Global Ship Lease, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Global Ship Lease Q1 2022 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 that session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded, and if you require any assistance during the call, please press star 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Ian Weber, CEO of Global Ship Lease. Mr. Weber, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. The slides that accompany today's presentation are available on our website, www.globalshiplease.com. Slides two and three of that presentation, 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 2021 and was filed with the SEC on March the 24th this year. You can obtain this via our website or via the SEC's. 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 material looking material update forward-looking statements, and 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. As usual, I'm joined today by our Executive Chairman, George Yeroukos, our Chief Financial Officer, Tasos Saropoulos, and our Chief Commercial Officer, Tom Lister. George will begin the call with a high-level commentary on GSL and our industry, and then Tasos, Tom, and I will take you through our recent activity, quarterly results and financials, and the current market environment, after which we should be pleased to take your questions. So now turning to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.

Thank you, Jan, and good morning or good afternoon to all of you joining us today. Looking at the current macro environment, it is safe to say that there is uncertainty related to any number of factors from the continuing war in Ukraine to COVID lockdowns in China and rising inflation. What is certain, however, is that the charter market for container ships has remained very tight with almost no vessel capacity coming into the charter market and net growth in our size segments is likely to be negligible. Moreover, Widespread supply chain disruptions has remained a persistent feature of the market, tying up global capacity and reducing effective supply. And perhaps most importantly for today's discussion, all of our 65 midsize and smaller vessels are earning revenues from fixed-rate time charters, many of which extend for several years and reflect the excellent chartering conditions that really took hold during 2021. Our results for the first quarter of the year reflect that reality, as well as benefiting from the significant forward charter fixtures that we were able to secure over the last few quarters, including those which only came into effect during the first quarter of 2022. higher rate charter renewals were due to come online in this current quarter, second quarter of 2022. As you can see on the right side of the slide, our financial metrics for the first quarter of 2022 are all multiples of what they were just a year ago, driven by cash flows that we have in many cases secured for long durations into the future. I'm particularly proud to say that our normalized earnings per share has more than tripled over the last year. In line with our policy to allocate capital dynamically, driven by relative returns adjusted for risk, we have used our increased cash flows and long-term visibility to increase our common dividend this quarter, as promised, as well as to opportunistically buy back around $5 million of our shares in the market. In line with our policy of returning capital to shareholders in a prudent manner that is well supported and sustainable for the long term. On the ESG front, I would like to mention two things. The first is decarbonization, where we are pursuing a collaborative approach. Over time, taking proactive steps to tackle decarbonization has become even more important to all participants in the supply chain. In line, With a risk-averse approach to investment, we are in continuous dialogue with our customers to identify opportunities where we can reduce our collective carbon footprint by retrofitting our fleet in the context of long-term charters. Interests are clearly aligned on this point, and we believe that there are prudent ways to incorporate such upgrades into the fleet in a manner that benefits all involved. Secondly, I wanted to mention the Safe Heaven Initiative that we launched to look after our Ukrainian seafarers and their families during the ongoing humanitarian crisis in their country by providing transportation to Greece and on arrival accommodation and food, etc., for a minimum of six months. We created a small community locally and now have a total of 60 people safely here in Greece and another 73 on their way. And it's wonderful to see Other industry participants with similar initiatives to look after people caught up in this awful situation. And with that, I will turn the call to Ian.