Finance for Asian Shipping

The availability of ship financing and alternative sources of capital was the central theme revolving Sea-Asia’s conference yesterday. Referring to a slide that illustrates the impact of banks writedowns on their market capitalisations (see below), Dagfinn Lunde, Member of the Board of Managing Directors of DVB Bank SE, pointed out that even though the traditional ship financing landscape has changed dramatically, there is still money available from banks. He told the crowd that DVB, DnB NOR, Nordea, Nord LB, Fortis and some Greek banks are open to different extents and it is possible to put together club deals between USD 100 million to 120 million today. “If you have the words ‘energy’ or ‘offshore’ in your project, even some US banks are still willing to lend,” he added. Continue Reading

Food for Thought

Sea-Asia 2009 kicks off in Singapore this week and Marine Money Asia had the pleasure to participate in the series of conferences to hear from industry leaders on where they think the markets may be heading. We present some notes from the event.

Li Zhen, Assistant President of Sinotrans Group is in the opinion that it will be difficult for many private shipyards particularly in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Fujian provinces to secure special support from the central government. State-owned shipyards are the main beneficiaries from the government’s assistance programme.  Continue Reading