Indian shipping companies are sharpening focus on gas carriers, as this segment remains a bright spot in the otherwise lethargic shipping market.

While shipping rates across all segments have fallen after a brief winter spike during the December-January period, a spurt in demand for hauling gas has kept rates in this segment relatively stronger.

Also, this segment holds out significant opportunities for Indian companies in the medium to long term as India is estimated to need at least 15 vessels by 2017 to ship LNG to meet the country's energy needs. GAIL alone may need at least five such carriers to bring home about six million tonnes of gas every year from 2017 from the US.

Though capital-intensive and time-taking, ship owners are looking at gas carriers to improve margins. Mercator recently forayed into this segment by acquiring a very large gas carrier from Varun Shipping, which is under financial duress.

Varun, which lost its operating licence earlier this year after it failed to honour its financial commitment, has one more such gas carrier-it is now trying to revive its gas carrier business under a new company, bringing its overseas fleet of LPG carriers under the Indian flag. Great Eastern shipping has one gas carrier in its fleet and will have another in the next three to four months. Shipping Corporation of India is already part of an Indo-Japanese consortium that has leased three LNG ships to Petronet.

Analysts attribute this trend to increased shale gas production by the US, which has resulted in more LPG production there.

"A six to seven million tonne per annum of additional exports (of LPG) is expected to come out of the US. The US exports tend to be long-haul ones because a lot of the demand is in Asia and most of this will be shipped in VLGCs," G Shivakumar, CFO of Great Eastern, told an analysts conference, earlier this month.

Charter rates for a large gas carrier peaked to $100,000 per day in early April last.

Currently, they are stable at $70,000-$80,000 a day, which is considered a profitable level. Compare this with the rate for a very large crude carrier-after peaking to $45,000 a day during the winter spike in December, they have slumped to an average of $15,000 in the first week of May.

While the global gas carrier fleet stands at about 155, there is a pending order book for 75 new ones.