We commenced business operations in April 2010 through our predecessor company
with the goal of building an enduring product and chemical tanker company that
emphasizes service excellence, innovation, and operational efficiency through
our focus on high quality, fuel-efficient vessels. We are led by a team of experienced
senior managers who have previously held senior management positions with highly
regarded public shipping companies and financial institutions.
We are strategically focused on modern, fuel-efficient, mid-size product and
chemical tankers. We actively pursue opportunities to exploit the overlap we
believe exists between the clean petroleum product (“CPP”) and chemical
sectors in order to enhance earnings, and also seek to engage in more complex
CPP trades, such as multi-grade and multi-port loading and discharging operations,
where our knowledge of chemical operations is beneficial to our CPP customers.
Our fuel-efficient operations are designed to enhance our investment returns
and provide value-added service to our customers. We believe we are on the forefront
of fuel efficiency and emissions reduction trends and are well positioned to
capitalize on these developments by (a) constructing new economically advanced
vessels (“Eco-design”), (b) modifying existing vessels to improve
fuel efficiency (“Eco-mod”) and (c) equipping our fleet with engine
diagnostic and ship performance management systems to optimize voyage performance.
As a result, we have reduced the fuel consumption of our Eco-mod vessels which,
in some cases, achieve performance close to that of new Eco-design vessels.
Our acquisition strategy is to build our fleet with Eco-design newbuildings
and modern second-hand vessels that can be upgraded to Eco-mod.
We have no related-party transactions concerning our vessel operations. Certain
of our wholly-owned subsidiaries carry out our management and administrative
services, with ASBL providing our management services and associated functions,
ASSIL providing our corporate, accounting, fleet administration and operations
services and ASA and ASUS performing our commercial management and chartering
services. Technical management of our vessels is performed by a combination
of ASSIL and our third-party technical managers. ASSIL’s operations team
is directly responsible for insurance and for overseeing significant operational
functions of the third-party technical managers. ASSIL’s operations team
also supervises the construction of our newbuilding vessels in close coordination
with the third-party supervision teams. We have a resolute focus on both high-quality
service and efficient operations, and we believe that our corporate overhead
and operating expenses are among the lowest of our peers.
We are commercially independent, as we have no blanket employment arrangements
with third-party or related-party commercial managers. We market our services
both directly to a broad range of customers, including oil majors, national
oil companies, oil and chemical traders, chemical companies, and a range of
pooling service providers. We monitor the tanker markets to understand and best
utilize our vessels and may change our chartering strategy to take advantage
of changing market conditions.
We believe that the market for mid-size product and chemical tankers has recovered
from cyclical lows, resulting from strong underlying demand growth driven by
both cyclical and secular trends, as well as a reduction in the supply overhang
due to reduced ordering activity and an extended period of fleet growth at a
rate below that of demand growth. We believe that we are well positioned to
benefit from the market recovery with a modern, fuel-efficient fleet, access
to capital for growth, a diverse and high-quality customer base, an emphasis
on service excellence in an increasingly demanding regulatory environment and
a relative cost advantage in assets, operations and corporate overhead.
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