Grieg Shipbrokers is recruiting for its chemical tanker and sale-and-purchase teams as the Norwegian shop rebuilds after selling off its Asian dry cargo desks.
Interim managing director Morten Muller told TradeWinds he is looking for experienced chemical tanker brokers to be based at its Bergen headquarters.
The company has already been scouting new sale-and-purchase brokers for its offices in Bergen, Oslo, and London, not to mention its ongoing search for a new managing director.
Muller would not be drawn on details of the executive search but said things should become clearer after a board meeting in May.
Grieg Shipbrokers, the 137-year-old original core of Grieg Group, has been through a tumultuous year, including the departure of managing director Finn Engelsen. The firm also sold its capesize chartering-oriented offices in Shanghai and Singapore to Affinity (Shipping), announced in January.
However, Muller told TradeWinds that rumours that Grieg Shipbrokers could sell off its London operations are false.
On the contrary, he is moving to integrate Norwegian and London operations more closely, he said.
"We want to integrate our three offices, and we very much want to keep our London team," he said.
"I have also heard those rumours but I don't understand where they come from. It's not even a unit we could sell if we wanted to as we sold Grieg Shipbrokers Asia, because of the different ownership structure."
"If anything we are scaling up in sale-and-purchase and also now in chemical tankers," he said.
In the recently published Grieg Group annual results, Muller outlined in broad terms an intention to expand the remaining offices.
Although the Asian offices had "failed to extract the internal synergies anticipated", the broking operation on the whole had seen record turnover and "a comfortable operating margin".
The expansion into large dry bulk chartering with desks centred on Asia-Pacific charterers was closely associated with Engelsen, who set up the Asian offices in 2017 and staffed them in part with former colleagues from his old shop, Lorentzen & Stemoco.
Sources with knowledge of the company indicated that Engelsen's departure was over lack of support from Grieg Group for the global strategy.
"[The sale of Grieg Asia] will give us greater financial flexibility to grow in segments where we have a competitive advantage," Muller wrote in the annual report.
Speaking to TradeWinds, he highlighted successes in dry bulk chartering, newbuilding and finance.
The company turned around its handysize and supramax segment in 2020 to "a decent profit after several difficult years", executed several aquaculture newbuilding deals, and continued to grow its ship finance business.
