Moby Lines set to grow with equity fund partner

Rising Italian ferry company Moby Lines is poised to take on a private equity fund as a small but significant minority partner, company chief executive Vincenzo Onorato has confirmed.

Mr Onorato said the move would permit the continued aggressive expansion of the company, while keeping its debt to capital ratio at the current 50%.

An initial public offering for Moby, which had been discussed in the past, is now thought unlikely.

Company managing director Luigi Parente said Moby would continue to expand, whether organically or through buying new ships and acquiring existing shipping companies, citing its recent acquisition of Lloyd Sardegna, with five ships, as well as two separate vessel purchases.

Mr Onorato added that Moby will now work to faze the new vessels into the fleet, though one of the Lloyd Sardinia ships will be sold.

At a press conference in Milan on Tuesday, Moby executives said passenger throughput rose 6% to more than 4m in the first nine months of the year.

The company also expects a 7% increase in revenue for the year, to EUR 180m ($225m), and a further increase to EUR 250m in 2007.

The company's Sardinian services registered a particularly strong increase of 11%, compared with an overall increase of 6% for the Sardinian market as a whole, and Moby now claims to be the leader in services to the island with a 37% share.

Around 1.9m passengers travelled the routes between Civitavecchia, Livorno and Genoa on the Italian mainland, and Olbia in Sardinia during the first nine months of this year, 200,000 up on the same period in 2005.