CMB.TECH NV Ordinary Shares

Welcome, everyone.

So apologies for a one-minute delay. We're just testing the sound, so I hope you can hear us. Welcome to this Q2 2024 earnings release. I'm joined here today by our CFO, Ludovic Savris. My name is Alexandre Savris. I'm the CEO of CMB Tech. And the topics of today's call will be a financial highlight, first of all, of the quarter, also highlighting everything we have done during the quarter. And then we will zoom in on all our marine divisions, division by division, and give you a market outlook to finish off with a conclusion and a Q&A. If you've seen the press release this morning, you have seen that the heading was transformation in full swing. And indeed, our company is in full transformation. We've had an incredibly busy second quarter, ratifying the name change from Euronav to CMB Tech. The ticker symbol has already changed. The real name change will take place on the 1st of October. But meanwhile, doing a lot of business, adding a contract backlog to our already large contract backlog. We have ordered new vessels. We have sold older tankers. We have taken delivery of many, many ships. And last but not least, we have also concluded our partnership with Anglo Eastern. So a lot to talk about. And I would like to hand over to Ludovic for the financials.

Thanks, Alexander. Focusing on the Q2 figures, we are happy to announce that we had another strong quarter with a net profit of $184 million. This brings the half-year profits to close to $680 million. Taking the last 12 months, we will conclude this $1.2 billion profit if we start from Q3 until today. Adjusted for capital gains, there have been quite a lot of capital gains, as you all know. The Q2 profit ends at roughly $70 million. Apart from the strong operational results, we were also happy to pay a dividend of $4.57, declare another dividend of $1.15 in Q2 that was paid in early Q3, bringing the total dividends and distribution for the half year $5.72. We ended the month of June with $420 million in liquidity. The contract backlog that Alex has mentioned stands today at roughly $2.1 billion of contracted revenue, forward revenue, whereas the outstanding CapEx, from end of Q2 stands at $2.7 billion. It is roughly $900 million every 12 months going forward. And last but not least, in the first half year, we concluded a share buyback program of 8 million shares for roughly $126 million. Continuing on that, as Alexander mentioned, we had a delivery in Q2 and the last couple of weeks of seven new building vessels. That is a continuation of the large new building program we have. We sold the CMACGM by car, which is a container vessel, upon delivery. We were able to successfully complete the sale of Euronapsha management to Anglo-Eastern that was concluded in the Q2, bringing an extraordinary profit of $20 million. The successful completion of the three VLCCs that were earlier announced got concluded in the Q2 as well, bringing a capital gain of $79 million. The LZS is another VLCC we sold. So the MOA has been signed, but the delivery will happen in Q1 2025 with a nice profit as well. On the new business, we've added one more CSOV to our elevation series, the future proof elevation series, which is number six in the series, and another two hydrogen powered CTVs. Previously announced as well, we have signed a collaboration agreement with Diamond Shipyards for building four hydrogen-powered tugboats. Continuing to the next slide, where we show, as previously in earnings calls, what fleet we have today on the water, with 38 tankers, six Newcastle Maxis, four container vessels actually now since yesterday, 54 workboats, four chemical tankers and three ferries and tugboats. On the right side, you can see that this will continue to grow, the total fleet on the water to reach 117 vessels end of this year, 136, 125 to come close to 160 vessels end of 26. Zooming in on the P&L figures, as previously shown, we want to highlight here, without going into too much detail, that for Q2, we were profitable in every single segment, and that the Q3 quarter-to-date results are still very positive. Alex will continue segment by segment to explain this. The contract backlog, as we've shown and discussed, we've added $161 million of additional long-term contracts on Suezmax new building, Suezmax underwater, and another chemical tanker, which for delivery in Q126 is on seven-year charter to Ultratank. This is our commitment that a lot of our clients like to work with our future-proof vessels, and hopefully we can increase this contract backlog in the months to come. This slide again is to show that while we are building a long-term contract backlog on some modern assets, we're still very much spot exposed. We have still 75% of open days for 24. This goes to 80% in 25. And you can see in 26, we end up a year with a total days of 30,000 shipping days, where the biggest obviously spot exposure is in our dry bulk division and also our tanker division. I'll pass on the word to Alexander who can continue to go into the various segments.