Diana Shipping inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Diana Shipping Incorporated's 2021 first quarter earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Ed Nebb of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Daryl, and thanks to all of you for joining us today for the Diana Shipping Inc. first quarter conference call. The members of the management team who are with us today include Ms. Semiramis Paliu, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Anastasios Margaronis, President, Mr. Yanis Zafirakis, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, Treasurer, and Secretary, Mr. Eleftherios Chief Operating Officer, and Ms. Maria Dede, Chief Accounting Officer. Before management begins the remarks and presentation, let me briefly summarize the Safe Harbor Notice, which you can see in its entirety in today's news release and in the deck that has been provided. Certain statements made during this conference call are forward-looking statements under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, and the forward-looking statements are based on assumptions, expectations, projections, and beliefs as to future events that may or may not prove to be accurate, and for a description of the risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements, please refer to the company's filings with the SEC. And now, with that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Ms. Semiramis Paliu, Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Ed. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Diana Shipping Inc.' 's first quarter 2021 earnings call. My name is Emilia Mipalios, the company's CEO, and it is an honor and a privilege to be presenting to you today. As you have probably noticed already, we have altered somewhat the format of our earnings call by adding a slide presentation to accompany our presentation. As a result, We will reference the various slides as we go along, and we hope that you will be able to seamlessly follow. Turning to slide four, we thought that since this is the first time that we are presenting via slide presentation, it will be beneficial to provide a brief company summary. Diana Shipping Inc. is a pure dry bulk company that has been listed continuously on the New York Stock Exchange since 2005. We currently have 37 vessels in the water with a carrying capacity of approximately 4.7 million deadweight tons. We have focused on the largest dry bulk vessels with our fleet ranging in sizes from Panamax vessels to Newcastle maxes. As a result, we mainly carry major bulk cargoes and for 2020 we transported 35.2 million metric tons with iron ore being the main cargo we carried at 26.2 million metric tons. The majority of our fleet, 31 vessels, is managed in-house by Diana Shipping Services, and six vessels are managed by a 50-50 joint venture with Williamson Ship Management. We currently employ over 900 people at sea and the shore. Moving on to slide five, I will go over the highlights of the first quarter and recent developments. This has been a very interesting quarter characterized by the rapidly improving market conditions that haven't been seen for years. The anticipated Chinese lull expected between the months of January and February 2021 did not materialize. On the contrary, there was strong demand for raw material. The fiscal policies to stimulate global economic growth, the frenzy to refill depleted inventories, the ban on Australian coal imports to China, and the limited supply of new ships all seem to support the higher prices for commodities and transportation. More specifically for our company, within the first quarter, we implemented leadership changes to ensure the continued sound strategic management of the company. Our new management team is eager to continue on the path set by our founder and chairman, Mr. Simon Palios, following the guidelines and principles adopted at inception. At the same time, we will endeavor to prepare, navigate, and expand the company successfully in this area characterized by rapid and radical technological changes and innovation. Also within the quarter, We repurchased via tender offer 6 million of our common shares at a price of 2.5 US dollars per share. We view the timing as very opportune, as based on the market developments over the last few months, this move has proved to be immediately accretive to our shareholders. The market strength experienced during the course of last quarter, which resulted in increased asset values, allowed us to reach an agreement to sell one of our older vessels, the Voltovessel Nayak, at an attractive price of US$11.25 million gross. We are also pleased that during last quarter, Diana Shipping Services signed an agreement with American Bureau of Shipping to implement the ABS Environmental Monitor Digital Sustainability solution across 31 of the company's vessels managed by DSS. This is a cloud-based application that enables us to monitor and track overall fleet or vessel-specific environmental data in such categories as emissions, waste, and consumables. We believe that the data analysis and reporting features of this application will support more sustainable vessel operations for our fleet while helping us enhance environmental performance. Somewhat related to the above issue is the new 91 million sustainability-linked loan that we signed earlier this week. Although the primary reason for entering into this loan was to refinance earlier loan facilities maturing in 2022, we are particularly pleased that we have been able to work together with ABN to introduce a sustainability element into the loan. This displays even further our commitment in being proactive in this specific field. We are further fostering our long-term commitment to sustainability by establishing a sustainability committee at board level. Lastly, we have continued over the last quarter to tackle successfully the COVID-19 pandemic related operating challenges, such as crew changes and crew repatriations. procurement of provisions and spares, and handling scheduled and unscheduled repairs. I would like to take a moment to highlight the most important short-term challenge faced today in the shipping industry during the pandemic. That is the difficulties to repatriate our crew. Restrictions placed by ports, borders, local and international authorities Travel disruptions and suspension of flights have made it extremely challenging for our crew to return home and to their families. The lack of cooperation by a number of charterers in facilitating this issue is noteworthy. We consider the crew change and repatriation issue extremely important, not only due to the human element factor. It affects the safety of our crew. the safety of the ship and the cargo, and could potentially affect the global supply chain of goods. Regardless, the shipping industry has shown once again resilience and adaptability to unforeseen and unprecedented events. Turning to the financial highlights of the first quarter of 2021 on slide 6, we find ourselves as of March 31st, 2021, with a cash and cash equivalents position of $86 million, including restricted cash, as against $82.9 million as of December 31st, 2020. Our debt, net of deferred financial costs, stood at $411.4 million at the end of the first quarter of 2021, as against $420.3 million at the end of 2020. Our time charter revenues for the first quarter of 2021 amounted to $41.1 million, as against $43.8 million for the first quarter of 2020. Lastly, our earnings per share for the first quarter of 2021 came in at a loss per share of 3 cents, versus a loss of 1.21 US dollars per share for the same period of 2020. It should be noted that last year's figures included an impairment loss taken at the time. Our CFO, Ioannis Zafirakis, will go over these numbers in more detail further on in the presentation. Moving on to slide seven, we find a summary of all of our year-to-date chartering activities. consistent with our conservative and disciplined chartering strategy. We have taken advantage of the improving chartering market and have secured attractive time charters for 13 vessels of our fleet. More specifically, we charted seven Panamax to post-Panamax vessels at a weighted average daily rate of $16,571 for a remaining average period of 169 days per vessel. We have also charted six Cape-sized to Newcastle max vessels at a weighted average rate of $18,896 per day for a remaining average period of 244 days. We anticipate that we will continue chartering our vessels that will be re-delivered to us in a similar way, by staggering maturities, locking in cash flows and positioning us in a manner that will allow us to continue to participate in a potentially improving market in a balanced way. Slide eight provides an indication of the kind of cash flows that can be secured by our vessels that will be re-delivered from their current charters within the remaining of 2021. As a base, We use the already fixed time charter revenues of 72.1 million US dollars, which amount to a daily average contracted time charter rate of 16,136 US dollars per vessel. If we use the current FFA rates for fixing the vessels opening up within the remainder of 2021 for a one year period, we expect to generate an additional 83.5 million US dollars of time charter revenues that equate to an average fixed time charter daily rate of $21,899 per vessel. When we compare the sum of the fixed and unfixed revenues as against our break-even levels, we find ourselves with the possibility of generating approximately $53.3 million of free cash flow, equating to an average free cash flow margin of $6,438 per vessel per day over the remainder of the year. Again, this is presented in order to display the free cash flow generating capacity of our fleet in the current market. It should be noted that the actual results will be dependent on how the market performs for the rest of the year and on how exactly we fix our vessels in this period of time. I will turn over the call now to Ioannis to go over our first quarter 2021 financials in more detail.