Commercial ship manager Signal Maritime has expanded its services and launched a new pool for MR product tankers. The move followed the success of its Aframax pool, which has been running since 2018
The new MR pool will benefit from Signal Maritime’s experience of managing clean tankers as well as utilising its cutting edge technology platform Signal Ocean.
Signal Maritime chief executive Panos Dimitracopoulos said “The clean tanker market has always been a highly competitive environment with the presence of many experienced owners and pools.”
He added, “We believe our new MR pool is good for a market that may see more players combining efforts to achieve benefits of scale, optimise their commercial management and address the demanding environmental requirements ahead.”
“The Signal team has a unique set of capabilities, driven by diversified backgrounds, with a strong track record in the Aframax and MR universe. This makes us very confident about the success of this new initiative.”
The new endeavour will replicate Signal’s success in the Aframax market by bringing together shipping best practices with internet-age advanced analytics and management methods.
In a recent article in Tanker Shipping & Trade, it was noted that pooling is a popular form of commercial operation in the tanker sector. Tankers in pools account for 17% of the total tanker fleet by value. In the product tanker sector, 42% of LR1 vessels and 26% of both LR2 and MR vessels operate in pools.
Tanker pools are built around the notion of pooling resources and a number of factors justify their popularity, the main one being the size of customers. The main customers for tanker services are a few, very large energy providers and associated traders. Individually, some of these client’s market capitalisation alone would dwarf dozens of tanker companies – the combination of resources behind the tanker pool gives at least a similar size across the negotiating table.
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