Greece’s Coral Shipping has wrapped up an unusually active year on the sale-and-purchase front by buying a nine-year-old tanker.

Market sources in Athens identified the John Kilakos-led company as the new owner of the 46,000-dwt Nord Sakura (built 2012). Coral, which declined to comment, bought the Shin Kurushima Dockyard-built ship from Japanese interests for $16.35m.

This was the company’s first ship purchase since October last year, when it pounced on another MR tanker. It bought the 47,300-dwt Butterfly (built 2005) from Greek peer Samos Steamship for about $11.2m, before renaming it Explorer II.

Sandwiched between those two acquisitions were three well-timed sales that saw Coral offload some of its oldest units in remarkable asset plays.

Asset plays

TradeWinds reported in March how the low-profile company sold the 113,000-dwt Aquanaut (renamed Shawna, built 2003) to Μiddle Eastern interests for $16.7m.

The price it fetched was far above the $10.7m that Coral spent to buy the ship in 2018 from Germany’s Hansa Treuhand.

It has now emerged that Coral pulled off a similar asset play with the 113,800-dwt Celestial (built 2003), an aframax sistership to the Aquanaut, which Coral bought from Hansa two years ago for about $9.3m.

The Celestial had an estimated market value of about $12.5m at the time Coral flipped it in the summer. The ship is now trading as Shanaye Queen, under the management of United Arab Emirates-based Eminence Shipping.

Coral offloaded yet another ship this summer — the 48,000-dwt MR tanker Adventurous (built 2004). The ship went to unidentified interests, possibly in Malaysia.

The vessel, which is now trading as Amelie, had a market value of about $9m at the time it was sold. This is not far below the $9.8m that Coral reportedly bought it for in 2017.

Latest acquisition

This flurry of S&P activity has lowered the average age of Coral’s fleet, which is still a considerably high 17 years.

The Nord Sakura becomes the youngest unit in Coral's fleet of 14 ships that includes several tanker types, from small clean product carriers to panamax crude carriers.

However, the overall thrust of Coral's S&P activity has been to expand its fleet. Since July 2017, the company has bought nine tankers and sold four.

Coral was founded in 1998. In addition to ships, the company has been managing a petroleum products shore storage facility in Oman since 2007.