Turkey’s Ciner Shipping has moved below the radar to add yet another batch of handysize bulker newbuildings at Jiangmen Nanyang Ship Engineering.
TradeWinds reported last year how the Turkish owner inked a quartet of 40,000-dwt open-hatch ships at the Chinese yard.
The Istanbul-based company appears to have developed an even bigger appetite since, with shipbuilding and market sources saying it has commissioned another six such vessels at the same yard, boosting its total orderbook there to 10.
Ciner booked newbuildings number five, six and seven in October last year and returned to Jiangmen some weeks ago for newbuildings number eight, nine and 10.
An official at Jiangmen Nanyang declined to disclose the shipyard’s newbuilding activities citing contract confidentiality.
According to the market sources, Jiangmen will deliver the first four handysizes to Ciner between September and December 2024.
The next batch of three vessels is due in April, May and June of 2025 respectively. Jiangmen is scheduled to complete Ciner’s final handysize trio in the same months of 2026.
Brokers believe Ciner is paying about $29m each for each of its latest handysizes.
The vessels will be built to comply with Phase 3 of the International Maritime Organization’s Energy Efficiency Design Index standards for greenhouse gas emissions and will meet Tier III NOx targets.
Secured employment
Ciner, one of Turkey’s largest industrial groups that has an active fleet of 22 bulkers in the water, is not on a speculative newbuilding spree.
Market sources expect Ciner to employ all its open-hatch handysize newbuildings on its own soda ash trading operations.
The company has also secured index-linked, long-term employment for another group of seven newbuildings, which it inked separately over the past couple of years at two different Chinese yards.
Cargill is believed to have fixed in advance the quartet of 64,000-dwt ultramaxes Ciner booked at New Dayang Shipbuilding.
Another trio of 88,800-dwt kamsarmaxes that the company has booked at state-owned Chengxi Shipyard are to be employed by SwissMarine, Singapore's PCL (Shipping) and Javelin Commodities — a low-profile trader founded in 2015 and led by Peter Bradley, a former senior trader with Goldman Sachs.
Alternative finance
Established in 2009, Ciner is among the Turkish shipping operations that sprung up in the depth of the 2008 financial crisis with backing from outside money coming from mining, media or textiles.
Alongside its own financial heft, the company has been successfully tapping alternative finance in recent years.
Since 2019, Ciner has arranged more than $1bn worth of Chinese leasing transactions for secondhand ships and newbuildings. Its partners have included SPDB Financial Leasing, CSSC Leasing, China Huarong Financial Leasing, China Merchants Bank Leasing and Avic Leasing.
Market sources suspect that Ciner may not be done ordering. The company is believed to be mulling further newbuilding opportunities in the ultramax sector, to potentially match the size of its handysize newbuilding programme.
