Hansa Heavy Lift · Shipping
Treasury built from zero for a newly founded heavy lift shipping company
Controlling, Treasury and Financing
- 20
- heavy lift vessels in fleet financing
- 12
- newbuilding projects controlled simultaneously
- Starting point
- Hansa Heavy Lift emerged from the insolvency of the Beluga Group, at the time one of Germany’s largest heavy lift shipping companies. The successor company needed a treasury function immediately: 20 heavy lift vessels under active financing, twelve newbuilding projects running simultaneously, and banking relationships, liquidity structures, and hedging all still had to be established. There was no existing infrastructure to build on.
- Approach
- I built the complete treasury function: banking structure and cash pooling, liquidity management across the fleet, an FX hedging strategy for charter revenues, and bunker hedging against fuel price risk. In parallel, I managed the refinancing of the 20 vessels and took over project controlling for the twelve newbuildings: costs, milestones, and financing drawdowns against construction progress.
- Result
- A functioning treasury department, built from the ground up, documented, and handed over to the line organization.
“He built our entire treasury infrastructure from scratch — fast, professional, and exactly what a company in our situation needed.”
Senior Management, Hansa Heavy Lift
What I take away from it
Shipping treasury is not standard treasury. It sits at the intersection of commodity markets, currency markets, and long-term project finance, all at once. Bunker prices move independently of charter rates, revenues often come in US dollars while costs are incurred in euros, and vessel financing involves structures that rarely appear in other industries.
Building a function like this from nothing requires technical depth in treasury and financial modeling combined with genuine understanding of the sector. Thinking in terms of liquidity under uncertain cash flows is part of my work on Planning and Liquidity today.