Pangaea Logistics Brand Guidelines: Newport Dry Bulk, Ice-Class Ships & Gulf Coast Terminals

Logistics first, ships second.

Pangaea Logistics Solutions is a dry bulk shipping and logistics company based in Newport, Rhode Island, whose shares trade on Nasdaq under the symbol PANL. The company names Ed Coll as its founder in a 2025 press release, and it describes itself as “a global provider of comprehensive maritime logistics solutions.”

Its own description, repeated at the foot of its results releases, sets out the cargoes it carries for industrial customers: grains, coal, iron ore, pig iron, hot briquetted iron, bauxite, alumina, cement clinker, dolomite and limestone. It lists the work around them too — cargo loading and discharge, port and terminal operations, vessel chartering, voyage planning and technical management of ships. The company says it relies on long-term contracts of affreightment, a specialised fleet and what it calls a “cargo-focused strategy.”

The fleet is a mix of owned and chartered ships. In its results for the third quarter of 2026, published on 5 November 2026, Pangaea said its owned fleet of 38 vessels was supplemented by an average of 31 chartered-in vessels to meet cargo commitments. In September 2024 the company described its own ships as a fleet of Supramax, Ultramax, Panamax and Post-Panamax bulk carriers, to which handy-size ships were added at the end of that year.

Leadership has changed in recent years. Mark Filanowski retired as chief executive on 1 January 2026 after eleven years with the company, and Mads Boye Petersen, previously chief operating officer, became president and chief executive on the same day, according to the company’s succession announcement; Richard du Moulin was named in that release as chairman of the board.

Nordic Bulk Carriers and the ice-class niche.

The most distinctive part of Pangaea’s story runs through Copenhagen. Nordic Bulk Carriers, a Danish company specialising in ice navigation, was founded in 2009 by Christian Bonfils and Mads Boye Petersen, according to Wikipedia; Pangaea says Petersen joined the company in 2009 “when he established Nordic Bulk Carriers in partnership with Pangaea.” The Danish business daily ShippingWatch reported in January 2015 that Bonfils had left the firm, and named the US-based Phoenix Bulk Carriers as its majority stakeholder alongside Petersen. Wikipedia records that the firm was later acquired by Pangaea.

The Danish partner made its name in Arctic waters. The Globe and Mail reported in September 2013 that the Nordic Orion, a 225-metre ice-strengthened bulk carrier loaded with coking coal in Vancouver and bound for Finland, had become the first bulk carrier to pass through the Northwest Passage. The newspaper added that in 2010 Nordic Bulk Carriers had become the first company from outside Russia to use the Northern Sea Route, shipping iron ore from Norway to China. Wikipedia gives the Nordic Orion as a 75,603-tonne ship built by Oshima Shipbuilding in 2011, and says the voyage ended at the Finnish port of Pori on 9 October 2013. It also records the Panamax Nordic Odin carrying iron ore from the Baffinland mine through sea ice in August 2015.

Pangaea has since built that niche into its fleet. A joint venture, Nordic Bulk Partners, was set up in 2019 to build four Ice Class 1A Post-Panamax bulk carriers, which were delivered in 2021, the company said in September 2024. One of them, the 95,000-tonne Nordic Nuluujaak, built at Guangzhou International Shipyard, received DNV’s Silent (E) class notation for underwater noise in October 2023; Pangaea described it as the first dry bulk carrier to receive that notation. The company says Petersen ran its Copenhagen office and oversaw newbuilding work in Japan and China.

The ice trade still sets the rhythm of the year. In November 2026 Pangaea called the third quarter “our strongest period for Arctic ice-class activity,” and said its “niche ice-class fleet” had worked at peak seasonal levels on Arctic routes, with late-season Arctic voyages continuing into October.

Design and documentation.

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.

More ships, and terminals on shore.

The largest recent change to the fleet came at the end of 2024. In September of that year Pangaea agreed to combine its 26-vessel fleet with fifteen handy-size bulk carriers owned by Strategic Shipping Inc., a private company managed by M.T. Maritime Management of Southport, Connecticut, paying in new Pangaea shares. Shareholders approved the deal on 30 December 2024 and it closed the same day, the company announced, leaving an owned fleet of 41 ships “in the range of handy to post-Panamax sizes.” Pangaea has also sold older tonnage: in February 2026 it agreed to sell the 2006-built Bulk Xaymaca, describing such sales as part of divesting “older, non-core assets.”

On shore, the company has been adding port work. Pangaea says it provides stevedoring and runs port and terminal operations that “complement its core shipping platform,” and its 2025 succession announcement counted 10 marine terminals across the US Gulf Coast and Mid-Atlantic. In 2026 it started new operations at Lake Charles, Louisiana and Port Aransas, Texas, and completed its first full quarter of terminal operations at Port Tampa Bay, Florida in the third quarter, according to its quarterly releases.

Ship names are the most visible thread in the company’s own material. The ice-class Post-Panamax ships of the Nordic Bulk Partners venture carry Nordic names, as did the Danish partner’s earlier Nordic Orion and Nordic Odin, while the ship sold in 2026 was named Bulk Xaymaca. The company’s releases set its story out through cargoes, routes and ports — grain, ore and clinker, the Arctic season, the Gulf Coast terminals — and that is the material a designer has to work with.

For a design guide, Pangaea Logistics shows how a shipping brand can lead with cargo and routes rather than with tonnage. Compare Eagle Bulk and Golden Ocean, two other dry bulk shipping names. For this guide we use polar navy, sea-ice blue and a rust accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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