{"id":95,"date":"2016-09-16T16:48:27","date_gmt":"2016-09-16T16:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/en\/?p=95"},"modified":"2021-12-31T17:20:05","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T17:20:05","slug":"hanjin-aims-to-sell-more-than-half-its-ships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/hanjin-aims-to-sell-more-than-half-its-ships\/","title":{"rendered":"The BOC Blast 152 – Hanjin Aims to Sell More Than Half Its Ships"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"imagen27\"<\/a>
\nHanjin<\/b> Aims to Sell More Than Half Its Ships<\/b>
\nSales are part of rehabilitation plan to be submitted to Korean court
\nDebt-ridden Hanjin Shipping Co. is working on a restructuring plan that calls for the drastic reduction of its owned fleet and returning the vast majority of the ships it charters to their owners, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
\nDespite the efforts, these people say the most likely scenario is still that the Korean operator\u2014 the world\u2019s seventh-biggest in terms of capacity\u2014will be liquidated, marking one of the shipping industry\u2019s biggest failures.
\nHanjin filed for bankruptcy protection last month. The South Korean government has strongly indicated it has no plans to bail out the company.
\nA Korean court will decide in December whether to accept the plan or let the company go under, according to court officials in Seoul.
\nOne person with knowledge of Hanjin\u2019s efforts to restructure said the operator is considering a number of scenarios but focusing on one that involves Hanjin keeping up to 15 of its 37 ships, and returning to owners almost all of the 61 chartered vessels. Under that scenario, which is subject to approval by the bankruptcy court, \u201cHanjin will emerge as a small regional operator in Asia that will move a small part of Korea\u2019s exports,\u201d the person said.
\nHanjin didn’t return calls for comment.
\nSince Hanjin filed for bankruptcy in Korea in late August, dozens of its ships have been denied access to ports around the world due to uncertainty about who would pay docking fees and container-storage and unloading bills. Those ships are carrying half a million containers with cargo valued at more than $14 billion. Some of them have been seized by the company\u2019s creditors.
\nThe Korean carrier moves roughly 3% of containers globally and up to 10% of those shipped between Asia and Europe. Some 25,000 containers cross the Pacific daily on Hanjin ships.
\nAbout 95% of the world\u2019s manufactured goods\u2014from designer dresses to laptops\u2014are moved in containers.The disruption in the supply chain comes as retailers in the U.S. and Europe are stocking their shelves for the year-end holiday season.
\nHanjin confirmed this week that it had returned five of its chartered vessels to their owners. A Korean government statement on Thursday said 73 vessels were still at sea, of which 37 were being told to return to Korea. The rest were near ports but stayed out on fears they would be seized by creditors.
\nHanjin\u2019s main charterers, including\u00a0 Danaos Corp., Navios Maritime Partners LP and\u00a0 Seaspan Corp. with a combined exposure of more than $1 billion to Hanjin, were hoping for a last-minute intervention by the Korean government that would allow Hanjin to honor its vessel-leasing commitments. That looks less and less likely.
\n\u201cHanjin now has two alternatives: either to drastically downsize or to liquidate,\u201d said Iraklis Prokopakis, Danaos\u2019s chief operating officer. \u201cWe have eight ships chartered to Hanjin and five will be returned. The other three still have cargo on them so I don\u2019t know what will happen.\u201d
\nDanaos has a $560 million exposure to Hanjin.
\nMr. Prokopakis said the key issue at the December court hearing will be whether Hanjin has enough cash to continue operating, even at a much smaller scale.
\nBut with Hanjin\u2019s main creditor, state-run Korean Development Bank, showing no intention to pump more cash into the ailing carrier, few executives in the shipping industry believe it will manage to stay in business.
\n\u201cAny cash Hanjin still has will go to get its ships safely to ports and unload the cargo,\u201d said Lars Jensen, chief executive of Copenhagen-based SeaIntelligence Consulting. \u201cI expect them to start selling their own ships when the legal issues with creditors are settled.\u201d
\nSelling the ships won\u2019t be easy. The majority of Hanjin\u2019s fleet are Panamaxes, which carry fewer than 10,000 containers. Such vessels are fast becoming outdated in the wake of the widening of the Panama Canal earlier this year. That expansion allows ships moving 12,000 containers or more to pass through the isthmus.
\n\u201cSo their only true valuable assets are four 13,000-container ships,\u201d Mr. Jensen said. Hanjin may try to hang on to them hoping to become part of an alliance when the mess clears up, he said, \u201cbut more likely they may sell them as customers won\u2019t want any of their cargo on Hanjin ships. The trust is gone.\u201d
\nThe Korean government said this week it is asking courts to protect Hanjin ships from being seized in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. It plans to do the same next week in countries including Australia, India and the United Arab Emirates. Such a legal protection is already in place in Korea, the U.S.,\u00a0 Japan, the U.K. and Singapore, it says.
\n\u2014Kwanwoo Jun in Seoul contributed to this article.<\/p>\n

\"imagen6\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hanjin Aims to Sell More Than Half Its Ships Sales are part of rehabilitation plan to be submitted to Korean court Debt-ridden Hanjin Shipping Co. is working on a restructuring plan that calls for the drastic reduction of its owned fleet and returning the vast majority of the ships it charters to their owners, according<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[507],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-boc-blast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2060,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/2060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bocintl.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}