CMB.TECH NV Ordinary Shares

Good morning, and welcome to the Euronav Q1 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Brian Gallagher. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and afternoon to everyone and thanks for joining Euronav's Q1 2020 earnings call. Before I start, I'd like to say a few words. The information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, Thursday the 7th of May 2020 and may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements reflect current views with respect to future events and financial performance and may include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies and future events, performance, underlying assumptions and other statements, which are not statements of historical fact. All forward-looking statements attributable to the company or to persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by reference to the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed in the company's filings with the SEC, which are available free of charge on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov and on our own company's website at uranove.com. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Each forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of the particular statement and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Please take a moment to read our safe harbour statement on page 2 of the slide presentation. I will now pass on to CEO Hugo to speak to start with again the slide. Hugo, over to you.

Yeah, thank you, Brian. We're going to do something a little bit different and more in depth with today's quarterly call, given the number of factors which are impacting on tankers' markets currently. So firstly, I will run through the Q1 highlights before passing on to Liv, our CFO, to provide a full financial review of the income statement and balance sheet. Then we will look at the current themes in the tanker markets and Euronav's outlook before we take questions. So if we move to slide four, the highlights page, I think it's fair to say that the first quarter was an extraordinary quarter for many different reasons. Q1 was a very strong quarter, building upon the solid foundations we experienced in Q4, but of course it was also a very volatile quarter with events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the oil price war between the OPEC Plus members, influencing dramatically the market freight rates as we have seen them. The TCE were as high as $200,000 per day, but also as low as $30,000 in the latter part of Q1. The average delivered VLCC rate was very robust and on average we managed to book $72,000 or a little bit more than $72,000 per day for VLCCs and nearly $60,000 per day for Suezmax, quite a record. This outstanding rate environment has pushed so far into the second quarter to higher levels with our VLFC fleet reporting so far $95,000 per day for VLFCs, as I said, and for the Suezmax, $65,000 per day. So this allows us to pay a very strong dividend related to the first quarter of $0.81 per share. As we mentioned many times in the past, we will, as of this quarter, pay quarterly dividends to Euronav shareholders. But the good news is that we will also pay our final dividends related to 2019 after our next AGM in May. So Euronav shareholders will receive $1.10 in June in cash dividends, which represents at the current share price more than 10% dividend yield. And this is within the first six months of the year. So quite extraordinary, you will admit. I will return later with more commentary on the key themes in our business, but now I would like to hand over to our CFO, Lieve, to run through the financials on slide 5. Lieve, over to you.