This week TradeWinds reports on major machinations at Navios Maritime Partners, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering’s sale hanging in the balance and India overtaking China as the largest importer of Russian crude.
The ongoing evolution of what was a diversified group of entities into one shipping titan looks to have moved a step closer with the news that Navios Partners is snapping up the entire bulker fleet of parent company Navios Maritime Holdings. The former is shelling out close to $1bn for the 36-strong fleet that includes chartered-in vessels.
Navios Partners also announced a $100m share buyback plan. The move should go some way to placating investors who have complained about the shipowner’s unwillingness to increase its shareholder distribution or dividend in proportion to its profits.
When troubles come, they come not single spies but in battalions, so said Claudius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This sums up the predicament faced by beleaguered South Korean shipbuilder DSME.
Still licking its wounds from a strike which saw the yard lose more than half a billion dollars that ended this week, a planned split up and sale of the shipbuilder appears even more difficult in the wake of the additional debt it will have incurred from the ensuing delays.
There are always winners as well as losers in times of war. And it looks like boom time for Indian refiners who have had no qualms in buying up ample supplies of cheap Russian crude. So much so that India has now overtaken China as the world’s largest seaborne importer of the fossil fuel. This is yet another example of how the Ukraine war has shifted trade flows.
Fears over a winter shortage of gas have prompted European countries to make contingency plans to import and store more LNG. But it appears that floating storage and regasification units will come nowhere near to filling the gap. According to one analyst, the likelihood of the EU achieving storage targets of 80% by 1 November is “very challenging”.
And finally, the saga of tanker owner St James rumbles on. New York ship financier EnTrust Global — the mortgage holder — is trying to take possession of four of its ships, with the crews inevitably caught in the crossfire. One of them, the Ariana, is stuck in war-torn Yemen with no access to fresh water. The London-based shipowner had sent a relief master and crew to take over the vessel, but EnTrust ordered the current master to refuse. The standoff continues.
