Two traditional Greek companies have shed a pair of 17-year-old crude carriers in deals highlighting the continued interest displayed by fringe players for such vintage ships.
Unidentified Egyptian interests are said to have spent $29m on the 319,200-dwt Gilos (built 2004), a VLCC previously controlled by Greece's Transmed Shipping.
A sale of a VLCC to an Egyptian company would be surprising. Available data platforms, such as VesselsValue, feature no company from that country owning or managing anything larger than an aframax.
Egypt's only three aframax owners are Cairo-listed leasing outfit Corplease, the Egyptian Tanker Co and Pyramid Navigation, which is a subsidiary of Greece’s Chandris (Hellas).
Transmed managers did not respond to a request for comment.
A sale of the Gilos would be the company's first tanker disposal since the end of 2018, when the Mylonas-family company began expanding into crude carriers.
By February 2020, Transmed had assembled a fleet of three VLCCs and two aframaxes, all purchased in the secondhand market. The Gilos was the last ship it bought in that campaign.
It does not seem to have been much of an asset play. The $29m Transmed fetched from selling the ship is a tad below the $31.5m it spent to buy it 20 months ago from Sinokor Merchant Marine.
Asset plays still possible
The most recent sale of another vintage VLCC shows that asset plays are possible in that asset class.
Greece's Cosmoship Maritime is believed to have raised $28m by selling the 307,000-dwt Fos (built 2002) to unidentified Chinese buyers at the end of September.
That is considerably above the $25m that the company spent to buy the ship from New York-based Icon Capital in late January.
Minerva Marine, another Greek company, is pursuing a different strategy. Rather than riding asset value fluctuations, the major tanker owner is primarily interested in offloading its oldest vessels as part of a long-term fleet renewal campaign.
TradeWinds has already reported how the Andreas Martinos-led company sold nine ageing tankers in the secondhand market in the 14 months to August.
Minerva has now sold a 10th vessel, the 105,300-dwt Atalandi (built 2004). The South Korean-built aframax fetched $13.6m, according to some Athens brokers.
The buyer remains unknown, but Minerva's previous aframax sale gives an idea of where interest for such ships comes from. The 105,300-dwt Minerva Nike (built 2004) has emerged as Pargo in the fleet of Perenco — a French oil and gas company that is understood to be converting it into a floating storage and offloading vessel.
Younger aframaxes, meanwhile, remain popular candidates for further trading.
Beks Shipmanagement, a serial buyer of such ships that has just entered the tanker market, has emerged with yet another one. The 108,900-dwt Ocean Vela (built 2009) is about to join the company under its new name, Beks Lion.
The ship had been sold at the end of September for about $17.5m, as part of the wind-down of the former Xihe Group fleet. Brokers had previously linked Greece’s Avin International to its purchase.
