Economou and Tsakos disagree on offshore diversification

The Dryships chairman repeated his stance on the opportunities within the offshore industry, attributing his thirst for diversification to a lull in growth within traditional shipowning, "I have urged time and again everyone that can to look at the offshore sector, there is no reason that the Greeks cannot excel in more than traditional dry bulk, tanker and container."

Following Economou’s comment, Tsakos was less supportive of the idea of diversification and saw work to be done on the markets the Greeks are already heavily involved in before spreading to other sectors.

"I think that the service we provide as an industry, conventional vessels bulk or tankers, is a very important service and it should be rewarded and we should not accept being rewarded with single digit returns,” he followed on.

"I think we have a lot of responsibility for this [low return]. Instead of us looking at which is the next industry to destroy, we should fix our existing industry which is the bread and butter of Greek shipowning. [We should] stay out of oversupplying other industries. the bread and butter of, or right now just the bread, right now we don’t have any butter, the bread of our business is conventional shipping.

"Let’s try and fix the business because it is an insult that we carry 99% efficiently all the cargoes around the world and sometimes we have to pay, we make losses."

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