Golar LNG Limited

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GOLOR LNG Limited Q1 2021 results presentation. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require operator assistance, please press star and 0. I would now like to hand the call over to your speaker today, Mr. Karl Staubo. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you, speaker, and welcome to Goal RLNG's Q1 earnings release. Thank you for taking the time to dial in. My name is Karl Fredrik Staubo, the recently appointed CEO of Goal RLNG. Before we get into the quarterly results, please note the forward-looking statements on slide 2. I'm joined today by Mr. Eduardo Maranhao, who's taken over my former role as CFO of Golar. Eduardo was formerly the CFO of Hygo and is well known to the majority of Golar's stakeholders. We are together looking forward to contributing to the continued success of Golar. Turning to slide three for Q1 highlights. We report adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of 78 million and net income of 25 million. both ahead of consensus estimates. Our shipping portfolio achieved a TCE of $61,700 a day for the quarter and our shipping revenue backlog stands at $187 million at quarter end. Hilli continues to deliver 100% uptime with the 56th LNG cargo currently being uploaded. Jimmy remains on schedule and is currently 69% technically complete. During Q1, we announced and on April 15th, closed the sale of Hygo and DMLP to New Fortress Energy. The transactions will be accounted for in our Q2 numbers, but it's expected to generate an accounting book profit in excess of $650 million and increase liquidity and liquid assets with around $900 million. We have initiated the announced buyback program of up to 50 million dollars with 1.2 million shares bought back to date. Our cash balance as of Q1 stands at 245 million and does not include saves proceeds from NFE contactions.

I'll now turn the call over to Eduardo to take us through the first quarter numbers. Thanks Karl and good morning to everyone. I'm excited to provide an update on our financial results for the first quarter of 2021. So turning on to slide five, we can see that the group had a very strong performance in Q1. Total operating revenues for the first quarter were $126 million, which was 7% above the numbers that we had in Q4 of last year. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $78 million and was in line with the previous quarter. A key driver for this performance came from the higher utilization and higher charter rates of our carrier fleet, which contributed to total revenues of $63 million. We were able to execute on our shipping strategy and increase TCE rates up $10,000 a day from the last quarter. SLNG revenues from the hilly came in line with our expectations at $54 million, Although lower than the previous quarter when we had the effect of overproduction revenues from past years, those numbers reflect the exceptional operational performance of our team, which again delivered 100% commercial uptime. The commencement of operations of our long-term O&M agreement with LNG Croatia resulted in higher management fees, which have also contributed to the increase of our other operating revenues, totaling $9 million in the quarter. Net income was at $25 million, which is $17 million higher than the previous quarter. This was mainly driven by improvements in non-cash mark-to-market gains in our interest rate swaps following favorable rate movements. On the financing side, our net debt position at the end of Q1 was just close to $2.1 billion and slightly higher than Q4. that was mainly driven by the $45 million drawdown under the GIME facility. We're gonna provide further updates on that later on in the presentation. So at the end of Q1, our total cash position, as previously mentioned by Karl, was $245 million, and that did not take into account the sales proceeds from the NFE transaction. So moving on to slide six, The closing of the HIGO and the GMLP transactions last month have further enhanced our liquidity position. With $150 million of unrestricted cash on hand at the end of the quarter and $131 million of cash proceeds received on April 15, our balance sheet has been materially strengthened. Based on yesterday's closing price, our stake in NFE is now worth close to $800 million, and that creates a lot of optionality to our funding strategy. Considering that, we have now over a billion dollars in liquid assets, as you can see on the left-hand side of the slide. We're now well positioned to meet our existing CAPEX commitments and also to fund future attractive investment propositions. I wanted to highlight that our focus for 2021 will be centered on optimizing our debt structure, which includes the refinancing of our April 22 convertible bonds. We're going to continue to further Simplify our group structure. And we're also looking forward to focus on the FLNG and upstream business development. So with that, I'll turn the call back over to Karl.