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Euroseas Ltd. (ESEA)

Q4 2012 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 14, 2013

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Euroseas Conference Call on the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2012 financial results. We have with us Mr. Aristides Pittas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Tasios Aslidis, Chief Financial 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. (Operator Instructions) I must advise you the conference is being recorded today, Thursday, February 14, 2013. Please be reminded that the company announced their results this morning with a press release that has been publicly distributed. Before putting the floor to Mr. Pittas, I would like to remind everyone that in today’s presentation and conference call, Euroseas will be making forward-looking statements. These statements are within the meaning of the Federal Securities Laws. Matters discussed may be forward-looking statements which are based on current management expectations that involve risks and uncertainties that may result in such expectations not being realized. I kindly draw your attention to slide number 2 of the webcast presentation, which has the full forward-looking statement and the same statement was also included in the press release. Please take a moment to go through the whole statement and read it. I would now like to pass the floor to Mr. Aristides Pittas, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Euroseas. Please go ahead, sir.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Good morning and thank you for joining Euroseas for our conference call today. Together with me is Tasios Aslidis, our CFO. The purpose of today’s call is to discuss the results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2012 financial results. Let us turn to slide 3 for our fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2012 financial results overview. The fourth quarter of 2012, we reported total net revenues of $12.4 million. Net loss for the period was $2 million or $0.04 loss per share basic and diluted. The results for the fourth quarter included $0.4 million net unrealized gain on derivatives and the $0.4 million net realized loss on derivatives. Excluding the effect of the earnings for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2012 of the unrealized gain and the unrealized loss on derivatives, the adjusted net loss for the period will have been unchanged $2 million or $0.04 loss per share basic and diluted. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2012 was $2.5 million. We declare the quarterly dividend of $0.015, i.e. $0.015 per share for the fourth quarter of 2012 payable on or about March 9, 2013 towards shareholders of record on March 2, 2013. This is the thirtieth consecutive quarterly dividend declared since the company accessed the capital markets in August 2005. For the full year of 2012, we reported total net revenues of $52.5 million. Net loss for the period was $13.2 million or $0.34 loss per share basic and diluted. The result for the 12 months of 2012 include a $1.1 million net unrealized gain on derivatives and $1.7 million net realized loss on derivatives and $8.6 million loss on sale of a vessel. Excluding the effect of the losses for 2012 of the net unrealized gain and derivatives on…

Tasios Aslidis

Management

Thank you very much, Aristides. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen from me as well. I will now provide you with a brief overview of our financial results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2012 in our usual format. For that, let’s move to slide 20, which shows our fourth quarter and full year 2012 results in comparison to the same period of 2011. I will go over here some of the same figures which Aristides gave you at the beginning of the presentation. For the fourth quarter of 2012, we reported total net revenues of $12.4 million representing a 19.2% decrease of our total net revenues of $15.3 million during the fourth quarter of 2011. The results for the fourth quarter of 2012 include a $0.4 million net unrealized gain and derivatives and a $0.4 million net realized loss on derivatives. Excluding the effect of the above, the net adjusted loss remained attained at $2 million or $0.04 loss per basic diluted. Our adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter of 2012 was $2.5 million, representing an almost 60% decrease from the $6.2 million achieved during the fourth quarter of last year. As Aristides mentioned earlier, we declared a quarterly dividend of $1.05 per share, which is the thirtieth consecutive quarterly dividend since the company accessed the capital markets in August 2005. Let’s now move to the right side of this slide to review these figures for the year ended December 31, 2012. For whole year 2012, we reported total net revenues of $52.5 million representing a 14.5% decrease over total net revenues of $61.4 million during 2011. We reported a net loss for the period of $13.2 million or $0.34 per share basic and diluted. That’s compared net income of $1.1 million or $0.04 per share basic…

Aristides Pittas

Management

Thank you, Tasios. I think it’s time to open the floor up for any questions that we may have.

Operator

Operator

Thank you very much indeed, sir. (Operator Instructions) From Wells Fargo, your first question comes from Michael Webber. Please go ahead, sir. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Hey. Good morning, guys. How are you?

Aristides Pittas

Management

Fine. How are you? Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Hey, I’m good, I’m good. I just wanted to start off with some questions around acquisitions and obviously you got some cash at the European level and then also in Euromar looking at both dry and box ships. Can you talk a little bit about what kind of deals are you seeing in the market right now particularly on the containership side? Are you seeing smaller, i.e. Panamax assets that are, that carry longer term contracts associated with them right now? and just a little bit of color from what your take on that is.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Yes. And on the container side, there is an abundance of elder ships, meaning 15 to 20 year-old ships, all of the size that we are looking at which are trying to get sold at prices which are very low, close to scrap value with no charters attached. This is one category of ships that we are seeing. There is the category of the ships that we are seeing some operators wanting to dispose of which are a little bit larger, as you said, Panamax ships, the old designs, relatively old ships but for which the charters are giving a couple of years of charter back at rates above the base market levels just to reduce the sale of those. And this is about it. We’re not seeing too much modern capacity being circulated for sale. So that’s where we currently stand. We think that the prices are really at the lowest that they have ever been right now. And it is interesting. As I said during my presentation, I think that this environment may continue for another six, seven months or so. And therefore, we have to use the limited resources that we have in buying the best deals that we can find. So we are not in a tremendous hurry to invest, but we do believe that we will invest both in Euromar and Euromar is mainly looking at containers ships at this point. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Right.

Aristides Pittas

Management

So we think that we will invest within the next six months or so, but we don’t have a purchase imminent this month or something like that. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Okay. That’s fair. I think just maybe thinking about it conceptually and you guys have had a lot of success with Euromar and we talked a bit about potentially Euromar II and other avenues to go out and acquire ships and from our perspective, it seems that there’s a bit of a two tier market developing with the larger asset sinking in higher utilization rates and then a part of that is a function of just the fact that they’re newer and a lot of them haven’t rolled off their initial charters yet, but some of those larger more fuel efficient assets are consistently generating better utilization. Is there any thought that maybe, aside kind of another JV pulling in private equity money, do you guys seek to go after maybe larger containerships that are going to maintain higher utilization rates, what are your thoughts there? Maybe potentially doing something even on spec?

Aristides Pittas

Management

Yes, we are having some discussions to do something on a different scale but these are very preliminary discussions so I can’t say that there is any conclusions there or any agreements there. We are obviously looking at various options available. We do think that it makes sense for people to be buying containerships today, yes the younger ones as well but you need more equity to do that and we don’t currently have it. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Okay. Now that makes. But I mean it sounds like you tend to kind of agree with at least the premise of that in order to make some sense.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Absolutely. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Okay. All right. That’s helpful. In terms of – and again, this is more theoretical but you guys have been successful in partnering with private equity and hedge funds and raising capital and you guys you’re obviously talking about potentially doing more. If I just look at the private vehicle, you’re creating below NAV at a pretty significant discount and it seems like most of the growth focus is via these JVs with more access to capital there. Is there any thoughts potentially taking Euroseas private, just given the fact that you can get one and acquire it cheaper than you could acquire steel?

Aristides Pittas

Management

That’s thought has crossed our minds, but we are not considering that at this point. The decisions that we reached was that the intention is to over time strengthen Euroseas. We believe that the way that Euroseas is standing right now is preparing it for significant improvement once the profitability is restored and this is maybe a year away, maybe six months away, I don’t know. Definitely, the next couple of quarters do not seem very promising. But we believe that we are sitting on a huge option value here with a fleet of Euroseas... Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Got it.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Where you know a slight improvement there in the markets will turn it to a profitable company quite soon. Let’s remember that 15-year-old ships technically can go for another 10 years, so there is no technical issue. It’s the issue of – the commercial issue is the important one here. And if one thinks that next year or the year after the market will be starting to approach historical averages, and I’m not talking about extremes, we believe that there is significant value there. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Sure. Sure.

Tasios Aslidis

Management

To complement Aristides’ answer, I mean, the commitment to keeping Euroseas public and using it to grow was the rights offering we did last year, where we there are the sponsors of the company invested the amount of funds in that. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: No, that makes sense. And it’s on a historical perspective and I’ve obviously covered the company for a long time. And you go back and you look, you still – you still right around in driving from the pre-crisis shipping companies. And they’re few and far between and you guys are certainly one of them. So, it makes sense to keep that afloat. Last question remain more to a modeling question and maybe you touched on your remarks, I think in your debt you gave out a drydock schedule for the year. Do you guys happen to have that on a quarterly basis?

Tasios Aslidis

Management

We certainly can, I’ll happy to share with you, after the call, I’ll be there to share it with you. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Okay. Okay. That’s all I’ve got. Thank you for the time, guys. I appreciate it.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Goodbye, Mike. Mike Webber – Wells Fargo: Bye.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, sir. Now from GRS Asset Management you have a question from Thomas Reynolds. Please ask your question, sir. Thomas Reynolds – GRS Asset Management: Good morning.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Good morning. Thomas Reynolds – GRS Asset Management: The scheduled to be drydocked in 2013, can you tell us if you plan on scrapping any of your older vessels, to take an advantage of a high steel prices?

Aristides Pittas

Management

I think that if the market deteriorates, we could consider it. But even at the very low levels where the market currently stands, as I said before, I think we have a significant option value here on our existing ships. So we feel comfortable about the technical situation, they are all well maintained ships. The intention will probably the preference is probably to keep the ships going because once there is a slight recovery we should be able to be making profits out of each one of them. There is only one ship built before 1990, which we might consider placing something else. But this is a decision that will be taken closer to the time when we need to drydock that ship. Thomas Reynolds – GRS Asset Management: Well, can you update us on Euroseas fleet renewal strategy. I mean other than scrapping older vessels? The option is to sell them require them and acquire a younger fleet?

Aristides Pittas

Management

Well, really as the vessels as the containerships are mostly scrap candidates in today’s market. So that’s why they fall under the category of ships that we would not really want to sell even though their scrap prices are relatively high. The potential that one can make when the market slightly recovers are quite significant. On the other hand, if the opportunity appears for us to maybe sell one of the older ones and replace it with a much younger one with a very small price differential, that is also something that we will be considering during the next six months. Thomas Reynolds – GRS Asset Management: Okay, thank you.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you (Operator Instructions) Gentlemen, there appear to be no further questions at this time. So we’ll pass the floor back for closing remarks to Mr. Aristides Pittas.

Aristides Pittas

Management

Thank you, everybody, for listening in to our today’s conference call. We will be here again in three months’ time to update you on how the first quarter of 2013 has gone. Thank you.

Tasios Aslidis

Management

Everybody, bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.