Fred Cheng’s New Sun

By Matt McCleery

It’s Monday morning and Fred Cheng is in Vancouver finalizing a deal to “bareboat charter,” as he says, his house to Eddie Murphy who will spend the next five months filming a new movie in that photogenic city. Yesterday he was in New York, tomorrow he will be in Hong Kong and a few days later he will be back at his home base in Tokyo, sipping his trademark Coca-Cola and tweaking various charterback deals. That may sound like an unusually demanding schedule to you, but it isn’t for Mr. Cheng. Having dusted himself off after being thrown from Golden Ocean, the company he spent almost three decades building, one of shipping’s most experience dealmakers is back in the saddle again.

Having shaking off the morass of lawyers and vulture investors, the affable deal architect is back to doing what he does best: designing and building shipping transactions with first class charterers and financiers. As we go to press, Marine Money believes his new company Shinyo International (Japanese for “New Sun”) has inked a sale/charterback of a three-year old handysize bulk carrier to Louis Dreyfus in a deal banked by Nedship. We also think he has a few other deals on subjects. Backed by a coterie of devoted equity investors, bankers, shipmanagers and charterers, Mr. Cheng is once again practicing the art of fine tuning risk and reward, and creating deals that are attractive to everyone involved.

This is only an excerpt of Fred Cheng’s New Sun

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