Global Ship Lease, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Global Ship Lease second quarter 2020 earnings call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. If you have a question during the session, you need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require operator assistance during the program, please press star then 0. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to do CO3's conference call. Mr. Ian Weber, Chief Executive Officer of Global Ship Lease. You may begin, sir. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease second quarter 2020 earnings conference call. As normal, the slides that accompany today's presentation are available on our website, www.globalshiplease.com. Also, as normal, slides one and two remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. that are based on current expectations and assumptions and are, by their nature, inherently uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to many factors, including those described in the Safe Hardware section of the slide presentation. We also draw your attention to the Risk Factor section of our most recent annual report on Form 20F, which is for 2019 and was filed with the SEC on April 2, 2020. and which you can obtain via our website or via the SECs. All of our statements are qualified by these and other disclosures in our reports filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements. For reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to which we will refer during this call, to the most directly comparable measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP, you should refer to the earnings release that we issued this morning, which is also available on our website. I'm joined today by our executive chairman, George Yurikos, our chief financial officer, Tasos Seropoulos, and our chief commercial officer, Tom Lister. George will begin the call with some high-level commentary and an update on our current areas of focus. And then Tasos, Tom, and I will take you through the quarterly results, our financials, and the current market environment, after which we'd be pleased to take your questions. So turning to slide three, I'll pass the call to George. Thank you, Ian.

Since our first quarter earnings call, a great deal has changed in the world and in the container shipping industry. Economies are beginning to reopen in many countries, containerized freight volumes are starting to improve, and importantly, policies have been put in place in many ports that make it possible for seafarers to safely disembark and to re-establish more normal crew rotations. I am personally grateful to all of our crew who have continued to operate our ships to the highest standards throughout this difficult period. At the same time, COVID-19 continues to be a major factor in many areas and much remains unknown moving forward. With that perspective, our top priority continues to be maintaining vigilance and resilience in this challenging environment in respect of our people, our ships and our commercial platforms. Our specific areas of focus remain largely consistent with those we discussed last quarter. We are prioritizing the safety and welfare of our personnel at sea and on shore, and we are taking all appropriate steps to protect and support our colleagues. We are focused on maintaining strong liquidity and a healthy balance sheet in order to remain strong, flexible, and resilient throughout all market conditions. Our strategy and charter portfolio put us in a good position here as we have $660 million of contracted revenue over an average of more than 2.3 years and only $5 million of debt maturities between now and late 2022. We continue to engage constructively with capital providers on the intended refinancing of our 2022 bond, ultimately due November 2022, and it remains our intention to pursue that refinancing on an opportunistic basis when market conditions are sufficiently supported. In order to benefit fully from our extensive contract cover, we strive to maximize commercial and operational uptime of our ships. We have remained active in chartering, and with our high-quality, well-specified fleet, I am pleased to say that we currently have our entire fleet employed on time charters. Despite the fact the global fleet saw idle tonnage spike into the double digits on a percentage basis in the second quarter, as the liner companies have managed capacity to meet reduced demand. This charter's success is closely related to our ability to offer consistently excellent service to our liner operator partners, providing them with reliability, operational flexibility, low slot costs, and high refer capacity that they rely upon every day. Tom will address this in more detail during his market overview, but it is worth noting that a number of the world's leading liner companies have customers amongst them, have now reported results for the first half of the year that have significantly exceeded expectations. Against what was widely expected to be a major test of their ability to operate in a challenging market, the liners overall have thrived, supported by a far higher degree of pricing and capacity discipline that has ever been seen in the past, as well as an increasing preference for not barely the largest ships for the trade, but those with a lower slot cost, flexibility, and appropriate reefer capacity to enable them to maximize their profitability in good times and bad. Finally, while we're primarily focused on vigilance and resilience, we also recognize that there are tentative signs of a potential economic recovery, of balance sheet and charter coverage being that we're not dependent upon the recovery being a near-term event, but we're making sure that GlobalShipLease is in a position to fully benefit from the recovery when it does take place. With that, I will turn the call to Ian for a review of our fleet and charter portfolio, as well as an overview of recent highlights.