TTS Group Brand Guidelines: Total Transportation Systems, MacGregor & the Nekkar Rename

A small crane business with a long name.

TTS began in Norway in 1966. Its successor company, Nekkar, says the business emerged from a small family enterprise that made cranes and was set up as Total Transportation Systems, a name later shortened to TTS. Norwegian Wikipedia gives 1966 as the founding year and 1996 as the year the present listed company was established; German Wikipedia, describing the group before its break-up, gives its seat as Bergen, on Norway’s west coast. Norwegian Wikipedia describes the company, formerly TTS Group ASA, as an international group that develops and supplies cargo-handling equipment and other services for the maritime and offshore industries, with its listing on the Oslo exchange running through both names.

The company’s own timeline, now published by Nekkar, tells the early decades in phases. In 1984 a delivery of cargo-handling equipment for a car carrier began what it calls a climb in access systems for that specialised type of ship. After years of falling orders as Norwegian shipbuilding declined, large contracts in 1988 marked a turning point, it says, and TTS was listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange in 1995.

An acquisition in 1996 began what Nekkar describes as a period of acquisition-driven growth, in which target segments, the product range and operations all expanded heavily. Between 2006 and 2018, the timeline says, TTS bought and later sold on the drilling-package supplier Sense EMD, built a position in heavy-lift equipment, set up a network of service hubs and strengthened its operations in China and Korea.

Nekkar’s account divides this history into ten-year phases, from 1966–1975 through 1996–2005, followed by a longer stretch from 2006 to 2018 and then 2019–2023, the period of the sale and the new name. Across those phases, it says, target segments, the product portfolio and the group’s operations were widened step by step, largely through acquisitions.

Cranes, car-carrier access and a German arm.

By the 2010s TTS was a Norwegian ship-equipment group traded on the Oslo exchange, German Wikipedia says. Its subsidiary TTS Marine had sites in Bremen, Bremerhaven and Bad Schwartau in northern Germany, and from August 2012 the group also owned the Neuenfelder Maschinenfabrik, known as TTS-NMF, a maker of ship cranes in Hamburg-Neuenfelde.

Its work, as the successor company describes it, ran across cargo and load handling: cranes, cargo-handling and access equipment for car carriers, heavy-lift gear and, under the Syncrolift name, ship lifts, which Norwegian Wikipedia gives as the main activity of the company today. Norwegian Wikipedia also says the company concentrates on the design, assembly and testing of equipment, with most production handled by an international network of subcontractors.

The break-up came through a single deal. On 8 February 2018 MacGregor, part of the Finnish group Cargotec, announced an agreement to acquire the marine and offshore businesses of TTS Group ASA, MarineLink reported. The transaction needed competition clearance in several countries. Germany’s Federal Cartel Office cleared it on 5 November 2018, MarineLink reported the next day, with approvals in China and South Korea still outstanding. MacGregor said then that it expected those approvals by the end of 2018 and would complete the transaction, under the agreement, as soon as possible afterwards.

South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission followed in December 2018, MarineLink reported on 27 December, when approval from China was still awaited and MacGregor expected to close the transaction in the first quarter of 2019.

Design and documentation.

Marine equipment makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and operators rather than to the public, and their identities reflect that. Their marks have long histories of their own: Schottel’s square S has been in use since the 1980s, its centenary history says, and Becker Marine Systems introduced its present logo with its new name in 2001, by the company’s account. The palettes in this guide are our own interpretation, in sea-going blues with warm accents, and none is taken from a company’s files.

The products themselves carry much of the visual weight. Thrusters, rudder propellers, rudders, deck machinery and bridge systems appear in this guide only as the companies publish and describe them, and their scale is part of the story: a regional magazine described one Schottel drive in Wismar in 2021 as twelve metres long once assembled.

Products are presented by vessel type as well as by name. Schottel says its RudderPropeller is used in more than 120 vessel types, from harbour tugs to ferries and offshore ships, and Becker presents rudders, nozzles and steering gear as parts of a single manoeuvring system for a given ship. Service matters as much as sale: both companies describe networks of subsidiaries and offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and German Wikipedia lists fourteen Schottel sales and service companies, from Brazil to South Korea.

Newer pages cover data. Schottel lists condition monitoring and data platforms among its products, and Becker sells monitoring systems for steering and rudder bearings. Trade fairs remain a fixed point in the calendar: Becker’s own history records a meeting at Nor-Shipping in Oslo that changed its management in 2001, and in 2022 Schottel’s holding company announced an agreement there, a trade paper reported.

One business absorbed, one company renamed.

MacGregor says it completed the acquisition in July 2019, and describes the deal as combining two complementary businesses in cargo and load-handling equipment. Nekkar’s own timeline says the same from the other side: in 2019 a major part of the company’s activities was sold to MacGregor, and the company was renamed Nekkar. TTS Group therefore no longer trades under that name.

Its marine and offshore lines carried on inside MacGregor, which has itself changed hands since. Cargotec agreed in 2024 to sell MacGregor to funds managed by Triton, and MacGregor says that transaction closed on 31 July 2025; it now describes itself as a standalone company headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The listed company took a different path. Nekkar, traded on the Oslo exchange and based in Kristiansand according to Norwegian Wikipedia, describes itself as a long-term owner of technology companies in ocean-based industries, built on what it calls a 50-year industrial legacy from Syncrolift. Its operating companies include Syncrolift, Intellilift, Techano Oceanlift and FiiZK, it says, and it lists maritime, aquaculture and offshore energy among its end markets. After the sale, Nekkar says, it set a new strategic direction to use the group’s heritage in engineering, electrification, automation and digitalisation to develop new technologies, and it now invests along themes it names as sustainable oceans, robotics and intelligent logistics, and digitalisation. Norwegian Wikipedia gives the company 63 employees across three countries.

For a design guide, TTS Group shows how a brand name can leave the market while both its products and its listed company carry on under other names. Compare MacGregor, which took over its marine and offshore businesses, and Hatlapa, a deck-machinery name that MacGregor says it acquired in 2013. For this guide we use a harbour navy, steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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