In a welcome turn of events, the market was resoundingly upbeat this week. The pace of transactions picked up notably across sectors, and we can’t help but view this as a positive sign for the financing market going forward.

On the M&A front Excel and Quintana successfully closed their merger. Each issued and outstanding share of Quintana common stock was converted into the right to receive $13.00 in cash and 0.3979 Excel Class A common shares. The merger creates a combined company that oper­ates a fleet of 47 vessels with a total carrying capacity of approximately 3.7 million DWT and an average age of approximately eight years. Stamatis Molaris stepped into the role of CEO of the combined company, while Hans Mende, Corbin Robertson III and Paul Cornell joined its board of directors. We were happy to hear that the deal was executed smoothly. Moreover, Nordea and the under­writing team were successful in syndicating the debt levels required to make the deal possible – without needing to bring market flex provisions into play.

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Aries Maritime Transport and TBS have emerged this week as the next shipping companies likely to head off on IPO roadshows to raise fresh capital. These two deals follow on the heels of the wildly successful IPO of Teekay LNG, and before that Diana’s less-than-spectacular post-offering performance.

We have been watching TBS since it made its initial S-1 filing with the SEC in March, but noticed that the company filed a revised document with the SEC this week that includes much more detailed figures, as highlighted in the Forthcoming IPOs table. Although public transactions are not generally deemed “effective” until shortly before pricing time, we imagine TBS is getting very close to launching. As for Aries, the deal was initially filed using the confidential Form F-1 and was therefore previously unknown to the marketplace.

This is a very good combination of deals to launch so close together in that they are very different and will likely appeal to different categories of investors. As you can see from the accompanying fleet list, Aries’ fleet is comprised of product tankers and container ships, 100% of which are on term charters. In contrast, TBS operates a long-established liner service using a fleet of owned and chartered-in bulk carriers to serve its industrial customers. There are plenty of other differences as well. For example, Aries plans to pay a substantial dividend that appears similar to Arlington Tankers in concept while TBS does not anticipate paying a dividend. As always, we will refrain from engaging in a valuation analysis until the deals conclude, but below are some facts and figures that appear in the public document.