AET Tankers says it will exit the chemical tanker sector due to a lack of scale and different investment priorities.
Speaking to TradeWinds on the sidelines of a naming ceremony for two shuttle tankers in South Korea last week, AET president and chief executive Rajalingam Subramaniam said it is considering its options for six 19,900-dwt chemical tankers, having sold seven handysize chemical tankers to Maersk Tankers in September.
The Singapore-based subsidiary of Malaysia's MISC has the six vessels on bareboat charter from Japanese owners until 2023 and 2024.
“We are looking at what we can eventually do with these ships, but they will be redelivered to the owners and we will get out of the charters,” Rajalingam said.
TradeWinds understands from tanker sources that at least two of these six 19,900-dwt vessels — the Bunga Lotus and Bunga Lucerne (both built 2012) — have already been sold by their owners to PetroVietnam Transportation.
Rajalingam described AET’s decision to exit the chemical tanker sector as part of an ongoing portfolio review.
“We tried to make as best possible a strategic fit between the chemical and the product sectors within AET for the last three years,” he said. “The performance, while there have been improvements here and there, has been suboptimal. We simply lack scale in that space.
“We decided that it's best to divest and monetise those assets, which are good assets that are managed by good people in our company, and use that money to reinvest and rejuvenate our fleet in areas where we have scalability.
MISC president and group chief executive Yee Yang Chien, who is also AET’s chairman, added that the decision to exit the chemical tanker sector was purely a financial one.
“In the case of the chemical fleet, we decided it was time to take the money, exit the sector and put it into something which we think would give us better quality income,” he said.
“We happened to find a very good buyer in the form of Maersk [Tankers]. They were able to buy all seven ships. We were also looking at the timing with all the projects we were bidding for. I would say in this case, it was a happy convergence. Everything just fell in place at the right time.”
Maersk Tankers is reportedly paying AET an enbloc price of $93.5m for the seven chemical tankers, which were built by South Korea’s STX Offshore & Shipbuilding in 2009 and 2010.
These ships will be handed over to Maersk Tankers between now and the first quarter of 2020, but Rajalingam did not give a time frame for the redelivery of the remaining six chartered-in tankers.
