Lorentzen & Stemoco is just Lorentzen & Co again, over 102 years after the founding of the company under that name.
The Oslo brokerage and its sister shipowning company Eastern Bulk are headed by chief executive Christian Andersen, and controlled by Caroline Figenschou Tidemand and Kristin Tidemand Eckhoff, who are fourth-generation descendants of founder Jorgen Lorentzen.
Andersen told TradeWinds the renaming was originally planned for the company’s centennial. But 2019 was an inauspicious year for festivities.
After a chaotic period in the company’s history that saw a high rate of churn in both staff and management, former Avance Gas chief executive Andersen had been recruited in 2018 to rebuild and tidy up.
The centennial champagne would have been broken out in December 2019, the same month a city in China began to report cases of a novel coronavirus disease in humans.
But there were more immediate reasons to put the celebration on hold.
“In 2019, we were losing money,” said Andersen. “But we have had a happy development over the past two years. We have done an optimisation of the group of companies, closing down idle subsidiaries and hiring a lot of new young brokers. But I can't think of anything really juicy to announce along with the rebranding.”
Annual results will not be out for several months and Andersen declined to provide any numbers for 2021 yet.
“Compared to 2019, it was good, but we still want it to be better,” he said.
Lorentzen & Co was founded in 1919 by four brothers of sea captain and shipowner Johannes Lorentzen.
Forty years later, their descendants split into Lorentzen Chartering and FH Lorentzen & Sons, and in 1994, the former merged with Stemoco Shipping. Former Stemoco owners Mike Steimler and Morten Mo sold out and moved on a few years later, but they left behind the name.
In 2013, the Tidemand family bought out other Lorentzen descendants and took sole control after a turbulent period in the ownership. In 2019, after recruiting Andersen, Otto Gregard Tidemand stepped back from operational involvement in favour of his daughters, Kristin and Caroline.
Today Lorentzen & Co has 14 brokers in Oslo, 12 in its sale-and-purchase and finance-oriented Shanghai office, and two dry cargo brokers in New York.
Most revenues come from chartering and S&P in the dry cargo and tanker sectors, which are evenly split, Andersen said. The company is also active in offshore and container ship broking and increasingly in renewables.
