Atlas Maritime is said to have made a further impressive asset play with tanker newbuildings ordered at the trough of the market.
Brokers in London and Athens reported the Greek owner as having agreed to sell the 115,100-dwt Delaware Star and Galveston Star (both built 2023).
The buyer is said to be Libya’s state-owned General National Maritime Transport Co (GNMTC).
Managers at both companies were not available for comment.
The Delaware Star and Galveston Star are two of the five aframax newbuildings that chief executive Leon Patitsas began ordering at DH Shipbuilding in November 2020, the low point of the coronavirus crisis, for between $45m and $46m each.
That was the lowest price for such newbuildings in two decades. In an interview with TradeWinds in November 2021, Patitsas described these orders as “perfectly timed”.
GNMTC is already known to have acquired the first two of these vessels — the 115,500-dwt Philadelphia Star and New York Star (renamed Anwaar Trablus and Ghat respectively, both built 2022) — at a hefty premium of $61m each.
The Delaware Star and Galveston Star, which DH Shipbuilding is due to deliver over the next few weeks, are now fetching an even more impressive $77.5m in the en-bloc deal, according to the brokers.
Atlas has clinched a profitable deal as well for the fifth newbuilding in this series, the only one it is holding on to. According to the sources, BP fixed the 115,100-dwt Freeport Star (built 2023) for a 12-month period after delivery at $50,000 per day.
Patitsas, a grandson of legendary Greek owner Leon C Lemos, set up Atlas Maritime in 2003 after studying shipping finance and mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University in the US.
The company’s name is inspired by the statue of an ancient Greek deity in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue, where Patitsas was working for UBP Bank in the late 1990s.
Atlas started with bulkers, which it sold at the peak of the market between 2005 and 2008.
Another string of well-timed sale-and-purchase moves early in 2020 put the company in the position to go on a shipbuilding spree.
