Danish bunker company Endofa is winding down more business activities and will concentrate on niche businesses going forward, says founder of the company, Kenn Søndergaard, who owns Endofa with his wife Maria Therese Lysgaard Søndergaard, in a brief comment to ShippingWatch.

Meanwhile, Copenhagen is no longer listed as an international office of the group on the company's website which reopened after being shut down this weekend.

In 2015, Copenhagen was established with a new Danish-registered company as the group's new HQ after multiple tough years of losses. One issue was a trust problem that impacted the entire international bunker industry after the dramatic collapse and bankruptcy of OW Bunker in November 2014.

Two executives from Endofa, CFO Torben Okkels and head of the company's office in Dubai, Mads Uldall Brogaard, both confirmed last Friday to ShippingWatch that they had left Endofa. The same is true of an unknown number of other employees.

In 2015, Okkels was recruited as CFO to clean up the company's economy, risk management and accounting, and he also headed a turnaround at the bunker firm. 2016 become the first year since Endofa's foundation in 2012-2013 that the firm booked a profit.

Niche businesses

"It's true that we've said goodbye to several people and that going forward in a more simple setup, Endofa plans to operated selected niche businesses which include Central America, France and some ports in West Africa," Søndergaard writes in an email to ShippingWatch:

"Our back-to-back business and large-scale [trading, -ed.] activities have thus been shut down as part of a process that we started earlier last year," Søndergaard adds. He had no further comment on the radical overhaul of the bunker business.

According to the new information on the Endofa website, the company will just have two offices going forward, one in Boston in the northeastern US, and one office in the southern French city Nice, from where the bunker activities will be operated.

The described activities on Endofa's updated website include physical bunker supplies at ports including in Nigeria, Ghana and Angola in West Africa and several ports in Central America as well as in Romania and Nice.

In connection with the plans for a Danish headquarters instead of Dubai, Søndergaard explained at the time that the company wanted more transparency and thus a better foundation for banks and other creditors to assess the businesses.

Søndergaard has operated the agent and broker company STL Shipping & Trading from Houston for several years.

English Edit: Gretchen Deverell Pedersen

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