Germany’s Peter Dohle Schiffahrts has emerged as the seller of four high-reefer panamax boxships to New York-listed Global Ship Lease (GSL).
The UK-managed boxship owner is paying $148m for the vessels on the back of a three-year charter to AP Moller-Maersk.
The vessels are the 5,470-teu Blandine, Bernadette (both built 2009), Barbara and Balbina (both built 2010), market sources confirmed.
They are currently on charter to three different liner operators: Feedertech, Ocean Network Express and X-Press Feeders.
The ships are expected to be delivered to the new owner and operator in the third quarter.
Attractive price
GSL is paying around $37m per vessel, which is a significant discount to the charter-free value of more than $51m, according to VesselsValue estimates.
That led Clarksons Platou Securities to raise its target price for GSL stock from $30 to $40 per share.
The investment bank said the deal "indicates another well-timed acquisition, as containership values have pushed up strongly in the past few weeks".
Maersk is expected to deploy the vessels on reefer-intensive routes.
The Venus 5300 designs have a high reefer capacity, with 1,200 reefer plugs, instead of the 500 usually found on modern ships of this size.
The ships were built at Zhejiang Ouhua Shipbuilding for German owner Hermann Buss, which ordered them for a high price of $70m.
Maersk has an option of chartering the vessels for a further three years after the initial charter expires.
Second deal with Maersk
The deal marks the second significant transaction between GSL and Maersk this year.
In February, they struck a leaseback deal for seven 6,000-teu boxships that were acquired for $116m and will be chartered back to Maersk for three to five years.
They are the 6,008-teu ER Felixstowe, ER London, ER Berlin (all built 2000), ER Canada and ER France, and 5,992-teu ER Kobe and ER Los Angeles (all built 2001).
Earlier in June, London-based GSL acquired a dozen containerships from the fleet of Borealis Finance in a $233.9m deal.
The vessels have an average size of around 3,000 teu and come with outstanding charters of between three and 25 months.
GSL owns 49 containerships, ranging from 2,207 teu to 11,040 teu. That will grow to 66 once all planned purchases are delivered.
