Christian Salvesen
| Christian Salvesen | |
|---|---|
| legal form | PLC |
| founding | 1872 |
| resolution | 2007 |
| Reason for dissolution | takeover |
| Seat | Edinburgh |
| Branch | Transport, whaling |
| Website | www.salvesen.com/ |
Christian Salvesen PLC , based in Edinburgh and Northampton , Great Britain, existed from 1872 to 2007. The company was at times the world's largest whaling shipping company and later mainly dealt with transport, handling and storage.
history
The company's roots go back to 1843 when the Norwegian Johan Theodor Salvesen opened a ship brokerage business in Grangemouth . An office in Leith followed three years later , which traded as Turnbull, Salvesen and Company with partner George Turnbull . The Leith office mainly dealt with the export of British coal and the import of wood from Scandinavia. In 1851 Johan's brother Christian came to Scotland from Mandal and took over the management of the office in Leith. Two years later Johan retired from the Leith office. In 1872 Christian Salvesen and George Turnbull dissolved their partnership and Christian Salvesen and Company was founded as an independent company.
Christian Salvesen turned to shipping and took over his first ship in 1879. In the following decades Salvesen became a tramp and liner shipping company. In the early 1900s, whaling began, initially from a station in Shetland, and later took over a majority stake in an Icelandic whaling shipping company, which eventually developed into the world's largest whaling fleet.
The company's founder died in 1911. In 1928 the shipping company Glen Line from Aberdeen was taken over to expand the liner shipping sector. The following year, Salvesen introduced stern towing on whaling factory ships. After numerous Salvesen's ships were lost during the Second World War, Salvesen entered the fishing business in 1947 and played a leading role in the development of the modern stern catcher and the factory ship with the takeover of the Fairfree and the construction of the Fairtry . In 1958, Salvesen took over the first cold store in Grimsby , later expanded this area considerably and expanded its holdings to include the food sector. Whaling, which had continued to shrink in the years after the Second World War, was finally given up in 1963 and the fishing industry was also given up in 1968. From 1966, bulk carriers were also operated instead. In 1971 the liner service between Norway and Great Britain was given up, instead brick production and the North Sea oil business were added as additional pillars in the early 1970s. In 1981 Salvesen took over the American company Merchants Refrigerating Company and in 1984 the power generator rental company Aggreko . The US company Electric Rental Systems was later taken over by the expanding company Aggreko. In the mid-1980s, Salvesen was converted to a public limited company. During this time, the company began in the area of non-food logistics and in 1986 transferred the fish trading division Christian Salvesen Fishselling to the Denholm Group . In 1990 the shipping sector was also completely given up.
In 1993 Christian Salvesen took over the British industrial logistics company Swift Services and in 1995 the German industrial logistics company Wohlfarth. The decision was made to continue converting Salvesen into a logistics company, so in September 1997 the subsidiary Aggreko was spun off in order to be listed on the stock exchange. Since the mid-1990s there have been plans by several companies to take over Salvesen, but none of them have been completed. On October 2, 2007, Salvesen finally accepted a takeover offer from French competitor Norbert Dentressangle , who acquired the traditional British company in December 2007 for £ 254 million. Before the takeover, the company had 200 locations in Europe with around 400,000 m² of storage space and operated around 5,000 trucks and 6,000 trailers. Salvesen employed about 13,000 people.
Web links
- Entry on The Ships List (English)