People usually bristle at being called opportunists. In shipping, however, it is the name of the game — especially this year, when markets are clear as mud amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Hardly a conference call or webinar goes by without a shipowner, maritime executive or analyst extolling the virtues of an opportunistic approach as the best tactic to cope with spreading Covid-19, wildly swinging freight rates and declining asset values.

“Chasing periodical opportunities and minimising risks [are] key aspects for a successful business model under the current market regime,” Thomas Chasapis, an analyst at Allied Shipping Research, wrote in a note late last month.

That is a playbook Greek shipowners practically invented — and they are at it again.

High-stakes move

The most eye-popping countercyclical move in the best Greek tradition recently came from Marios Iliopoulos, who is the owner of ferry company Seajets.

Shrugging off his own exposure to a revenue slump that Covid-19 has inflicted on passenger shipping, Iliopoulos bought four cruiseships from Carnival Corp, a company hit far worse by the crisis.

The 77,500-gt Oceana (renamed Queen of the Oceans, built 2000), 57,100-gt Veendam (renamed Aegean Majesty, built 1996) and 55,600-gt Maasdam (renamed Aegean Myth, built 1993) are currently all moored in Greece. The 55,900-gt Pacific Aria (built 1994) is nearby in Cyprus.

The price at which the quartet changed hands has not been revealed — and given how illiquid and opaque the market is for such ships, it is difficult to gauge the financial size of Iliopoulos’ gamble.

However, it is beyond question that the Greek owner’s upside stands to be huge if the cruise industry were to return to normal anytime soon.

The four ships he bought had a combined worth of more than half a billion dollars last year. Iliopoulos may have purchased them for less than a tenth of that price.

Iliopoulos is expected to sit on the vessels and flip them as soon as an asset play window opens.

Korean love story

Greek owners have staked even bigger sums in the crude tanker business.

Notwithstanding any concerns about the long-term prospect of fossil fuels amid tighter environmental regulations, Greek owners did not hesitate to strike when struggling Far Eastern shipbuilders lowered their prices to attract orders.

Between May and September, players such as Evangelos Pistiolis, Ioannis Alafouzos, Nikolas Tsakos and Anna Angelicoussis regaled yards in South Korea and China with orders for aframaxes, suezmaxes and VLCCs totalling more than $1.5bn.

"We're ordering ships when nobody else wants to — that's when you get the best deals," Pistiolis, who was one of the first Greek owners to move, told TradeWinds in May when asked to comment on his timing.

Low shipbuilding prices are not the only sure sign of where the balance of power lies between yards and owners.

South Korean managers made long and inconvenient trips to Athens to steer some of those deals to a fruitful conclusion.

Seung-Yong Park, chief operating officer of Hyundai Heavy Industries, personally flew to the Greek capital at the end of September to sign contracts.

Scrubber deals

It was Park’s first trip out of South Korea since its Covid-19 lockdown and the HHI manager enlisted government support to obtain a special travel permit.

Several of those deals were for scrubber-equipped ships, in a sign that the enthusiasm of owners committed to the technology has not cooled, despite a narrowing spread between the price of high-sulphur and low-sulphur bunkers, which also narrows the profitability of scrubbers.

No single issue has divided the Greek shipping community as deeply, and sometimes as bitterly, as scrubbers. The jury is still out on whether the investment was worthwhile.

Big listed owners such as Alafouzos and Pistiolis argue that scrubbers still make financial sense — even at the current fuel spreads, which they expect to widen again.