They’re overstocked! They’re slashing prices! They won’t be undersold! Sound like a local mattress sale commercial? Nope, it’s actually a Somali pirate gang talking about the great deals they’re offering on ransoms.

A group of Somali pirates announced Sunday that they’re cutting their asking prices for hostages by 20 percent — to speed up the negotiation process, make room for more hostages and take in more cash.

“We want to free ships within a short period of time instead of keeping [hostages] for a long time and incurring more expenses in guarding them. We have to free them at a lower ransom so that we can hijack more ships,” Reuters quoted one pirate spokesman as saying.

When the European Union’s anti-piracy task force last took count on March 1st, Somali pirates were holding around 30 ships and 659 hostages. And, at an average ransom of about $5.4 million a ship, that’s a pretty sweet deal for pirates, who raked in an estimated haul of around $238 million last year.

Apparently, it’s not as efficient as it could be to take care of all of those hostages during the increasingly lengthy negotiation process. So, pirates are willing to take a 20 percent hit on ransoms to speed things up and make room for yet more hijack victims.

This isn’t an “every hostage must go” kind of sale, though. The discount won’t apply to “bulk ships,” only to those hijacked for use as mother ships. It might be worth waiting a little while on the ransom negotiations with the bigger shipping companies. Somali pirates are currently sitting on two oil tankers, the Savina Caylyn and the Irene SL,, and oil tankers have historically brought in some of the biggest ransoms.

The attempt to cut down on overhead costs and squeeze the profit out of every penny of ransom is yet another example of piracy’s imitation of the legitimate business world. In 2009, pirates in the Somali port of Haradheere had to set up a stock market to coordinate the capital invested in their operations.

Photo: EU Navfor

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