Andrian “Andy” Dacy has seen the worst and best of shipping markets from the perspective of a lender, an investment banker and a private equity investor in a 32-year career.

He entered shipping as a lender with the old Manufacturers Hanover in 1988 at the tail end of a market crash. “It was like parachuting into the aftermath of a hurricane — the sun was coming out but there was wreckage all around,” he tells TW+.

Thirty@30 Years: about this series

This story is one of 30 profiles in a special edition of our TW+ magazine.

To celebrate TradeWinds’ 30th birthday, TW+ is not looking back, but forward, with a Thirty@30 focus on the important people and issues extending out to 2050.

TradeWinds reporters have profiled 30 personalities who have shown traits that we think mean they will influence the directions the shipping industry takes, maybe not quite as far forward as the next 30 years, but certainly over the next decade.

Read all the profiles when TW+ is published on 16 October.

Dacy, 53, led JP Morgan’s investment banking efforts from 2003 to 2008 in the biggest shipping “super cycle” of modern times, when “banks were throwing money at shipowners” who, of course, couldn’t resist taking it and building vessels.

And for the past 11 years, in markets generally between those extremes, he has proved himself an adept investor in buying and selling vessels for JP Morgan and clients as the London-based chief executive of the bank’s Asset Management Global Transportation Group.

With that platform, Dacy’s generally positive assessment of current shipping market fundamentals carries weight.

“We’re at an interesting and potentially attractive point in the cycle, coming off 10 years of working through a heavy orderbook overhang that was near 60% [of the fleet] in 2008 but has reduced to 8% today,” he tells TW+.

“You’ve seen capital availability decrease significantly over the last 10 years. It should prevent much of the over-ordering we saw in the past. The market is much more balanced from a supply-demand perspective and should remain tighter for the foreseeable future.”

Dacy refers not only to the pullback of traditional ship lenders, but also the growing selectivity of Chinese lessors and the hesitance of shipowners to commit significant capital to newbuildings, given uncertainty over future environmentally oriented propulsion systems.

In his 11 years as an asset manager, Dacy has endeavoured to design transactions that will allow JP Morgan and clients to see returns, no matter what turns the market might make. He describes the key components: don’t overpay for assets, keep leverage low and arrange charter employment with high-quality counterparties.

“We may not be generating 20% private-equity style returns, but the low leverage allows us to weather any turn the industry may provide. One can make a return no matter the conditions.”

Shell LNG carriers

Dacy is limited in his willingness to discuss specific deals, including some that have been widely reported. However, he does address JP Morgan’s newbuilding project with Shell for LNG carriers.

As TradeWinds has reported, Shell will employ two 171,000-cbm LNG units that JP Morgan interests have under construction at Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea. JP Morgan is also said to be backing two similar newbuildings at Samsung Heavy Industries, due for delivery in 2022.

Dacy says the project takes into account not just JP Morgan’s investing fundamentals but also the growing environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives that he has hailed in public speaking appearances as an integral part of shipping’s future.

“We spent time with Shell working to design a vessel that would limit the carbon footprint, meet our collective ESG goals and to be built with employment attached,” he says.

“It’s a more conservative and ESG-transition-focused approach, and a big-ticket approach. We think it’s an interesting place to combine all of these elements and put capital to work.”

Yet Dacy also demonstrated his versatility and the flexibility of JP Morgan’s platform when he pounced on 18 secondhand bulkers during the dry-market downturn of 2016-2017 before flipping them for large profits. The buys came through JP Morgan’s $500m Global Maritime Investment Fund.

“It’s more of an adjunct strategy,” he says. “In 2016 the prices were so low it was hard not to view them as a good opportunity. If that were to happen again, we’d try to pursue the opportunity.” But longer-term, the core focus is “what I’ve described”.