Frontline Ltd. (FRO) Q2 2023 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Second Quarter 2023 Frontline plc Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lars Barstad. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Dear all, thank you for listening in to Frontline's second quarter earnings call. In the second quarter, we had a very untypical spike for VLCC and Suezmax towards the end. And this puts us in a position to make some extra cash and also to carry some value into the third quarter. Most interestingly, this spike was caused by minor weather delays, telling a tail of how narrowly balanced our market is. The macroeconomical headwinds seem to have a very-muted impact on our little part of the global macro puzzle, and we'll get to that later in the presentation. I think it's worth mentioning that in the markets like these, Frontline’s efficient and transparent platform comes to shine and effectively turning revenues to shareholder returns. Our running cost remains fairly stable, as expressed in our cash breakeven levels and all the incremental income goes straight to the bottom line and back to you, shareholders. Before I give the word to Inger, let's look at our TCE numbers on slide 3 in the deck. In the second quarter, Frontline achieved $64,000 per day on our VLCC fleet, $61,700 per day on our Suezmax fleet and $52,900 per day on our LR2/Aframax fleet. I hope you're all fairly comfortable with these numbers. And we are back to a somewhat reverted earnings relationship between our segments, where the VLCC makes the most. We have secured quite firm numbers as we progress into Q3, with 74% of our VLCC days booked at $53,200 per day; 67% of our Suezmax days fixed at $48,800 per day; and 57% of our LR2/Afra days at $40,500 per day. And again, to remind you, all these numbers are on a load-to-discharge basis, and they will be affected by the amount of ballast days that we end up having towards the end of Q3. Now, I'll let Inger take you through the financial highlights.

Thanks, Lars, and good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Let's then turn to slide 4, profit statement and look at some highlights. In the second quarter of '23, we recorded the highest second quarter profit since 2008 of $230.7 million or $1.04 per share. Adjusted profit came in at $210 million or $0.95 per share. Revenues came in at $513 million. We declared a cash dividend of 0.80 per share [Technical Difficulty]. I will mention that following the transition to IFRS, drydocking costs will be capitalized and subsequently depreciated over the period to the next scheduled dry docking, which is 2.5 to 5 years. In the second quarter, dry docking costs of $1 million have been capitalized and one vessel was dry docked in this quarter. In addition, I will mention that the Company revised the estimated useful life of its vessels from 25 years to 20 years, effective January 1, 2023. Let's then look at some balance products on slide 5. The Company has no remaining newbuilding commitments as the Company took delivery of the 2 last VLCC newbuildings, Front Orkla and Front Tyne in January 2023. The Company has strong liquidity of $719 million in cash and cash equivalents, including undrawn amount of unsecured facility, marketable securities and minimum cash requirements for bank as per the 30th of June 2023. And we have a healthy leverage ratio of 51%. Then lastly, let's look at the cash flow potential on slide 6. We estimate industry-leading cash breakeven rates of $22,700 fleet average, including drydock cost for 8 Suezmax tankers in 2023, 4 in the third quarter and 4 in the fourth quarter. The Q2 '23 fleet average spot excluding drydock was $7,300 per day. We know this from this the graph on the right-hand side that free cash flow indicates strong potential return. If we assume VLCC TCE rates of $75,000 per day at 5.5 year historic spread to VLCC for Suezmax and LR2 tankers, the annual free cash flow potential is $1.4 billion or $6.34 per share, which translates into a free cash flow yield of 36%. With this, I'll leave the word to Lars again.

Thank you, Inger. So let's go to slide 7 and look at what's going on in the current market. So, we've just been through a very volatile summer market. Hopefully, it's coming to an end. The key themes have been Asia Pacific continue to pull volume. We're seeing increased supply from what I would refer to as “new” exporters, as you can see on the bottom right-hand side chart. This is United States and Brazil. They're not really new, but they are kind of growing at least, and then Guyana, which is like the added spice to the mix here. As OPEC cuts production, predominantly around the Middle East, and with the continuous pull from Asia Pacific, we've seen ton-miles increase and benefiting VLCC ton-miles, in particular. Year-on-year or quarter of Q2 last year versus Q2 this year, demand in the Asia Pacific region is actually up 1.8 million barrels per day. That's quite significant, considering most of that oil is being freighted on tankers. And this represents about a 5% increase in commensurate volume for going on shipping. And that -- those 5% is not taking into account a ton-mile effect. We started to see that the Russian price cap started to bite in Q2. I'll come a bit back to that later. We are also seeing refinery margins improving as we move towards the end of maintenance season. And we have the background music of basically every analyst under the sun, expecting oil demand to grow by about 2 million barrels per day for the second half. Let's go to slide 8, and I'll go through the Russian price cap and what effect that has had on our markets. So, the G7 oil price cap came in to effect in December 2022, and it was set at $60 per barrel for Russian crudes. We're using on the bottom left-hand side, the Urals as reference oil price and is predominantly the quality one discusses around Russian supply. With the price moving above the price cap, it's become increasingly complex to freight Russian oil. We've seen various kinds of policies amongst owners, whether if they're willing to service the Russian market or not, year-to-date. But what we have seen now recently is that some of these owners are less lenient to lift Russian barrels, basically because it's very hard to argue you're doing it inside the framework of the current sanctions. These vessels are then returning to the non-Russian market or the plain vanilla Suezmax and Aframax markets, and this has put pressure on rates as obviously, the capacity then has increased particularly in these fleet sizes. Product exports have been less affected. It hasn't yet kind of traded above the price cap. It is actually flirting with the price cap now where the price cap is actually at $100 for gasoline. Not that gasoline is a big product for Russian exports, but it's kind of -- it's a product to represent where product -- where it is. And gasoline in Singapore is now trading very close to $100 per barrel. We've seen Russian exports kind of falling quite rapidly due to this. We've lost 1.7 million barrels per day of Russian exports since the peak in April. 400,000 barrels of that is products and we see that the fall there is less pronounced with 1.3 million barrels per day of crude or fuel oil has been lost during the last 5, 6 months. It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops further. We're starting to see analysts arguing for the Russian controlled fleet or the Russian owned fleet struggling to maintain volumes, which is evident looking at the export statistics. The only way they can kind of replace the capacity there now would be to actually go into the non-Russian trading fleet and purchase more assets. There are actually, in fact, fairly high numbers of vessels that's needed in order for them to maintain their export levels, should they want to do so. They are obviously a part of OPEC plus, so the official argument will always be that they're working in line with the OPEC strategy with the voluntary cuts. But we believe that it can be very interesting to see what happens in both the markets for older purchases -- older vessels in asset classes we trade, particularly then Aframax and Suezmax as this progresses. Let's move to slide 9 and look at what's going on in the refinery world. I think it's important -- we almost forget because we've had so many black swans and whatnot in the tanker industry for the last few years. But the seasonal summer slowness or softness is, in fact, caused by the scheduling of refinery maintenance. On the bottom left-hand side there, we see kind of global refinery outages. These are basically -- refining volume that's been taken out due to maintenance work. And we see it's a very distinct kind of highs in April. And likewise, there's also a distinct high in September, October where refineries are shut in basically to do maintenance work so that they can run effectively, either for the summer season or for the winter season. This has fairly significant effect on demand for oil and also demand for tonnage [ph] then. What we see now is that we're heading in towards -- kind of on the refinery turnaround side, we're actually fairly low, but we're going -- we are going to go into the high turnaround season in September, October. So, it's actually looking at it on face value, fairly varies for tanker demand. But one has to remember that the tankers are fixed ahead, VLCC now is being fixed for mid-September, and the oil will land in the various refining regions by end September. If you look at West African crude that's being fixed today will actually land in the beginning of October. And in the U.S. Gulf, we're actually already fixing for oil that will land in the mid-October. So basically, it's -- over the next few weeks, we will start to see kind of the purchasing managers on behalf of the refineries starting to plan to bring more oil into the refinery as they come out of turnaround. Looking at the refinery margins, they are firming. This is obviously a result of refinery outages but it's also a fairly strong signal of demand expected to look fairly okay. The diesel margins are leading the pace and this is typical for the season. The winter season is kind of predominantly a diesel market, this historically due to heating, whilst the summer market is -- sorry, the -- yes, the summer market is more gasoline market due to driving. We had a very mild winter last year in the Northern hemisphere. Well, the jury is still out, but will we have that occurring again? Let's move to slide 10. And this should be known to everyone who's been on Frontline call before, basically, the fleets and orderbooks. It's kind of the notable thing to comment on in this quarter is actually the increase in ordering for LR2s. We've seen [50] new LR2 orders being placed in the first half of this year, and that's bringing up the order book close to 20%. If you -- we also use a measure of a 20-year effective lifetime for trading tanker. This 20-year is actually more like a 15-year for an LR2. LR2s have coated tanks and the coating in these tanks will kind of lose its quality over years. So, charterers are very hesitant to book a clean LR2 above 15 years. If you use that as a measure, about 22.9% of the LR2 fleet is going to be above 15 years this year. Then the orderbook actually doesn't really look that worrying. What is worrying is the lack of orderbooks for VLCCs and Suezmax. We have the highest percentage of kind of the population above 20 years we've ever seen. 108 VLCCs will be either be above or past 20 years this year. 85 Suezmaxes will be above or past 20 years this year. And on the orderbook side, if you go into the market to book a tanker now and particularly on the VLCC, you're looking at second half 2026 delivery. That's three years from now, and it doesn't really add up to the overall expectations of oil demand remaining fairly firm for the next 3 to 4 years. So with that, I'm going to move into the summary side on slide 11. We're very happy to report the highest second quarter profit since 2008, $210 million, and a cash dividend of $0.80 per share. In the last 4 quarters, if my record is correct, Inger, we've paid out $2.72.

That's correct.

And with an average share price during that period of $13.9, that's a 20% yield. So quite impressive, I believe. Asia demand continues to be supportive, and OPEC cuts are driving ton-miles. The price cap on Russia crude is starting to bite, and what's going to happen next there. Seasonal refining maintenance coming to an end and margins are improving. And this is what we're going to kind of see reflected in the -- particularly the VLCC and then secondly, the Suezmax market over the next few weeks. Ordering is still muted for the bigger vessels for the 1 million barrel and the 2 million barrel vessels, but LR2s, we've seen a lot of activity in the last couple of months. How? The big question is obviously how the winter will play out this year? But then I think kind of the background music and the absolute biggest question in the tanker industry going forward is represented by the chart at the bottom here, the tanker order book as a percent of fleet. I've just taken it from 1996 to show kind of a little bit of the history behind us. We see the dark kind of blue line, which is the product tankers that started to react but not to any extent so far. And then we see the gray one being the VLCC, which is supposed to be the pipeline of the world on crude oil, virtually nothing on order. With that, I think we can open up to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And now we’re going to take our first question. And the question comes from the line of Jon Chappell from Evercore.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Lars, you mentioned in this closing slide, the question about the winter. Everything seems queued up pretty well from the inventories to the refinery maintenance coming to an end to the IEA's outlook for the second half’s sequential recovery. What can go wrong this winter? Is it just a macro event where oil demand continues to disappoint? Is there something related to Russia? Do the Saudis become more emboldened and keep more oil off the market, so there's a bigger inventory draw, but the tankers don't see the demand? Where can we miss the typical seasonal recovery that seems set up so well?

I think there's two key factors there that needs to be watched. One is obviously China. There's mixed signals coming from -- so in our little part of the world, as I mentioned, which is transport of oil, China looks to run on all cylinders. Their import numbers are kind of record high every month. And that doesn't tally up with kind of all the other macroeconomical data coming out of China. So, if they're building -- building a lot of inventories into the winter here, they have -- at least historically, they've been able to kind of kind of take the foot off the gas pedal and suddenly disappoint by 1 million or 2 million barrels per day in their import program. And if that happens, well that's obviously not going to be very, very bullish. So I think that's the big question. Are they either running in preparation for other stimulus that will stimulate their economy to need basically all this oil? Are they importing in order to have the ability to export into the winter season, or are they basically trying to hoard crude oil before an expected price increase on crude oil or others? It's very difficult to know. But I think that's the thing to watch. And kind of with the imports next to all the economical news we're getting out of China, it's -- one tends to become a little bit worried. Secondly, it’s obviously the weather, and the weather we can't really control. Whether if we're going to have a repeat of last year which was fairly warm or if we're going to have a proper full-on winter, which is going to kind of affect demand on the positive side. So, I think those two are the key factors that at least I'm a little bit concerned about.

Okay. That makes sense. Just a follow-up question on strategy. I thought it was interesting, you noted the dearth. I mean, we all know that there's not much of an orderbook, but you said that's even a concern that there's not enough ships to offset some of the older ships. It's kind of rare to see frontline without anything on your new building plan. Given that give and take of not getting a ship for three years or the economics of it versus maybe a need at some point in the back of the decade, how do we think about your capital investment on newbuilds or secondhand ships going forward?

Well, I think on the newbuild, we are definitely sitting on the fence. We've been kind of commenting on that before. You need flat out north of $50,000 per day in 20 -- every day for 20 years in order to make sense of going and ordering a newbuild at these levels. And then obviously, you have the technology discussion kind of adding to that. So, we don't see that as a good proposition. On the secondhand market, yes, we will always be looking. But I think as you also know, there's been extremely little modern tonnage out offered. There have been a couple of deals done, but it's been very, very slow. So, it hasn't really been a big option. So -- and this is where I've kind of alluded to in previous calls that maybe we are in a harvest period. It's difficult to say.

Would you harvest by selling any more older tonnage, or are you just happy with the fleet as it stands today?

I think we're fairly content with the composition of the fleet. Of course, we have some units that kind of further down the line we'll probably look to let go of. But we we're fairly comfortable. And some of the older vessels we hold are modified or derated and so forth. So they're actually holding pretty well into the things to come on the regulatory side. And so, we're fairly content.

Thank you. And now we're going to take our next question. Just give us a moment. And the next question comes from the line of Amit Mehrotra from Deutsche Bank.

Hi. Good morning, good afternoon. This is Chris Robertson on for Amit. Lars, I just wanted to go back to the discussions around the supply coming back into the market from the Russia trade. So, as these ships come back in, are they in the penalty box at all in terms of returning to the “vanilla market”? Are they trading normally? How much of that supply just won't ever come back? Can you talk about that a bit more?

Yes. It's -- we've been kind of previously talking about the dark fleet, which is obviously Venezuelan and the Iranian trading vessels, and they are kind of in the penalty box forever. And then, we have the gray fleet, which may be kind of -- or have questionable trading history and will struggle to get accepted by kind of compliant charterers that way. And then, we have the non-trading Russian fleet or the -- just touching the Russian oil on a few occasions fleet and whatnot. And it's shades of gray, if that makes sense. What we've observed when some of these units come back to, say, the -- West African CD20 markets is that they might have to discount a little bit in order to get going, but we haven't seen a huge resistance from charterers to -- as long as long as they don't have kind of shady FDS history in their kind of papers or have kind of activity that can't explain, they're actually fine to get back. And I think we need to remind everyone of transport of Russian crude has -- it’s legal as long as it's within the sanctions.

Right. Yes, that was good color. My follow-up question is related to your comments around the order book and then the lack of scrapping. As you think about 20-year old vessels, could you give us some commentary on how much of a discount those vessels are currently earning in the market compared to the average because if it's at a shallow discount, it would imply the ships might stick around for longer.

Yes. No, I think it's a question of that portion of the fleet is not really engaged in the normal freight market that we at least compete in. It's been a long while since we've seen across 20 vessels fixed by any commercial party. I think the last one was IOC last fall. So, I think the way we measure it, it’s not the discount they have to accept, but it's more the efficiency they're able to offer. So, this is why we kind of, in our S&D model tends to cut their efficiencies in half, the minute they past 20 years. I think this -- and just to -- that question is probably coming, so I'm going to put that in there. As we proceed here, I think, yes, there is a scenario where ships will have to actually service the market for a longer period of time. And although not what we want, but we will potentially see more and more charterers having to accept 20-plus vessels as a part of their -- to service them and to get oil moved. But that can only happen when we have a firm pricing. We need earnings to get to a level where the charterers like Chevron, BP, Shell, Total and all these guys, and their vetting departments say, "Hey, okay, well-maintained the 22-year-old vessels, we can use that." But they're not going to use that until we have rates up in $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 per day, I believe.

Thank you. And now, we're going to take our next question. And our next question comes from the line of Omar Nokta from Jefferies.

Lars, I have a couple of questions. Just as a follow-up, I think, to Jon's questions at the beginning and your comments maybe first just on the order book and your thoughts about the -- your disinterest, I guess, in ordering VLCCs given the time frame and the cost. Is that commentary just based on VLCCs, or does that also hold for the Suezmaxes and LR2s?

I think kind for the VLCCs, that's more us because we're quite content on the Suezmax size we carry. And we also have very modern Suezmax fleet, predominantly very modern Suezmax fleet. So for us, it's been looking into the VLCC space. And I think also, we've communicated quite clearly that we believe that VLCCs over time, basically due to the benefit of the size kind of offers our investors more bang for the buck. But I think you could say it’s the same for the Suezmaxes as well. The challenge we have actually in this market, if you look further into the shipyard industry is that one thing is that owners are not really interested in ordering them, but yards are not really interested in taking the orders either. As long as there are higher margin kind of ships to build, they will prefer that. So, it's kind of a little bit twofold. I also have to look at the overall yard capacity in the world and it's probably anybody's guess that it's somewhere between 150 and 200 shipyards in the world servicing kind of commercial segments that we care about. And you have, I think, currently more than 100 yards building dry bulk vessels; we have more than 80 yards building container vessels. We have 13 yards, I believe, that currently have tanker in the order book. So it's quite peculiar. And also, you have -- the other thing is that if you take off those 13 yards that build a tanker, there's actually very few that can build the VLCC. So, it's a structural kind of issue we have at hand here as long as the Koreans are completely absent from the VLCC building side.

Thanks, Lars. That's interesting. Something has to give at some point. Maybe just one follow-up and also kind of what Jon was talking about and maybe the inverse of the question of what could go wrong. Maybe what could go right in terms of this market over the next few months? Clearly, you laid it out in your opening remarks. But just in general, we've seen, as you mentioned, the refining margins have gone up. We've seen LR2s push higher. And so, when we think about both crude and products here over the next few months, should we think that LR2s will outperform for now? And then, what are you looking for in terms of laying the groundwork for crude tankers to start to get a bounce?

Well, I think, at the end of the day, we need -- if we get oil demand anywhere near where EIA or IEA or OPEC or whoever you ask put that, that we go and consume 103, 103.5 million barrels per day in December, I think that's basically all we need. If that trajectory is true, I think we're going to kind of gradually come out of here. And also Russia is obviously a big factor in addition to China. It's quite likely that with that demand projection, oil prices will behave fairly okay. Then I think there will be initiatives from to start to get hold of assets that can actually transport their product products. And that will kind of be the reverse of what we've seen just now where a lot of Russian -- or former Russian trading vessels have started to compete with us in the Suezmax and Aframax markets. They're basically going to go back. I saw some -- one headline from a broker that this fall, if that plays out, it's going to be very good for S&P brokers that deal with the kind of tonnage going in that direction to put it that way. And this is obviously going to be the older tonnage in both the Suezmax and Aframax fleet. So -- and then there is also an alternative story starting to develop on all the kind of headwinds coming out of China, because you can speculate what will they actually do now. Will they allow the country to run at half steam until kind of they get to some sort of natural recovery, or will they actually start to stimulate in order to carry kind of their economy over this gap? And if they do so, I think we will get the same result. We will have the 2 million barrels extra of demand and we will have a healthy -- kind of continued healthy import into China. So I think it's fairly easy to paint a bullish picture here. But, I think it's more important to try and look for the cracks because it's almost too good to be true.

Yes. It certainly looks like the script is written and we just have to follow through on it. Great. Okay. Thanks, Lars. I'll pass it over.

Thank you.

Thank you. Now we're going to take our next question. And the question comes from the line of Chris Tsung from Webber Research.

I just have a quick question on your fleet. What are your plans for the 2010 built VLCCs without scrubbers? Would you look to install scrubbers, or could those vessels be sold, and what would the timing be for those decisions?

Well, that's a fairly specific question. I think it's very likely that they will have scrubbers in accordance with the drydocking schedule. But we don't have any -- apart from that -- it's funny how some ships are lucky ships, so they actually make money, literally around every corner. And these have been very, very good operators. So, for now, they're in our fleet and going to remain there.

Okay. Fair enough. One for you, Inger. Sorry, I missed the part earlier where you provided drydocking guidance. Can you repeat how many vessels do you plan on drydocking for the rest of the year?

For the next year?

For the rest of the year.

For the rest of the year. For this fiscal year, we plan to drydock 8 Suezmaxes, 4 in the third quarter and 4 in the fourth quarter.

Okay. That's it for me. I’ll turn it over. Thank you guys.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from the line of [Lo McGibben from Frank Winnie].

Hi. Two questions. The first is, when you went from 25 to 20 years on your depreciation, how much did that reduce the earnings per share?

It was about -- for year, it totals about $60 million. So that means, yes, means -- yes, that means divided by 222 million shares -- yes, just a moment.

Excuse me. Do you have any further questions?

Yes. The second question, this deals with...

[$0.36]. That's your answer.

Okay. Thank you. It's a conservative mood, and I applaud you for taking that. The premium on the modern vessels, I was wondering if you could discuss that. And in particular, the IMO guideline, the regulatory side that you've mentioned, when does the next major change kick in? And I was curious what makes up the premium that Frontline gets such a benefit on because it has the world's youngest fleet?

Yes. It's -- that's like 5 questions in one -- five answers, at least. Now, first of all, I think kind of the biggest -- it's actually not really an IMO change that's going to happen. It's the EU ETS. That's the next in line for us, or for everyone in the industry. It's basically the -- that we need to start to pay carbon tax in Europe, trading in Europe or trading into Europe or trading out of Europe with the carbon emissions related to those voyages. That comes in -- comes into effect next year. And I think it's going to -- maybe not so much for the bigger ships because it's -- they're not that frequent inside the EU zone. But for Suezmax and Aframax and LR2s, it's going to have an impact. And there, we do believe that having efficient vessels help a lot. Also, I think kind of the discussion around alternative fuels is going to become more and more important. Right now, you wouldn't really willingly could use kind of partially biofuel in your fuel mix basically because it costs more. But obviously, if you put it against the buying carbon credit, then it becomes kind of economically effective to do so. So I think that's kind of the biggest headline on, say, the regulatory framework going forward. I think your question was around the premium we achieve on our vessels due to the -- having the modern ships, was that correct?

Yes. In particular, I was curious if interest rates have an effect because on a shorter vessel, it's less costly to hold a couple of hundred million worth of oil, but then also the insurance rates, how that would affect because you’re shorter time frame.

Okay. So, that's more like the trading side of it. So, if kind of our charterers are being limited by the high interest rates, because they are the ones who own the cargo, and they're the ones who basically have to then finance themselves from A to B. We haven't really seen that having an impact kind of in the spot market, to be quite honest. I think it's more a discussion for had we been in the carrier market, meaning that oil was going to be stored on ships, it would have a huge effect. The difference between having 0.5% interest per day and the 7% interest per day has a huge impact on the economics of storing oil. But I think in general, kind of the financing cost has affected the world in general willingness to keep inventory. And I think that is probably partly why we see inventory levels fairly low across the globe.

Okay. One final comment. What percentage of your business is European that would be affected by that regulatory side change?

It varies. So it's -- and it also varies a lot amongst between asset classes. But I think our kind of the headline number would be 10% to 15% of our voyage days would be affected by the EU ETS.

Thank you. And I congratulate you both for running the most efficient best tanker fleet in the world.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. Dear speakers, there are no further questions. And I would now like to hand the conference over to Lars Barstad for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much. And thank you so much for listening in. We are -- the markets are a little bit kind of in the doldrums right now, but I'm hearing bottoming kind of from various sides of the marketplace. Over the next few weeks, we're going to hopefully start to -- into the winter season, and we're looking forward to see what comes. Thank you.

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

Thank you.