The Arne Blystad group remains positive on tankers, despite sales this summer that have cleared out its last tankers larger than 20,000 dwt.
The company declined to comment on fresh reports of the sale of the 107,100-dwt Songa Coral (built 2005) by a Blystad-controlled entity.
But brokers have reported the Songa Coral as sold to unknown buyers for $25m. The price reflects its ballast water treatment system and scrubbers, both installed in January 2020.
The Songa Coral is the oldest and biggest ship in the private Norwegian shipowner’s fleet. Blystad bought it for a reported $31.2m in 2015 from Bihar International.
The aframax sale follows the reported $12.8m sale of an MR2 product tanker of similar vintage last month, the 48,700-dwt Challenge Passage (built 2005). That transaction, however, may reflect the terms of an underlying charter to Japan’s NYK Line.
Blystad bought the Challenge Passage from NYK in 2015 for a reported $19m with a bareboat charter back, and the ship has remained under NYK’s commercial control.
Arne Blystad chief executive Fredrik Platou was on holiday this week following the latest sale and declined to confirm it or to comment on the outlook for acquisitions on the wet side.
“We have a generally positive outlook on the tanker market, as we have had for some time,” he said.
In recent comments to Oslo business daily Finansavisen, Platou expressed a broader optimism.
“With a generally very low orderbook in most segments, we see the outlines of what can become a strong cycle within shipping over the next few years,” he told the Norwegian newspaper.
The sales leave the group as a whole with a fleet of 20 ships, according to VesselsValue: seven small container ships and 13 small chemical carriers.
Its assets within shipping, other than steel of its own, include significant equity stakes in shipowners Subsea 7, MPC Container Ships (MPCC) and Star Bulk Carriers, as a result of cash-plus-shares corporate and fleet sales.
Arne Blystad’s eponymous company Arne Blystad, under Liberian-based parent company Songa Corp and Norwegian-registered Songa Holding, manages ships and other investments for the family-controlled group under a variety of brands.
Songa Holding’s publicly reported after-tax bottom line for 2021 was NOK 1.89bn ($192m), up from NOK 78m the year before. The figure includes non-shipping earnings, notably from real estate investments.
Over the past 12 months, the group has been a frequent seller of tonnage from the older end of its tanker and box fleets in one-off opportunistic deals.
But single-ship transactions stand in the shadow of the big fleet deals, including the merger of heavylift shipowner OHT into Kristian Siem’s Subsea 7 to form Seaway 7, the sale of Songa Containers to MPCC and the formation immediately afterwards of the new Songa Box and its acquisition of six former Vroon ships.
