded the company that year, and Baird Maritime dated the company’s establishment to 2002 in a 2024 report. Danish Wikipedia names two founders, Anders Østergaard and Jan Jacobsen, and says they started the business from a small office in Kolding, moving the head office to Fredericia in 2005, the year it says Monjasa bought its first ship, the Monjasa Pioneer, in South Africa.

The business grew far from Denmark. ShippingWatch wrote in 2016 that although Monjasa’s roots were in Fredericia, it was the sale of bunker fuel in West African countries such as Nigeria and Angola, and in the Middle East, that had built the company. In 2012 Monjasa and its two owners were named Entrepreneur of the Year in the “globalization” category by the consulting and accounting firm EY, the same report said. The two owners had withdrawn from daily management in October 2014 to work at the holding company level.

Ownership has since narrowed to one person. Danish Wikipedia, citing the holding company Endeavour Invest, says Anders Østergaard has been sole owner since 2017. The company’s own site says Monjasa Holding A/S controls all activities in the Monjasa Group and is fully owned by co-founder Anders Østergaard, who acts as Group CEO from the Dubai office, while the Group CFO works from Fredericia. Monjasa describes itself as Danish-founded and privately held, and says the group is divided into four main holding companies, one of them CBED, a Danish shipowner offering accommodation and work space at sea for offshore operators.

Trading, supply and a fleet of its own.

Monjasa describes its core business as the trading and physical supply of marine fuels, oil terminal operations and ship-owning. Its service pages cover gas oil and fuel oil, marine lubricants, sourcing and risk management, with regional pages for north-west Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, West Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America. The company says it has more than 700 employees on land and at sea.

The fleet is central to that model. In July 2024 Baird Maritime reported that Monjasa had taken over two tankers, the 17,200 dwt Monjasa Rover and the 7,858 dwt Monjasa Hunter; the second, under 110 metres long, can go alongside oil rigs and platforms in West Africa. With them Monjasa controlled more owned than chartered tonnage for the first time since 2002, with 16 owned and 15 time-chartered vessels. The company reported a fleet of 28 vessels at the end of 2025, against 33 a year earlier.

Monjasa says it carried out 16,741 supply operations across 877 ports in 2025, and that its marine fuel volume of 6.8 million tonnes matched its largest reported volume, set in 2024. Ship & Bunker, reporting the same volume in April 2026, said the Americas took 36 per cent of it, the Middle East and Africa 32 per cent and Asia 22 per cent, and described Monjasa as consistently ranked in its list of the world’s top ten bunker companies. The company opened its 15th international office, in Japan, in 2025.

Its work in the Emirates has a long history by the company’s account. In April 2026 Monjasa reflagged the tanker Monjasa Shaker from the Liberian registry to the flag of the United Arab Emirates during a drydocking at Dubai Maritime City, the first of three UAE-based tankers it plans to move, and its Group CEO pointed to 20 years of maritime operations in the country.

How bunker suppliers present themselves.

Marine fuel suppliers sell to a small, technical audience: ship operators, charterers and fuel buyers who order bunkers for a vessel arriving at a given port on a given day. Their identities tend to be simple. Many use a plain wordmark in a single strong colour — often a deep blue, sometimes an orange or a green — with a short symbol beside it, and the name usually says what the company does: bunkering, marine fuels, oil or energy. Several have shortened or changed those names as they add new fuels or change owners.

Photography does much of the work. The companies publish pictures of their own bunker barges and tankers moored alongside container ships, bulk carriers and cruise ships, of hoses and fuel lines at the ship’s side, and of new vessels at their naming ceremonies. Port-coverage maps are the other recurring image: a world map marked with the hubs where a supplier delivers fuel itself and the wider set of ports where it arranges supply through others.

Product pages are written plainly, by fuel grade rather than by brand name: very low sulphur fuel oil (VLSFO), high-sulphur fuel oil (HSFO), marine gasoil (MGO), LNG, and biofuel blends described by their bio-component share, such as B20 or B30. Larger suppliers add pages for their trading desks — buying fuel for delivery across many ports, and managing fuel-price exposure for customers — and for delivery records, including mass flow meters and digital delivery notes.

Sustainability pages have grown alongside these. Suppliers describe the alternative fuels they offer or plan to offer, newer vessels able to run on LNG, and their own codes of conduct, usually in the company’s own words. This guide separates those descriptions from what dated trade-press reports show about each company: who founded it, who owns it, and where it supplies fuel.

One name on hulls, offices and a stadium.

Monjasa’s identity travels on its ships. Its vessels take the company name as a prefix, from the Monjasa Pioneer that Danish Wikipedia names as the first to the Monjasa Rover, Monjasa Hunter and Monjasa Shaker of recent years. When the two 2024 tankers joined, Baird Maritime reported, they were dry-docked for renewal surveys, renamed, then blasted and painted to match the Monjasa fleet design. Monjasa itself says it serves customers through one commercial entrance and a single global brand.

The company also writes its culture into the brand. It states a corporate purpose “to inspire our business partners and become first choice by challenging the status quo with our original solutions,” and four values: Respect, Ambition, Curiosity, and Smile & Joy. Its site says that Monjasa means personal business in the oil and shipping industries. A trainee scheme, the Monjasa Oil & Shipping Trainee programme, or MOST, began in 2018 and had produced 51 graduates by September 2026, Ship & Bunker reported; the 2026 intake of nine was placed in offices including Fredericia, Copenhagen, Dubai, Singapore, Panama, Houston and, for the first time, Tokyo.

At home the name reaches beyond shipping: Danish Wikipedia says the company is the naming sponsor of the stadium in Fredericia, Monjasa Park.

For a design guide, Monjasa shows how one name, repeated on every tanker and office, can hold together a business spread across ports on several continents. Compare Bunker Holding, another Danish marine fuel group, and Maersk, the Danish shipping group. For this guide we use a harbour navy, a tanker orange and a sea grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Monjasa’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.