Esbjerg-based Danish transport and logistics group founded in 1972, today with more than 80 offices and 2,500 employees worldwide. Its Portuguese subsidiary, BWS Portugal Unipessoal Lda, has operated from Lisbon and Leixões since 2015, marked its tenth anniversary in March 2025 with a team of 26, and has grown from sea-freight exports into air freight, cruise logistics and project cargo under Director Portugal and Spain Hélio Esteves.
Blue Water Shipping is a family-founded Danish forwarder from the North Sea port of Esbjerg whose business areas run from road, sea and air freight through port services, reefer logistics and marine logistics to a large oil, gas, projects and renewables practice built on Denmark’s offshore-wind industry. It opened in Portugal in 2015 with offices in Lisbon and at the port of Leixões, trading through BWS Portugal Unipessoal Lda, which the group lists as its country head office. The Lisbon office sits in the Edifício Mar Vermelho on Avenida D. João II in Parque das Nações; the Leixões office serves the northern export base around Porto.
When the two offices marked ten years in business in March 2025, the company said the Portuguese operation had expanded from an initial focus on sea-freight exports into air freight, cruise logistics, project cargo and end-to-end supply-chain work, with a team of 26 under Hélio Esteves, Director of Blue Water Portugal and Spain. The example it chose to illustrate the network effect was a solar-energy project won by the Portuguese team for an Australian client: a ten-month contract in which ten vessels were chartered from Leixões to Houston to load torque tubes, coordinated between Blue Water teams in Portugal, Australia, Houston and Denmark. The anniversary was marked with a DKK 20,000 donation from the Blue Water Foundation to O Nosso Milagre, a Portuguese charity supporting children with disabilities.
Blue Water is the kind of mid-sized Nordic operator that rarely makes headlines but carries a lot of the corridor’s physical trade: a Danish forwarder with a decade-old Portuguese subsidiary at the country’s two main ports, growing in exactly the segments — project cargo and renewables logistics — where Portugal’s solar build-out and Nordic developers such as Eurowind Energy and Vestas intersect. For Portuguese exporters it is one of the few Nordic-owned forwarders with local staff in both Lisbon and Porto.
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