COPENHAGEN: Denmark based Hafnia Management plans to significantly expand its global footprint by adding more Long Range II tankers into its pool and also have an increased presence in the Medium Range tankers segment in the Asian region, a senior company official said.
Hafnia is one of the founders of the Singapore-based Straits Tankers’ LR Pool, in which it has an ownership of 50% and the remaining half is with Mitsui OSK Lines. Hafnia also operates product tanker pools for Handy and MR segments.
“There is more that could come into the [LR2] sector,” Mikael Skov, CEO Hafnia Tankers, told S&P Global Platts in an interview, on the sidelines of the Sea Asia Conference in Singapore.
Straits’ entry into the LR2 market is significant because it is already the largest pool in the LR1 segment, with close to 50 ships plying both East and the West of Suez, with an everage age of around eight years.
“Straits already has so many LR1s and we feel there is a lot of similarity between LR1s and LR2s, so it makes sense to operate them together,” Skov said.
There is also a lot of freight correlation between Handysize, MR, and LR1 and LR2 tankers, and therefore to have ships of each size helps provide a bigger choice to the customers, he said.
The Mitsui OSK Lines Ltd.-controlled Phoenix Dream is the first LR2 tanker to be admitted into Straits’ pool. Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. also has around 20% ownership in this ship, sources said.
Skov said that around 25 ships have been added to the company’s pools in the last 12 months.
“The constant focus of our strategy is to have a critical mass and the optimization of scale,” he noted.
