[Abrupt Start] With us today, we have Mr. Mads Peter Zacho, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Niall Nolan, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Oeyvind Lindeman, Chief Commercial Officer and myself, Randy Givean, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development North America I must advise you today that this conference is being recorded. Now as we conduct today's presentation, we will be making various forward-looking statement. These statements include but are not limited to, the future expectations, plans and prospects from both the financial and operational perspective and are based on management assumptions, forecasts and expectations as of today's date and are as subject to material risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ significantly from our forward-looking information and financial forecast. Additional information about these factors and assumptions are included in our annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I now pass the floor to Mads Peter Zacho, the company's Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, Mads.

Thank you. Good morning, and thanks a lot for taking part in our earnings call today. I'll start off by providing a brief overview of our Q1 results and then hand it over to Nile, Oeyvind and Randy for more color on our results and recent events. Our first quarter results came in stronger than the previous quarters with revenues at $136 million, adjusted EBITDA just below $70 million and net income of $19 million. The result was mainly driven by higher charter rates and higher vessel utilization. Our balance sheet is robust with cash of $191 million at the end of Q1. Net debt increased slightly due to the financing that we raised for the secondhand vessel acquisitions that we made in the quarter. The initial $50 million share purchase program has been completed and a further $25 million authorized as part of our new return of capital program. So this is opening up for both dividends and further share buybacks. Commercially, our utilization was very high, just over 96% compared to our guidance of 95% and the 94% that we reached in Q4 2022. Terminal throughput ran above nameplate capacity right above 250,000 tons. As previously announced, we grew our vessel capacity through the acquisition of five efficient modern secondhand vessels that we commercially managed for the past few years. The takeover was completed faster than originally planned, a strong effort and result created by our team. Expansion of our ethylene export terminal at Morgan's Point has started. This flex train will allow for up to 2 million tons of additional export capacity. The CapEx for Navigator share is expected to be around $125 million and to be completed by the end of next year. Outlook continues to look good. Q2 utilization is expected to hover around 90%. It's below Q1, but it's high in a historical context. Time charter rates are robust and boding well for earnings in Q2. The terminal throughput in Q2 is expected to remain strong, around 265,000 tonnes and the ethylene is in high demand in both Europe and Asia. This current robust demand for seaborne gas transport is well complemented by a modest Handysize order book and also an aging global fleet of gas tankers. With this brief overview, I'll just hand it over to Niall for a more detailed review of our financials. Go ahead, Niall.

Thank you, Mads, and good morning. The quarterly net income of $18.8 million and the adjusted EBITDA of $69 million, as we show on Slide 6 here, are the highest quarterly result for many years -- since the first quarter of 2016, and we expect that trajectory to continue. This improvement in results was positively impacted by increased total operating revenues, which were $136 million for the quarter, 16.2 million greater than the $119.8 million for the comparative first quarter of last year. But also importantly, a 10.3% increase from the $123.3 million revenue achieved during the last quarter, Q4 of 2022. The quarter-on-quarter increase was as a result of increases in charter rates, which rose to $25,620 per day from $22,933 per day for the first quarter of last year. This quarter's average charter rate was also $2,000 a day increased from the $23, 621 achieved during the last quarter. In addition to increases in charter rates, utilization also increased during the quarter to 96.2% compared to 89.5% for the comparative quarter of last year and an increase of 2% from the strong 94.1% achieved in Q4 of 2022. Our Greater Bay joint venture, which is 60% owned by us, acquired three additional vessels during the first three months of this year. The second 17,000 cubic meter 2018-built ethylene capable gas carrier, Navigara Solar on January 17 and two 22,000 cubic meter 2019-built ethylene carriers, Navigator Caster and Navigator Equator on March 24 and March 27, respectively. This also increased vessel available days, which contributed to an increase in revenue during the quarter. And the joint venture acquired its fifth and for now final vessel on April 13, a further 22,000 cubic meter 2019 built ethylene carrier named Navigator Viga. We had two vessels in dry dock for the…

Thank you, Niall, and good morning, all. If we move to the next slide, please. So we'll usually start off with the U.S. natural gas liquids production. NGL gas liquids production is constituted of ethane and LPG being the major commodities of that. And as you can see on the graph on the left-hand side is increasing during the first quarter of this year. LPG exports rose in the same time period, helped by the increased production, but also by declining U.S. domestic consumption. Creating an export oriented environment, benefiting all gas carrier segments. More specifically for the handysize segment, looking at the graph in the middle, it is the first time that we can show three months in a row where we, on the Handysize side, have exported more than 100,000 tons each month. Increasing natural gas liquids production, combined with limited incremental domestic consumption of ethane reinforces the competitiveness of U.S. ethane for ethylene production. Ethane continues to be an excess supply and reinjection continues in a big way. The yellow line in the first graph on Page 13 illustrates this point. Ethane is becoming cheaper and cheaper red tank typically translates to cheaper ethane production and therefore, cheaper U.S. ethylene pricing. The recent ethylene price is shown by the gray line. The price differential to international markets remain with the possibility to purchase ethylene in the U.S. for $400 a ton with consumers in Europe and Asia Pacific buying at 900 as a ton, leaving a delta sufficient to cover terminal fees as well as freight transportation. During the end of the fourth quarter last year, the majority of U.S. ethylene exports were shipped to Europe. This is shown by the gray line in the middle graph. However, recently, alongside a slight rejuvenation in particular, the Chinese…

Thank you, Oeyvind. So following up on several announcements we made in recent months, we want to provide additional details on updated developments regarding many of those announcements. So yeah, starting on Slide 19. Our fleet renewal program continues to be implemented as we sell our oldest vessels and replace them with modern secondhand tonnage. Starting with the sale. On May 2, 2023, we sold our oldest vessel, Navigator Orion, a 2,000-built, 22,000 cubic meter LPG carrier to a third party for $20.9 million. That leaves us with only three of our original vessels built in 2000 we continue to engage buyers who are showing interest to acquire those older assets. On the acquisition side, as a reminder, in September of 2022, Navigator Holdings announced that we entered into a joint venture agreement with Greater Bay to acquire five ethylene-capable vessels. Now following this announcement, our new joint venture owns 60% by us and 40% by Greater Bay, has now taken delivery of all five vessels completing the acquisitions earlier than previously expected. As a reminder, the total cost was $233 million, 65% of which has been financed by the $151.3 million bank loan with 60% of the remaining costs of about $49 million paid from available cash. So as a result of all of this S&P activity, our current fleet consists of 56 vessels with an average age of only 9.9 years and an average size of 21,032 cubic meters. Now to the good part, we are pleased to announce our new return of capital policy on Slide 20. So in October of 2022, we announced the Board's authorization for a share repurchase program of up to $50 million of NVGS common stock. And between December and May we repurchased 3.8 million shares at an average price of $13.12…

Thanks a lot, Randy. If you go to, yeah, 22. Navigator is on a good path right now. Our earnings are trending in the right direction with robust utilization and gradually higher charter rates. Both are supported by the high utilization of our ethylene export facility at Morgan's Point, with more to come once the expansion is complete by '24. The balance sheet is in its best shape ever with appropriate levels of net debt and recently refinanced loan portfolio giving a long runway until next maturities in 2025. This gives us capacity for further growth, balancing growth with redistribution of capital through the dividends and further share buybacks as outlined in our new return of capital policy. Our work on positioning Navigator for the future continues, and you will hear back from us in June when we release our ESG report. By the end of June, Niall will step down as CFO after almost 19 years in the position. I'd like to take this opportunity to say a deep-felt thank you to Niall for having taken Navigator from a small five-vessel gas tanker company in a difficult financial position to where we are today as a global leader in the handysize segment with a large modern fleet complemented by our infrastructure assets with a strong organization and a highly recognized brand in our industry. Thank you, Niall. You'll be solely missed by colleagues. And I'm sure that also analysts and investors will miss your safe pair of hands when it comes to managing our financials. With that, I'll hand it back to you, Randy.

Thank you, Mads. Operator, we'll now open the lines for some Q&A. [Operator Instructions] So first question, your line should be open.

Okay, sorry. Hey, guys. It's Omar Nokta from Jefferies. Can you hear me?

We can.

Okay. Great. Well, yes, Niall, first off, yes, also congratulations from my side. I'll miss working with you. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, I wish you the best of luck in the next chapter. But definitely, you're leaving Navigator on a very solid footing.

Thank you, Omar.

And I guess, broadly, first off, I guess, to the team, congrats on a very strong result. And clearly, we'd say as we look at just the numbers as they've kind of evolved here, there's been a step change, I would say, in Navigator's earnings power. At least relative to what we've been seeing in prior years, but things definitely here in the past couple of quarters look like they've kind of stepped up to a new threshold. And I wanted to ask, you spent a good amount of time talking about the market. I just wanted to ask maybe just kind of holistically, -- what do you think has been driving this overall improvement in your earnings power? Is it the market? Is it a shift in how you've been deploying your fleet? Is it the terminal giving you some additional insight? Is there a way that you can just maybe calibrate to us? What's been driving this overall improvement?

I think from our perspective, it's a little bit of all. Clearly, the global economy has recovered after the COVID melt down, and we've seen also now that China is coming back. And I think that's in great contrast to what you saw during the middle part of last year. I think there's a part of the supply demand picture also that plays into this. For a number of years there's really been no additions to the handysize fleet or the smaller gas tanker vessels. But we've seen gradually growing production of most of the commodities that we're transporting the production out of North America has gradually grown and the global handysize fleet has just not followed suit. But I'll invite my colleagues to add to this.

One of the important factors consistent performance of ethylene exports from the U.S. and that has taken quite a few of our ethylene ships, which were doing other non-ethylene cargoes higher this. So this consistency and also sort of an even steven trade between Europe and China, it's helpful. And that's another -- and then the other development is, of course, ammonia. Ammonia is quite sticky now. So I made a little commentary about despite Europe importing less seaborne and ammonia. Our charter parties remain or the market demand for our ammonia service transport services is quite sticky. So that is a new thing that we haven't seen before. So those two factors, in particular, are keeping the fundamentals quite strong Omar.

But I think what you mentioned, Omar, about the export facility in Morgan's Point. It is, of course, an important contributor, making sure that there is supply pushed on ethylene from North America, which has to go long distance. And that, of course, has ensured that what our ships were built to do transport ethylene is now happening. So that's, of course, a very important one. And I think also one of the reasons why we are reasonably constructive on the future, with this additional capacity that's going to come onstream by the end of next year.

Thank you. That's a very good overview. Thanks, Mads and Oeyvind. Just a follow-up, Randy in his comments or your comment, sorry, about the terminal and being able to -- you're feeling confident of being able to secure a lot of the offtake capacity ahead of completion of the project. Just in terms of kind of what we're seeing then in the shipping market. Is there that same type of maybe first, call it, for chartering -- because we have seen obviously a stronger market. Rates have continued to evolve higher. How has the time charter market developed for the ethylene carriers that are available? Is it still more of a short-term spot approach? Or are you able to now secure or are you seeing interest to secure for two or three years at a time?

So I think we mentioned this before, Omar. And it still remains the same, whereby petrochemical commodity trading, transportation is generally voyage charter based, so short term of nature. However, the ethylene consumers, particularly in Far East, are getting into familiar with the consistency of U.S. exports. So this is a new factor. So they are getting more familiar with pricing with the contractual types and so forth. So I think that the -- what we'll see in the future is it's going to be a little bit more time charter based than just voyage charter all -- but it's a journey, and it's not very yet.

And one thing we are seeing currently is forward fixing so a little further in advance, right? So vessels being fixed instead of two-three-four weeks in advance, maybe six-eight, 10 weeks in the day.

Thanks. That clearly speaks to the at least the pace of the market. Great. All right, well, I'll leave it there. Congrats again, guys. And Niall, I'll be seeing you.

Thank you.

Thanks again, Omar. All right, operator, we're open for the next question.

All right, I guess not the operator. But can you guys hear me?

Howdy Ben, we can hear you.

All right, guys. I appreciate. I have just a couple. Well, three. But the first, I wanted to follow up a little bit just on the state of the market, especially the utilization. It's been a long time since we've seen high 90s utilization and appreciate the 2Q is normally a little bit lower. But one of the things that had been a little bit my understanding is one of the things that had been an issue is that for a lot of the ethylene that was going to the Far East, charters knew that you were -- those ships are going to be coming back to the Gulf Coast to refill. And so they were not chartering during the ballast voyage and the laden voyage was much a higher rate, but it was having an impact on utilization. So has that changed? Are we now seeing contracts for both the ballast and laden portions of the trip.

Ben, the Holy Grail is, of course, triangulation. At some instances, we are able to reload propylene from Asia. We're talking about Asian destinations. However, that hasn't happened for some time. It occurred last year. So the ethylene voyages that we're doing from Houston, Morgan's point to Asia Pacific consumers, they are generally based on rental. They are based on voyage economics. So whether they are in laden or ballast, the earnings are decent. However, the utilization is the timing of when those contracts are fixed that impacts utilization, not necessarily the earnings. But to add on to what Randy was talking about, the earlier, the charters or our customers' contracts the better it is in terms of utilization because what we're seeing today is that some of the voyages that are in route laden to, say, China, before they are discharged, they are concluded from another voyage. And therefore, you have 100% utilized utilization on those things. So what dragged down or penalized a couple of percentage points on utilization was that we have technical issues on a couple of the boats and et cetera, which they were unavailable to be employed and therefore, there was a penalty there. Nothing to do with the market per se.

Okay. But going forward, we should assume utilization, seasonally adjusted low to mid, maybe even upper 90s and periods of strength. That's the new -- is that fair?

I mean regarding to around 90% for our second quarter as I mentioned, which is interesting is that despite utilization to be lower the average rate so far in the second quarter are higher than first quarter.

So I think that's a good point you're making here, Ben, that it's not normal to run at close to 97% utilization. There will inevitably be times when we have a vessel for sale, which is then it needs to sit idle while that process is unfolding or there are some technical issues with the ship or to and so on. So during the normal course of business, we would probably often say that if we can hit around 90% or a little bit above, we are very pleased with that.

Okay. And then just sort of sticking with the state of the market. Your ethylene terminal is running pretty close to full capacity. I think the ethane terminals generally are running pretty close to full capacity. Are we at a sort of ethylene ethane plateau until some of the expansion projects to hit next year? Or is there a little bit more that can be squeezed out, do you think?

On the ethane side, then, I know for a fact that both Morgan's Point and [Indiscernible], they have spare capacity, at least for handysize. So handysize ethane cargo is quite small in the sort of capacity availability sense. So depending on the naphtha price and the competitiveness of ethane, we do see attains spot cargoes, which are outside the term contracts at those terminals, and they do pop up. So for handysize spot opportunities, there are capacity for ethane.

And -- but ethylene is pretty much fully utilized.

Ethylene capacity at Morgan's Point. There's two handysize cargoes at Target [ph] terminal generally every month and -- but that is the max capacity, you're correct for ethylene.

Okay. And then lastly for me, maybe this one's for you, Randy. I mean I am increasingly having inbounds from infrastructure companies asking me for references about you guys. Can you maybe fill me in a little bit on sort of what incremental development looks like for new projects outside of the terminal. I mean I'm hearing a lot on ammonia projects. So where are you sitting with respect to how you're viewing incremental infrastructure development on the Navigator level?

Sure. Hopefully, you're getting some positive recommendations there. But yeah, we are certainly interested in, frankly, bedding, blue ammonia, green ammonia out of the U.S. Gulf, looking at some other CO2 transportation projects, some terminals in and around Europe as well as, obviously, on the export side here in the U.S. Gulf. So all of that is on the table and certainly projects that we are actively looking at.

And here, maybe you could say that we are very comfortable with the structure of the joint venture with Enterprise, where we have the joint venture on the port part of it, the infrastructure between the ship and the pipeline system they're operating. And those would be natural places to search for other joint venture opportunities, find something that where we have something to add and something that can bring synergies to our vessel operations. So we're still a shipping company. We expect to continue to be a shipping company, but finding ways where we can optimize the supply chain and where we can see the synergies between the ship side and the land side, we are certainly looking for that.

Right, understood. I guess just to clarify a little bit. In terms of this process, far maybe put it in baseball analogy, like are some of these getting sort of into the middle or later innings with respect to opportunities? Or is it just a whole lot of early innings type work that you're doing right now?

Yeah. With our affinity for the shows. I would say somewhere in the third inning, right? The first picture has certainly already been thrown out, where we have some NDAs in place and some other kind of agreements in paperwork. But yeah, it's hard to say. It's still a multiyear process, right? These especially blue ammonia, your green ammonia, we're talking 2027 maybe later. But in terms of our participation in that, we expect something in the next 12 to 18 months in terms of an announcement and making some capital contributions in those things.

Perfect. Yeah, appreciate. And thanks for all the color, guys. And I'll miss having another Nolan around. So good luck.

Thanks, guys. My email [Indiscernible] in a lot of different company. Thanks, Ben. All right. Operator, next question, please.

Hey, guys. Niall, I think the Gallic [ph] would be what soon let [ph]. So and good luck to you in your next role or whatever you pursue after this. It's been nice working with you.

Thanks, [Indiscernible].

So I'll try to come up with a couple after I think Ben went through quite a few. But just to sort of expound on the grand ammonia questions. Are you guys seeing any sort of inbound from any of the -- I know there's some hydrogen activity, which has been funded by the federal government in kind of Houston area where you're already sort of active on the export side. And also, do you see that sort of developing as a handysize trade? Or do you think that it would kind of follow the path of like LNG, where the scale of U.S. exports starts to hit levels where you would potentially grow that ammonia fleet into, say, a larger class of vessels.

Yeah. All good questions there. I think especially when you're looking at hydrogen or certainly green ammonia, I think the scale starting will be a lot smaller obviously than methane or LNG now. So we do think the handysize, especially going over into European ports, right, where they're handy, they can get in and out of anywhere basically. So we do think the handysize trade for those ships makes a lot of sense. Now we do expect larger vessels to especially move ammonia, green ammonia, blue ammonia, west or through the Panola to the Far East rather -- so we think that will naturally come. But for what the -- some of the projects that we're looking at, the handysize vessels make a lot of sense just in terms of smaller storages needed, right? And then again, you can fit into multiple more ports with our size ships.

Great. And then as we kind of look at the chart, just I guess we'll stay on the ammonia theme on Page 15. You see the rates are rolling off a little bit, still definitely elevated kind of versus historical? Is some of that maybe some of the dislocation from Ukraine's trade getting kind of normalized in the market? Or what do you attribute that to? Because you said the volumes are very sticky.

Yeah Sean [ph], the volumes are -- we still have the issue with Ukraine and exports being shot. So the market hasn't recovered from that. So there's still some traditional movements of ammonia, which is benefiting us. So my commentary earlier was really about the normalization of natural gas prices. So many of the European producers, ammonia producers stopped producing when natural gas prices were extremely high during the last 12 months. Now they are producing again. So they're satisfying some of their own demand, but the Ukraine situation is not resale. So many of the ammonia charters that we have, we expect to continue. Remember, only 12 months ago, we had three-four ships in ammonia and now we have nine. And the stickiness seems to be -- I'm surprised that -- it is a sticky, meaning that the charter parties are bringing renewed and we are getting more inbound interest for additional ammonia. So the ammonia story is not vanishing or going away, which is good for us.

Okay, thanks, Oeyvind and Randy and everyone. Thank you.

Thanks, Sean. Okay, with that, I believe that wraps up our Q&A. So I just want to thank you again for dialing in. Obviously, if you have any other additional questions or follow-ups, feel free to reach out to myself, randygiveans@navigatorgas.com or anyone on the team. And I do want to say thank you to Niall. It has been such a pleasure working with you. So thanks again, everyone. And we will talk soon.

Thank you.

Good bye.