Navios Maritime Partners chief executive Angeliki Frangou said she was pleased with the bulker owner's latest financial result but said the Wuhan coronavirus makes it impossible to guess where the market will be heading this year.
New York-listed Navios Partners reported adjusted profit of $12.2m in the fourth quarter, up from $5.1m in the same period in the previous year.
Dry bulk markets fell again on Monday, with the benchmark Baltic Dry Index down four points to 411, as the capesize index further into negative territory, down 20 at minus 254.
The Baltic Panamax Index rose five to 546 points.
Navios' result, however, excludes impairment losses of $71.9m that pushed the company's bottom line into a net loss of $62.9m for the quarter, reversing a $517,000 profit from a year earlier.
About $29m of those losses was due to a vessel the company didn’t identify. Navios Partners attributed the remaining $43m to the company’s investment in boxship outfit Navios Maritime Containers.
The impairments helped push the full-year result to a $62.1m loss, deeper than the $13.1m in red ink in 2018.
Revenue in the fourth quarter climbed by 6.5% year-on-year to $61.3m. The company maintained its cash distribution unchanged from the previous quarter at $0.30 per unit.
Looking forward, Frangou said she couldn’t make any statement about where the dry bulk market is currently heading.
“The dry bulk market has been adversely affected by the Chinese New Year and the fear and uncertainty caused by the global coronavirus outbreak,” she said. “Because the situation is too fluid, we are unable to provide any meaningful indication of the effect on our 2020 activity, but we are closely monitoring the events,” Frangou added.
Athens-based Navios Maritime Partners expanded its fleet operating at the end of last year to 46 vessels, up from 37 at the end of 2018. The company acquired five containerships and six bulkers in the last quarter of 2019.
The boxships were part of Navios Europe, a private Frangou entity that the Greek owner liquidated late last year. Navios Partners may resell those five containerships on the second-hand market, since it does not consider them as "strategic to the company," Frangou told analysts in a conference call.
Another entity affiliated with Frangou sold four bulkers to Navios Maritime Partners at about the same time for $37m. The company didn’t identify the quartet. Its description, however, matches the vessels TradeWinds reported in December as sold by Irika Shipping, a company headed by Frangou’s brother John, in a distressed deal to US hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital.
