The Class of 2006

For most of the past 40 years, shipping IPOs have been a rarity. Being by nature private, shipowners preferred to keep their activities away from the public eye and were therefore reluctant to move forward with public offerings. These entrepreneurs operated in secret and could well afford to. In fact, it was about 20 years ago when a real estate entrepreneur named Mike Hudner created the B+H companies which are the forerunners of today’s IPOs. The market was subsequently fallow for a period, but times have changed, and with those changes, so have the models for raising capital. Shipping is now stylish and the younger generation is far more receptive than its forbearers to capital market opportunities.

2005′s graduating class contained 18 newly public companies, a sizeable sum, but of even greater interest was the fact that five members of this class finished in the top ten in this year’s formal rankings. Last year for these rankings we received a slightly smaller class of 14 graduates and of some significance was the fact that the New York exchanges were not dominant. Companies this year decided to file in London, Dubai, Germany and Luxembourg. We look forward to including them in our Rankings next year and have high expectations for their performance. As a precursor to next year’s competition and for fun, we have decided to rank this group on the basis of total return to shareholders for the shortened period between going public and the end of May. But before we get to the results, here is the class of 2006.

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