Scorpio Tankers Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Scorpio Tankers 8 second quarter 2020 conference call. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian Lee, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Operator, and thank everyone for joining us today. Welcome to the Scorpio Tankers second quarter earnings conference call. On the call with me today are Emmanuel Norrell, Chief Executive Officer, Robert Bugbee, President, Cameron Mackey, Chief Operating Officer, Commercial Director, David Morant, Managing Director, James Doyle Seaton, Financial Analyst. Earlier today, we issued our second quarter earnings press release, which is available on our website. The information discussed on this call is based on the information released today, August 6, 2020, and may contain forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainty. Actual results may differ particularly from those set forth in the press release. For our discussion of these risks and uncertainties, You should review the forward-looking statement disclosure and learning express release that we issued today, as well as the Scorpio Tankers SEC filings, which are available at scorpiotankers.com and sec.gov. Call participants are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live on the Internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. An archive of the webcast will be made available on the investor relations page of our website for approximately 14 days. On the call, there will be a short presentation... which are available at ScorpioThinkers.com and the investor relation page under reports and presentations. If you have any specific financial modeling questions, you can contact me later and discuss offline.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning or afternoon to all and thank you for your time today. Firstly, I'd like to open the whole mentioning that we continue to stand with our employees, especially our seafarers whose life has inevitably been affected by the pandemic. As far as the business is concerned, the second quarter has been a very eventful one for the company. We have retired that at a record pace, nearly $230 million this quarter alone. At this stage, we retain close to $300 million of cash on the balance sheet, and that generated the best part of $600 million of EBITDA in the last 12 months. We are aware and respectful of what is happening in the world. However, we do look at the future with confidence. In the first half of the year, we saw some of the highest rates ever achieved. in the period. This was due to the aggressive contango trade that persisted in the oil markets. At the same time, a significant drop into the seasonally weak summer months has been exacerbated by destocking as the mean reverts and storage patterns normalize. We addressed this as much as we could through the significant work we did to turn out our rate exposure during the first half of the year. Lars will talk more to this and the opportunities that the market volatility presents during his remarks. We're now in the third quarter, which is our seasonally weak period. But we've made a good start, and we do believe that current spot rates have found a support level. So by the time of our next reported earnings, we expect the winter demand in the northern hemisphere will start to build. And as other asset-backed markets are clearly already pricing in a rapid recovery in global GDP, we feel our confidence mentioned before is justified. Our capital management message has been consistent, and as promised, our priority has been to deliver. We're finding chances to opportunistically create value whilst doing so, such as in the recent retirement of a portion of our outstanding convertible bonds. We have also refinanced some facilities, as outlined in the earnings press release, raising liquidity and further extending the funding profile of the business as our CapEx run rate reduces and normalizes over the next 12 months. In the last 12 months, we just went through an impactful CapEx period, a massive dry docking program, probably the biggest in the industry with around 70 vessels which have faced special surveys, balanced water treatment system installation and scrubbing installation. the next 12 months would be much less intense from a capex standpoint. Behind this volatility and short-termism, the big trends start to swing as a powerful tailwind to our business, mainly those of new refineries and routes and the extremely constrained supply picture against the backdrop of a rapidly aging fleet. With this, my remarks are concluded, my opening remarks are concluded, and I would like to turn the call to Lars.