Beijing-based Minsheng Financial Leasing (MSFL) is looking increasingly like an asset-playing shipowner after it flipped a Chinese-built ultramax bulker for a tidy profit only two months after buying it.

Meanwhile the buyer, Shanghai Newseas Navigation, is in transition. Just two ships into a stalled programme of secondhand acquisitions, its chief executive is calling it quits amid a state-ordered reorganisation of its parent group.