Star Bulk Brand Guidelines: Athens Dry Bulk, an Archimedes Motto & the Eagle Bulk Merger

A Marshall Islands company run from Athens.

Star Bulk Carriers is a dry-bulk shipping company: it owns and operates bulk carriers that move iron ore, minerals, grain, bauxite, fertilisers and steel products. Its annual report for 2025, filed in March 2026, says the company was incorporated in the Marshall Islands on 13 December 2006 and began operations on 3 December 2007, when it took delivery of its first vessel. Its executive offices are in Athens, and its website adds offices in the United States and Singapore.

The shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol SBLK. The company’s home page carries its motto, “Give me a Ship and I shall move the Earth,” which it says is inspired by an original quotation from Archimedes.

The chief executive is Petros Pappas. The annual report says he has led the company since July 2014, after serving as its non-executive chairman from its beginning, and that he founded the dry-cargo company Oceanbulk Maritime in 1989. When the Eagle Bulk merger closed in 2024, gCaptain reported that Gary Weston, a former Eagle director, joined Star Bulk’s board. The company lists six values on its website — entrepreneurship, openness, meritocracy, initiative, teamwork and sustainability — and says it ships more than 80 million tonnes of cargo a year.

Newcastlemax to Supramax, mostly managed in-house.

Star Bulk’s fleet runs across the main dry-bulk sizes. On its website the company says that, on a fully delivered basis, it has 145 vessels with an average age of about 12 years and more than 14.4 million deadweight tonnes of capacity, from Supramax ships up to Newcastlemax ships of over 200,000 tonnes. Its 2025 annual report gave 141 vessels and 14.0 million tonnes at the time of filing; fleet counts change as ships are bought, delivered and sold.

The report also sets out what the size names mean. A Newcastlemax carries between 200,000 and 220,000 deadweight tonnes and a Capesize between 100,000 and 200,000; a Kamsarmax carries 80,000 to 90,000, an Ultramax 60,000 to 65,000 and a Supramax 50,000 to 60,000. Star Bulk also owns a Singapore company, Star Bulk (Singapore), which it says links the origin and destination of dry-bulk cargoes for end users.

The fleet page sorts the ships by class: Newcastlemax, Capesize, Post Panamax, Kamsarmax, Ultramax and Supramax. The names mix a long run of “Star” names, such as Star Leo and Star Laetitia, with others such as Goliath, Gargantua and Maharaj. Several of the largest ships were built in China, at the NACKS and SWS yards, according to the fleet page.

Newer ships are of the Kamsarmax size. The annual report says Star Bulk ordered five 82,000-tonne Kamsarmax vessels from Qingdao Shipyard in 2023, due between April and September 2026, and in October 2025 took over contracts for three more of the same size being built by Hengli Shipbuilding.

Management is largely kept in the group. The company’s strategy page says most of its owned vessels are technically managed by wholly owned subsidiaries. The annual report adds that at the end of 2025 outside managers provided technical, operating and crewing services to 36 of the 136 vessels then in operation.

The same strategy page says the company uses its management team’s experience and its own in-house market research to decide where and when to deploy the fleet, and that it relies on long relationships with charterers, brokers, shipyards and financial institutions. It also names technology and data analytics, through resource-planning and business-intelligence tools, as part of how it runs the ships.

How bulk owners present themselves.

A tanker or dry-bulk owner sells a service rather than a product, so its identity has to live on its ships and in its paperwork. The oldest signs are the funnel mark and the house flag, painted or flown on every vessel the company operates; today the same hull in company livery is more often seen in an aerial photograph taken from a drone, the ship shown loaded and under way, filling the first screen of a corporate website.

Behind that picture sits the fleet list. Owners publish their ships by class and by name, from the very large crude carriers and Suezmax tankers of the crude trade to Capesize and smaller bulk carriers. Frontline’s home page, for example, counts its VLCCs, Suezmaxes and LR2/Aframax tankers, while CMB.TECH groups its ships under division names such as Euronav for oil tankers and Bocimar for dry bulk. Vessel names can run in a family too: Bocimar’s ships usually carry the prefix Mineral, English Wikipedia says.

Most owners also give space to crew welfare and safety, to environmental reporting and to the next generation of ships. Newbuilding and fuel announcements carry much of the story: CMB.TECH, for one, uses the slogan “Decarbonise Today, Navigate Tomorrow” and in 2026 presented a dry-bulk ship it describes as ammonia-powered, while Frontline’s 2026 fleet-renewal deal was framed around scrubber-fitted “ECO” newbuildings.

Because so many of these companies are listed in New York, Oslo or Brussels, the investor-relations section often does the heaviest lifting: quarterly results, presentations, dividend histories and charts of freight rates. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it was founded, who controls it and what became of its name — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Eagle Bulk, absorbed in 2024.

Star Bulk’s largest step came in 2024. On 9 April 2024 it completed an all-stock merger with Eagle Bulk Shipping, the New York-listed owner of Supramax and Ultramax bulk carriers. Each Eagle shareholder received 2.6211 Star Bulk shares for each Eagle share, and Eagle’s shares stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Eagle Bulk therefore no longer exists as a separately listed company; its ships and business are part of Star Bulk.

gCaptain, reporting the completion that day, said the combined company controlled 163 owned vessels with 15.6 million deadweight tonnes, and called it the largest US-listed dry-bulk shipping company. Star Bulk shareholders held about 71 per cent of the enlarged company and Eagle shareholders about 29 per cent. Star Bulk’s annual report says the deal brought in Eagle’s fleet of 52 Supramax and Ultramax vessels, and that the integration has been substantially completed.

In 2026 the company added a second market. A question-and-answer page on its website, dated 15 September 2026, says its shares were to begin trading on Euronext Athens on 16 September 2026, as a parallel listing alongside Nasdaq, with no change to its Marshall Islands incorporation or its head office in Greece. By November 2026 the home page was showing quotes from both exchanges.

For a design guide, Star Bulk shows how a shipowner can give a fleet a voice through a single motto and a family of ship names. Compare the Golden Ocean and Maersk guides. For this guide we use Aegean blue, ink and signal silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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