Word: fleetness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...fast new freighters to slake the world's impatient thirst for machinery and steel, coal, wheat, and other basic raw materials that must be hauled from the ends of the earth (see color pages). Most of all, shipowners are clamoring for tankers. Though the world's tanker fleet has doubled since World War II, oil shipments have grown to 45% of all tonnage moved by ship (v. 21% in 1937), and the fleet is still inadequate for the load. The answer: supertankers...
...kind of betting on the future, no one has done better than Niarchos. Except for 1954, when six of his ships were laid up for five months, his tankers have hauled all the oil they could load, often at fancy prices. Shuttling between long-and short-term contracts, his fleet last year transported the equivalent (3.5 billion gals.) of New York State's annual gasoline consumption...
...reasons, Niarchos is distrusted by oldtime shipowners, sneered at as an "uptown boy," i.e., a landlubber who doesn't know his fantail from a fo'c'sle. Though he seldom sets foot aboard a tanker, Niarchos retorts angrily that he is far more concerned with his fleet than his fortune...
Lowest of the Low. Niarchos has a rare faculty for expanding his fleet "when shipyards are hungry." In 1949, when British yards were hungry ($120 a ton), he ordered ten tankers; when British berths filled up, Niarchos fed the German, Dutch and Swedish yards, later moved on to hungry Japan. He drives a hard bargain. Says Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Co.'s Pieter Goedkoop, who has built two tankers for Niarchos: "He dictated the price. It wasn't unreasonably low. It was the lowest of the low that he could reasonably ask." But after signing a construction contract...
...modest man. "People ask me," says he, " 'If your brother-in-law is worth $150 million, what are you worth?' I say. 'Maybe minus $150 million.' You can never tell what ships are worth. Why someday I may even have to sell the whole fleet for scrap iron." Few shipping men think that day will ever come-or, if it does, that Niarchos will lose money on the deal...