In the kind of boring but important news bulletin that you’d typically hear at the beginning of, say, a James Bond movie, a mysterious group of wealthy shipping tycoons is buying up the oil supertankers. A Seoul-based firm has bought about 120 very large crude carriers over the past month or two, a position so large that it’s unprecedented. The final buyer is believed to be an entity linked to an Italian shipping magnate, and the relationship between the two is unclear. What is clear, though, is that they bought a whole lot of oil tankers. It’s effectively 15 percent of the total non-sanctioned tanker fleet, and of the big boats, the tycoons effectively control one-third of the VLCC global fleet. The market has been spooked, and the cost of freight has jumped: VLCCs can haul two million barrels of oil and now cost $120,000 per day, up fourfold since before the buying spree.
Alex Longley, Weilun Soon and Alaric Nightingale, Bloomberg
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