Monaco: Scorpio Tankers plans to sell 15m shares of its common stock at a par value of $0.01 per share through an underwritten public offering. All the net proceeds of the offering are expected to be used to fund a portion of the acquisition costs of additional modern product tankers, which may include three LR2 product tankers that the company currently has options to purchase from an unaffiliated third party.
UBS Securities is acting as sole book-running manager with Clarksons Platou Securities onboard as joint lead manager.
Scorpio Tankers currently owns 67 tankers with an average age of 0.9 years. It also time charters-in 21 product tankers, and has contracted for 11 newbuilding product tankers, seven of which are expected to be delivered in the second quarter of 2015 and the remaining four vessels in 2016. It also owns approximately 16% of Dorian LPG.
“The product market continues to surprise us in its strength and diversity even though we’ve been, you know, pretty bullish in our actions last year and stock buybacks taking ships and on time charter and buying assets would reflect that,” Scorpio Tankers president Robert Bugbee said in a first quarter results breifing earlier this week.