Mr. Pribor: The company is coming up on its 10th anniversary. It started in 1997 and went public in 2001. The founder, Peter Georgiopoulos, began with one tanker in 1997, and built the fleet up to a total of 43 tankers by the end of 2004. After completing our fleet modernization plan, our fleet currently stands at 21 tankers.
TWST: Were the tankers you sold single hull tankers?
Mr. Pribor: We sold our single hulled and double-sided tankers. We also sold our
older OBO vessels; basically we disposed of all of our older and non double-
hulled tonnage.
TWST: What's on your agenda for the next few years?
Mr. Pribor: We fully intend to grow our fleet again with modern double-hulled
tankers. We expect that we will be doing that in the coming years. We just have
been careful with respect to growing, because in the last year or two, the
prices that we've seen for tankers has been very high relative to the rates,
which themselves are good. We haven't felt that we could have purchased tankers
and achieve the returns on equity that we target. Those kinds of situations
don't persist forever, and we fully expect that we will have the opportunity to
acquire more vessels in the near future.
Tickers included in this excerpt: GMR
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