MINOAN LINES SHIPPING S.A. announces its financial results for the six months ended June 30, 2003, which exhibit continuing strong growth and enhance our optimism for a notably better year than 2002.

Over the current year the generally observed decline in tourism, negatively influences the sea traffic for the passenger-shipping sector. Moreover, the vessels' operating expenses are heavily burdened by the continuous high fuel prices in spite of recovering part of the cost by the weakening of the dollar against the euro.

Despite all the above negative factors we have managed to significantly increase revenues and by cutting back on costs to produce robust growth in operating profits.

In detail, sales were EUR 77.8 million (EUR 71.7 million in 1H 2002), up by 8.4%, while the operating profit (EBITDA) was EUR 15.9 million, up by 46.3% versus last year. Reported net result was negative as expected, however improved by EUR 2.3 million relative to 2002.

It is worth noting that over the first six months of the year the operating activity for the passenger shipping sector significantly lags that of the second half, due to the lower traffic of passengers and private vehicles and for that reason alone the interim results for all the companies are as a rule negative.

In general, consolidated financial results do not materially differ from parent company results, except on a net income/loss level. Higher consolidated net loss against the net loss of the parent company is attributed to the negative financial results generated by certain of the affiliated companies of the group. It is of note however that the consolidated net result of the 1st half of 2003 demonstrates a EUR 5.5 million improvement in group's performance over the reported group performance for the same period of 2002.