CMB.TECH NV Ordinary Shares

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the CMB Tech Q1 2026 earnings call. My name is Alexandre Sévrys and I'm joined by my colleagues Ludovic Sévrys, Enya Derkinderen and Joris Daman. We will present to you the highlights of our first quarter and the title of this call is Firing on All Cylinders. We had a very interesting quarter, a very good quarter, and we would like to start with some financials and highlights, and I will hand it over to Ludovic.

Thanks, Alex. As usual, we will start with a high-level overview of our company. We're active in five different segments, from black belt crew tankers, containers, chemicals, to offshore energy. We had an interesting quarter, as Alex mentioned. Compared to last quarter, our total fair market value has increased. Our market cap has increased. We've reduced our leverage. We've reduced our CapEx commitments and increased our contracts backlog. Next slide, please. If we zoom in on the Q1 financials, we've ended the quarter with a net profit of $368.8 million. Notable in these figures are obviously our increased revenue, but we've been able to, while the quarter passed, deliver quite a bit. and reduced our margins with the banks. And so our net finance expenses decreased from $113 million from last quarter to $81 million this quarter, delivering a very nice profit. The liquidity of the company, NFQ1, stands a little bit above half a billion dollars. And our equity on total assets value adjusted is below 50%, which is our through-the-cycle target. Further zooming in, we have delevered. We are paying dividends and we're strengthening the balance sheet while we are optimizing our fleet through well-timed S&P. Notable on the contract backlog, we have signed one five-year time charter on the Suezmax vessel and extended to nine-year time charters by another year. The board of directors has decided they would like to distribute 64 cents per share as distribution. This will be managed by 20 cents interim dividends and 44 cents distribution out of share premium. That's quite interesting because there is no withholding tax on that part. So 70% of our dividends will be exempt from withholding tax. We took delivery of seven new building vessels, which Alex will discuss a little later on. And we have sold quite a few ships that were announced already on two Cape sizes and eight VLCC. One additional vessel, the Swiss Max Sienna, has been sold and will be delivered in Q2. But the capital gains of the first quarter were $267 million. And in Q2, we're expecting a capital gain of $127 million debt. We are a diversified platform. However, we have a large spot exposure on two of our promising markets, which is dry block on one hand and tankers. If you look at full 2026, we have roughly 53,000 shipping days from which 80% is spot. And from those spot days, we have 36,000 open dry-bill days, which is roughly 10,000 on the Kamsar MAXs and 26,000 on CAPEs and Newcastle MAXs. These are increasing markets, and hence we are favourably positioned to enjoy those in the coming quarters. On this slide, we have shown a hypothetical free cash flow for our company in 2026. This is including a free cash flow from the first quarter, but putting some rate assumptions on the right bottom side where you can see that Actually, if we take the market today, we are in the plus 20% case compared to our market assumptions, and we would have an operational free cash flow of over $1 billion. This is excluding vessel sales, but it is also excluding the remaining capex, which we will discuss a little later on. On the CapEx, we've come a long way. We have the remaining CapEx end of April of $1.2 billion, from which roughly $184 million is unfunded. If you have followed our story, you know that with the vessel sales, this is more than double covered for the unfunded CapEx. But this slide shows that 2026 will be the last heavy year new building delivery a year with the remaining $740 million to be paid to the shipyards in the coming three quarters, where after obviously our free cash flow could be used on other topics than net capex. Contract backlog. We've increased our contract backlog roughly by $200 million, as mentioned. There is a gradual repayment. The contract backlog reduces by roughly $100 million per quarter, but we've added $200 million of fresh charters. Of these long-term contracts, still $1.9 billion is on dual-fuel-related vessels, and we have quite strong counterparts, most of them investment rates, as you can see on the right side.

I'll then hand over the discussion topics to Alex to talk about the markets.