Diligent Holdings has wrapped up a lucrative sale campaign that saw the low-profile Greek bulker company offloading its smallest and oldest ships to benefit from rising asset values.

Unlike several other firms rushing to reinvest their asset-play profits into newer vessels, Athens-based Diligent considers ongoing market prices to be too high to resume buying again — at least at this stage.

Past history suggests the Dimitris Michalos-led company is a shrewd player in secondhand markets.

Starting out with a single handysize bulker in 2011, Diligent began buying vessels at the low-point in the market in 2016. By 2020, it had assembled a fleet of 16 handysizes and supramaxes.

As values started soaring earlier this year, the company began selling some of those ships. As TradeWinds reported previously, it gradually offloaded four Imabari-28 design handysizes.

The company now confirms that it has sold its fifth and final vessel in that class as well — the 28,400-dwt Magnolia (built 2009), for $13m.

"These small Japanese handies have been fantastic workhorses for us but we now wish to move with the times into index-linked tonnages only, which our chartering clients both prefer and pay premiums for," the company said in a press release on Thursday.

The five off-market sales, arranged by London-based brokerage Hull Search International, raised the company about $54m in total.

Even though Diligent flipped four of these ships at an average profit of about 65% compared with their original acquisition price, the outfit is loath to describe itself as an asset player.

Diligent describes its strategy rather as one of "grabbing the advantages" of rising dry bulk markets by focusing on well-maintained vessels built in Japan or under Japanese supervision.

Looking towards the next cycle

In its next round of expansion, the company plans to concentrate on larger handysizes, as well as on supramaxes and ultramaxes to join its existing fleet of about a dozen vessels in those sizes.

Diligent said it will also explore the possibility of investing in kamsarmaxes.

However, none of these possible purchases will be done at current market levels, which company managers seem to think are far too high.

"We will look to invest in [the] next cycle," Diligent said.

The company's new focus comes along with a management shake-up and recruitment campaign since last year that saw Michalos and his wife, Dorothy Kefala, personally assuming supervision of all Diligent's activities and day-to-day operations.

"In some cases, we wiped out entire departments and started from new," the company said. "We [are] now fixing with major charterers such as Norden, Cargill and Bunge, using top international dry chartering brokers."