Oldendorff Carriers

On 19 February 1921, 21-year-old Egon Oldendorff joined a small shipping company in Hamburg as a partner, where he trained for nine months. The shipping company was renamed Lilienfeld & Oldendorff and taken over by Oldendorff at the end of the year. The company's first ship was an 870-ton steamer, Planet, built in Rostock in 1881. The company moved to Lübeck in 1925. At the outbreak of World War 2, the company owned 13 ships, but only the Gisela Oldendorff and the Nordmark remained after the war.

The fleet grew rapidly in the early 1950s due to the Korean War. The operation of bulk carriers started in 1958 with the Baltic Sea timber trade. In 1964, Klaus E. Oldendorff, one of the sons of the company's founder, left to start the shipping company Reederei Nord in Hamburg. In 1980, 23-year-old Henning Oldendorff took over as CEO from his 80-year-old father, who died on May 9, 1984, leaving Henning as the majority shareholder. In 1995 Henning founded another shipping company, Concept Carriers, which merged in January 2001 with the main company to form Oldendorff Carriers. Increasingly the company has been buying its ships from Chinese yards, which it has described as a good experience.

As at January 2019 the company had 716 ships in service, or under construction, 143 of them owned by the company (OWN) and others as index chartered vessels on floating charter (T/C), or Bareboat charters (B/B). Of those 165 were Capesize, 206 Panamax, 178 Supramax, 111 Handysize and 56 used for transhipment. Total dwt amounted to 60,881,703 and the average age of the fleet was 8 years. The company planned to receive four new ships from Japan's Oshima Shipbuilding in March 2020.