FreightWaves Ocean

Tanker takeover talk heats up

product tanker

Trading of Ardmore Shipping (NYSE: ASC) shares surged to over 10 times normal volume on May 26. Shares closed up 18%. Industry publication Tradewinds attributed the jump to takeover talk. A banking source speaking to FreightWaves agreed. He was getting a lot more client calls than usual about Ardmore over the prior week.

The mystery of that late-May rumor is solved — probably. Loose lips appear to have been whispering about Hafnia Tankers (Oslo: HAFNIA), which is 65% owned by the BW Group.

Hafnia...

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/tanker-takeover-talk-heats-up

Crew crisis to trigger ship detentions and diversions

ship crew

Around 200,000 seafarers still can’t get home due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Expired and extended crew contracts are piling up. Now, some port inspectors are beginning to balk and detain arriving vessels. 

“We are not just talking about a humanitarian crisis. This is turning into something that has a real impact on the global supply chain,” warned Belal Ahmed, chairman of the International Maritime Employers Council (IMEC), during a webinar presented by Capital Link on Wednesday.

More port...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/crew-crisis-to-trigger-ship-detentions-and-diversions

Seafarers still stranded at sea — and more test positive

tanker

Shipping groups and seafarer unions are desperately trying to convince governments to allow crew the right to transit after work contracts expire. Most governments still haven’t listened. An estimated 200,000 crew remain stranded at sea, unable to get back to their homes after their initial work contracts expired.

It will be even harder to convince governments to allow seafarers passage through their ports and airports if more shipboard outbreaks occur. And while still relatively rare, new...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/seafarers-still-stranded-at-sea-and-more-test-positive

A lost decade for shipping stocks

burning cash

A decade after the Great Recession, shipping stocks once again wallow in a sea of red, with yet another plunge on Friday due to coronavirus fears. 

There’s a sense of deja vu, not just because there’s another global crisis, but because there has been so little evolution in the public shipping space over the past 10 years.  Shipowners on Wall Street were supposed to mature into the kind of blue-chip, consolidated, corporate, creditworthy investment vehicles that are coveted by the long-only funds...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/a-lost-decade-for-shipping-stocks

Supertanker rates collapse: ‘The dam has burst’

crude tanker

Some sayings pop up again and again in shipping circles: “The way to make a big fortune in shipping is to start with a small one.” “Moving cargo is what you do between buying and selling ships.” “If analysts say the market can only get worse, buy.”

There’s also one that goes: “If there are 98 ships and 101 cargoes, boom, 98 cargoes and 101 tankers, bust.”

Alas, there are now a lot more tankers than cargoes. Rates are sliding, owners are capitulating, and charterers have the upper hand.

Rates for...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/supertanker-rates-nose-dive-the-dam-has-burst

Can dry bulk woo stock gamblers who bet on tankers?

gambling

Dry bulk has tanker envy in 2020.

Dry bulk was where day traders placed their bets back in the day, in the mid-2000s, but this year, investors on Robinhood and other retail platforms have instead put their chips on floating storage and stocks like Nordic American Tankers (NYSE: NAT).

Here’s the emerging dry bulk shipping pitch: Dry bulk stocks trade in relatively high correlation with spot rates and unlike tanker stocks, they don’t face a painful floating-storage destocking phase. Dry bulk rates...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/can-dry-bulk-woo-stock-gamblers-away-from-tankers

Carrier capacity cuts send trans-Pacific rates into orbit

container port

There’s an old adage: “Forecasting is the art of saying what will happen and then explaining why it didn’t.”

Remember those dire warnings that ocean carriers could suffer catastrophic losses and go bankrupt en masse, crippling the global container-transport system? Today, carriers are obtaining very high spot rates on the China-to-West Coast route — and could theoretically end the year with big profits.

Copenhagen-based Sea-Intelligence laid out two scenarios back on April 6. In one, carriers...

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/carrier-capacity-cuts-send-trans-pacific-rates-into-orbit

Will Venezuela sanctions spark another tanker spike?

crude tanker

Tanker owners have a love-hate relationship with U.S. sanctions. On one hand, sanctions can pull perfectly good fleet capacity from the market, causing spot rates to skyrocket. On the other, your own perfectly good fleet capacity can get pulled from the market.

What’s unnerving to tanker owners about U.S. sanctions is their apparent randomness: some ships get hit, others that perform the exact same voyages do not. It calls to mind the famous Shirley Jackson story, “The Lottery,” in which a...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/will-venezuela-sanctions-spark-another-tanker-spike

Cracking the case of the containerized cocaine

cocaine

The drug bust aboard the container-ship MSC Gayane on June 17, 2019, was spectacular in every sense: the largest drug seizure in U.S. history, over a billion dollars’ worth of cocaine, a ship operated by one of the world’s largest carriers and owned by one of America’s largest banks, a conspiracy among the crew, nighttime liaisons off the South American coast, a globe-spanning trafficking network … it sounded like a maritime version of “Scarface.”

A year later, the saga continues to unfold.

The...

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/cracking-the-case-of-the-containerized-coke

Crew crisis is on verge of becoming global trade crisis

ship crew

Watching the growing threat to global trade from the stranded-crew crisis is like watching a train wreck in slow motion — and the governments of the world still don’t see it coming.

A June 15 deadline was set by the union representing seafarers, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), to resolve the crew repatriation issue, get thousands of seafarers stranded by COVID-19 travel restrictions back home, and designate all seafarers “key workers” who can travel unrestricted.

That...

https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/crew-crisis-is-on-verge-of-becoming-global-trade-crisis

+ More