Compared to recent Chinese New Year breaks, sales and purchase activity remained rather perky this week, redolent of the current markets where owners still believe there’s money to be made in the secondhand markets.
On the dry bulk side, European owners remained busy fixing deals with modern handysizes leading the way.
Multiple shipbroking houses including Intermodal and Optima listed the sale of the 2014-built capesize bulker South Trader, with Allied Shipbroking identifying Berge Bulk as the buyer of the 181,343 dwt vessel, which fetched a price of $36.5m.
Allied Shipbroking also reported another deal in which Switzerland-based owner NovaAlgoma Cement Carriers acquired the 2009-built general cargo vessel Wes Monica from German owner Wessels Reederei for an undisclosed price. The 8,048 dwt vessel has been renamed Sider Monica.
In the tanker sector, S&P activities in the past week mainly focused on larger tonnages.
“On the tanker side, we started to see a fair amount of action take place, with the most prominent deal being that of Ocean Yield, which snapped up four resale VLCCs on relatively favorable terms. There was also some interesting deals to be seen in the rest of the size segments, with the largest proportion of deals centering around fairly modern vessels,” Allied Shipbroking said.
Advanced Shipping & Trading has identified Indonesia owner Pertamina as the buyer behind the sale of 2004-built VLCC Taga. The 303,430 dwt vessel was sold by Japan’s Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) for $25m.
More than five shipbroking sources listed the sale of 2003-built aframax tanker HS Carmen. Greek owner Adam Polemis’ New Shipping is said to have bought the 112,900 dwt vessel from German owner Hansa Treuhand for $11.3m.
In addition, Intermodal listed a deal that saw Vietnamese owner FGAS acquire two LPG carriers, the 1998-built Epic St John and the 1995-built Sea Sawasdee from Singapore’s Epic Gas and Thailand’s Seamanship separately. The price for the Epic St John is $5m while the price for Sea Sawasdee was undisclosed.
There are no deals to report in the secondhand containership sector.
With the holidays now over Chinese owners are expected to roar back in the coming days.
