HLPFI meets: Lars Bonnesen

I am an hour early and I pull into a layby just shy of Naestved, Denmark, and settle down to while away some time. But no sooner had I found the podcast I was looking for when Lars Bonnesen calls to see how my journey up from Hamburg is progressing. “I have arrived a bit early Lars so I’m killing some time. I don’t want to intrude”. “Rubbish’” he says – “stay there, I will come and get you.” Moments later a flame red Ferrari arrives, and I am greeted by a smiling Lars who offers his apologies for the car being so dirty. “Looks to me that it has been well driven,” I say, “isn’t that why you have it?” And then he is off like a whippet and I am left behind in 2 tonnes of diesel SUV gamely trying to keep up.

We roll into his driveway 10 minutes later, an unfinished gravel track that leads up to a series of farm buildings. A 130 ha farm is where Lars calls home. Spring barley is growing in nearby fields and a tractor a short way off is tilling and sending up clouds of dust. The orchard is in blossom and ducks contentedly paddle around the pond. It is the personification of farm life. 

Country life 

“I like to be in the fields,” he says. “It is very tangible. If you spend 2 hours in the tractor you can see what you have been doing.” This is offered as a contrast to shipping where there is almost no lasting physical imprint of one’s efforts. 

“I bought this farm after having been looking for more than 10 years. It was a childhood dream to own a farm, but I have no idea where the dream came from. I get my eggs from down the road, and I pay for them in grain for the chickens. 

“The farm at the top of the road has 3 ha of grassland that has to be cut for the government subsidy. The owner is a vet, and she has no time. So, I cut her grass and she vaccinates my dogs. We are all trading something with each other.”

We go into the Hunting Shack – a couple of out-buildings that are adorned with hunting trophies, photos and memorabilia. This is where Lars works, accompanied by two enormous Hungarian Vizslas. As we sit and mull on our coffee for a while, I look out over the fields and hear only nature’s silence. I sense this could be what Hygge is (a widely used Danish word that does not have a real meaning but is used to express a feeling of cosiness and  contentment). When I ask him later what more he wants from life he answers: “I like it like this. I want more of the same.” But ‘this’ has not come easily, he says with an edge. “I have a lot of scars on my back from a career in shipping.”

Born in Korsør, Denmark in 1969, Lars, together with his two older siblings, was raised by his late father Ole Peter Bonnesen. By his own admission Lars was a hopeless student. “I played football more than I studied.”

Island origins

Ole was from a small island near Skaw where expectations of him were of becoming a farmer or a fisherman. He wanted neither and joined the merchant navy as a deck hand on the DFDS liner service between Europe and the Far East at a time when cargoes could have been anything – wet/dry – bulk/breakbulk. He stayed with it until his late 20s, and then for the rest of his career serviced the public on the Korsør ferry. 

“My father had hoped that my brother would follow him to the sea, but my brother didn’t want that and instead went off to become a technician with Siemens.” 

On leaving school and quite by chance, Lars landed an apprenticeship with the J. Poulsen shipping company in Korsør, which got him started in the shipping business. Soon after he turned down a place with SAL Heavy Lift in Hamburg. “Everyone was heading to Germany and I wanted something else. I dreamed of the USA, Singapore… Marseille. Don’t ask me why Marseille. I have no idea. It is a weird thing.” 

“Everyone was heading to Germany and I wanted something else. I dreamed of the USA, Singapore… Marseille. Don’t ask me why Marseille. I have no idea.”
– Lars Bonnesen, UHL

Broking desk 

Instead, he headed off to Mobile, Alabama, together with his girlfriend to start with a small family agency called Stiegler Shipping – who still seem to be around today. They wanted to start a broking desk but had little more to offer than two files– positions and cargoes. The positions files were not much use so instead he got onto the phone as by now he had connections with Danish shipping companies that were operating vessels in the Caribbean region. This brought him into early contact with the venerable Svend Andersen of BBC Chartering renown and now the ceo at the new incarnation of Intermarine – who at the time had his own shipping company, Queen Shipping. “We fixed a lot of 2,000 to 4,000 tonners, 30-50-tonne derricks, in and around the Caribbean and that is how I got my start in chartering.” 

But in 1993 aged 24, and finally arriving in Singapore, life changed forever. Having accepted a job with Lars Juhl at Elite Shipping’s Singapore agent’s office, a clash between Elite and Juhl resulted in Juhl resigning. Lars had yet to take up his place so instead, together with Nortrans and TP Shipping, the two Lars’ founded what became one of the biggest success stories in breakbulk shipping in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Scan-Trans.

The business plan was pure broking. Vessel owners did not have offices all over the world as they do now. The whole industry was smaller, and Scan-Trans was perfectly positioned. Vessels arriving in the region needed backhauls and this was where they could start to make their mark.

“One day we were called to attend a meeting with JGC in Japan to whom we had offered some rates for cargoes from China to South Asia and they wanted to book. We knew how to calculate but we didn’t have any ships. So, they said to us ‘go and find the ships’. With the support of our main shareholder, we took some ships on time charter trip (TCT) and that is how we got into operating,” said Lars.

Hard work and a supportive market helped the company to grow quickly. By 2007, it had close to 20 offices worldwide – including Marseille – and upward of 30 vessels on charter.

“We had taken an earlier decision to sell the company” – he tells me – “to a Danish investment house. Everything was agreed.” And then came the global financial crisis. “We had had a good 2008 but I came into the office on January 2, 2009, and the market was collapsing. The buyers wanted to see the projections for the first quarter 2009. Once they saw them the offer was halved, so we decided not to sell.”

Setbacks

This left them with a problem. The market was in chaos, and with nearly 30 ships on charter at top-of-the-market rates, the outlook was ominous and eventually it took its toll. During a phone call Lars Juhl suffered a stroke. He was 43 years old and although he recovered well enough to return several months later, he decided he had had enough. So, they decided to see whether they could find a buyer. 

Juhl recounts these moments and the life leading up to it in his brutally honest 2015 memoir I’m Lars Juhl and I Fucked Up My Life (translated from Danish). The title alone points to the naked sincerity found between its covers. I suggest to Lars that there is little point in writing a memoir if it is not an honest account. “Yeah, but sometimes I think too much honesty is not always helpful,” he says.

Lunch arrives. A typical Danish Smørrebrød selection – rye bread with cold cut toppings of paté, egg, fish and liver sausage. We segue into the subject of hobbies while we are eating, and I am surprised to learn Lars is a competitive table tennis player as well as playing in two veterans’ football teams – “I play the matches but never train.”

They are activities that help him disconnect. “I used to do triathlon, but with the swimming and the cycling I could never switch off. When I step over the white line of the football pitch, I am in the game and it is the same thing with table tennis.”

I mention that I recall reading somewhere that Scan-Trans once had a ship hijacked off the Somali coast. “True,” he says. “We were not going to Somalia, just passing when we were boarded by pirates and taken to an anchorage at Eyl. It was scary for everybody.

”Fortunately, we had ransom insurance, and the insurance company sent a negotiator, an ex-SAS officer, and we had to pay USD1 million cash to get the ship and crew back. But getting USD1 million in cash to the ship was a real problem. We eventually found an old tugboat captain – you cannot make this up – who with his little tugboat was willing to sail the five days from Mombasa to the ship and hand over the money. He got USD500,000 for his trouble and I won’t tell you how we got the money to Mombasa, but that was really crazy.”

“I remember going to a company function and I was used to everyone talking to me and me talking to everyone. But no one talked to me. It was as if everyone knew what was going on except me.”

Scan-Trans sale

Scan-Trans was sold to Intermarine in 2012, which at the time was a US-flag shipping company. Acquiring Scan-Trans gave Intermarine an international footprint and Lars continued as a director. But carrying too much debt through the winter years of MPP’s great recession forced Intermarine into Chapter 11 insolvency, only to be bailed out in 2018 by the new kid on the block, Zeamarine, at which Lars survived a month.

“I remember going to a company function and I was used to everyone talking to me and me talking to everyone. But no one talked to me. It was as if everyone knew what was going on except me.” 

Offered the role of key account manager, it was a technical firing.

Only a month earlier, the 25th anniversary of Scan-Trans had passed by and now he had been forced out. As a silence passed between us, the pain of it was still very evident.

Implosion

Then, in 2020, Zeamarine imploded. “I had no idea what I was going to do. I was not ready for it all to end. But out of nowhere Lars Rolner calls me and asks me to come to Hamburg – which I did. I was offered a role with UHL, but instead I asked to become a shareholder which Lars eventually agreed to. I paid a good price for the shares.” In April 2019, when Lars joined UHL, the company had five vessels on commercial management but the collapse of Zeamarine opened up an opportunity to acquire the nine-vessel F-900 fleet. Deftly and not without considerable risk, UHL succeeded. Today, there are 19 x F-900s in the UHL fleet and they are the most modern and fuel efficient MPP/heavy lift ships in the world.

So how does Lars Bonnesen see the future, I ask? “Change is inevitable,” he says. Like many companies that have pivoted away from being seen as service providers to the oil and gas industry, Lars sees UHL as an energy transport company. “Nearly 50 percent of all the cargoes we carry are related to renewables and alternative power and this is going to grow in the coming years. Only last week a customer asked us how much capacity they could secure from us in the future. It was not a question of price. They know a big bottleneck is coming.”

The question could well be asked that if the future market looks so good, why are more ships not being built? According to Lars the answer is less ‘why’ and more ‘where.’

“Every year we have a meeting to evaluate the risks in the company and how to be prepared in case the worst should happen. For instance we expect to have to be far more alert in future of the consequences a fast changing geopolitical landscape could have on where we source ship finance.” 

The cost of building new ships in China remains lower than elsewhere but with yards full of containerships and tankers, they have little appetite for fussy MPPs. So, the problem remains, where in the world can an owner build ships that offers yard access at a low enough price together with a financial framework that is attractive to a volatile industry like MPP? The search is on.

“Only last week a customer asked us how much capacity they could secure from us in the future. It was not a question of price. They know a big bottleneck is coming.”

Family matters

I ask about his daughters, of which I know he has two with his former wife. Both are in Copenhagen. The elder is an accountant and the younger training to become a lawyer. “They are both developing useful skills for your business,” I suggest. As well as the farm, Lars has a property portfolio and building developments under way, all in the Naestved area. “That is the plan,” he says. “Both daughters will likely come into the business when they are ready. But it has to be their choice. I think they are willing.”

We have missed the Teams meeting Lars was scheduled to have by more than an hour. But when you have Hygge, time does not seem to matter.