If you can handle the risk of a company 100% devoted to financial engineering these guys are pretty good at what they do.
Our boilerplate introduction to the Chairman of the parent company:
David Sokol, Chairman of Seaspan, was CEO and chair of MidAmerican Energy when Berkshire Hathaway bought the utility. At the time MidAm was running the largest utility-owned wind generation fleet in the U.S., in addition to the hydrocarbon fueled generation. He appeared to have the inside track to replacing Buffet, with Ajit Jain being elevated to God-King of all insurance ops.
Then Sokol decided to trade ahead of a Berkshire acquisition and Buffet did the investigation and fired Sokol....
And on the CEO of the larger of the two operating companies:
Hong Kong Shipping: Do Not Short Seaspan's Bing Chen (ATCO)
From gCaptain:
Containership owner and operator Seaspan Corporation says it has completed full financing for its 70-vessel newbuild program.
The final $1.4 billion in financing closed on December 23, 2021, bringing its total financing proceeds to $6.9 billion.
The $1.4 billion will be used to finance ten 15,000 TEU LNG dual-fuel newbuild vessels and marks the last arrangement needed to fully finance its $7.6 billion newbuild program.
“We have now concluded binding financing arrangements for our full Newbuild Program, solidifying our long-term liquidity,” said Graham Talbot, CFO of Atlas and Seaspan. Seaspan is a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlas Corp. (NYSE: ATCO). “We have demonstrated consistent success in executing on attractive growth opportunities at the right time, while diligently managing associated risk. We do this by ensuring we enter into newbuild contracts only once a long-term lease is in place with one of our high-quality counterparties, and that we have a clear line of sight to financing the project.”
Seaspan charters its vessels primarily on long-term, fixed-rate time charters to the world’s largest container shipping lines. Its fleet consists of 134 vessels with a total capacity of 1,156,800 TEU, plus another 67 vessels under construction, increasing total capacity to 1,959,200 TEU. The 70-ship newbuild program includes three recently delivered ships....
....MUCH MORE
Our last visit to Seaspan was July's "Shipping: French Engineers To Design Ammonia-Ready LNG Fuel Tanks for Hong Kong's Seaspan Containerships"
We ended that post on Mr. Chen by saying:
Because there is so much financial engineering involved in what Seaspan does, buying ships with debt and chartering them out to operators it is a little spooky to look at their financials but if they keep all the plates spinning there is a lot of money to be made. And that's the dilemma for betting on either side of this one.
