Wilson Completes Successful Roadshow and Starts Trading on OSE Today

Bergen-based Wilson Carriers is the latest dry bulk company to list on the OSE and has started trading today under the ticker code WILS. In Ship (owned by Mr. Kristian Eidesvik) sold 35% or 14.8 million shares at NOK 19.50 to selected Norwegian and UK investors raising NOK 288 million. Arrangers DnB NOR Markets and Pareto Securities reported a huge interest in the company, demonstrating investor attraction to their planned dividend stock. The offering was oversubscribed by 3.3 times and sold 20% to retail and 80% to institutional investors. Among other things, the success of the deal is a testament to its perfect timing in that asset prices on dry bulk ships are widely considered to be at the top.

Seeing the rush of capital towards dry bulk deals like DryShips and International Shipping Enterprises and watching the line for this capital begin to form among operators in the United States, Eidesvik-controlled European-focused minibulker Wilson ASA opted to take a different spin on what so far appears to be a successful model.

Testing New Waters

With only indirect exposure to China, the company had a slightly different story to sell, and the current degree of dry bulk liquidity and demand in Oslo has been largely untested. Like its foreign comparables, however, Wilson ASA met with great success this week when it priced its 14.8 million secondary shares at NOK 19.5, above the anticipated range of NOK 16.5-19.

Both upside and downside risk in this deal were narrower than some of its U.S. comparables, as the company maintains a focus on long-term contracts. While part of the purpose of the offering, which raised approximately $47 million in USD terms, is to facilitate the paying down the debt of selling shareholder In Ship, other reasons cited in the prospectus include providing a regulated marketplace for share trading, making the company more transparent and facilitating satisfactory liquidity in the company’s shares by increasing the free float and broadening the shareholder structure.

Wilson owns or operates a fleet of approximately 90 vessels and 15 million tons, making the company the second largest player in the European short sea market. Core tenets of the company’s business strategy include long-term contract portfolios and extensive knowledge of its customers’ needs. The company believes that this structure allows it to ensure high productivity and stable long-term earnings, which makes it quite a different animal than many of the more spot-focused dry bulk deals we have seen.

A Complicated Past

The ownership history of the company is somewhat convoluted but worth reviewing. Wilson Group, consisting of Wilson EuroCarriers AS and Wilson Ship Management AS, was sold by Actinor ASA in 2000; half went to In Ship AS and half went to Caiano. These companies then established Wilson Holding AS, which has since become Wilson ASA. Caiano was already controlled at the time by Kristian Eidesvik, while In Ship AS was owned by Holter-Sørensen Invest (18%) and Ole Henrik Nesheim (82%). Since that time, Caiano acquired all of the voting share in In Ship AS, the selling shareholder in the offering.