Investment firm to buy as many as 50 containerships
Maritime investment firm Tiger Group could “very easily” buy as many as 50 large containerships in the next two years, betting that the box ship industry will see the most growth in traditional freight markets, the firm’s managing director said.
The Hong Kong-based firm, with assets of more than $10 billion, looks to raise as much as $6 billion to invest in shipping over the next few years through its companies, said Tiger Group’s Managing Director Julian Proctor. The investment firm, a major shareholder in New York-listed Seaspan (SSW.N) and six other maritime firms, is mainly targeting opportunities in the box ship industry.
It does not see much growth in the near term for the oil tanker or dry bulk sectors, which are both struggling with an oversupply of vessels and rock-bottom freight rates.
“Across the various businesses that we have, we could very easily be ordering 30 to 50 ships over the next 24 months,” Julian Proctor, Tiger Group’s managing director, told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference in Singapore. “We think there is good value in large containerships of the right type and right technology. That same proposition is not currently in place in the dry or wet sector at the moment,” he added, referring to the dry bulk and oil tanker markets.”
In today’s prices, 50 new containerships of 8,800 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) would cost around $4.75 billion, according to Clarkson Research.
Source: Reuters
