United Maritime Corporation

Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United Maritime Corporation conference call on the fourth quarter in the year under December 31st, 2023 financial results. We have with us Mr. Stamatis Santonis, Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Stavros Gistakis, Chief Financial Officer of United Maritime Corporation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a question and answer session, at which time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one and one on your telephone keypad, and you will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. Please be advised that this conference is being recorded today, Tuesday, February 20th, 2024. The archived webcast of the conference call will soon be made available on the United Maritime website www.unitedmaritime.gr under the Investors section. Many of the remarks today contain forward-looking statements based on current expectations. Actual results may differ materially from the results projected from those forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that can cause the actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements is contained in the fourth quarter and year-ended December 31, 2020 free earnings released, which is available on the United Maritime website again, www.unitedmaritime.gr. I would now like to turn the conference over to one of your speakers today, the Chairman and CEO of the company, Mr. Stamatis Santonis.

Please go ahead, sir. Good afternoon.

Welcome to United Maritimes conference call regarding our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year period of 2023, as well as our recent corporate developments. Following the profitable sale of our last tanker vessel in the third quarter of 2023, the fourth quarter marked our first period operating purely as a dry bulk company. On this note, we are pleased with the timing of our transition towards larger gearless bulkers as we are recently witnessing the strongest first quarter for the dry bulk market of the past decade. Even though 2023 served as a transitional year for our company, We marked a three-fold increase of the book value of our fleet by investing $144 million to acquire seven ships, including the implied value of the bare-bottomed vessels with purchase options. All this was accomplished organically and avoiding any equity offering dilution for our shareholders. We also marked another profitable year generating adjusted EBITDA of $18.9 million and net income of $0.2 million. At the same time, we are fully consistent with our commitment to reward our shareholders both through cash dividends as well as share buybacks. Since November 2022, we have declared approximately $10.7 million or $1.38 per share in cash dividends, including the cash dividend of $0.75 approved for the fourth quarter of 2023. This represents approximately 45% of our market capitalization. Additionally, on our share buyback plan since the beginning of Q4, we have repurchased 84,813 common shares at an average price of $2.4 per share. We always evaluate the best way to return capital to our shareholders in conjunction with the company's liquidity needs and our aim is to continue to engage in share buybacks by means of stabilizing the share price. Regarding our investment activity, we have been actively evaluating opportunities to grow our fleet and in this manner we have acquired a high-quality Kamsar Max dry bulk vessel built in 2016 in Japan through an 18-month bare boat charter with a purchase option at the end of the charter period. Commenting on the commercial performance of our fleet, all our vessels operate on index-linked time charters, providing direct exposure to the positive fundamentals of the dry bulk market. For the first quarter of 2024, we exercised our options to fix daily earnings under these time charters on about half of our operating days at an average gross rate of about $14,300. It appears that our hedging was a bit premature, but we aimed to provide downside protection against the seasonal weakness of the dry bulk market in the first quarter of the year. Based on the current FFA values, we expect to achieve a total net time chart equivalent of about $14,200 across our fleet. Given the recent strength in freight futures, we have started to fix some of our second quarter operating days at considerably higher levels. As a brief commercial guidance for 2024, Since the start of the fourth quarter, we have experienced robust dry bulk market conditions given by healthy commodity demand and limited fleet supply. For the Panamax market, low water levels in the Panama Canal and increased congestion at Brazil loading ports played an important role in reducing effective vessel supply, while the Red Sea tensions since December have introduced further inefficiencies in the world trading fleet. In the Cape Sight segment, we have witnessed high demand for iron ore and bauxite imports, coinciding with increased Brazilian iron ore exports that contributed to high Atlantic basin activity, therefore leading to a very strong market both in Q4 2023 as well as in the first quarter of 2024. Looking ahead into the next two years, net dry bulk fleet growth is expected to be lower than 2% per year, which we believe forms a sound basis for market conditions going forward. We are very encouraged by the strong demand for iron ore, coal, grains and bauxite, which have not shown any signs of slowing down in the first months of 2024. Given the strong demand for metals and energy, driven mainly by manufacturing and infrastructure investments globally, it is worth noting that we expect the seaborne volume of related cargoes to continue to increase. Reduce fleet deliveries in combination with steady demand growth should provide a very positive backdrop for the dry bulk market over the next years. In its current form, I am confident that United Maritime presents investors with a very potent platform to benefit from the positive fundamentals of the dry bulk market, continuing to deliver a profitable performance with high capital returns and significant shareholder rewards. That concludes my summary of the fourth quarter updates, and I pass the floor to Stavros for a more detailed update on the financials of our company. Stavros, please go ahead.