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Johan Nurminen started the family
company’s long business tradition by
founding a general store in the town of Rauma in
1886. The shop’s goods also included
timber and chandlery. The company gradually
expanded into the shipping and forwarding
business. Uljas, the first ship owned by the
company, was built in 1891.
As operations reached an international level,
the head office was relocated from Rauma to
Helsinki. The company’s shipping business
was at its height in the late 1950s, after which
the importance of the shipping business
diminished and resources were concentrated into
international forwarding and transports.
In 1964, John Nurminen started operations at the
Helsinki airport, thus becoming the first
company in Finland to provide air freight
forwarding. Around the same time, the company
built the first warehouse of its own in
Helsinki’s West Harbour. In 1967, the last
of John Nurminen’s ships, Pirkko Nurminen
and Inkeri Nurminen, were sold.
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Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the company
increased its presence in international
forwarding. In 1995, John Nurminen gradually
started abandoning traditional forwarding and
focusing on special logistics. In the beginning
of the 2000s, the company grew through
acquisitions in the Baltic Sea area.
MatkaKaleva, which used to be Finland's
largest private business travel agency, was also
for a long time part of the John Nurminen group.
MatkaKaleva's business operations were sold
in 2001.
On 1 January 2008, John Nurminen Oy demerged
into two companies, Nurminen Logistics Oyj and
the newly-founded company John Nurminen Oy.
Among the business units of the former John
Nurminen company, rail services, cargo handling
and value-added services, customs clearance
services, special and heavy transports and
healthcare logistics were transferred into
Nurminen Logistics, which went public on the
NASDAQ OMX Helsinki on 1 January 2008.
John Nurminen continues to take advantage of its
long business history and entrepreneur-oriented
values both in the management of its
subsidiaries and its private equity investment
activities.
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Barquentine Uljas, the first ship owned
by John Nurminen
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