Global Ship Lease, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease Third Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to Ian Weber, Chief Executive Officer of Global Ship Lease. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Global Ship Lease's third quarter 2002 earnings conference call. The slides of the companies in today's presentation are available on our website at www.globalshiplease.com. Slides 2 and 3, as usual, 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 harbour section of the slide presentation. We also draw your attention to the risk factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 20F, which is for 2019 and was filed with the SEC on April 2nd, 2020, and which you can obtain via our website or by 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. The reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to which we will refer during this call are 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. As usual, I'm joined 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, the current market environment, and our financials, after which we'll be pleased to take your questions. Turning now to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.

Thank you, Ian, and good morning or good afternoon to you all. As you may recall, on our last quarterly earnings call, we expressed guarded optimism about the signs that we were beginning to see for a potential charter market recovery. Three months later, I'm very happy to confirm that the container shipping industry has significantly outperformed all expectations and the charter market for our ships has experienced a remarkable rebound that continues through today. Demand for containerized freight has bounced back, with volumes and freight rates in certain trade ranges reaching record highs. In order to service this robust demand, our liner company customers have been extremely active in chartering ships, rapidly driving idle tonnage down from a second quarter peak of around 12% to below 2%, a level that is close to full employment for all practical purposes. Furthermore, in the post-Panamax segment, where over 75% of our fleet capacity is concentrated, competition between charterers for donuts is particularly fierce. And idle capacity is pretty much zero. Is Global Shipley is catching the wave, is the question to everybody's mind. The answer is yes. First of all, we are reporting both revenues and adjusted EBITDA that are up from the third quarter of 2019, reflecting both fleet growth and recent market strength. Second, and perhaps more significantly, our charters expired. We have been able to sign 15 new charters or extensions since the beginning of July, for combined revenues of over $120 million, demonstrating our ability to lock in contracts at good economics and for longer periods with top tier liner companies when the time is right. As of September 30th, we have a total of $674 million of contracted revenues over another period of 2.3 years. Importantly, in the face of weaker demand earlier in the year, the Lanner companies, our customers, have demonstrated a new level of resilience and discipline in managing capacity, which has allowed them to deliver stellar results despite COVID. That, combined with our ability to secure strong charter rates and improve our forward contract cover, as well as our reduced leverage, has allowed Moody's to recently upgrade our credit outlook. With that background, We believe that we have excellent momentum as we pursue a strategic priority of opportunistically refinancing our 9.875 notes that come due in late 2022. The container ship market is becoming more mature with both owners and operators moving forward, embracing the multiple challenges that we face. In view of that, and supporting the type of accountability that we believe is important, We have also published our inaugural ESG report, providing investors and other key stakeholders with insight into our approach to running a business in a forward-thinking, sustainable, and socially responsible manner. With that, I will turn the call to Ian.