Here's something that may help stave off a filing. From Bloomberg via gCaptain:
Add oil shippers to the list of winners from this year’s collapse in crude.
The price plunge has spurred China, the world’s second- biggest importer after the U.S., to accelerate bookings of oil cargoes. It will also shave almost $20 billion a year in fuel costs across the maritime industry if prices that dropped 18 percent since last November hold around current levels, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
While the oil slide is hurting nations from Saudi Arabia to Iran that depend on energy for revenues, companies including airlines and cement makers are benefiting as their fuel costs decline. Ship owners serving the industry’s benchmark Middle East-to-Asia trade routes are reaping the best returns from charters in years as the slump drives down the industry’s single biggest expense.
“We’ve seen the Chinese buying a lot from the Middle East and that’s really let rates cook,” Erik Stavseth, an analyst at Arctic Securities ASA in Oslo whose recommendations on shippers returned 15 percent in the past year, said by phone Nov. 11. “With oil prices low going into winter, that’s likely to continue.”
The number of supertankers sailing toward China’s ports matched a record on Oct. 17 and is still close to that level now. The country added 35 million barrels to its inventories in the past three months as the nation fills its strategic petroleum reserves, OPEC said yesterday.
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Brent crude has plunged amid speculation that Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries won’t respond to a global surplus by making the necessary supply cuts. The contract traded below $80 a barrel yesterday for the first time in four years, and is at $78.93 today, down from a 2014 peak of $115.06.
China National United Oil Co., a unit of the country’s biggest energy company, bought a record of about 21 million barrels of Middle East oil in October, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from a pricing window organized by Platts, a unit of McGraw Hill Financial Inc.
“The Chinese, among others, seem to be responding to the lower oil price with additional demand,” Paddy Rodgers, the chief executive officer of Euronav NV, an Antwerp-based owner whose fleet is part of the world’s largest pool of tankers, said by e-mail Nov. 10.
Robert Hvide Macleod, the chief executive officer of the management unit of Frontline Ltd., the tanker company led by billionaire John Fredriksen, said he was unable to comment.
Shares of Euronav fell 1.4 percent to 8.68 euros on the Euronext Brussels exchange. They are down 6.2 percent this year. Frontline gained 2.3 percent in Oslo today....MORE
