Shipbroking group SSY is targeting Chinese business by hiring banker Terry Chen to head up a new ship finance desk in Shanghai.
Chen, whose job title will be head of ship finance (China), is the third new hire for the division in less than a year and he will start work immediately.
Last month, SSY hired well-known shipping banker Ali Susanto as global co-head of its ship finance division alongside Jarl Magnus Berge, who joined SSY in August.
Chen has two decades of experience, particularly within the Chinese vessel leasing business.
SSY said he is “well known for his extensive experience in concluding intricate and detailed lease transactions”.
Susanto said: “With Terry on the team, we will be able to provide comprehensive assistance to lessors and financiers, extending beyond mere transaction facilitation to encompass detailed information provision and industry analysis.”
A graduate of Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, Chen held senior positions at CSIC Leasing, Taiping & Sinopec Financial Leasing and Minsheng Financial Leasing before becoming Partner at Hongdao Capital.
Chen’s hire comes at a time when ship financing is essentially a shipowner’s market, awash with money from banks, funds, lessors and private lending.
Chinese lessors continue to be particularly competitive on the global stage, offering “generally superior” margins, loan-to-value and other commercial items, according to a report published this week by Hamburg-based ship finance platform Oceanis.
Singapore resident Susanto joined from rival Braemar, where he was managing director of its corporate finance team.
As well as its new Shanghai base, SSY has dedicated finance desks in Singapore, London, Oslo and New York that provide advisory services and arrange, structure and execute shipping investments, mergers and acquisitions, divestments and restructurings.
Bigger plan
The spate of new hires represents a fresh effort by SSY to make waves in ship finance, an area in which the group has intended to grow its business for some years now.
The shipbroking firm established ship finance business SSY Carnegie as a joint venture with Swedish investment bank Carnegie in 2016, which began trading in June 2017.
But the joint venture did not work as the partners had envisaged and SSY bought out the investment bank’s stake in the business in 2019 after Carnegie decided to focus on its core Nordic business.
In an interview with TradeWinds in 2021, then chairman Mark Richardson said the shipbroker had found it difficult to match up potential financings with investable projects.
“Often the deal gets driven from the other side, whereby it may be the ‘money men’ that are actually driving the deal,” he explained.
“They’ll be saying, ‘Well, we’ve got this amount of cash to be able to invest. We want to get this kind of yield on it’. That’s where the deal starts. So, actually, there wasn’t a match-up there.”
Nikos Stratis joined SSY Finance from Clarksons in late 2020 but departed less than two years later.
SSY’s headcount has grown by about 150 over the past two years and now numbers about 500 people across the world.
