Hong Kong: The Caravel Group, the shipping and trading group founded by Harry Banga in 2013, is in the market for secondhand handymaxes.
Speaking with Splash, Mudit Paliwal, managing director of Caravel Shipping, said; “We have started to look at secondhand ships, but no one wants to catch a falling knife.”
Paliwal, who like Banga was at Noble Group previously, reckons the dry bulk market should bottom out in the third quarter. He said the company was looking at “opportunistic” buys of handymaxes of 56,000 dwt and above, ideally Japanese-built and no older than 11 or 12 years so that the ships can command a reasonable price when the market recovers.
Currently, Caravel has 67 ships chartered in. The group handled 13m tons of freight in the past 12 months and is looking to shift more than 20m tons in the coming 12 months, Paliwal said. He said Caravel’s ideal fleet size was between 65 and 80 ships.
Caravel’s shipping division now has 27 employees in offices in Hong Kong, New Delhi, Stamford and Geneva.
