Profile

Navigator Gas L.L.C. is a publicly traded liquefied gas shipping company with a global market, that was incorporated in 2000 in the Marshall Islands. It was restructured in 2006, and revitalized in 2012 to become the world's largest fleet of large, sophisticated gas shipping vessels. In 1997, Giovanni Mahler of Lugano, Switzerland and Shaun Fergusson Cairns of the Isle of Man formed Navigator Gas Transport PLC as an Isle of Man public limited company with the intention of constructing the world's "largest ethylene capable vessels." The first five vessels were built in the Jiangnan Shipyard/CSTC shipyard in China, a shipyard known for constructing carriers that are technically complex and capable of transporting even ethylene gas. They provided regular transoceanic service with a shipping fleet of sophisticated large vessels capable of carrying different types and sizes of cargoes, such as liquefied petroleum gas and petrochemical gas, including ethylene to ports in North and South America, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Following a slump in the gas shipping transport market in the late 1990s and early 2000s, delays in the delivery of the vessels, and other factors, NGT was forced into a restructuring which was completed in 2006. In 2006 Navigator Gas Management Limited and its affiliated companies were under new management and owned and operated "five semi-refrigerated 22,000 cubic meter liquefied ethylene gas carriers". In 2012, when Wilbur Ross—who had acquired his first stakes in Navigator in 2011 through WL Ross & Co and affiliates—increased his stake, the company was transformed. Ross, who served as Chairman of Navigator in the 2010s, arranged financing so that Navigator Gas could make major purchases which included the 2013 acquisition of Maersk's Handysize LPG fleet, two secondhand LPG carriers, and construct four new buildings. Before Ross' transactions, Navigator Gas's fleet of ten gas shipping vessels was the second largest in the world after Maersk. When Ross purchased the 34% stake of Navigator Holdings held by the then-bankrupt Lehman Brothers in August 2012, Ross' stake increased to 55.7%. By 2013, with the purchase of Maersk's fleet, Navigator became the largest gas shipping company in the world with 27 vessels and "a 28% market share in the handysize gas segment." By 2017, Navigator Holdings had 14 ethylene-capable semi-refrigerated gas carriers, 17 semi-refrigerated and 7 fully refrigerated vessels.