Toro Corp has made its first sale, benefitting from soaring tanker values to triple its money on a 21-year-old aframax.
The tanker spin-off of Petros Panagiotidis outfit Castor Maritime announced late on Thursday it accepted a $30.1m offer to offload the 106,100-dwt aframax Wonder Avior (built 2002).
The Nasdaq-listed company expects to deliver the ship to its new, undisclosed owners by the end of June.
This vessel used to trade as Makronissos with Greece’s troubled Eletson, which sold it about two years ago as part of its fleet wind-down at a price just above $10m.
The Makronissos and another four Eletson ships emerged shortly afterwards with Castor Maritime, a US-listed Panagiotidis outfit, which bought them for just $49.5m in total.
Rising tanker prices in the wake of the Ukraine war have opened an asset play window for Panagiotidis.
Castor started using this in May 2022, when the company made its first sale after 18 months of exponential fleet growth by selling the Wonder Arcturus — a sistership to the Wonder Avior — for $13.15m.
In late 2022 Panagiotidis transferred all of Castor's eight tankers, including its quartet of former Eletson ships, to Toro Corp, which began trading in New York in March 2023.
Toro said on Thursday it expected to book a net gain of nearly $19.6m from the sale of the Wonder Avior. This means that Toro has now the opportunity to make similar asset plays with pretty much all of its remaining tanker fleet, which consists of five LR2s or aframaxes and two MRs.
Following a $19.47m cash injection into Toro last month, Panagiotidis boosted his stake in the spin-off to 47.4% of its common shares and 100% of its preferred ones.
The capital injection was made with a view to renew and grow Toro’s fleet.
The company subsequently indeed agreed to buy a quartet of 5,000-cbm LPG ships, in a pending transaction worth $70.7m.
Toro didn’t identify the four LPG ships but market sources suggest they might be coming from fellow Greek, US-listed owner StealthGas.
Brokers named the four ships as the 4,900-cbm Eco Czar and Eco Enigma, the 4,918-cbm Eco Nemesis (all built 2015) and the 4,900-cbm Eco Texiana (built 2020).
Following the Toro spin-off, the original Panagiotidis vehicle Castor Maritime is left focusing on the bulker and container ship segments, with a combined fleet of 21 ships.
