The firm
Delos Shipping
A merchant bank and lessor to the maritime industry, providing debt and equity financing to shipping companies worldwide.
Delos was built on a simple observation: shipping is enormously capital-intensive, its cash flows are cyclical, and the banks that traditionally financed it withdraw at precisely the moment owners need them most. That gap — between the capital a fleet requires and the capital a balance sheet can carry — is the firm’s business.
Rather than diversify across asset classes, Delos stays, in its own words, one hundred percent immersed in shipping around the clock. The firm treats industry knowledge as its principal asset and its due-diligence discipline as the thing that protects it.
Target markets
Sale-leasebacks
Five- to twenty-five-year sale-leasebacks on all maritime asset types, for counterparties with implied or actual credit ratings from CCC to AA. The structure lets an operator convert a vessel into working capital and improve its balance sheet while retaining full commercial use of the ship.
Distressed acquisitions
Purchases of distressed loans, corporations, partnerships and assets across the maritime industry — situations where the analytical work is heavy, the timeline is compressed and conventional lenders have already stepped away.
Cyclical opportunities
Opportunistic acquisitions in dry bulk, container and tanker tonnage, underwritten against freight rates, newbuild orderbooks and second-hand asset values rather than against sentiment.
Segments
Across the fleet
Delos finances and owns tankers, dry bulk carriers, container vessels, car carriers, cruise ships and specialty marine assets. Its stated ambition is a diversified sale-leaseback portfolio across those segments, with growing emphasis on fuel-efficient and dual-fuel tonnage as emissions regulation reprices older ships.
“Sale-leaseback of the asset to improve their balance sheet can be a very attractive transaction.”
Brian LadinSelected transactions
- 2025 Sale of the car carrier Asturias A 2010-built, 44,037 dwt pure car carrier with capacity for 4,200 vehicles, built at Nantong Mingde Heavy Industry, sold to a European logistics provider. Delos’ first Ro-Ro acquisition.
- 2018 Acquisition of MS Deutschland A cruise vessel acquired after an extended negotiation and best known as the ship hosting the Semester at Sea programme.
- 2013–2016 Hamburg expansion European build-out alongside board service at König & Cie.
- Through the cycle Fleet built and sold at the peak A fleet of 63 vessels assembled from nothing and largely divested into market strength, after which the firm pivoted to structured leasing.