Performance Shipping Brand Guidelines: Diana Containerships Renamed and Turned to Tankers

A container-ship owner set up in 2010.

Performance Shipping began under another name. A November 2010 press release, still kept on the company’s website, describes Diana Containerships Inc. as “a corporation founded on January 7, 2010 to pursue vessel acquisitions in the container shipping industry,” issued from Athens. At that point its shares were not yet traded on a national exchange; the release says an exchange offer for registered shares had begun on 19 October 2010.

The company had financial ties to Diana Shipping Inc. In September 2016 MarineLink reported that Diana Shipping had amended an existing loan agreement with a wholly owned subsidiary of Diana Containerships to defer some payments. A 2020 Performance Shipping release says Diana Shipping had also received Series C preferred shares under a then-existing credit facility, in exchange for a reduction of the debt.

Its business was container ships. In August 2019, according to its own release, the fleet still included four of them, two Post-Panamax and two Panamax, and its March 2019 release described it as a company “specializing in the ownership of containerships,” with its ships employed mainly on time charters with liner companies.

The name changed in early 2019. The company’s press archive lists a release of 25 February 2019 still issued as Diana Containerships; its release of 19 March 2019, announcing the 2018 annual report, was issued as Performance Shipping Inc., though the shares still traded under the old ticker, DCIX.

From boxships to Aframax tankers.

The move into tankers came the same year. On 11 June 2019 the company announced that it would buy two 2011-built Aframax tankers by acquiring two entities affiliated with its chairman and chief executive, Symeon Palios, paying for them in new shares. He called it “an important step in the Company’s diversification from the container industry into other areas of the shipping sector.” The first, the Blue Moon, formerly the Maersk Jeddah, was delivered in August 2019, when the fleet stood at four container ships and one Aframax tanker.

The container ships were sold over the following year. On 1 April 2020 the company said it had delivered the 2008-built Post-Panamax Rotterdam to its buyers and taken delivery of the Aframax P. Kikuma, leaving four Aframax tankers and one remaining container ship. Days earlier it had redeemed all of its Series C preferred shares from Diana Shipping and announced that its shares would trade on the Nasdaq Capital Market as PSHG from 30 March 2020. The deputy chief executive, Andreas Michalopoulos, said the changes enabled “a differentiating business strategy with an independent management team.”

Since then the company has added larger ships. The company’s fleet page says that as of 17 September 2026 it owned twelve tankers: seven Aframax tankers and two Suezmax tankers on the water, one LR1 newbuilding due in early 2027 and two Suezmax newbuildings due in late 2028 and mid-2029. The newest Aframax ships are LR2 tankers from Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding: the P. Tokyo and P. Massport of 2025 and the P. Marseille of 2026. Older ships include the Blue Moon and the Briolette, both built by Sumitomo in 2011.

In March 2026 TipRanks, in a report carried by The Globe and Mail, said that on 2 March the company had signed contracts through two subsidiaries with China Shipbuilding Trading Co. and Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding for two 158,000-deadweight-tonne Suezmax tankers, due for delivery in October 2028 and May 2029. The company says it employs its fleet on spot voyages, in pools and on time charters.

Tanker owners and how they present themselves.

Tanker owners rarely sell to the public, so their brands live mostly on corporate websites, in investor material and on the ships themselves. The pattern is consistent across the companies in this series: a short purpose line, a fleet page, an investor section and a sustainability page, set in restrained corporate type and colour. The palettes in these guides, from navy and steel to deep sea greens, are tones of our own choosing rather than any company’s colours.

Photographs do much of the work. Owners publish photographs of their own crude and product tankers, and Ardmore Shipping’s homepage, for example, pairs its values with pictures of named ships from its fleet. The ship names themselves often carry the identity: Ardmore puts its own name on every hull, while Okeanis names its tankers after Greek islands.

The fleet list is the core document. Companies set out their ships by size class, from Medium Range (MR) and Handysize product tankers to Suezmax and VLCC crude carriers, usually with the year built, the shipyard, the deadweight and the flag, and they list newbuildings on order with expected delivery dates. Pages on pools, chartering arms and ship-management partners explain who markets and runs the ships commercially and technically.

Many of these companies are listed, so investor pages sit close to the top of the menu: press releases, quarterly results, presentations, filings with regulators and share data, sometimes for two stock exchanges at once. ESG and sustainability reports, often published once a year and prepared with reference to named reporting frameworks, complete the picture. This guide sets out what each company’s own pages and dated independent sources show about its history, ownership and fleet, and keeps the company’s own claims marked as its own.

A new name for a new business.

The company’s website today calls Performance Shipping “a global shipping company specializing in the ownership of tanker vessels.” It names Aliki Paliou as chairperson of the board, Andreas Nikolaos Michalopoulos as chief executive, director and secretary, and Anthony Argyropoulos as chief financial officer. Commercial and technical management sits in-house with Performance Shipping Management Inc., which the company describes as wholly owned, and the website gives the company’s office in the Athens area as care of that manager.

The ship names follow a pattern of their own. Since the move into tankers, several of the vessels on the fleet page carry a “P.” prefix and a port or city name, such as P. Tokyo, P. Marseille, P. Long Beach and P. Monterey, while the two 2011-built Sumitomo ships kept the names Blue Moon and Briolette.

The website lists its values as safety and sustainability, transparency, teamwork and ethical conduct, and states a vision “to become a leader in our industry via continuous improvement in every aspect of our operations.” Its pages are organised around who the company is, its fleet, its investors and its press releases, with a press archive that still runs back through the Diana Containerships years to 2010.

For a design guide, Performance Shipping shows how a company can keep its corporate record while changing its name, its ticker and the main type of ship it owns in little more than a year. Compare Okeanis, another tanker owner in this series, and Frontline, a tanker owner that began in Sweden in 1985. For this guide we use Aegean navy, teal and a brass accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Performance Shipping’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.