Global Ship Lease, Inc.

Hello and thank you for standing by. My name is Jeannie and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome you to the Global Ship Lease Q4 2023 earnings conference 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 that time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ian Webber, chief executive officer of Global Ship Lease. You may begin your conference.

Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. You can find the slides of the company today's presentation on our website at www.globalshiplease.com. As usual, slides two and three of that presentation 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 would also like to direct your attention to the risk factor section of our most recent annual report, which was on 2022, and that was filed in March 2023. You can find the form on our website or on 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. Please 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 Yurikos, our Chief Financial Officer, Tasos Saropoulos, and our Chief Commercial Officer, Tom Lister. George will begin the call with some 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 that, we'll be pleased to answer your questions. So, turning now to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.

Thank you, Jan, and good morning, afternoon, or evening to all of you joining us today. Elevated macro and geopolitical uncertainty defined much of the fourth quarter. This was most visible in the Red Sea, where the deteriorating security situation saw many liners rerouting their services away from the Suez Canal and instead taking the much longer route around the Cape of Good Hope. This has tightened supply-demand balance in the container ship charter market, causing charter rates to firm. and deferring the market normalization that had been underway through March of 2023. It is impossible to know how long disruptions to the Red Sea will last. In the meantime, consistent with our core strategy, and while conditions are supportive, we continue to work hard to lock in additional contract cover in order to grow cash flows and forward visibility. On the back of our strong contracted cash flows, we continue to fortify our balance sheet and build equity value by delivering. Furthermore, we have no refinancing needs before 2026, until which time we have also kept our floating interest rate exposure to suffer at 0.64%. Our business model and approach to capital allocation are unchanged. The sustainability of our $1.5 annualized dividend remains a key priority, and we continue to be active in the opportunistic buyback of shares. At the same time, we remain focused on ensuring GSL's resilience and positioning ourselves to act selectively on the investment opportunities we expect to emerge in the months and quarters ahead. Driving all of our actions is our relentless focus on preserving and building long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call back to Ian.