Want some James Bond in your oil market news? A South Korean shipping tycoon has your back. No Daniel Craig required.
Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Sinokor, a South Korean shipping company, has been secretly carrying UAE crude oil out of the Persian Gulf for months.
How?
Put on your James Bond or Navy Seal hat. How would you do it?
Turn off the ship’s transponder. Sail it right along the Omani coast, as far from Iranian waters as possible. And do it all in the dead of night.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s exactly how they did it.
The tycoon in this story is Ga-Hyun Chung, the head of Sinokor.
Sinokor was founded in 1989, and got its start shipping containers back and forth between Korea and China.
Not a bad time to get into the Chinese shipping market, huh?
(I’m “reading” the audiobook version of _China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know_ by Arthur R. Kroeber. It’s a really great way to appreciate China’s multidecade trajectory.)
Back in mid-March, only two weeks after the war began, Bloomberg ran a piece on how Ga-Hyun Chun had been aggressively buying oil tankers for months.
While Sinokor was in the bulk transport space before last year, they completely transformed their presence with these new tankers.
The timing could not have been better.
The war started in late February. Sinokor was ready to think creatively in getting stranded crude to market very shortly thereafter.
Read this excerpt from Bloomberg’s March piece and tell me we’re not in James Bond world:
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Even in an industry known for its swashbuckling risk-takers, Chung stands out. His move to buy up a significant share of the global tanker fleet in recent months shocked old hands of the shipping market. Now, the deeply private scion of a Korean shipping family, who’s known for his militaristic approach and his love of challenging subordinates and business partners to arm-wrestling contests, is poised to emerge as one of the big winners of the turmoil in the oil trade from the Iran war.
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Is that not a character directly from the James Bond franchise?
I’ll admit, when I say oil markets are never boring, this isn’t precisely what I have in mind. But it counts.
