Global Ship Lease, Inc.

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 harbor section of the slide presentation. We would also like to direct your attention to the risk factors section of our most recent annual report on our 2023 Form 20F, which was filed in March of 2024. 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 usually refer to the earnings release that we issued this morning, which is also available on our website. I'm joined, as usual today, by our executive chairman, George Yuroukos, and our chief financial officer, Tasos Tsaropoulos. George will begin the call with high-level commentary on GSL and our industry, and then Tasos and I will take you through our recent activity, results, and financials, and the current market environment. After that, we will be pleased to answer your questions. So, turning now to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.

Thank you, Tom, and good morning, afternoon, or evening to all of you joining us today. 2024 has been another strong year during which we have generated $9.74 earnings per share, which rises to just below $10 EPS on a normalized basis. The overarching trends we saw throughout 2024 continued in the fourth quarter, in particular Geopolitical uncertainty and disruptions around the Red Sea have persisted. Ships have continued transit around the Cape of Good Hope, increasing TEU miles and absorbing effective ship capacity. At this point, the situation there remains unpredictable, and as such, those liners who have been avoiding the area have continued to do so. Tariffs have once again become a major area of discussion. It is difficult to predict the larger impacts with any conviction. Notably, the tariffs placed on China during the first Trump administration actually led to supply chain diversification throughout Southeast Asia, which in fact added to demand for midsize and smaller containerships. Now amidst these conditions, We have continued to make progress in key areas, including adding charter coverage at attractive rates. We added $714 million of contracted revenues in 2024, $118 million of which was in the fourth quarter, with another $171 million added so far in 2025. We have also remained disciplined and opportunistic financially, lowering our outstanding debt overall, as well as bringing our cost of debt down to 3.85% and pushing average maturity out to 4.2 years. Our robust corporate credit rating reflects our ongoing efforts to deliver the risk and build equity value for shareholders. Now we're pleased to have paid an annualized dividend of $1.80 per share, reflecting the impact of the supplemental dividend that we put in place from the second half of 2024. Looking ahead and beginning with the first quarter of 2025, dividend which is payable in June. We will be doubling our supplemental dividend, bringing our overall dividend to 52.5 cents per share per quarter, which is $2.10 per share annualized, an increase of 17%. Now, even more strikingly, this represents a 40% increase in our overall dividend since we introduced our supplemental dividend less than a year ago. As a reminder, this supplemental dividend is additive to our underlying long-term quarterly dividend reflecting the extent to which our business has continued to outperform our expectations and provided us with additional cash flows that we are pleased to share with our investors. The increase that we are announcing today is prompted not only by charter fixes that are already public, but also by the good progress that we are making on additional charters. As a result, of the sustained market appetite for ships like those in the GSL fleet. Now, in order to drive our business forward, refresh our asset base, and support the continued generation of economic value for our shareholders over time, we're focused on renewing our fleet. To this end, we were pleased to have purchased four high-specification, high-earning ECO 9000 TU ships, while also rotating out three of our oldest ships for opportunistic sale, all on attractive terms. Overall, we have built a GSL platform to maximize optionality, positioning us well to continue to manage risks and seize opportunities in a complex dynamic world. We think, we allocate capital, and we act on a through-the-cycle basis, and we firmly believe that the greatest value accrues to those with both balance sheet strength and the patience and discipline to wait for the right time to deploy it. With that, I will turn the call back to Tom.

Thanks, George. Please turn to slide five. Here we show the diversification of our charter portfolio. And as of December 31, 2024, we have close to $1.9 billion in contracted revenues, which amounts to 2.3 years of average remaining contract cover. During 2024 and the first couple of months of 2025, we added 50 charters for approximately $885 million of contracted revenues. So as we constantly monitor the market for growth opportunities when the time is right, this charter cover and our balance sheet give us a solid foundation from which to act. This brings us to slide six where we recap our dynamic capital allocation policy. We're in a fundamentally cyclical industry and as such it's critical that we plan accordingly for both the opportunities and the challenges. The best opportunities that can generate exceptionally strong returns for shareholders over time typically arise when the availability of capital is either limited or expensive or both. To capitalize on these opportunities, you need a strong balance sheet providing both the optionality and the ability to move fast. While staying primed and ready to pounce on the right deals, and we'll come back to this in the next couple of slides, we continue to return capital to shareholders via our soon-to-be-upsized dividend and also keep opportunistic share buybacks under constant review. And it goes without saying, every capital allocation decision is context-specific and risk-adjusted. Ultimately, the GSL business model is intended to provide public investors with a stable and liquid platform through which to participate in the cyclical upside and positive volatility of our industry while mitigating exposure to downside risk. And as George has put it in the past, it's easier for investors to buy and sell GSL shares than it is to buy and sell ships. On slide seven, we provide a long-term view of charter rates and asset values. Our mantra, as you can see clearly from our track record on this chart, is to be patient, disciplined, and nimble, pouncing on purchase opportunities only when the risk and return mix is right. In both the pre-pandemic period and then in the recent post-pandemic normalization, you can see that we made selective vessel acquisitions while stepping back when asset values were at super-cyclical highs. More recently, you can see that the four vessels we bought at the tail end of 2024, with charters attached, were purchased at a 30% discount to charter-free market value, de-risking the transaction right out of the gate and providing attractive upside potential on the ship's residual value when these charters roll off. This brings us to slide eight, where we provide more details. We announced the purchase of these four Eco 9000 vessels back in December. They were delivered on, or in fact, slightly ahead of schedule a charter to Hapag-Lloyd are immediately cash-generative, are accretive to earnings per share, and are financed on very attractive terms. Also, they're young assets with lots of upside earnings potential and option value going forward. Illustratively, long-term historic average charter rates for this class of ship are over $50,000 per day, and we have a couple of almost identical ships in our fleet on five-year charters at $65,000 per day. Returns are further enhanced with attractive financing, 178 million of 10-year debt priced at SOFR plus 2.5%, 83 million of which benefits from our 64 basis points SOFR caps. So, to summarize, executing on fleet renewal, great ships, great upside earnings potential, great financing, and low risk. On the other side of the fleet renewal coin, we're rotating out of three of our oldest chips, which we have contracted to sell on attractive terms. The exact gain on sale will depend upon their respective divestment dates, but the aggregate sale price is at roughly 30 million premium to their respective book values at December 31. So, we're managing our cash generating fleet assets in order to protect, maintain, and continue to generate shareholder value going forward. We're doing this in accordance with our strict investment criteria and dynamic capital allocation policy. And we're able to achieve this because our liquid financial position, strong balance sheet, and access to high-quality deals allowed us to move quickly on a $274 million opportunity. With that, I'll pass the call to Tasos to discuss our financials.