Karen Kong

Director, Treasury

Shipping is a capital intensive and cyclical business. As such, it is vitally important that we maintain a healthy cash position and access to long-term funding to support us both operationally and as vessel purchase opportunities arise.

Internally, our Treasury team works closely with the senior management and other functional units to forecast both the short-term and long-term cash flow requirements of the Group. We always ensure payments are settled in a timely fashion, as part of our effort to promote Pacific Basin as one of the most reliable counterparties in our sector.

Externally, we strive to develop and maintain our relationship with a range of industry-experienced financial institutions worldwide. This allows us to diversify our access to competitive funding sources, including traditional shipping loans, long-term leases, capital market instruments and government supported export credit financing.

With increasingly stringent capital adequacy and other regulatory requirements, banks and financial institutions today are more selective of their borrowers and business partners. However, we believe that our transparency gives a great deal of comfort to our banking partners as it does to our investors and other stakeholders. We promote transparency by engaging in regular dialogue with our bankers to enhance their understanding of our financial performance, business model and strategy and our outlook for our sector and our business. In addition, we ensure consistent compliance with loan and convertible bond covenants, we are proactive in discussions with our lenders and plan for any potential issues.

We offer our full support to our business units from fulfilling their payment obligations to implementing their business plans. We work closely with the entire Pacific Basin team ensuring that the Company is always optimally positioned throughout all stages of the shipping and economic cycles.