Attica Group, Greece’s biggest passenger shipping company, has added a vessel to its fleet of 42 ships with a purchase from small domestic peer Fast Ferries.
The ship changing hands in a deal worth €17.75m ($19.8m) is the 5,992-gt Thunder (built 1998). Attica said in a stock exchange filing in Athens that the vessel was fully refurbished four years ago and can carry 1,068 passengers and 215 cars.
The acquisition follows up on the addition of two vessels last month, when Attica exercised purchase options for €8.9m in total after having the ships in its fleet on bareboat charters — the 30,000-gt Kissamos (built 1992) and Kydon (built 1990).
Much of the liquidity for these acquisitions came from a €22.8m gain that the company pocketed in April from the sale to Stena Line of two vessels trading in Morocco, outside Attica’s core Greek business — the 16,071-gt Morocco Star (built 1980) and 2,926-gt Highspeed 3 (built 2000).
The company is also expanding in the hospitality business, where it spent €14m earlier this year to buy its second hotel on the Greek island of Naxos.
Tourism is key for Attica, as foreign and domestic visitors make up a big part of the 2.8m passengers and 460,000 cars that its vessels carried in the first half of the year.
Attica, which is 86.7%-owned by Mubashir Mukadam’s Strix Holdings, posted a net loss of €4.5m in that period, which included the seasonally slow first quarter and expenses related to its takeover of ailing Greek peer Anek Lines.
Once these one-off costs are digested, Attica expects its bottom line to benefit from the Anek merger, which bolstered its position as Greece’s biggest ferry company.
A taste of Attica’s ambitious plans became evident from its announcement in July that it will operate — and later possibly purchase as well — a pair of 240-metre ropax newbuildings ordered in China by Stena RoRo.
Meanwhile, one of Attica’s main rivals in the Greek ferry market seems to be focusing more on snapping up privatised Greek infrastructure lately.
On 18 September, Italy’s Grimaldi Group, which controls Greek ferry firm Minoan Lines, completed the €80m purchase of a 67% stake in the port of Heraklion, the biggest city on the island of Crete.
This is Grimaldi’s second privatisation deal in Greece after an €84.7m purchase two years ago of a 67% stake in the formerly state-owned Igoumenitsa Port Authority in north-western Greece, which is just across the sea from Italy.
