In International Shipping News 13/09/2016
The funds flowing to listing Hanjin Shipping were likely to fall far short of what was needed to get its stalled cargo moving, said Daniel Yoo, head of global wealth management at Kiwoom Securities.
“Hanjin Group is now going to raise $90 million to fund the cargo ship unloading around the world. Estimated amount is about $543 million,” Yoo told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday.
“It’s still short of the overall, but nevertheless, it is the beginning point,” he said. “The Korean government as well as the company is acting quite fast in terms of trying to solve this problem.”
Hanjin filed for court receivership on August 31, leaving its ships stalled around the world while carrying an estimated $14 billion worth of stranded cargo, much of it Christmas goodies headed for retailers’ shelves.
The shipping line was no minor industry player; industry data provider Alphaliner placed Hanjin at the seventh largest globally, with 98 ships and a 2.9 percent market share. That compared with the largest, APM-Maersk, with around 622 ships and a 15.4 percent market share.
Hanjin’s parent company, Hanjin Group, planned to raise around $90 million to help cover the cost of unloading cargo, but the court said the amount was inadequate and that it wasn’t clear when that plan would be executed, Reuters reported last week. Media reports over the weekend said that shareholder Korean Air Lines agreed to provide around $54 million of that amount, in exchange for collateral in the form of Hanjin’s stake in a terminal at Port of Long Beach.
One ship, Hanjin Greece, managed to dock in Long Beach, California, over the weekend, and had its cargo unloaded, but it there was no timeline for other vessels at ports globally, Reuters reported Monday.
The stalled cargo has dogged retailers.
Nate Herman, senior vice president of supply chain for the American Apparel and Footwear Association told Citigroup in a conference call last week that his organization’s members, as the cargo owners, were paying fees directly to terminals, stevedores and truckers to get their products unloaded from Hanjin ships.
“These are payments for services that they had already paid Hanjin for and so now they’re having to repay it. And so the issue is, will they get money back,” he said, according to a transcript of a conference call published by Citigroup. “That’s unclear but the chief goal throughout all this for our members is to get a hold of their cargo so they can get it to where it’s supposed to be. And why – because it’s holiday cargo.”
But he noted that it wasn’t clear what would happen with the ships that were still in the middle of the ocean. Some of those ships had been expected to go to East Coast ports, which required traversing the Panama Canal at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a ship, he noted.
It wasn’t clear if those ships would instead be brought into West Coast ports, causing further disruption, he said.
Looking past the immediate funding issues, Kiwoom’s Yoo said it wasn’t clear what Hanjin Shipping’s final shape would be ahead.
“The size of this company will definitely shrink. The actual breakup is definitely happening,” he said, noting that another South Korean shipper, Hyundai Merchant Marine, would likely buy some of the assets.
But Yoo noted that after the government faced criticism for using taxpayer money to deal with other troubled companies in the industry, such as Daewoo Shipbuilding, authorities were likely trying to isolate the issue.
Source: CNBC
