M&A: Liner’s Lunch Continues

As readers of these pages know, in early 2004 we felt that the writing was on the wall that 2005 would be the most active year of consolidation among shipping companies in history.

Our thinking was that shipping companies would continue to generate loads of cash from operations and, combined with the abundance of capital markets financing and investor pressure to exploit operational and commercial synergies through growth, this meant that deals would get done.

Since the enterprise value of the dominant companies has grown so big in recent years, in order for it to be meaningful we expected this growth to come in the form of fleet acquisitions rather than single vessel purchases or orders. And as you can see from Figure 1, deal flow has certainly been brisk.

This is only an excerpt of M&A: Liner’s Lunch Continues

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