d’Amico in Talks to Sell Three More Ships

Product tanker shipping company d’Amico International Shipping (DIS) is in talks to dispose of three more tankers, the company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Carlos Balestra di Mottola, said in the shipowner’s financial report for the first quarter of the year.

The announcement comes following the disposal of two medium range product tankers to Monaco-based ship management firm Sea World Management for USD 13.5 million each, earlier this year.

“Three further vessels are currently under sale negotiations and their disposal is expected to generate net cash in excess of USD 15 million during the current year,” Balestra di Mottola said.

“These deals together with the share capital increase we recently announced will considerably strengthen our balance sheet and provide the required resources for our company to complete its long-term investment plan.”

For the first quarter of 2017, the company booked a net profit of USD 1.8 million, down from USD 7.2 million in Q1 of 2016. DIS said that the variance compared to the previous year is almost entirely due to the higher spot rates in the first three months of 2016.

However, d’Amico’s EBITDA reached USD 16.5 million, which the company claims is USD 1.7 million higher than the EBITDA achieved in the previous six months.

The positive result was ascribed to an improving product tanker market, which led DIS to increase its daily spot average by over 32% (or USD 3,200/day) at USD 13,363 relative to the average of the second half of last year.

“At the same time, DIS’ good level of time-charter coverage (41% at USD 15,908/day), allowed us to achieve quite of a satisfactory total daily TCE average of USD 14,412 in the quarter,” Marco Fiori, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, noted.

“We maintain our positive outlook on the product tanker market and on its very solid fundamentals,” he added, referring to the currently low MR orderbook and expected increase of the world’s oil product demand in the next few years, outpacing supply growth.

” In this context, as I have been saying in the past I think our company is very well positioned to benefit from the expected market recovery.”

DIS is scheduled to take delivery of six LR1s between Q4’17 and Q4’18, for which the remaining CAPEX amounts to USD 197.3 million.

However, almost 70 percent of the total CAPEX will be financed with a bank debt DIS said it had already secured, totaling in USD 136.5 million.