V.Ships Brand Guidelines: A 1984 Ship Manager, the V. Shorthand & a 2024 STAR Capital Sale

A ship manager that owns no ships.

V.Ships is the ship-management brand of V.Group, a marine-services group that says it was formed in 1984. V.Group calls V.Ships its “primary” brand, covering ship management and services, risk management, procurement and financial services for tankers, bulk carriers, container ships, offshore vessels and the leisure sector. The group describes itself as “an independent service provider, not a ship owner or a manufacturer”: the vessels it runs belong to its clients, and its job is to staff, maintain and operate them on their behalf, across commercial shipping, cruise and energy work, according to its About page.

The group has grown partly by buying other managers. In a December 2016 press release V.Group named its recent acquisitions of Bibby Ship Management and Selandia Holdings, and said it then worked from 70 offices, managed more than 1,000 vessels and employed more than 3,000 people. Its brand page today lists a family of names around V.Ships. International Tanker Management handles oil and chemical tankers, and Dania is a ship manager based in Copenhagen. Oceanic runs catering and hospitality on board, and GMT arranges crew travel. SeaTec supplies technical products and services, Marcas negotiates purchasing for its members, and V.Risk is an insurance business that the group dates to 2013.

Headcounts come from the company and its investors, and they differ from page to page. In November 2026 V.Group’s home page listed 44,000 seafarers, 60 offices and 30 countries, and its About page spoke of an onshore team of more than 3,000 people. STAR Capital, the group’s lead investor, gives about 2,900 employees, 50 offices across 30 countries and around 3,500 vessels serviced.

Crewing, technical work and ShipSure.

V.Ships’ pages split the work into two halves. Ship management covers the technical running of a vessel for its owner, with separate pages for tankers, bulk carriers, container vessels and offshore units, and further pages for LNG carriers, leisure ships, newbuild supervision and lay-up management. Crew management is described as attracting, recruiting, training, deploying and developing seafarers through crew management centres around the world, with online courses from Marlins, which the group calls its in-house learning provider. A second division, V.Services, sells crew services, technical services, supply chain and insurance.

Cruise and leisure work has its own unit. In February 2024 Cruise Industry News reported that MOL Cruises had signed V.Ships Leisure to handle the technical management of the cruise ship Mitsui Ocean Fuji, the former Seabourn Odyssey, for the period in which the ship would sail under a foreign registry. In 2025 the group launched V.Yachts, offering management, crewing and consultancy to yacht owners. In May 2025 V.Group and the tanker company International Seaways announced a cadet programme for women, with the first intake joining two adapted training ships that September.

The group’s software is ShipSure, which it calls its marine digital platform. Two newer deals extend the range. In January 2026 V.Group announced the acquisition of Njord, a fuel-efficiency and decarbonisation business founded by Maersk Tankers, which is to keep its own brand inside V.Services (announced in January 2026; not completed at the time of writing). In March 2026 it announced that Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, through its subsidiary MOL Euro Energie, would take a 25% stake in V.Ships France, the group’s LNG specialist in Nantes, with V.Ships keeping 75% and taking on the technical management of two new MOL LNG carriers (agreed in March 2026; not completed at the time of writing).

Design and documentation.

Third-party ship managers sell a service rather than a product. They run vessels that belong to someone else, so their identities have no hull, funnel or cargo of their own to show. Instead they present themselves through the work: technical management, crewing, newbuilding supervision and the training of seafarers. V.Group, for example, describes itself as “an independent service provider, not a ship owner or a manufacturer,” and Anglo-Eastern says it manages vessels on behalf of shipowners, charterers and operators.

Their marks tend to be simple and sit on corporate websites. Blue and teal wordmarks are a familiar sight in the trade, but not a rule: V.Group’s logo files come in green and black versions, and Anglo-Eastern’s header pairs a white wordmark with a golden emblem. Around those marks sit photographs of ships and crews as the companies publish them — a managed vessel at sea, a simulator room, cadets with their teachers or on graduation day.

The websites follow a common plan. There are service pages for technical management and crewing, often split by vessel type, from tankers and bulk carriers to LNG carriers and cruise ships. Training-centre pages show simulators and classrooms; Anglo-Eastern, for instance, runs its own academy and training centres in India and the Philippines. Office maps and location lists stretch across Asia and Europe, and careers-at-sea pages set out cadet programmes and routes to promotion.

This guide looks at how each manager tells that story: who founded it, who owns it, which mergers shaped it, and how it describes its services and its seafarers. Figures for fleets, staff and offices are given as the companies or dated reports state them, and each palette here is an unofficial interpretation, not a brand standard.

Private equity, then a STAR-led consortium.

V.Group has passed between financial owners. In December 2016 it announced that Advent International had agreed to acquire a majority stake from OMERS Private Equity, which would reinvest alongside it, with the management team keeping a minority stake. In June 2024 the London investment firm STAR Capital agreed to acquire V.Group at the head of a consortium of investors that includes Ackermans & van Haaren; STAR’s portfolio page gives its entry date as September 2024 and lists the investment as current. The website’s legal footer names Vouvray Acquisition Limited, its subsidiaries and affiliates as trading as V.Group.

The brand works as a shorthand. In its 2025 and 2026 releases the group often calls itself simply “V.”, and its sub-brands — V.Ships, V.Services, V.Yachts and V.Risk — hang off that one letter and its full stop. The logo files on its website come in green and black versions. Its home-page copy is short and declarative: “Committed Partner of Progress,” “We are Vision,” “We are Value,” followed by lines about shaping the next generation of seafarers. Its contact section lists offices by country, Glasgow among them, and its news pages run case studies and press releases side by side.

For a design guide, V.Ships shows how a service company with no ships of its own can build an identity from a single letter and a set of matching sub-brands. Compare Anglo-Eastern, a ship manager based in Hong Kong, and Wilhelmsen Ship Management. For this guide we use a deep navy, a sea green and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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