Greece’s Coral Shipping has embarked on an expansion move with the purchase of its youngest aframax tanker.
Recent broker reports linked the Athens-based tanker player to the purchase of a vessel from Norway’s Det Stavangerske Dampskibsselskab (DSD).
Coral is spending $18.5m to acquire the 105,400-dwt Stavanger Eagle (built 2009), London brokers said.
According to US-based brokers, the Greek company bought sistership Stavanger Falcon (built 2009) as well, for $18m. Both ships are without scrubbers.
Asked to comment on the reports, a DSD manager said the company is in the process of selling a single tanker only. She did not identify the vessel.
Managers at Coral Shipping were not available for comment.
The Greek company, which lists about 15 tankers on its website, is a busy player in the secondhand market. Never in recent years, however, has it put its hand as deeply in its pocket to buy an aframax that is less than 14 years old.
The move would be in line with a strategy to gradually reduce the average age of its fleet.
Coral’s last move in this direction came last October, when it bought the 46,000-dwt MR tanker Nord Sakura (built 2012) from Japanese interests for about $16.3m.
The Shin Kurushima-built vessel, which is now trading as Invictus, is the youngest unit in the company’s diversified tanker fleet, which consists of several types of ships, from small bunker vessels to large LR2s.
Coral is pursuing fleet renewal through asset sales as well. It is also said to have circulated for sale one of its oldest ships, the 38,700-dwt Aris (built 2001). The vessel was built at Romania’s Damen Shipyards Galati and is trading in clean petroleum products.
Potential buyers can arrange to inspect the vessel in Singapore, Athens brokers said.
Coral Shipping was established in 1998. Aside from managing tankers, it has operated a petroleum products storage facility in Oman since 2007.
As for DSD, a diversified company whose portfolio includes tanker owner DSD Shipping, a sale of a vessel such as the Stavanger Eagle would be part of a fleet renewal as well.
Such a deal would be “in line with our strategy to reduce our exposure to elderly ships”, DSD's Marianne Fronsdal told TradeWinds.
DSD is instead concentrating its resources on a quartet of MR tankers it took delivery of as newbuildings last year from Hyundai Vietnam Shipbuilding.
The quartet is estimated to have cost the company $32m each, without the cost of installing scrubbers.
In another restructuring move in May 2019, DSD sold its ferry subsidiary. This transaction helped the company deliver its best annual result ever in 2019, with a pre-tax profit of NOK 1bn ($117m), up from NOK 109m the previous year.
