Yildirim: Offered Hapag-Lloyd stake first

Yildirim: Offered Hapag-Lloyd stake first    The head of the Turkish conglomerate that’s taken a stake in French shipping line CMA CGM said Thursday the company had been offered a stake in German container line Hapag-Lloyd, according to a report by the maritime news outlet Tradewinds.

Yildirim

   'Our banks also showed us Hapag-Lloyd first, but we chose CMA because we believe it was a better investment,' Robert Yuksel Yildirim, chairman of the Yildrim Group, said at the Marine Money Hamburg conference.
   The group took a 20 percent share in CMA CGM — worth $500 million — in late January, and Yildrim said the company offered the French line as much as $1 billion. Yildrim said his company had a stockpile of cash of $500 million entering the financial crisis and sought opportunities outside of its mostly industrial activities.
   “We are diversified,” Yildrim said. “We mainly use the shipping as a speculative investment, while we make the money on the industrial side.”