Shipowner George Economou spoke with unusual candor at the TradeWinds Shipowners Forum Greece, held as part of the Posidonia exhibition, referring both to his involvement with publicly traded shipping companies and to his long career in international shipping.
The Greek billionaire admitted that his involvement as an activist investor in companies such as Genco Shipping, Performance Shipping, OceanPal, and Seanergy had a single goal:“To make money.”
As he put it, he had no intention of acquiring Genco, adding, however, pointedly that “I would probably like to take Seanergy private, but that’s another story.”
Commenting on Diana Shipping’s public offer for Genco, he assessed that the deal could only move forward if the price offered to shareholders were improved.
At the same time, he criticized the mindset of certain management teams at publicly traded companies, saying that he had met executives who told him, “This is my company,” to which he replied: “I thought it was a publicly traded company. When you’re a public company, you have to deal with whatever comes your way .”
Referring to the much-discussed DryShips case , which resulted in an almost complete write-down of the value of its shares following successive new share issuances and strong investor backlash in the U.S., he argued that the decisions made during that period were driven by the company’s need to survive.“Either the company would survive or it would close,” he noted.
The shipowner recalled that when he was a child growing up in Athens, at a time when his father was active in the paper products industry, he observed that the people around him who were prosperous were the shipowners. “The only people who had a decent standard of living from their salary were those working in shipping,” he said.
“I had to choose between mathematics, which I loved, and shipping. And I decided to go into shipping to make money, because mathematicians didn’t make any money at all.”
Mr. Oikonomou ruled out a return to the capital markets, stating that he is now satisfied as a private shipowner, while concluding with a telling observation about the industry’s future: “Shipping isn’t the only way to make money. And you can probably make more money with less work in many other sectors.”