The Marine Money keynote speaker, Wilbur Ross, was not surprisingly touting the virtues of fuel efficient eco-VLCCs of the type that one of his funds has recently ordered from Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, in conjunction with a Norwegian owner.
Throughout the day, movements of energy were a dominant theme. An oil spreads expert, Andrew Lipow, speaking after Ross, who has also invested in additional suezmaxes through his existing Diamond S which failed earlier in the year in an IPO effort, stressed a whole raft of changing trade patterns in US oil. He voiced an opinion that relaxed oil export restrictions could bode negatively for the U. Jones Act vessels.
On the subsequent panel, where shipping prospects were explicitly tied to energy market developments, the one Jones Act owner, Charles Fabrikant, of Seacor, was strangely unable to comment. Blank Rome lawyer Matt Thomas, based in Washington DC, told the audience that: “We are on a glide path towards crude oil exports.”
Overall, the panel, which included Chembulk’s Jack Noonan, Scorpio’s Robert Bugbee, and Art Regan from Principal Maritime, a suezmax specialist formed by the Apollo group which had also sought to offer shares to the public, agreed that changes in oil trading patterns, tied to both shale oil production increases in the States, and shifting price spreads between differing oil grades- especially over the past few months, had been good for shipping.
Later in the day, owners who had timed the tanker market correctly, DHT, and Tanker Investments Limited, an offshoot of Teekay Corp revealed some of their now prescient looking analytics. A presentation by Pareto Securities provided insights into success of Navig8 which also appears to have made an optimal entry point into a few of the stronger sectors.
The Maritime Consortium event, presented a view that New York and London are very much aligned on arbitrations where the similarities may overshadow their well-known differences. Yet only one panelist, Dr. Aleka Mandaraka-Sheppard, a noted maritime lawyer and arbitrator from London, mentioned the unspoken elephant in the room- rise of the Lion City not represented on the panel, in recent years.
Jeff Pribor, the top shipping banker at Jefferies & Company, appeared at both events- discussing the successful restructuring of OSG at the Marine Money event, and then offering views on the differing financing environments on both sides of the Atlantic to the Consortium’s audience.
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