Sinokor Merchant Marine is actively looking for scrap offers for two of its older feeder container ships, brokers say.
The 834-teu Sinokor Qingdao (built 1999) and 1,129-teu Sinokor Hongkong (built 1996) were being widely circulated among specialist recycling brokers this week.
They are among 10 feeder container ships dating from the late 1990s in Sinokor’s owned fleet. Four others were sold for recycling in the second half of 2023.
The availability of the pair on the demolition market came just days after the South Korean shipowner clinched a hefty $600 per ldt, or $4.18m, for its 1,512-teu Sawasdee Singapore (built 1995) from a recycling facility in Bangladesh.
However, brokers cautioned at the time that the sale should not be taken as a new benchmark price for container tonnage, as there were some exceptional factors, including a significant quantity of bunkers remaining on the vessel.
The brokers believed that $550 per ldt was a more realistic pricing level for container ships being sold to Bangladesh, which has acquired most of the feeder container tonnage sold for recycling in deals that did not specify that the ships go to Hong Kong Convention-certified yards.
The pace of container ship recycling has slowed since the beginning of the year. VesselValue data shows that only 15 have been sold this year, compared with 29 in the first four months of 2023.
Nine of this year’s tally were sold to Bangladesh, with India acquiring six.
