UK shipping fund Tufton Oceanic Assets has completed its exit from container ships with the sale of a last sub-panamax vessel.
The London-listed company said on Tuesday it has agreed a deal to sell the 2,546-teu Sealand Guayaquil (built 2009) for $13m.
The buyer has not been revealed.
Tufton said the ship is being sold at depreciated replacement cost, reducing the fleet to 22 vessels, mostly product carriers and bulkers, but also including an LPG carrier.
VesselsValue assesses the unit as worth $21.5m, but in April it was valued at $58m in record container markets.
The ship has been chartered to Maersk in the US at $17,500 per day for two years since March 2021.
Tufton acquired the sub-panamax from Germany's Hammonia Reederei in 2018 for $12.6m.
The fund has been selling its boxship fleet in recent months, and has also exited crude tankers, to refocus on product vessels and bulkers.
Three container ships were sold in 2022.
Boxship return
The internal rate of return on the Sealand Guayaquil exceeds 12%, Tufton said.
The return on boxships over the past five years is 27%, the company added.
“This divestment, together with the other divestments and investments over the previous two years, demonstrate our commitments to capital re-allocation and ESG,” the fund said.
The company continues to eye an “attractive pipeline of opportunities” as the recent macroeconomic and geopolitical environment “creates dislocations and reduces some industry participants’ access to capital”.
Tufton also said the product tanker market remains strong, driven by a continued lack of new supply combined with the demand impact of low inventories and energy market dislocations.
“In recent months, the chemical tanker market has further improved materially, converging towards the product tanker market as it tends to do. This is expected to further increase the yields from our two chemical tankers with partial market exposure as well as, in the medium term, their asset values,” the fund added.
