Petredec says the building of a stake in an Oslo-listed VLGC rival helped give it the confidence to consider its own tilt at a potential public listing.
At one stage in late 2021 the privately-owned Singapore-headquartered LPG specialist had built up a 17% stake in the John Fredriksen-backed Avance Gas.
It eventually sold the shareholding after Fredriksen launched a mandatory NOK 43 per share bid for the company’s shares, netting Petredec $67m for its stake.
“One thing that it taught us… was the idea of participating in the capital markets,” Jonathan Fancher, chief executive of Petredec Global, told the Marine Money Asia conference on Tuesday.
“Throughout that process we got more comfortable in Oslo and New York, the two capital markets we were attracted to.
“It led us to look at our own integrated model and to conversations with potential investors and with banks, and it really got us more comfortable for what we had to offer that would be of interest to the capital markets,” he added.
In April 2022, Petredec announced that it was setting up Petredec Global, which consisted of its trading platform as well as its modern fleet of 27 VLGCs and was “exploring the possibilities of a public listing”.
The company, which is the second-largest VLGC owner, said it offered a “significantly higher ECO, scrubber and dual fuel penetration, and the lowest fleet age among its peers”.
Petredec, which was formed in 1980, said its new arm would be the “world’s first fully-integrated VLGC shipping and trading company listed on a stock exchange”.
It added that the company was “uniquely positioned to benefit from a call on US shale, growing US production, increasing global demand for LPG and a widening LPG arbitrage.”
On the timeline for the listing Fancher was non-committal but did say that Petredec Global’s official listing was “more a question of when, not if.”
On the question of the large VLGC newbuilding order backlog, Fancher said that irrespective of the conversation about whether or not there are enough, or too many VLGCs going forward, one thing he is is “100% confident of” is that there are not “enough new-age, next-generation dual fuel ships”.
For its part, Petredec is due to take delivery of six 93,000-cbm dual fuel VLGC newbuildings from China's Jiangnan Shipyard in 2023.
