Last week, Pelagic Partners took part in the inaugural Oslo Ocean Days, a new conference from TradeWinds and Nor-Shipping. Our Managing Director, Atef Abou-Merhi, joined the Shipowners Panel, “Locking in growth: how do you build from a position of strength?”, held at Gamle Logen alongside senior leadership from MPC Container Ships, BW LPG and Christiania Shipping and Zen.
The panel brought together some of the industry’s most active owners to discuss how they are directing earnings, whether alternative finance models are shifting the balance of power between asset owners and traditional banks, and whether current market conditions are prompting a broader rethink of business models across shipping.
Asked about Pelagic Partners’ own strategy, Atef used the panel to walk through the thinking behind the firm’s evolution. Pelagic Partners started as a Cyprus-based ship-owning maritime equity fund, and over the past six years has invested in or owned more than 40 vessels. Six months ago, in Oslo, the firm took a new part of that business public: a credit-focused vehicle.
He explained that the move was rooted in timing as much as strategy. Looking back 12 to 18 months, most shipping segments were coming off cyclical highs, with large order books prompting many in the market to expect the long cycle to be ending. Pelagic Partners shared that read at the time, and sold down a number of tankers as a result, a decision Atef acknowledged, in hindsight, was made too early, since disruption over the past year has continued to lift markets that many had expected to soften.
That disruption, though, created a different kind of opportunity. As Atef put it, strong markets quietly reopened the capital markets, a window that doesn’t come often in shipping. Pelagic Partners saw a chance to build something new: a business that invests in and owns vessels backed by long-term leases and contracted cash flows, offering a less volatile counterpart to traditional vessel ownership. At the time, the firm identified no comparable public company pursuing this model, in Oslo or elsewhere.
Taking that business public was, in Atef’s words, a way to diversify against the volatility of the equity markets that ship ownership is typically exposed to, pairing it with a vehicle built around longer-term, fixed cash flows.
Conversations like the one at Gamle Logen are a reminder of how quickly shipping’s capital structures are evolving, and how owners are having to think beyond the traditional playbook to build durable businesses through the cycle.
We’re grateful to the Oslo Ocean Days organisers, our fellow panellists, and everyone we connected with throughout the event. We look forward to continuing these conversations with colleagues and partners across the industry.
Pelagic Partners is a ship-owning maritime equity fund based in Cyprus.
