"Shipping Magnates Shock Industry With Huge Orders"

From Bloomberg via gCaptain:

A shopping spree by two billionaires is shaking up a shipping industry still recovering from years of falling rates and overcapacity.

Jacques Saade’s CMA CGM SA, the world’s third-largest container line, announced an order for nine massive vessels in September, after a year of tepid sales for new ships. Within days, Gianluigi Aponte’s Mediterranean Shipping Co., the No. 2 container line, confirmed it had lobbed in an order for 11 behemoths, each of which can hold 22,000 shipping containers, enough capacity for 44,000 cars or 8.8 million 50-inch TVs.

The orders amounted to almost $2.9 billion combined, according to London-based Vessels Value, an online ship-valuation database. Longer than 3 1/2 football fields, the container ships will be among the largest ever built.

Some analysts, however, say it’s the last thing the market needs right now.
“The problem with the industry as a whole is that there are just too many ships,” said Toby Yeabsley, an analyst at Vessels Value. “It’s a struggle to see where these are going to fit in.”

Ferry Captain
But brash bets are characteristic of ship owners, in a volatile and cyclical industry. Aponte, an Italian-born former ferry captain, started operating cargo ships in 1970 and amassed a fleet of 490 container vessels, ferries, cruise ships and stakes in port terminals. His son Diego became chief executive officer in 2014. Saade formed CMA in Marseille after he moved from Lebanon in 1978. He built it into what has become France’s largest shipping company, helped by a 1992 bet on China’s economic growth. His son Rodolphe is now CEO.

Their success means Aponte has a net worth of $8.9 billion and Saade $4.4 billion, placing both men on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people. Both companies declined to comment on their founders’ net worth....MORE