Greek bulker player Gourdomichalis Maritime has revealed its first acquisition in the sale-and-purchase market in three years.
The Piraeus-based company bought the 58,700-dwt supramax Easter N (renamed Kavo Perdika, built 2013) from Japanese interests in January this year, at a price of about $15m. The ship has entered its fleet as the Kavo Perdika.
Delivery took place last week in Japan, where ship handovers are not marred by the usual Covid-19-related problems that currently dog such transactions in other parts of the world.
The Kawasaki Heavy Industries-built N Easter has become the youngest ship in Gourdomichalis Maritime’s fleet, which consists of three supramaxes and as many panamaxes.
The Baltic sub-indices for such ships are about 30% lower year-on-year. However, that has left a senior company executive unruffled.
Long-term player
“We’re not here for one, three or six months – this crisis will blow over at some point,” he told TradeWinds. “The Kavo Perdika has at least five to 10 years of trading ahead of it,” the executive added.
Gourdomichalis Maritime is led by chief executive Theodore Triphyllis. The company was set up in 1968 by Stathis Gourdomichalis, a former president of the Union of Greek Shipowners (UGS) who died in 2006.
For more than 30 years, the company has been putting the prefix "Kavo" — the Greek seafarers' term for “cape” — in front of its ships' names.
Gourdomichalis Maritime's last deal in the S&P market took place in July last year, when the company sold a much older vessel — the 76,800-dwt Kavo Manali (built 2004) — to Greek peer Niriis Shipping for about $8.7m. It was its first ship sale in 11 years.
TradeWinds reported at the time that Gourdomichalis Maritime was not in a hurry to replace the Kavo Manali, first giving careful consideration to which type of vessel it wanted to invest in and at what price.
The Easter N, the ship the company ultimately went for, had attracted interest from rivals as well.
“We see some decent value in these well-built, fuel-efficient Japanese supramaxes at the moment,” said one executive at a suitor.
