Ridgebury Tankers is still looking at acquiring secondhand tonnage, CEO Robert Burke told the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum, held at Posidonia in Athens on June 7.

Burke sees two big issues affecting the industry, the first being the low price of crude oil, which could lead to future tanker acquisitions by the Connecticut-based firm.

"I don't understand how the price of a commodity can fall by half and the analysts only project that it will only increase by a couple of extra percentage points," Burke told delegates.

"If you look at the driving miles so far in the US, India and China, it's all surprised to the upside and I think that's going to help tankers quite a bit over the next year or so and we have thought about buying some older tonnage."

In early May, Ridgebury bought DHT Holdings' 15-year-old suezmax DHT Target (164,600 dwt, built 2001) for a reported US$22.5m. Last year, it bought four VLCCs, each around 15 years of age, from Independent Tankers Corp for US$135m en bloc.

"The other issue is access to cash, and everybody always asks where the money's going to come from," Burke continued.

"The money will come when the money's supposed to come. It will come when PE [private equity] thinks they can quote-unquote 'do a trade'. In fact, we're backed by a PE group [Riverstone Holdings] and they allow us to buy one ship at a time, like real shipowners, in the secondhand market," he went on.