Tsakos Energy Navigation Limited

Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Tsakos Energy Navigation Conference call on the third quarter 2019 financial results. We have with us Chairman of the Board, Mr Nikolas Tsakos, President and CEO, Mr Paul Durham, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr George Saroglou, Chief Operating Officer of the company. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. Thank you very much and good morning to all of our participants.

I'm Nikolas Bournois of Capitalink, Investor Relations Advisor to Tsakos Energy Navigation. This morning, the company publicly released its financial results for the third quarter and the nine-month period of 2019. In case we do not have a copy of today's earnings release, please call us at 212-661-7566 or email us at 10TEN at Capitalink.com and we will have a copy for you emailed right away. Please note that parallel to today's conference call there's also a live audio and slide webcast which can be accessed on the company's website on the front page at www.tenn.gr. The conference call will follow the presentation slides so please we urge you to access the presentation slides on the company's website. Please note that the slides of the webcast presentation will be available and archived on the website of the company after the conference call. Also, please note that the slides of the webcast presentation are user-controlled. And that means that by clicking on the proper button, you can move to the next or to the previous slide on your own. At this time, I would like to read the safe harbor statement. The conference call and slide presentation of the webcast contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor Provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In this precaution, such overlooking statements involve risks and uncertainties which may affect tenants' business prospects and results of operations. And at this moment, at this time, I would like to pass the floor to Mr. Nikolas Tsakos, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Security Navigation. Mr. Tsakos.

Thank you, thank you, Nick, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is again a pleasure to report the company's growth, developments, and results, and it's even more a pleasure because we were able to finally do this in a much better long-term positive environment, I would say after a very long period of time. The year so far has been really a roller coaster. It started with a market that was a positive and started giving us indications of things that were there to come. We got a cold shower very quickly in the second and third quarter with the market dropping significantly. And then, of course, we have had this significant freight strengthening eruption that is gaining strength to strength day to day. So, overall, an interesting year. And TEN always has been, for 26 years now, navigating... Thank you very much. and I think looking back it was a wise move. It has of course affected the third quarter results but it has kept us profitable for the year and for sure the fourth quarter we're going to be rewarded for these actions. In the meantime we still grow the business. Our LNG footprint is growing. It's a business that we believe there is a future into it. However, we're not willing to sacrifice shareholders' equity in participating in this market accepting very low rates. And that's why we're very choosy when we look at these transactions. However, we have doubled our footprint in this at the right time when the value of those assets were at the lowest level. in the middle of the soft period in around June and July. Also, our long-term strategic conventional relationships go from strength to strength. Four more ships are being built, one delivered already to a major end user for a very long period of employment, very accretive transactions that are the base of the company's growth. The company maintains strong liquidity. However, not only we pay a dividend which we announced today, but we reduced debt by another $144 million year-to-date. In the middle of July, we repaid our first preferred. and of course we have outperformed the market by 20% for the first nine months but more importantly or as importantly for us that we are on-hands operators is that we maintain good control of operating expenses so we want to thank our technical management and everybody on the ships basically and around that are you know when we're knocking on wood keep our ships running at very very attractive low operating expenses that allows us to be able to navigate through the harsh waters. Talking about harsh waters, we can see the environment is much calmer out there. We have 23 ships which will be starting to, and you will see this in the presentation, on top of our existing 27 vessels on the spot market that take full advantage of that. 23 vessels are going to be opening up, I think seven already in the first quarter and so on going forward for rechartering and today is much, much higher rates. So with this in mind, we believe that we will have a very strong year for 2019 and hopefully this will be continued in 2020. And we will be able to enhance even our dividend when we have our full year results in March. And with this, I will ask George Saroglou, our CEO, to give us a more analytical view Thank you Nikolas and good morning to you all.