The Beauty of a Public Life

2005 was widely regarded in our industry as the Year of the Shipping IPO. Briefly, it seemed that the public markets in New York were open to anyone who could find a loan or a private equity sponsor – ships were optional. And taking out China COSCO Holding’s massive $1.2 billion Hong Kong IPO and BW Gas’ $650 million IPO in Oslo, 70% of the activity was occurred in New York alone.

This year the trend towards accessing the public equity markets has continued, but in many ways things couldn’t be more different. New York up through November had seen but three IPOs against last year’s 14: those of Omega Navigation in the spring and Ultrapetrol and Danaos this fall. Meanwhile equity markets for shipping have been blossoming around the world – Dubai saw its first major shipping IPO in the form of Gulf Navigation, while Singapore moved from just Courage Marine’s tiny $34 million IPO in 2005 to the much more substantial Pacific Shipping Trust and Berlian Laju Tankers IPOs in 2006. More recently, China Merchants Energy Shipping priced a massively successful $566 million IPO that saw its shares appreciate 80% in their first day of trading, while Aegean Marine and Teekay Offshore met with success in New York.

This is as much evidence of maturation in the global capital markets as shipping’s 2005 dive into public equity was evidence of growing maturity in the shipping industry’s relationship with the public investor. It is a reverberation of trends globally, where more and more industries find investors of the local variety as their exchanges grow to meet their capital requirements and securities laws evolve. It is a reflection of the increasingly tiresome burden of Sarbanes-Oxley, one that many hope legislators will tweak to make more bearable in the near future.

This is only an excerpt of The Beauty of a Public Life

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