New Uni-Tankers CEO Per Ekmann has revealed the company's blueprint for the future as it tightens up its fleet acquisition process.
The Danish product tanker company has been refinanced and is now back under the 100% control of tycoon Torben Ostergaard-Nielsen’ USTC group, after Danske Bank exited as co-owner.
Ekmann told TradeWinds: "We want to move from say a rather opportunistic fleet development to a high focus on fleet acquisition processes enabling us to explore the various fleet developments in a structured ongoing way for newbuildings, second-hand tonnage and time-charter ship arrangement with purchase option.
"Furthermore we are proceeding as planned with our time-charter fleet and will now have increased focus on increasing the share of the time-charter fleet in order ensure operational agility."
The company has 17 of its own ships currently, out of a fleet of 42, with sizes ranging up to 25,000 dwt.
Ekmann said Uni-Tankers needs to maintain a strong base of its own vessels in order to "keep in-house technical management and keep present high standard and approvals with oil and chemicals companies."
He added: "We might consider to sell a few of them due to age and/or due [to] not [being] fit for core trade because of size and/or lack of equipment, which is a part of our strategic goals to have a proactive position concerning own ships matching our customers needs.
"Replacement would come from purchase of new ships, and/or second-hand modern ships, and/or declaration of purchase option on some of the time charter fleet vessels."
Narrowing of geographical focus
The geographical focus is also shifting.
"We want to move from worldwide market focus into focus on core markets and main trade lanes," Ekmann said.
This involves North-west Europe, including the East Mediterranean and Black Sea, West Africa and the US/Caribbean, he added.
The company is targeting five must-win battles, including a stronger focus on core markets and main trade lanes, key customers and its core ship size of between 5,000 dwt and 17,000 dwt.
It wants to achieve long-term value creation for customers, with a clear competitive position.
And Ekmann intends to steer the owner away from "low-cost competitiveness" and manual handling of several processes towards cost competitiveness, digitalisation and automation.
Peter Stokbro, former technical director at Navig8 Group, has joined as technical director.
