CMB.TECH NV Ordinary Shares

Good day and welcome to the Euronav Q2 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press start on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press start in two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to Brian Gallagher. Head of Investor Relations at Euronav. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning and afternoon to everyone, and thanks for joining our Euronav Q2 2022 earnings call. Before I start, I would like to say a few words. The information discussed on this call is based on the information as of today, Thursday, the 4th of August, 2022, 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, future events, performance, underlying assumptions and other statements which are not statements of historical facts. 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 on the company's website with the SECC and which are available free of charge on the SECC's website at www.secc.gov and our own company website at Euronav, www.euronav.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 safeguard statement on page two of the slide presentation. It's now my pleasure to pass on to our Chief Executive, Hugo Destuc, to start with the content slide on slide three. Hugo, over to you.

Thank you, Brian, and good morning or afternoon to wherever you are, and welcome to our call. I will run through the Q2 highlights before passing on to Liv Logger, our CFO, to give more details on the financial with specific focus on the FSO. Brian Gallagher, the head of IR, will then highlight some key and current trends in the wider tanker market, before I return to summarize our strategy and outlook. So, turning to slide five and the Q2 highlights. Once again, we've had a very busy quarter across our businesses. Fleet Rejuvenation was again front and center with nine vessels transacted. We sold our three Elders to SMAX. We also sold four older VLCCs that were non-ECO and bought two almost new ones. These actions have substantially reduced the age of our fleet and, more importantly, the average consumption and emission profile. So we are fully ready to what we believe will be a sustainable freight rate market recovery. Also, remember, we still have six vessels to be delivered to us over the next 18 months, so the Euronav platform will continue to grow and get younger into this freight recovery. We also brought out our joint venture partner in the FSO segment. This move gives us more visibility on income in an asset that we believe we know very well because we have operated those two units since 2010. Strategically, just after the quarter and we formally announced the combination agreement with Frontline, and I will touch upon the next steps later regarding this combination. That is not all as we printed an important milestone that perhaps has been overlooked with all our corporate activity. Indeed, we organized our first sustainability presentation in early May. This has clearly set out our path to net zero, and we look forward to providing updates on this and other sustainability initiatives going forward. These moves were all made with a tanker market showing sequential rate improvement and even stronger signals in a normally weaker Q3. However, freight rates are still not at the levels where we can be satisfied, as slide five illustrates, thus indicating a lot more progress is required to return us to sustained profitability. That brings me to slide six and further focus on some of the short-term catalysts. Tone miles are rising across the tanker market spectrum as the dislocation from Russia continues to impact. As prices continue to rise with secondhand tonnage again rising over the past three months, and new build price are at the multiple year highs. This has led to virtually no new ordering of ships. Also, we've seen increased volume of exports and therefore cargoes in recent months. And this is in turn has led to Q2 performing better than Q1, which given the seasonality history of our sector is unusual. Turning that with Euronav specifically on slide 7 and how we have positioned ourselves to this improving cycle. I wanted to point to the scale of our fleet rejuvenation during Q2. This has driven material reduction in our fleet age where we have taken advantage of the higher second-hand prices to recycle into younger tonnage. And yet the platform is still ready for growth with our core fleet ready to expand with six new vessels adding around 11% to our capacity over the next 18 months when those vessels will be delivered to us. With that, I will now pass over to Lieve to provide more detail on the financial. Lieve, over to you.