Iran war supercharges secretive Korean tycoon’s big tanker bet

SEOUL – As the war in Iran wreaks chaos across global energy markets, one enigmatic Korean tycoon has seen his earnings soar.

For months, Mr Ga-Hyun Chung has been buying up vast quantities of oil tankers – a bet of unprecedented scale that shook the global shipping market even before the conflict started.

Now he is reaping huge rewards after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drove chartering rates to never-before-seen highs.

In the weeks before the war, Mr Chung’s Sinokor group had moved at least six empty supertankers into the Persian Gulf, where they sat idle waiting for cargoes.

Now, with exports through the strait choked off and regional storage fast filling up, Sinokor is hiring ships out at eye-popping rates of US$500,000 (S$641,000) a day to hold oil, brokers said – almost 10 times the level of 2025.

Even in an industry known for its swashbuckling risk-takers, Mr Chung stands out. His move to buy up a significant share of the global tanker fleet in recent months shocked old hands of the shipping market.

Now, the deeply private scion of a Korean shipping family, who’s known for his militaristic approach and his love of challenging subordinates and business partners to arm-wrestling contests, is poised to emerge as one of the big winners of the turmoil in the oil trade from the Iran war.

“They’ve had a major impact,” said Mr Halvor Ellefsen, a London-based director at Fearnleys Shipbrokers UK.

“They’ve controlled a big part of the fleet,” he said, “sharpened competition, and ultimately sometimes have been able to name their price.”

Since the US and Israel attacked Iran, the tanker market has continued to tighten as vessels are forced to reroute and a chunk of the fleet remains trapped inside the Strait of Hormuz.

The disruption to shipping flows will take time to untangle even after the fighting stops – keeping rates higher for longer and generating outsized profits for owners like Sinokor.

This account of Sinokor’s huge bet is based on conversations with over a dozen industry insiders, including brokers, rival owners and former employees, most of whom asked not to be identified discussing private interactions. Sinokor did not respond to requests for comment.

Vital cog

The upheaval caused by the Iran war means the world’s attention is increasingly focused on the tanker market, an industry run by some of the most colourful and secretive figures in the oil world.

A vital cog in the global economy, it is a business that has minted fortunes for those willing to make the riskiest bets – whether sending ships into and out of war zones or continuing to carry Russian oil after its invasion of Ukraine.

Founded in 1989, Sinokor originally started out as a container shipper, and launched the first Korea-China container line service that year, according to its website.

Its chairman is Mr Tae-Soon Chung – Mr Ga-Hyun Chung’s father – a relatively public figure in South Korea who has served as the chairman of the national shipowners’ association. 

By contrast, Mr Ga-Hyun Chung keeps a low profile outside of the industry, and even people in the shipping world say he is an enigmatic character who tries to remain as discreet as possible.

People who have dealt with Sinokor say the younger Chung makes the key decisions himself, and personally negotiates the most important contracts.

He creates WhatsApp groups to communicate, often with large numbers of people in them, whether to issue instructions to his team or conduct business with external parties. He often phones rival owners to talk about the market.

Mr Chung is known for his love of judo, and one former employee describes him as devoted to work and his fitness; according to industry lore, he’s rarely been beaten in arm wrestling.

Aggressive bets

Until recently, Sinokor has featured as a smaller player in oil supertankers, and a person who worked with Mr Chung in earlier years said that for the most part he was considered a conservative risk-taker.

However, in recent years his bets have been getting bigger. In 2024, the company sent oil tanker rates surging after it made a rush of bookings that left others in the business nonplussed. But the move soon played out, and the market moved on.

Sinokor’s latest buying spree came on quickly and aggressively. In a matter of weeks, the company moved to buy or hire a huge number of very large crude carriers (VLCC), giving it a level of influence on the market that industry veterans said was unprecedented.

The shipping world was transfixed. The cost to hire a supertanker anywhere in the world soared to record levels as shippers responded with panic bookings, while rumours flew about the scale and purpose of the bet – especially as Bloomberg and others reported that it was being funded, at least in part, by entities linked to Italian shipping billionaire Gianluigi Aponte.

The bet came at a time when a growing number of the world’s tankers had been hit by sanctions or were being used as floating storage, leaving fewer and fewer vessels available for hire just as the volume of oil being shipped around the world was surging.

The company continued to snap up tankers, and by late February some rivals estimated that Sinokor controlled about 150 supertankers, a number that equates to almost 40 per cent of the ships at the time that were not either sanctioned or already tied up.

The cost of hiring a VLCC for one year surged to more than US$100,000 a day on average – a record in data going back to 1988.

As Sinokor acquired tankers, a handful were moved into the Persian Gulf.

On Jan 29, the Sinokor-operated Singapore Loyalty crossed the Strait of Hormuz, where it waited empty inside the gulf. Over the next four weeks it would be followed by at least five more vessels that began waiting together in a cluster near Dubai.

(It is not clear whether Sinokor moved the ships into the Gulf in anticipation of US military action, or if they were simply heading to a major oil-producing region in search of cargoes to pick up.)

By March 2, after the start of the conflict left Hormuz frozen and Middle Eastern energy supplies choked off from the rest of the world, tanker rates soared further.

Shipbrokers reported that Sinokor was asking the equivalent of about US$20 a barrel to transport oil from the region to China on its VLCCs, an eye-watering figure compared with an average of about US$2.50 in 2025. 

Few empty tankers

Back inside the Gulf, Sinokor’s ships were now among the few empty tankers available for hire by oil companies desperate for additional storage space.

Two weeks later, many of the ships now appear to have loaded oil. As the Strait of Hormuz remains largely closed to traffic, the ships are on charter as floating storage, suggesting they will keep earning Sinokor its US$500,000 a day as long as the war continues.

When the company went on its purchasing spree in January it bought a series of ships from another owner at an average of US$88 million, according to data from a broker.

One of those ships is now loading cargoes in the Gulf and would have paid for itself in less than six months on a US$500,000-a-day deal if those rates were to be sustained.

There is still no guarantee Mr Chung’s bet will be a long-term success. While the conflict has upended oil tanker markets, it is also creating what the International Energy Agency described as the biggest supply disruption on record – an effect that in time will mean less oil on the world’s oceans.

For now though, Sinokor is reaping huge earnings both inside and outside of the Gulf. One recent booking was made at a rate of US$181,000 a day from Brazil, according to Tankers International data, about triple the average daily earnings for VLCCs in 2025.

“A good position is a little strategy and a little luck,” said Mr Carl Larry, an oil analyst at Enverus. Sinokor’s big bet on tankers “was quite unusually advantageous”. BLOOMBERG