Ian Webber
Analyst · Euro Pacific Capital. Your line is open
Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us this morning. I hope that you’ve been able to look at the earnings release that we issued earlier today and also been able to access the slides that accompany this call. As usual, slides 1 and 2 remind you that today’s call may include forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and assumptions and are, by their nature, inherently uncertain and outside control of the company. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to many factors, including those described in the Safe Harbor section of the slide presentation. We also draw your attention to the Risk Factors section of our most recent Annual Report Form 20-F, which is for 2014 and was filed with the SEC earlier this month on April 21, 2015. You can access this via our website or via the SEC’s. All of our statements today are qualified by these and other disclosures in our reports filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements. For reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to which we will refer during this call to the most directly comparable measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP, you should refer to the earnings release that we issued this morning, which is also available at our website. I’ll start today’s call by reviewing first quarter highlights, followed by an overview of our fleet and of our growth strategy. After some comments on the container shipping industry overall and the vessel acquisition environment, I’ll turn the call over to Susan for her comments on our financials. Then, after some brief concluding remarks, we would be pleased to take your questions. Slide 3 shows our highlights for the quarter. We continue to execute our strategy of generating stable, predictable cash flows from our mainly long-term fixed rate time charters with high quality counterparties. In the quarter, we earned revenues of just under $38 million, net income just positive at $24,000 and adjusted EBITDA of $23.6 million. Most importantly, we completed the acquisition of the OOCL Qingdao on March 11, 2015, as we discussed on the previous call. This vessel was immediately chartered back to OOCL for between 36 and 39 months at a gross rate of $34,500 per day. This acquisition, as did the OOCL Tianjin in October last year, added between $38 million and $41 million to our contracted revenue, and that’s a further $9.4 million to our annual EBITDA. This represents an increase of approximately 10% from our Q4 EBITDA run rate and over 20% from our Q3 2004 EBITDA run rate. It also deepens our relationship with OOCL, a leading liner company. Turning to Slide 4, you can see our path to a dividend which we meaningfully advance to in the quarter with the acquisition of our second 8,100 TEU vessel. This acquisition incidentally, and we’ll come back to it, ticked all of the boxes in respect of our near term strategy. Having substantially increased our EBITDA generating capacity, we are in striking distance of our goal of exceeding the fixed charge coverage ratio which is set out in our bond indenture and governs our ability to pay a dividend, that all within striking distance of our goal of unlocking our dividend paying capacity. I’d also like to emphasize that the relevant hurdle is being able to consistently pass this test overtime. As a test applies each time, we wish to consider causes dividend. However, our revenue streams are largely locked in place from the long term charters that we have on 17 of our 19 vessels. And costs are, to a large degree, stable. So we’ve got good forward visibility on our cash flows and our financials generally, allowing us to take a waveform view on the development - of a likely development of the fixed charge coverage ratio. To pass the test, compared to today, we need additional EBITDA, so further additions to our fleet; or reduced fixed charges, basically lower interest costs. Or, of course, a combination of the two. Looking now at the first quarter overall, you can see on Slide 5 our financial results in the context of over the past five years. As previously, because we focus primarily on long term fixed rate time charters with high quality counterparties, our revenue has remained consistent. And given that our operating costs remain reasonably stable, overall, our operating income and EBITDA are largely consistent and unchanged from quarter to quarter. Outside the effect of additions and drydockings, we have reduced our revenue temporarily, as you know. And this stability in our earnings is irrespective of the stock market which experiences significant volatility or continued depression which you can see at the top of the slide. This consistency in our operations and our results is also attributable to our focus on operational performance and maintaining a high quality fleet that enables us to maximize vessel utilization, which again reached 99% for the first quarter with a missing, if you want to look at it that way, 1% primarily related to nine days of a planned regulatory drydocking for the OOCL Tianjin, plus three days of general unplanned offhire. With the Tianjin’s 10-year drydocking completed early in the first quarter, we have no further regulatory drydocking schedule for 2015 and we look forward to having full benefits of earnings for both the Tianjin and the Qingdao in our fleet for the remainder of 2015 and beyond. On Slide 6, we show our fleet and charter portfolio, including the two OOCL vessels, most recently the Qingdao which began its charter some seven weeks ago. As of March 31, 2015, the weighted average age of our fleet was approximately 11 years out of an economic life of 30 and our weighted average remaining contract term was 5.8 years, excluding the two 4,100 TEU vessels which operate on short term contracts. This contract coverage of 5.8 years gives us the extensive forward visibility on cash flows which I mentioned earlier. Overall, our contracted revenue stream as of the end of March is approximately $873 million, including the contribution from the Qingdao. We have no charter explorations until late 2017, other than the 4,100 TEU vessels, Aquarius and Orion, which operate in the spot market. We are well insulated from volatility in the overall container ship charter market. On Orion and Aquarius, their charters will most likely expire at the end of the redelivery ranges, June and July respectively this year. Their charters are currently under spot market rates and we would expect our charter to retain the vessels as long as possible. To this point, it’s encouraging that charter rates for this asset class have recovered significantly in the past few months. And I’ll come back to this shortly. From the stable foundation, we continue to pursue our growth strategy which is set out on Slide 7. First, we look to maintain strong contract coverage for our fleet with high quality counterparties, primarily on longer term fixed rate time charters. Second, we continue to see counter [ph] opportunities to diversify our portfolio of top tier charters to complement our strong relationship with CMA CGM. Our ability to establish and then expand relationships with both Sea Consortium and OOCL has proven that this part is available to us. And we believe that further diversification primarily through additional charter attached acquisitions with high quality container liner companies as a counterparty is an important component of our continuing strategy. First, we continuously evaluate opportunities that exist to enhance our capital structure, accessing multiple non-dilutive sources of capital and using such capital to immediately fund accretive growth. In this way, we gain strategic and financial flexibility whilst creating real value for our shareholders. Finally, we are focused on allocating capital in a value-maximizing manner. By identifying and acting on attractive immediately-accretive acquisition opportunities, we’ve expanded our contracted revenue base and thus our ability to support a consistent dividend for our shareholders in due course. By growing our EBITDA generating capacity by more than 20% since Q3 2014 through our two recent acquisitions, we made great progress towards consistently and securely passing that fixed charge coverage ratio test during 2015 in order to unlock our dividend-paying capacity. As with all dividend declarations, however, the specific timing and size of the dividend will be determined by the board at the time. Turning to Slide 8, you can see an outline of the two recent vessel acquisitions which were essentially on the same terms. The only appreciable difference is in the purchase prices which take account of the one-year age difference between the Qingdao and the Tianjin - Tianjin, $55 million, Qingdao $53.6 million. I point to these acquisitions not just as a recap of what we’ve accomplished but also to illustrate the types of immediately accretive charter-attached opportunities that have existed and we continue to believe still exists in the marketplace for a lessor like us with a good reputation and demonstrated access to capital. These two vessels both commenced their charters back to OOCL immediately on delivery, earning $34,500 a day and jointly increasing our annual EBITDA by approximately $18.8 million. This is equivalent to a free cash flow yield of 17% and an EBITDA increase of well over 20%, as I’ve already mentioned, since third quarter 2014. We’re delighted to have completed these transactions and have advanced on our strategic goal of growing our fleet, diversifying our charter portfolio with top tier liner companies, increasing our cash flow and net income on an immediate basis which brings us closer to being able to pay a dividend. And we continue to work hard to identify further growth opportunities. Turning to Slide 9, this supports the thesis for our investments in 8,100 TEU vessels as we’ve discussed before. So I won’t spend a great deal of time on it. But it does show that this asset class, which includes 8,100 TEU vessels, are being deployed throughout the world’s container trade in systems on an ever increasing basis which gives us considerable comfort that these vessels should have good reemployment opportunities when their initial charters come to an end. Slides 10 and 11 show an update on the supply-demand data which continues to be encouraging. Bear in mind that the nominal capacity of the container fleet must increase, all things equal, at a greater rate than demand increases due to the need to add capacity based on the growth of the nominally larger volumes carried on the lead or dominant leg of each trade length. So status quo, you would expect supply growth to exceed demand growth. With current estimates of almost equal supply and demand growth for 2014 and a similar view for 2015 and a substantial excess of demand growth forecast for 2016, when incidentally shipyards are generally full, so it’s going to be difficult to add new orders for delivery in that year. The industry looks to be turning a corner in dealing with the structural oversupply inherited from the massive order book existing end 2008 through 2009 and which was exposed by the demand collapse in the same period 2008 and through 2009, exacerbated by the much reduced compared to previously annual demand growth rates ever since. Slide 11 looks at the differences between the arterial trades, the main east, west trades, notably Asia, Europe and the Trans-Pacific. And illustrates, as we’ve discussed before, the medium-sized and smaller trades represent the bulk of global container trade 70% or so and that these trades, which are generally served on medium-sized and smaller ships which is the focus of our own fleet, have grown and are forecast to grow at reasonable rates. The order book for this special class, mid-sized and smaller ships, is modest. It’s around 9% of standing capacity due to the scarce capital that exists being directed towards strategic investments in super large container ships to drive economies of scale for the operators. This, the small order book, combined with high levels of scrapping which, although down in Q1 2015 on 2004 run rate, continue to be reasonably high, may lead to fleet contraction in these vessel passes in the near term. This, combined with reasonable demand growth, should introduce tension into the pricing dynamic, driving spot charter rates up. Now, we’ve been saying this for a while and it’s great to see that there has been some real improvements in the spot market for charter rates of this type of assets almost double compared to a year ago. And that improvement appears to be continuing. You can see this on Page 12 actually, Slide 12, the charter index, the red line for mid-sized ships and smaller shows a very positive and definite uptick toward the end. Incidentally, the idle fleet continues to remain low at under 2%. While we’re on Slide 12, despite the improvement in the time charter index, freight rates continue to be volatile, particularly in Asia and Europe where freight rates are suffering especially at the moment. Fortunately for carriers, they continue to benefit from lower bunker prices which significantly offsets the pressure on their top line revenue. Slide 13 shows the same time charter index movement, the red line, ticking up towards the end and also shows the secondhand asset values have edged up, too. They remain low by historic standards but they’re off the bottom. Notwithstanding this modest increase in secondhand prices, we continue to believe that there are good investment opportunities for Global Ship Lease going forward. Let me now hand over to Susan for her commentary on our financials.