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spk01: Thank you, and welcome, everybody, to this fourth quarter webcast. I know it's a busy day. We have a lot of shipping companies reporting on the last day of February with VW, Frontline, Hafnea, Kulko, MPCC, and American Shipping Company. So I thank everybody for taking the interest to also join the advanced class call. I have Randi Navdal-Becklund, our CFO, joining me for the call today. I will present the latest update on the company. Before we begin, just want to highlight the forward-looking statement disclaimer. We will be providing some forward-looking statements, some non-gap measures, and there are limits to how much details we can cover in the presentation. So let's jump to the Q4 highlights. Q4 TCE. came in at $46,500 a day, in line with the guidance of $45,000 to $50,000 per day. Please note the discrepancy here. We have two different numbers for the TCE. Usually, in a stable market, they are quite similar. However, when the market moves, which happens quite often in shipping, then there could be a wide discrepancy in these numbers. The bean counters and the professors in the audit community, they have decided that we are to use IFRS numbers, the load to discharge, which is not the industry norm, where we use the discharge to discharge, which is the full round trip basis. However, that said, you know, over time, these numbers even out. But when the market moves, you could have some big mismatch here because you only are accounting income when you are loaded under the IFRS number. So our discharge to discharge numbers came in at $55,800 per day, which was slightly ahead of our guidance of $50,000 to $55,000 per day. This resulted in strong profits, $34.7 million for the quarter or $0.45 per share. And in total for the year, we generated net profits of $89 million, or $1.16 per share. Recent events, we just recently took delivery of the third dual-fuel VLGC from DCME in Korea on February 9th, and she left the yard on February 11th. And we have now fixed her in the spot market for a maiden voyage, loading a cargo in the U.S. Gulf Coast. during March and heading then to Far East for this charge. As we announced in November, we have sold and delivered the promise to the new owners. This transaction resulted in a book gain for us of close to $8 million and a cash release of $20 million. During Q4, when we had our call on Thanksgiving in November, We announced that we had covered two-thirds of a ship on FFA. So FFA is the alternative to fixing a ship on time shutter where we can use derivatives to hedge the freight. And then if we also hedge the bunker's fuel, we can lock in our returns. So we managed to secure the remaining part of that derivative freight. So we have fully covered one ship. on derivatives for the full calendar year 2023 at 47,500 per day, which is a pretty good rate. In terms of guidance, we are reporting a bit late, but we are already today almost fully covered for Q1. We are 98% covered with a TCE of $55,000 per day on a discharge-to-discharge basis. So basically we are replicating the Radarsprang earnings from Q4. Okay. Siri wanted also to jump in here on Thanksgiving. But yeah, as I mentioned on the low to discharge numbers, these are lagging a bit. So we expect slightly higher low to discharge numbers in Q1 of around $58,000 for the quarter. We are now booking mostly Q2 dates, and we are already 61% covered. We have a fairly good TC coverage from 23 already. It's a bit premature to give out any TCE numbers as we have three chips on index, so that the earnings for these chips are uncertain at the moment. So given the strong earnings, we have a healthy balance sheet. we have decided to hike the dividend from 20 cents the last three quarters to 50 cents for Q4. This means that the last four quarters, so the fiscal year 2022, we paid out $1.1, which translates to around 60% dividend yield, or actually 29% dividend yield if you're only counting the fourth quarter. Let's jump to our During last year, we sold three of our older ships, 2008 ships. Now, one 2008 ship and two 2009 ships. It was the Tetris Glory in Providence in Q1, and then Promise in Q4. All of these with pretty big book gains, as Randy will tell you more about shortly. These two older ships we have left are fully covered for most of 2023. with Iris Glory covered until Q3 and then Venus Glory until Q4. We are doing the special service of these ships this year. Iris Glory is currently going through docking where we are also installing Ballas water treatment system and Venus Glory is scheduled for docking in May. Then we have 8 through 15 Eco ships in our portfolio. The two ships without the scrubber, Chinook and Pampero, we have TC coverage on. Chinook is a variable hire time charter where the rate fluctuates with the spot market, while Pampero is a fixed TC, which we entered into last year when we sold Promise, which had a TC with a similar duration. So that means we have six ships clean coverage. spot exposure for 2023, with Iris Glory coming open end of the year. We also have two dual-fuel ships delivered last year on variable hire time charters, and then, as I mentioned, we had Riegel delivery in February, which is also in the spot market, and we expect her sister ship, Avior, to be delivered in May, and she is also open and scheduled to to trade in the spot market. The last remaining new buildings were originally scheduled for 2023, but there are certain postponements at the yards, so we expect those two ships to be delivered early 2024. Note that the new ships, the four last ships in our fleet, are also ammonia ready, so ship number three and four, Riegel and Avio, They can burn LPG, subject modification of the main engine, while Castor and Pollux can also be ammonia carriers, which gives them a lot of trading flexibility and also have kind of put them in line to be net zero ships in the future if ammonia is the fuel for the future. Also note the FFA coverage. We had a legacy FFA for Q1. about one third of a ship at around 30 000 per day and then we have secured one ship for the full year at 47 500 as i mentioned and then coming to 2024 we are fully open and have a very high level of market exposure dividends just we have touched upon this slide Last quarter, I just want to give you an update on this in terms of the parameters. Earnings per share, 0.45. We are paying out 50 cents slightly more than our earnings for the quarter. For the year, it's in line with the earnings, 116, and then $1.1 of dividends, as I mentioned. And the decision factor there is earnings and cash flow, which is very good with the TC improvements in Q4. and also the bookings for Q1, where we are basically replicating the earnings from Q4. Backlog and visibility, we have three ships on fixed rate higher, three on variable higher, and one ship on FFA, and we have pretty good visibility these days. The market is pretty firm. We are booking ships forward with quite a lot of time. Liquidity position is strong, as Randi will tell you more about, $324 million of cash, and we have no unfunded capex with actually $6 million positive cash effect from delivery, given the new billing financing we put in place. We don't have any debt maturities before early 2027, no issues with covenants. So with that, we think it's fair to pay out the full earnings. or actually a slightly ahead of the earnings for the quarter. So that's it for me for now. I will leave it to Randi to go through the numbers in a bit more detail.
spk00: Thank you, Eitan. Let's go to slide six and have a look at our highlights from the income statement. As already presented, the fourth quarter was a solid quarter with an achieved average time charter equivalent or TTE rate of $46,500 a day, up from $33,000 in the previous quarter. This is also in line with our guidance of 45 to 50. The fourth quarter results have a significant low to discharge adjustment of negative 10.8 million or a reduction of $9,300 in TCE per day as the market moves significantly upward and exceeded $100,000 a day at the end of the quarter compared to mid-30s at the end of the third quarter. Our commercial TCE per day, also known as discharge to discharge, was there for $55,800, slightly ahead of our guidance level of $50,000 to $55,000 a day. In these figures, we had a time chart of coverage of 49% at an average TCE rate of $41,000 a day and a spot a voyage of 51% of our vessel days, earning approximately $70,000 a day. TCE for the full year 2022 was $38,200 compared to $31,300 a day in 2021. And the TCE on a discharge-to-discharge basis was $40,000 a day for the full year 2022 for comparison. Operating expenses in per day figures were 8,700 during the first quarter, which is slightly higher than previous quarter of 8,200. The increase was driven by higher travel expenses for crew due to imbalance in the air freight market, combined with somewhat higher spheres and services than normal. Operating expenses for the full year 2022 have come down from 8,400 a day from the $9,000 a day levels we saw in 2021 and 2020. The decrease is mainly due to rollouts of the vaccines having a positive effect combined with the lower off-deck donor and new building. In November, we successfully completed the sale of Promise and the 2009 VINCC. With the TC attached, the sale resulted in a gain of 7.9 for the fourth quarter, bringing the total gain on sales to 18.7 million for the full year, which includes the sale of TC's Glory in March and Providence in May. The net profit was tripled from previous quarters, recording a net profit of 35 million for the fourth quarter compared to 12 million for the third quarter. Net profit year to date is 89 million. It's the best results Avanskas has delivered in seven years since 2015. And this is even adjusting for the gain or fail of 18.7 million for the three older vessels. Below the net profit, we have other comprehensive income where we recognize our hedging position to mitigate the risk of rising interest rates. We have benefited quite well on our interest rate plots with a total gain of 26.5 million for the full year 2022. The total gain will be reclassified and recognized through our P&L until the maturity of our fleet facility in January 2028. And we're happy, again, to share our good results with our shareholders. We have declared a dividend of 50 cents per share, or 38.2%. 3 million for the fourth quarter, bringing the total distributed dividend to $1.10, or 84.3 million for the fiscal year 2022. And as Einstein pointed, this is an attractive yield of 16%. Moving to slide 7, we can see that 73% of our balance sheet consists of 12 VGCs at year-end, which is becoming 14 very soon, as we took delivery of a few new builds just a few weeks ago, and one of them is scheduled for delivery in May this year. While our two last new buildings are expected to be delivered in 2024, it is currently recognized as a vessel under construction on new builds, with pre-delivery costs being capitalized in terms of it. The new buildings were contracted in 2019 and 21. That's an average price of 80 million per vessel. It's today close to that, about 100 million each if you were to order a similar vessel today. And the cost of values on our new building vessels amounts to in total 120 million in potential gains if we were to sell these today. Our cash position has been significantly improved during the year. It's up from 102.9 million from the last year to 2024 at the end of 2022. And that leads us to the next slide, the cash position, showing the quarterly cash movements. We started the quarter with a cash balance of $188 million. And as the market moved upwards significantly, exceeding our normalized cash break even of about $22,000 a day, we generated $26 million in net cash flow from operations. This includes the scheduled debt repayment of $10 million. We delivered promise to the new owner in November as committed, releasing at 20 million in net cash proceeds. And we saw a peak in the interest rate market during the quarter. Therefore, we released an interest rate hedge position and cashed out a total gain of 8.4 million, consisting of 6.1 million in cash and 2.3 million being amortized over the next 30 months. Lastly, we paid out 15.3 million for the third quarter as we did for the two first quarters, and this adds up to a net positive movement of 36 million for the quarter. So in addition to the movement during the fourth quarter, we had a net increase of 87 million, bringing a total positive cash movement to 123 million for the year 2022-2023. And the increase comes from the divestment of thesis glory and providence generating in total net cash proceeds of 47 million. We had a refinancing of 83 million and positive cash flow from operations of 88 million offset by scheduled debt repayments of 30 million, dividends of 34.3. million and New Berlin capex of 65.5 million. This includes the pre-delivery cost and the next cash proceeds from delivery of our two first New Berlin. And thereby, we have recorded a cash of 224 million as of December 31st, 2022, which is the highest cash position recorded in Avanza history. And the cash The vessels on our balance sheet adds up. The share price really supports the book value here more than last quarter, I would say. Today, it's about 85% price to book ratio, despite the three recent sales at well above the book value. Moving to the next slide, 9, we can see that our new building program has been paid by about 50% of the social capital expenditure at year end. And the remaining capex of 242 is fully financed with bank facilities for Avanze Rigel and Avanze Avion, while Avanze Gastrod and Avanze Pollux is financed with a sale leaseback arrangement, which was signed in August last year. This means that we have no unfunded new building capex. Actually, it's also funded with 8 million at year end. And the financing of our new building program is now completed. Besides concluding the financing of our new building program, we refinanced our fleet bank facility consisting of nine vessels, in May last year. This significantly improved the terms compared to what we had, where we have achieved longer repayment profiles from 18 to 2022 years. We've increased our revolve capacity to utilize the flexibility to manage and optimize cash. We've lowered the margin and longer tenor, pushing our first debt maturity from June 2024 to February 2027. And with a staggered debt, no unfunded new billing capex, a solid cash position, and strong earnings, we are well positioned to continue returning value to our shareholders as we have done the past year. And with that, I hand the word over to you, Estin, for the market.
spk01: Okay, thank you, Randi. Let's go to some market slides there, and let's start with our overview of the market 2022. So the VLGC market, which is the big gas carriers, that market, or the cargo, grew with 10% during 2022. There are two main export markets. It's the Middle East and North America. We saw very strong growth in the Middle East, despite OPEC holding back oil volumes at a certain time. But some of the companies there increased the export growth by 29% to 46%. U.S. was more muted in 2022, but still, this is the biggest export market. So altogether, this translates to about 90 million tons, which is the vast majority of the seaborne LPG exports. On the import side, we saw widespread growth. China, despite the zero COVID policies, grew their imports by close to 10% for the year. despite LNG imports being down 20% for the year. Europe, with the energy crisis, also had to substitute feedstock and increase their imports by 55%, although Europe is a rather small import nation for T-Bone LPG. If we look at the key import nations, as I mentioned, China, very strong growth despite zero COVID policies. It's a price sensitive market where you have a lot of substitution and LPG prices have been at a very low level. At the same time, China is ramping up a lot of new plastics factories. So we do expect growth to China to continue to be strong in the years going forward. And then you do see something European countries also have on the list being big import nations. Let's jump to U.S., which is the most interesting market. U.S. have had a very high inventory. Production of LPG is very high. At the same time, we have had less domestic demand due to our warmer winter than normal. So U.S. inventories are staying at very high levels, 25% above 10-year average. And this has put a dent on domestic prices in U.S. and widened the arbitrage to international markets. And we do expect U.S. to come out of the season here with very, very high LPG inventory levels. Growth in the LPG sector was a bit muted in 2022. We don't expect that to be the case in 2023 with the Energy Information Agency forecasting 16% export growth in 2023 and then somewhat lower in 2024 with 4%. So we do expect the US, which is also our export nation with long sailing distances to the end consumer market to grow very steadily during 2023. And then of course if you have about 45% of the cargoes flowing out of US to markets mainly in Asia, these cargoes often mostly have to go through the Panama Canal. Panama Canal has been clogged at several locations and it happened really quite a lot here during November when LPG rates went to all-time high levels. So we do see that the Panama congestion is affecting vessel availability, and we have a symbiosis there where lack of ships are also driving the arbitrage, not only the arbitrage driving the freight levels, but they both work in a feedback loop. So if you're looking at the arbitrage from US to Japan or China for that matter, The arbitrage levels have been keeping at very conductive levels for freight during the last couple of months. Turning back to the Panama Canal on slide 14, just to illustrate how this works in real life. In an ideal situation, you would like to take a US Gulf Coast cargo through the Panama Canal and ending up in China. 10,500 nautical miles or 58 days round trip at 50 knots. This is without any waiting time. So in real life, typically the round trip would be slightly higher. And also depending on whether you are discharging in one or very often two ports or maybe even three ports. When the Panama Canal is clogging, and because usually of high demand also for container ships and LNG ships, Then, of course, alternatives are either going through Suez Canal, which is adding about 4,000 nautical miles, resulting in a round trip of 81 days, or saving the canal fees in Suez, going through Cape of Good Hope, and you can get to 15,800 nautical miles, turning into 88 days on an efficient round trip, or 30 days more. So this is really driving tonne mileage. And at the same time, we do see the Panama Canal being clogged. It creates a lot of uncertainty when you are fixing a ship and you have a lake end or let's call it the loading day when you have to be at the terminal. And usually when you fix a ship, you have maybe a window of two days to meet that lake end for loading the cargoes. But if you have a ship in Asia, it's very hard to predict how long the waiting time in Panama will be. Will it be six days? or will it be up to 25 days as it was in November? At the same time, we do see the fees for going to Panama Canal basically doubling from 2022 to 2025, which also puts further incentive to go around the Panama Canal, taking all the routes, thereby also making sure you have a fixed lake and that you can guarantee because if you are not meeting the lake end for loading the cargo, and if the market drops, you are typically also dropped from that voyage, which means that you need to fix your ship again. So this is creating a bit different trading pattern, which in general is positive for freight demand. Yeah, turning to 15 again, it's a bit same story. The arbitrage, if you look at the levels here, the arbitrage on the right-hand side, paying at around $150 per ton. We do see the dark blue line, which is the Montelview, the U.S. domestic propane price, and then the lighter blue color being the Far East Asia price. There is a substantial spread here, and then depending on the supply and demand of ships in the market, that will affect how much of this arbitrage is ending up with the cargo owners. or with the ship owner. The TCE potential for 23 and 24 is $67,000 and $56,000 for a non-scrubber vessel. Then, of course, the ships fitted with the scrubber, they have access to cheaper fuel, so the economics for those ships are substantially better at $74,000 and $62,000 a day. Again, these arbitrages are changing quite a lot. They are quite volatile. as the freight market is, so this is just a snapshot of how it looks today. If we look at slide 16, we have had speed reduction in the industry with speed going down 4% in 2022 compared to 2021, and with the implementation of the carbon intensity indicator from 2023, we do think that some of the older ships will continue going slower with engine power limitation, which will result in less ships available in the spot market. And, of course, torn days going up. If you go to slide 17, and I think one of the themes people have been talking about for a long time is the order book for 2023. People have had in the past, especially last summer, had a negative feeling view on the market for 2023 because of all the scheduled deliveries for 2023, totaling about 46 ships. But we do see some slippage, and for our own sake, we have had four ships with contractual delivery date in 2023, and we do expect to take half of these in 2023, and then the last ones early 2024. So we do expect some slippage. At the same time, We do see a lot of dry docking scheduled for the year. Energy Aspect has a number of 76 villages scheduled for dry docking this year. Other people are operating with somewhat lower numbers, but it's a big jump in dry docking this year. The numbers, depending on source, being somewhere around 65 to 76 ships, and they are skewed to the beginning of the year. Additionally, scrubber economics are very compelling. So we do see people looking at installing scrubbers, which will entail the ships being longer in dry dock. And we also see people installing ballast water treatments, as we are doing on two of our ships, which can also lead to somewhat longer dry docking period for the ships. So in all in all, I think when you are getting to 2024, order book to fleet is 7%. rather than the 24% or 25% it is today. So we do think that getting to 2023 is important. That's one of the reasons why we have taken some time shutter coverage this year to protect ourselves or the possibility of some oversupply of ships. And then we are fully open from 2024 onwards to reap the benefit of a much tighter shipping market. Then the highlight of today, I hope, is a special VLGC edition. We have from time to time some investors having some concern about the VLGC market, so we have kind of made the top five worries that people are concerned about when they're investing in the sector and try to address those concerns. give some data to them. So let's start with number one, the most typical concern, which is the order book is too big. As I mentioned, 24, 25% order book compared to fleet depends a bit on whether you're counting in the deliveries already for the year. In historical perspective, it's about average. We have had situation where order book has been a lot higher These are typically also driven by technology changes. We had the eco class in 2014, 2015, which resulted in this big spike in order book and coincided also with the US becoming our exporter. And then we had this sort of spike 2006 to 2009, where we also had a lot of deliveries. At the same time, the fleet is also aging. There's hardly been any scrapping. in this sector over the last couple of years and we do have today 58 older ships which are expected to be scrapped. One of the reasons they have not been scrapped is the shadow fleet of ships being in captive trade between Iran and typically China and these numbers of ships being in this trade is just increasing month by month and as I mentioned on the last call in November, the number was then 44 ships. So this number is increasing and is leading to scrapping being delayed. But the order book today, 69 ships, compares favorable to the older ships. And then point number two is also maybe important to take into consideration. This is not really a zero-sum game. One thing is the order book compares to kind of the scrapping candidates, but That is more the sense in our flat market where you don't really have any growth. But seaborne trade in LPG is growing quite steadily, so the growth will take care of the new building demand. With a CAGR since 2012 of 7% average annual growth. And even in COVID, you do see that there was very limited decline in growth for LPG. 2019, 106 million tons going down to 105 in 2020 and then bouncing to 112 in 2021. So it's a fairly resilient fuel because it has a lot of uses and it's generally also cheap. And of course, as I mentioned, Seaborn Trade's share of LPG consumption is increasing. One of the main reasons for this is U.S. becoming a huge exporter, the biggest and they are very far away from the end consumers and they then tend to trade their LPG exports on very large gas carriers. So that was number one and two. Another concern that typically pops up is people think the rates are volatile and I don't disagree. We have seen this year rates going to far above 100,000 at the end of last year. falling down in the 30s before bouncing back now to, let's say, call it around $80,000 per day. So for sure, the rates are volatile, but that's fine. But what you also have to measure is what are the rate levels compared to your cash break even. So we are kind of showing the VGC rates last 10 years compared to cash break even of assumed $22,500 per day in line with our cash back even levels and how often are you then underwater on the earnings compared to your cash back even and actually it's just one third of the of the months and then if you're looking at kind of the distribution of earnings we and then comparing these to to other commodity shipping segments we'll see the very large crude carriers and and big bulk driver ships cape sizes We look at the distribution of this, and you will see that the VLGC is more even. You see that on the VLGC you have periods where you can make a lot of money, but also periods where you are underwater more often, where you basically have positive cash flow, 46% of the month the last 10 years, and even less so for cave sizes, which have had positive cash flow, 30%. of the month's last 10 years. Of course, the market is not stupid, so this is also one of the reasons why VLCC and case size order books today are very low, and why I don't think the cash flow projection for the last 10 years can be projected into the future, the outlook for for VLCC in Cape Stiles I do think look a lot more compelling today because they have been through a cycle of scrapping. While the VLCC, as I mentioned, all the book is on par with what it has been in the past and we have a growing sector. Then we always have number four, which is a bit more technical. It's more that if, of course, NASA is a substitute for propane, so if the economics are too good, You could always have NAFTA coming in replacing propane and killing your economics. But if you look at the numbers since January 2022, actually in this Q4 when we have had very favorable phase rates, the spread from NAFTA and propane has not been really good. Despite that, the earnings for VGCs has been fantastic. We haven't really seen that the NAFTA has been replacing propane and killing kind of the VGC market, at least for the last cycle. Last item is, it's more the, am I too late to buy the stock? And then it's about calculating what is the net asset value. So yes, our stock has gone up quite a lot the last year or so. But so has also the new building prices. For new building prices, as Randy mentioned, we have ordered six ships at more or less the bottom of the cycle, $80 million. If you have read Trade Wednesday, it just had a story about new building prices now being quoted at around $100 million. That is for ships delivery, 25, 26. So you are tying up a lot of capital then until you can take delivery. And now having a ship in the market is very positive because the rates are really good. And then if you look at the resale numbers, resale numbers have gone up quite a lot. It's been a good and liquid secondhand market. As I mentioned, we have been selling three ships the last year. And we also have VW ships. coming out today announcing quite a few ship sales, where we are looking at $50-60 million for 15-year-old VLGCs. So if we then kind of put in $50 million for our two last remaining VLGCs, the second-hand values for a five-year VLGC is around $80 million, according to Clarkson's. So if you're putting in 70 million for each of the 215 VLGCs, and then 100 million for the useful VLGCs we have, maybe it's a bit on the low side. If new building prices for delivery 25, 26 is 100, then maybe this number should be higher. But for simplicity, let's assume 100 million. Then you have a fleet value of 1.26 billion. We have some working capital. We are trading, as Randy mentioned, about half of the fit on time charter and then half of the fit on voyage charter. And on voyage charters, you typically have some working capital where you are getting paid after you discharge your cargo rather than in advance like you have on a time charter. And we have some derivative. We have a derivative book, which is pretty good in the money. So that is $31 million. We have remaining capex of 242 million. As Andy mentioned, this is fully covered by debt of 250 million. But regardless, it's still remaining capex. And then our net debt was 228. So then the net value here is 821 million. It would be costing you to replicate Avans Gas either through new buildings or resales. We have 77 million shares in the company, and that gives kind of cost of making a new advanced gas at around $11 per share. And our share price today is, I believe, $6.6. So that means that there should be plenty of upside despite the stock going up because new building prices and secondhand prices have also moved up quite a lot the last year or so. So that's it for me. I'll just repeat the highlights. Strong quarter, we had a big mismatch on the load-to-discharge and the discharge-to-discharge numbers, but 46,500 in line with guidance on the load-to-discharge, 55,800 on the discharge-to-discharge, slightly ahead of guidance, turning into a profit of close to 35 million for the quarter or close to 90 million for the year. We have taken delivery of our third. We'll just see our Antrigel sister ship coming in May. Both ships dedicated to the spot market. We recently sold our ship at Healthy Book Gain. We have taken out some more coverage for the year. We are 98% covered for Q1, and we expect Q1 to be on par. with Q4 on a discharge-to-discharge basis and are much better numbers on a load-to-discharge basis. We're already booking Q2 numbers at good levels, and we have decided to hike the dividend to 50 cents, which gives our investors hopefully uncompelling yield. So that's it for me. Let's check whether we have some questions.
spk03: Certainly, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star 11 on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star 11 again.
spk02: Once again, if you have a question, please press star 11 on your telephone. And I'm not showing any questions at this time.
spk03: I'd like to turn the program back to management for any further remarks.
spk01: Yeah, thank you. Nobody wants to talk on the phone anymore. Everybody wants to chat. So we have two chat questions there. I think I'll start with Øystein from Fronlind, which is asking us, given your cash position and no unfunded capex, etc., etc., is it fair to assume 100% of earnings being paid out going forward. I think as we said it in the Q3 report in November, I think I said something like this. Some shipping companies are bragging that they are paying out 50% of earnings in dividends. We are not planning to do that. We are planning to pay out everything. So as long as we have a fairly good outlook and a good financial position, we don't see any reason to be worried holding back all that cash. Cash today has a much higher value than it had before Fed started to raise interest rates. You can now put your money to 5% with the U.S. government, or you can put it to us at 16% or 29% yield. So we are rather paying out full earnings. We are actually paying in excess of earnings for this quarter, despite some of the earnings coming from asset sale. So, yes, I think it's fair to assume 100% dividend yield in terms of earnings, at least as long as we have a positive outlook. And I think the financial position is super strong, so nothing's going to change there any day soon. And then we have one more question. Could you give some more color on the 63% books on good levels in Q2 2023? I was maybe expecting that question. I think I touched upon it in the introduction here that it's too early for us to give our assessment of the TCE. We have three ships on variable higher rate, so we have no idea what that number is going to be. The spot market rates will decide the earnings on those three ships. What we know for sure is we're going to have 100% utilization on the ships. I would say two of the ships we have, we have a fairly good floor level on in line with cash break even. So those ships tend to perform better in a worse market where we, despite more rates going very low, we will still be able to get a cash break even level on them. The other remaining ship has more upside than downside protection, which I think is a good combination. But what we are doing now is, of course, we are fixing ships where the voyage is going well into Q2. And of course, as I mentioned, her rates today are at around $80,000 per day, which means that you can book pretty good coverage for Q2. Additionally, we have three ships on fixed-hire TC. And we have these three ships on variable higher. I think I have to quit bringing my iPhone to this call, because Siri is annoying me all the time. And then we have three ships on variable higher rate and one FFA coverage. That's why we have such a high coverage for Q2. It's three ships fixed TC, three ships variable higher, one FFA. But it's too early to give a TC rate. But once I'm back here in May, we will give you more details on the expected VC. Last question, which is not really an investor question. There's a guy who wants to join our group asking us if there are career opportunities and he would like to get employed. Yes. and whether it's possible to get directly hired by the advance group rather than through your ship manager. So just to tell you a bit about that. In order to kind of be cost efficient, we have a pretty good OPEX, as Randy informed you about, and even more so on the general administration cost. In order to be able to deliver such good OPEX numbers, we are reliant on having good ship managers. In the office here in Oslo, where we're running the shipping companies day to day, we have around 250 ships we're operating on our platform. It's tankers in Frontline. It's more than 100 dry books in Golden Ocean. It's a lot of ships in SFL. Altogether, they have around 75 ships. And then the third in LNG ships in Flex LNG. And then there are 16... in advance. So we have a kind of scale of economics to run shipping companies, but we use outside managers to run our ships in order to have access to crew pools, purchasing, maritime IT. So we have today two managers of our ships, Northern Marine and Berna Schulte, they are operating our ships, and that gives us a way to kind of level the kind of the sea tanker platform, despite Avans Gas being a fairly small shipping company. So I hope that gave you some input. And then we got one more question while I was talking here. With your effective valuation relative to the calculated value of Avans Gas, do you consider share buybacks? Well, I don't really agree. I do think I calculated that. a cost of replicating this company by buying or ordering new ships at $11 per share. Our share price today is about $6.6, $6.7. So I don't really see the value being attractive. But I think maybe what you're meaning, well, the stock is attractive to buy back. In that sense, I think it's a bit hard for us to buy back shares. I've said this in the past. We have one dominant shareholder, Heman, who owns 77% of our shares. So we have an exemption from Oslo Stock Exchange, which typically requires a free flow of 25%. We have less than 25%. We have an exemption from the Oslo Stock Exchange to still be listed. And that makes it hard for us to buy back the stock. Instead, we are maximizing dividends to you guys, who are all investors. And then if you think the valuation is attractive, you can reinvest that dividend in buying more ships. So I think that's it for us. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, everybody, for joining the call. We will be back in May with our Q1 numbers, and then I will give more details on what we mean with attractive bookings for Q2. Thank you.
spk03: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.
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