Santoku Shipping Group's founder and owner is 77-year-old Masashi Taga.
He began his shipping career as a “salary man” for a local owning and operating company.
In 1972, Taga decided to carve out his own outfit and set up Santoku by acquiring a secondhand 6,500-dwt general cargoship to transport spare parts for Japanese carmaker Mazda.
Today, the largest ship type that Santoku owns is capesize bulkers. It used to own some chemical tankers but exited from that market as it deemed tankers to be more difficult to operate due to the strict vetting criteria of oil majors.
Today, Santoku controls about 100 vessels, of which it owns about 60 with the rest managed for other shipowners.
Santoku has about 3,000 seafarers, of which about 67% are Filipinos, and the company owns a manning company in the Philippines.
The rest of its crews are from Japan, China, South Korea, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
