COMPANY HISTORY
BW GROUP THE GREEN SHIPS Jim Shaw examines the history of Hamilton, Bermudaheadquartered BW Group, a modern conglomerate formed out of two of the world’s largest shipping companies.
T
he transportation of gases in liquefied form by ship is becoming very big business, and one of the leading operators of this type of tonnage is Bermuda-based BW Group, known for its ‘green’ ships. The initials in the company’s name hint at a historic past: ‘B’ stands for Bergesen, once Norway’s biggest shipping company and operator of the world’s largest bulk carriers, and the ‘W’ for World-Wide Shipping, at one time the largest independent shipping company in the world. The latter firm, founded by Hong Kong’s Yue-Kong Pao, had more deadweight tonnage capacity in the mid-
Launch of the 10,403gt tanker Berge Bergesen, which was completed by Norway’s Rosenberg Mechanical Components A/S in 1951. THE ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY Built by Barclay, Curle in 1927, the 5,101gt City of Hereford became the first vessel of Y.K. Pao’s World-Wide fleet when she was purchased as Inchona from Willamson & Co in 1956 and renamed Golden Alpha. CMRT
1970s than the US and Soviet merchant fleets combined, and Pao appeared on the front cover of Newsweek magazine in 1976 as ‘King of the Sea’. Today, the BW Group is a world leader in the petroleum, gas and offshore sectors, with nearly 400 vessels in operation.
While gas carriers and floating storage and regasification units (FSRUs) make up the most valuable portion of the fleet, a merger with Copenhagenbased Hafnia Tankers last year saw product tankers become the largest single type of ship operated. At the same time,
One of Bergesen’s best-known ships was the 364,767dwt Berge Stahl, completed by South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries in 1986 as the longest and largest iron ore carrier in the world. A. BEEM
BW elected to drop out of the chemical tanker business by selling its final two stainless steel tankers, the 1997-built Bright World and 1998-built Bold World, for scrap. Of the two historic companies consolidated in 2003 to form BW Group, the oldest was Bergesen d.y. ASA, formed by 42-year-old Sigval Bergesen as Sig. Bergesen d.y. & Co in 1935. Bergesen built up a fleet of three tankers just before World War II, but one, the 15,540dwt Charles Racine, was lost to Italian torpedoes in 1942. After the war, orders were placed for new ships, several of which were completed by the Rosenberg shipyard at Stavanger, which Bergesen had acquired from the Central Bank of Norway in the late 1940s. By 1955 the Bergesen fleet stood at seven tankers, the largest of 34,000dwt, and in 1967 the dry sector was entered when Sig. Bergense took over his son’s fleet. This included several large ore-oil
www.shipsmonthly.com • February 2020 •
51
