Buyers looking to feast on an array of main courses at the great Xihe Holdings’ tanker buffet may find themselves left with only hors d’oeuvres as four of the failed Singaporean owner’s few remaining MR product tankers have been reported as sold.
Multiple brokers this week said Xihe’s liquidators have offloaded four SLS-built tankers to as yet undisclosed Greek buyers.
Sold via a tender process, the ships are listed as the 50,300-dwt Ocean Jupiter (built 2007), 50,200-dwt Zhu Jiang (built 2009), 41,400-dwt Ocean Winter (built 2009) and 41,000-dwt Ocean Spring (built 2009).
No pricing details were disclosed.
The sale of these ships leaves only two MR tankers in the inventory of unsold Xihe vessels — the 41,300-dwt Ocean Autumn (built 2009) and 41,400-dwt Ocean Summer (built 2009).
Since Xihe’s liquidators began methodically disposing of the company’s vast tanker fleet in mid-2020, all of the larger vessel assets including VLCCs, aframaxes, LR1s, and LR2s have been sold — but not at the fire-sale prices that many buyers originally had been anticipating.
Most ships that were sold directly by the liquidators via tender only went for a small discount on their trading value, an amount brokers have said has been mostly tied to their anticipated reactivation and dry-docking costs.
Apart from the two unsold MRs, the only other tankers left on the table now are about 20 small product tankers that Xihe affiliate company Ocean Tankers used either in Asian regional trades or as bunkering vessels.
This fleet of smaller tankers has also been drastically reduced since the sell-off began, attracting interest mostly from Asian buyers.
Singapore’s Pioneer Tanker, for example, has just emerged as the buyer of the 12,000-dwt product tanker Ocean Goby (built 2017), which went under the hammer at auction in December 2021. The ship was renamed Linkwood when it was handed over in February.
Pioneer Tanker, a subsidiary of China’s Pioneer Logistics, bought two identical sisterships in late 2021. The company has also acquired several 34,800-dwt product tankers that Xihe had under construction at Fujian Mawei Shipbuilding.
