Greece’s biggest passenger ship firm Attica Group sold one of its oldest vessels to local rival Marios Iliopoulos while reporting its biggest profit in 16 years.
The Athens-listed company said it has garnered a €2.8m ($3.03m) net gain from the €9m sale of the 1,982-gt Express Skiathos (built 1996) to a firm called 4Naver Shipholding.
The Greek business register and shipping data sources show Cyprus-based 4Naver Shipholding to be an affiliate of Iliopoulos-controlled Seajets.
The Greek-built Express Skiathos is set to join the Seajets fleet this week.
Attica will book the proceeds from its sale in its first-half 2024 results. The company will further benefit this year from a €21m net gain due to the sale to Stena Line of its 49% stake in Africa Morocco Link (AML), which operates between Spain and Morocco.
This sets the stage for Attica to follow up this year on an extraordinarily robust set of 2023 financial earnings.
The company announced on Friday that it earned €61.2m in net income last year, up from €17.1m in 2022.
According to past company results, this was Attica’s best financial performance since 2007.
Booming tourism played a large part in the company posting its highest earnings in 16 years.
Another weighty factor was a merger with local, cash-strapped rival Anek Lines, which helped boost the Attica fleet by 10 ships last year to 43 vessels and its annual revenue by 11% to €588m.
The Anek takeover boosted Attica’s financial results with a €22.8m goodwill gain.
Attica operates four different brands on domestic Greek routes, as well as on international ones between Greece and Italy: Superfast Ferries, Blue Star Ferries, Hellenic Seaways and Anek Lines.
Twenty-eight of its ships are conventional ro-ro passenger vessels and 13 are fast ships.
The two remaining vessels exclusively operate as freight-only ro-ros.
Attica struck in December a 10-year deal worth up to €1bn to maintain, repair and upgrade existing ships, as well as potentially build new ones at fledgling local ONEX Technology Group shipyards.
“With the absorption of Anek, we completed a phase of expansion through acquisitions,” Attica chief executive Panos Dikaios said in an earnings statement.
“In 2024, we are focusing on further improving our operational performance by incorporating Anek and achieving synergies,” Dikaios added.
