Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp.

Thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Capital Clean Energy Carriers Court Fourth Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. We have with us Mr. Jerry Calogiritos, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Brian Gallagher, Chief Executive Vice President, Investor Relations, and Mr. Nikos Tripadakis, Chief Commercial Officer. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session, at which time, if you wish to ask a question, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad and wait for your name to be announced. I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today. The statements in today's conference call that are not historical facts, including our expectations regarding acquisition transactions and their expected effect on us, cash generation, equity returns, and future debt levels, our ability to pursue growth opportunities, our expectations or objectives regarding future distribution amounts or unit buyback amounts, capital reserve amounts, distribution coverage, future earnings, capital allocation, as well as our expectations regarding market fundamentals and the employment of our vessels including re-delivery dates and charter rates may be forward-looking statements as such as defined in Section 21E of the Securities of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause the stated or forecasted results to be materially different from those anticipated. Unless required by law, we expressly disclaim any obligation to update, revise, or revise any of these forward-looking statements, whether because of future events, new information, a change in our views, or expectations to conform to actual results or otherwise. We make no prediction or statement about the performance of our common shares. I would now like to hand over the call to your speaker today, Mr. Brian Gallagher.

Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Good morning, afternoons, wherever you are, and thanks for joining the Capital Clean Energy Carriers Q4 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, we'll be referring to the supporting slides available on our website as we go through today's presentation. So let's start with the highlights on slide three. After a very busy period for the company during 2024, the fourth quarter was more standard and routine. The company generated net income of $20.8 million from continuing operations. From this, a dividend of 15 US cents per share has been declared. Of the five container vessels agreed to be sold, the company completed the sale of three of these within the quarter, one in January 2025, while the last one is expected to be delivered in early March to its new owners. As discussed on our last call, we remain focused on improving the liquidity in our share and have initiated an ATM program to help us address that issue. We continue to work hard to improve and build the company profile and are pleased that we now have increased research coverage to seven analysts. That's up from three this time last year. And we look forward to delivering further initiatives in our capital market engagement during the year. We know and appreciate that this will take time, but we are aware that this is necessary to provide the group with a trading currency in the future and further strategic optionality. The key event during the quarter was the challenging LNG spot market background, which not only was absent its usual winter freight rally, but also saw rates hit multi-year lows, driven by an oversupply of vessels and lower ton-mile trading patterns. Capital clean energy carriers is largely insulated from these short-term headwinds, but we believe there will be a silver lining to this market in terms of a rationalization of the supply side. Our new head of commercial, Nikos Tripodakis, will run through this in detail much later. With that, I'll hand it over to our chief executive, Jerry Kalajotis, to run through the comments.

Thank you, Brian. And good morning or good afternoon, everybody. As you said, this was a more routine quarter for SEC. Turning to the financial slide five, profit from continuing operations reached 20.8 million. We derived a further 72.2 million in one of gains this quarter from completing the sale of three out of the five container vessels we agreed to sell last quarter. We will continue to be opportunistic about the sale of the three remaining container vessels, as these are modern ecovessels with long-term cash flow attached. We declared a dividend of 15 cents for the quarter. I think that is a good opportunity to reflect on what we have delivered since the company's listing on NASDAQ in 2007. This quarter is the 71st consecutive quarter that the company has paid a cash dividend. In total, the company has returned its current market cap, over $1 billion, back to shareholders in cash, dividends, and shares. Returning value to our shareholders is in our DNA, and we look forward for the company to add further to that track record going forward as our fleet under construction is delivered in 2026 and 2027. Now, the quarter showed operating income from continuing operations of 20.8 million up from 1.1 million during the comparative quarter last year. Interest charges rose as the fleet increased in size to 36.7 million compared to 25.8 million during the same quarter last year. At the same time, interest charges were lower by approximately 4 million compared to the previous quarter, Q3-24, reflecting the softening of SOFR. Now, turning to slide six, we see that our balance sheet continues to grow with the addition of new vessels, and our asset base as of year end 2024 was over a billion higher than the same period last year. Also, our leverage ratio has improved quarter-on-quarter. Reflecting improved cast generation on the back of the net cast proceeds generated from the sale of three out of the five container vessels we agreed to sell back in September. Importantly, our net leverage fell below 50% at the year end. We expect our capital base to consolidate now for a period as we have no delivery scheduled until early 2026. Turning now to the next slide, slide seven. On slide seven, you can see our revenue backlog of 2.5 billion remaining highly diversified, with no counterparty having more than 20% share. 2.2 billion of this backlog is expected to come from our LNG assets. Our remaining charted duration is at seven years, and we expect to add to this strength as we start again taking deliveries of our new builds in 2026 onwards and fixing long-term employment for these assets. Before moving now to slide nine and our LNG market slides, I would like to introduce our new Chief Commercial Officer, Nikos Tripodakis, who will run through these slides and be available to answer your questions at the end of the call. Nikos joins us from the LNG trading side at Hartree Partners, building on a decade embedded in various roles in the LNG sector. Welcome, Nikos, and over to you.