Greece’s Diligent Holdings was one of few buyers in the secondhand market for dry bulk ships last week, in a deal that is indicative of a drop in values following the slump in freight rates for such vessels.
Market sources have named rapidly expanding Diligent as the buyer of the 55,600-dwt Triton Valk (built 2009) for $11.25m. The vessel is understood to have been sold by its previous owner, Triton Navigation, for prompt delivery.
The price at which the Mitsui-built ship changed hands is far less than the $13.1m it was reportedly fetching in a deal at the end of May last year, but which ultimately failed.
The price gap between now and then is characteristic of the sour mood in which the sale-and-purchase market currently finds itself in for such ships.
Some weekly broker reports released on 31 January featured the Triton Valk deal as the only bulker transaction concluded last week.
Weak earnings
“The extremely weak bulk carrier earnings environment in recent weeks has unsurprisingly been putting a large amount of downward pressure on bulk carrier values,” Clarksons reported.
“Buyers who are willing to move forward are doing so with caution and only at levels well below the last-done. However, in many cases the sellers are unwilling to follow suit and [are] subsequently withdrawing,” the London-based brokerage added.
Diligent and Triton seem to have been among the few parties to have actually gone forward with a deal.
Diligent managers declined to comment on the reported purchase of the Triton Valk.
However, a deal would be very much in line with the company's recent moves.
Athens-based Diligent has been a keen and consistent buyer of supramaxes. Led by Dimitris Michalos and believed to include members of the Kefalas family as principals, Diligent has acquired eight such ships since the autumn of 2018. If confirmed, the Triton Valk would be the ninth.
Triton, on the other hand, has been a consistent seller. The Triton Valk would be the second supramax that the company — a Netherlands-based subsidiary of Japan’s Sumitomo Corp — has sold this year, following the 55,700-dwt Nord Fuji (built 2011), which reportedly went to Taylor Maritime for $13.3m.
The company sold another four vessels between October 2018 and June 2019: two supramaxes and two panamaxes.
Triton executives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Another bulker seller was Slovenia’s Splosna Plovba. The company is said to have offloaded the Chinese-built, 53,600-dwt Novo Mesto (built 2005) to unidentified Indonesian buyers for $6.3m.
Vietnamese interests are rumoured to have been behind the purchase of a Splosna supramax sold in mid-January: the 53,100-dwt Nova Gorica (built 2008), also built in China, which fetched about $8m.
Splosna, a company set up in communist Yugoslavia in the 1950s, circulated both vessels for sale in December last year.
Its managers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Nova Mesto and Nova Gorica apart, Splosna manages four supramax, two ultramax and two handysize bulkers.
