Global Ship Lease, Inc.

Good day and welcome to Global Ship Lease Q1 2023 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star again. For operator assistance throughout the call, please press star zero. And finally, I would like to advise all participants that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to welcome Mr. Ian Webber, Chief Executive Officer, to begin the conference. Ian, over to you.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. The slides that accompany today's presentation are available on our website, www.globalshiplease.com. Slides two and three remind you, as normal, 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 factor section of our most recent annual report filed on Form 20F, which is for 2023 and was filed on March 23rd this year. You can obtain this 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. The 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 usually refer to the earnings release that we made 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 Siropoulos, 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, the quarterly results themselves, and the financials, and the current market environment. After that, we'll be pleased to take your questions. So, turning now to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.

Thank you, Ian, and good afternoon or evening to all of you joining us today. As flagged in recent quarters, ongoing normalization in the charter market due to macro headwinds had led to downward pressure on charter rates and asset values relative to the record-breaking levels of last year. However, in recent weeks, the charter market has shown some signs of stabilization at rates that are still some way above both pre-COVID and historic average levels. It is difficult to say whether these recent positive trends will be sustainable, but we will of course closely monitor the situation. Meanwhile, our extensive contract cover for a large portion of our fleet, much of which was secured for long durations during the market's hot strike, has positioned GSL to weather whatever markets are ahead. We have a robust balance sheet with no debt for refinancing requirements before 2026 and an overall low cost of debt. With all of our floating rate, debt fully hedged through 2026. From this position of financial strength, we are focused on the sustainability and resilience of our business in the long term and on further improving our competitiveness by investing in our fleet to meet the challenging regulatory requirements and commercial demands for decarbonization. As and when growth opportunities arise that meet our strict and disciplined criteria, we want to be ready to act decisively for the benefit of our shareholders, as with our recently announced commitment to purchase four ships with attractive charters attached. More importantly, we've also continuing to pay our sustainable dividend of 37.5 cents per common share quarterly, $1.5 annualized, and we have returned further capital to shareholders through the buyback of an additional 3.8 million of shares since our last earnings call, $3.8 million, just to make sure, bringing the total share repurchases since third quarter 2021 to $43.8 million. With that, I will turn the call over to Ian.