from the hip

The Norwegian shipping magnate and multi billionaire John Fredriksen, the owner of several billion dollar shipping and oil rig companies, is canceling 4 chemical tankers ordered at the Alcock Ashdown yards in India. These tankers were ordered by Fredriksen’s daughters Kathrine and Cecilie.

The Fredriksen controlled oil drilling company Seadrill is also negotiating cancellation of four floating oil rigs, valued at 850 million dollars, with the Keppel Fels & PPL yards in Singapore. As well, Fredriksen’s Golden Ocean is negotiating cancellations of some of its ordered ships at yards in China and South Korea.

There is no indication that Fredriksen’s businesses is suffering more than other businesses due to the current crisis. Rather it is assumed that the cancellations reflect Fredriksen’s view that the next few years may be somewhat tougher than the previous years in shipping.

Billionaire Norwegian shipowner and businessman John Fredriksen has placed one of his twin daughters, Kathrine Fredriksen (see picture), on the board of his major stocklisted tanker firm Frontline Ltd. Her sister, Cecilie Fredriksen, already sits on the board of another Fredriksen-controlled company, the Oslo-based collection agency Aktiv Kapital.

“He’s a modern-day Onassis. The tanker king. He landed squarely in the sweet spot of the tanker cycle, with the largest fleet of ships.” In 2001 an article on Forbes.com described him as having “a tanker fleet bigger than anything Aristotle Onassis ever had.”

Simultaneously, John Fredriksen is seemingly launching a media campaign to promote his daughters in Norwegian media. While I don’t know this for sure, the articles presenting his beautiful daughters Kathrine and Cecilie has all the marks of a professional PR-campaign on them. They appear at roughly the same time in several papers each time, and the content is similar.

The two young ladies are presented as savvy business-women. While I think it is wonderful that John Fredriksen is teaching his daughters business, I think perhaps the PR firm may be overstating the case a little, perhaps in order to please Mr. Fredriksen. While they may be talented, they are still a little too young for the heroic role assigned in some of the articles.