US-listed dry bulk companies could record a collective loss in excess of $1bn this year, a new report from Alphabulk has warned. With Q1 results in for six out of the eight bulker firms listed in New York Alphabulk said “the picture is not pretty” as it extrapolated potential full year losses.
“As the market still does not show any sign of real recovery, we can say these Q1 results give us a flavour of what is to come in terms of 2016 as a whole if the market stays where it is,” Alphabulk said in its June monthly report.
The eight firms are Golden Ocean, DryShips, Scorpio Bulkers, Genco, Eagle Bulk, Diana Shipping, Safe Bulkers, Navios, Star Bulk and Paragon.
“Not one of these companies recorded a positive result in 2015, and collectively they have clocked up $7 billion in losses since January 2010,” Alphabulk reported.
Alphabulk is part of French broking software specialist AXSMarine.
The $1bn number is small in relation to the losses of ten times that number that equity holders have lost in quoted shipping companies and with more than $50bn of on-performing bank debt in Germany alone, shipping is a disaster and many companies need to be wound up and the ships sold or scrapped.
The losses in Korea and China are also huge but the ships still exist.
Many of the US public companies are now managed by Fund managers who only understand numbers.
The worst quote of the week is from the President of Star Bulk who boats that he has got operating costs down to $4000pd which as one prominent Greek owner said “which bit of the ship is he managing??”
Compare this with NAT where the Chairman is an experienced shipping man and states confidently that he is running his tankers at$11,000pd. This includes all the expenses that EBITDA
excludes!!
Well said, Paul! Fancy extending this into a column for us?