Singapore’s Sentosa Ship Brokers has continued its international expansion with plans to open a new office in Geneva.

The two-year-old broking shop has recruited Will Hermon, previously a director and head of clean tankers at Clarksons Singapore, to oversee the clean desk in the Swiss shipping hub.

“Unlike many other markets in Europe we feel Geneva is under-broked given the scale of the tanker chartering market there,” Sentosa Ship Broker managing director Miles Wright told TradeWinds.

“We have many existing clients based in Geneva and of course aim to expand that client base as well as we start to have more focus and coverage of the West of Suez tanker markets on clean, dirty and projects.”

Wright said the plan is to have an office up and running in Geneva by the end of this year or early 2021, with the intention to have two clean brokers and two on dirty within the first half of next year.

“We are in active discussions with other brokers to join him [Hermon], focusing again on our core business of the clean, dirty and projects markets,” Wright said.

Hermon began his career in London at ACM about 15 years ago, before spending 12 years in Singapore working for Clarksons.

“Will has spent the last two years running a family business in Zululand, South Africa,” Wright said.

Will missed the fast pace environment of spot tanker broking and is very much looking forward to returning to a very different kind of 'jungle'

Miles Wright

“As appealing as that may seem to most of us, particularly at the moment, Will missed the fast-paced environment of spot tanker broking and is very much looking forward to returning...

“We heard he was looking to get back into broking and, having known him personally for many years, he was the obvious and ideal person to set up an office for us in the West.”

Geneva will be the location of Sentosa’s second overseas office and follows the announcement last month that it was setting up shop in India.

The company recruited Sanjay Mathur, the former head of shipping at Indian Oil Corp, to take charge of the operation in New Delhi.

On how the company intends to differentiate itself in an already competitive market in Geneva, Wright said adding value is “integral to what we do, and we pride ourselves in offering a certain level of service”.

“We will have very close working relationships between our desks in Singapore, New Delhi and Geneva with a constant flow of information which will benefit clients across all regions we cover,” he said.

Sentosa, which started in 2018, has since grown to a staff in Singapore of 24 including eight clean tanker brokers, one small tanker broker and four dirty tanker brokers.

On the current market situation, Wright said news of a Covid-19 vaccine alone has “no direct impact on demand or freight rates and middle distillate arbs to the West remain firmly closed”.

“For the freight market, the vaccine actually needs to be administered and for travel and work to reach some sort of normality before we'll see any significant improvement,” he said.

“Even then, from a products perspective, inventories on both land and floating storage are so high that it will take some time for the excess supply to clear out, but we remain confident in 2021 as a whole for shipping, particularly in the second half.”