Scorpio Tankers sees the impending product tanker boom brought on by IMO 2020 as a rising tide, lifting all its ship segments.
Speaking during the New York-traded company's first quarter conference call Thursday, president Robert Bugbee said that for MRs, LR1s and LR2s, "they're all going to benefit from IMO.
"There's no question," he said.
"We're going into a strong environment. So LR2 [rates] should expand and start to trade at a multiple. We saw that this winter."
For the first quarter, the company posted a $14.5m profit, with its largest ships fetching an average of $22,923 per day in the spot market.
The results beat analyst expectations by $0.13 in a year when IMO 2020 sulphur emissions cap are expected to kickstart a turnaround the tanker sector.
Lars Dencker Nielsen, Scorpio's commercial director, said LR tankers were hurt by terminal size restrictions.
He said those terminals can how handle larger tankers, allowing more trading opportunities for the vessels.
"You know, we are seeing today ships that we are fixing out of the Arabian Gulf during the standard voyages into Japan, reloading the vessel out of Korea, taking that cargo into the Arabian Gulf, reloading in the Arabian Gulf or in the Red Sea, taking that to the [European] continent and then reloading that vessel out of Norway and taking it to Australia," Dencker Nielsen said.
"And you know, that's obviously a beautiful example. It's a true example, but this is where we're going."
