VLCC rate indicators have fallen for the fourth straight day, even though a Friday fixture scored by the Onassis group’s Olympic Shipping & Management showed the potential rate uptick on the flagging Middle East to China trade.
The Baltic Exchange’s assessment of average time charter equivalent rates in the spot market dropped 6% on Friday to just under $37,200 per day. That is a 12.3% dive since Monday, when spot earnings peaked at $42,400 per day before turning downward.
Friday’s rate was the lowest reading of the index since 2 October.
Of the trades that feed into that average, the biggest slumps were on the benchmark Middle East to China route.
Howe Robinson, a London-based tanker broker, assessed Worldscale rates on the route from Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to China’s Ningbo port at WS 55 on Friday, down from WS 60 on Monday.
But Olympic’s 319,500-dwt Olympic Target (built 2011) defied that assessment, scoring a fixture from Chinese refining giant Unipec for WS 56, or $48,100 per day, according to data from Tankers International.
The fixture was higher than Kuwait Petroleum’s Thursday charter of Pantheon Tankers Management’s 299,300-dwt Sea Ruby (built 2017) for the same route at a rate of WS 55, or $28,700 per day.
The differing earnings of the two tankers are affected by the fact that the Olympic Target has a scrubber, allowing it to use cheaper heavy fuel oil, while the Sea Ruby does not.
Rates for VLCCs lifting cargoes in West Africa and the US Gulf Coast also lost ground since Monday.
On Friday, Petroineos Refining & Trading hired the 300,000-dwt Ascona (built 2019), which is controlled by Michael Lykiardopulo-led Neda Maritime Agency, for a voyage to the UK or continental Europe at WS 65.
That leads to earnings of $36,100 per day for the scrubber-fitted ship, according to Tankers International.
The rate is well below the WS 67.5 fetched in the last reported fixture on the route, when Zodiac Maritime earned $44,500 per day by chartering the 297,600-dwt, scrubber-fitted Horten (built 2018) to Glencore’s ST Shipping & Trading.
