Jacob Meldgaard
Analyst · SEB. Please go ahead
Thank you, Morten and please turn to Slide 4. A warm welcome and good afternoon. Thank you to all for dialing in. Here today before we commence the review of our financial results, I'd like to express my gratitude to our seafarers. They are the foundation for TORM's operations and while the restrictions on crew change have decreased all over the world, they continue to make great sacrifices during this trouble period. Today also special gratitude goes to the crew on board to TORM ALEXANDRA that over the weekend were attacked by pirates in the Gulf of Kenya but due to their excellent seamanship and the excellent support from the Italian Navy, they managed to stay safe and in control of the situation. Turning now to the oil product tanker market, the freight rates here in the third quarter of 2020 have come down from what you consume unprecedented high levels during the second quarter, primarily impacted by the unwinding of floating and stores. The [indiscernible] was also characterized by record high regional rate disparity with the West market being significantly stronger than the East due to record low vessel availability in the Western Hemisphere. I'll go into details on the market shortly. Now for the third quarter, the product tanker fleet realized an average TCE of $16,762 a day and here for the first nine months of 2020 the crew number was $21,942 per day. Looking at probably vortex [ph] here in the third quarter of 2020 we realized profit of before tax of $1 million with the number being $129 million for the first nine months of the year. The number is negatively impacted by a nonrecurring highest and a provision of $8 million related to bookings [ph]. Our return on invested capital, our earnings per share was 2.7% for the quarter, 12.5% for the nine months. As announced in our second quarter earnings release, we sold two older MR vessels during the third quarter. Here after the quarter ended, we then agreed to buy two 2010 field [ph] MR vessels for total consideration of $32.6 million. These vessels are built at the Korean well-known yard in our industry Hyundai Mipo. Here we are in advanced discussions for the financing of the vessels and the purchase is expected to have only minimum impact on our liquidity position. Further our scrubber program, this is progressing according to plan and as of today, we have installed a total of 43 scrubbers on our fleet. Lastly, I want to mention that we've refinanced debt related to eight vessels, thereby postponing the maturity to 2027 for this particular facility. This further supports our strong financial position and the attractive dept repayment profile we had. In line with our environmental focus, we have in this particular agreement, managed to include a few two emission link price mechanism that motivates us through monetary benefits to reduce our Q2 footprint and subsequently live up to our most 40% reduction target by 2030. Now let me turn to some of the drivers in the product tanker market and please turn to Slide five. As already mentioned, the product tanker rate averaged $15,752 per day for the quarter. When we look at the individual segments and on the LR2, rates were $23,854 per day, LR1 rates of $20,629. In the larger segment the MR we achieved rates of $15,077 per day and finally into Handysize segment, we achieved rates of $7628 per day. Since the unprecedented freight levels that were reached in the second quarter, product tanker freights have come down also here in the third quarter and this development has continued into where we sit today in the fourth quarter. We see there are three drivers from the third quarter that I want to highlight here. Firstly the rebalancing of the oil market, we started with the unprecedented shop to the global oil demand back in April. This led to a continued unwinding of floating storage which released a large number of vessels into the market in the third quarter and obviously reduced the freight rate environment. Secondly, we saw an increase in number of crude new buildings taking [indiscernible] the voice as a result of the weakening crude tanker market. Thirdly, here is in the last quarter it was really characterized by record high regional rate disparity as I already mentioned. While you can say generally freight levels were on a weakening trend, the market in the West was actually still showing strong earnings as a result of record low vessel availability here in the Western Hemisphere. So far into the fourth quarter, we've experienced that the number of new COVID-19 cases unfortunately have been increasing fast, especially in Europe, but also within the United States. This has resulted in renewed dropdowns and installing oil demand recovery. It has kept refineries from ramping up their wants and logically this has subsequently trade flows, which is reflective also in the weak product tanker freight rates we are currently experiencing. Explaining all these factors in more detail in a short while, but before I get to that, let me stress that the uncertainties around the COVID-19 impact on the global economy and oil demand specifically, that remains not relieved in light of the second wave of COVID-19 cases especially in Europe. Please turn to Slide six, obviously there are a number of different drivers behind the freight development this year, but a large part of this can't be explained by developments in product stockpiles. Here on this slide, this illustrates the dynamics of the COVID-19 impact on the oil demand on refinery runs and changes in the product stockpiles. Initially, as you can see, refinery runs were slow to react to declines in demand. This led to the unprecedented inventory builds which in turn benefited TORM benefited the broader product tanker market. By the end of the second quarter, oil markets actually target all events to rebalance as the lockdown measures were relaxed in many parts of the world and the oil demand started to recover. As refinery margins remained very weak, refinery markets did not ramp up as fast and we moved from the stock building phase into a stock [ph] face, which is generally associated with headwinds for the tanker market as vessels are being released from filling storage and destocking lessens the demand for transportation. Now in recent months, we've seen this second wave of COVID-19 emerging in Europe, which has resulted in new lockdowns as we speak, put a break on the oil demand recovery. Similarly, the US is facing a third wave of infections. However, what we'll see this time around refineries are there already running at a very low utilization and that basically just now keeping runs from ramping up. This will avoid a new large scale stock build from emerging and the market in general continues to rebalance. We do believe that it's difficult to estimate the exact timing, but the inflection point is expected to be reached once the countries reopen their -- from their current lockdowns, the demand recovery gains momentum and this will bring product inventory back to normal levels. Slide seven please, so let me say a few more words now about this doctoral because we think it's very important for the dynamic in our market. The destocking was initially driven by the offshore inventories and most of the excess floating stores of clean petroleum products, which peak at around 14% back in May, have cleared by now. The level of vessels in floating stores has stayed relatively stable and what we see now is rates around 6% of the fleet. It's slightly above what we consider a normalized level, which would be at around 4%. It should be mentioned that we continue to see some volatility in floating stores at the COVID-19 continues to impact the market, but this is at a small scale compared to what we saw back in second quarter. For example, reason there have been floating stores picking up in Africa but the current oil structure does not provide for the contango necessary to significantly into stores. If we look at onshore inventories, these have also started to decline, although this process has anything longer than in the case of offshore inventories, especially when we look at diesel as particular product. For example, in main training hubs such as the US and in North West Europe, Singapore the middle diesel stock has reduced significantly since September but are still 10%, 12% above the five year average lows. Light vessels on the other hand are only 5% above the average levels. Looking at global stock piles, the market continues to be impacted by excess inventories and while a destocking means that part of the demand is being met by local stock piles rather than being imported. It is important to mention that all not of the inventories are likely to compete with freight. We estimate that around 40% of the cumulative inventory build since March is actually accountable by China's team product stock build, much of which is either trade neutral or even trade creating considering that China is a net exporter of these products. And here please turn to Slide Eight. As already mentioned, one of the main characteristics of the third quarter was a record high disparity between regional freight rates and more precisely a strong outperformance of the Western market. This was driven by an unprecedented shift of the fees balance from West to East back in March, April, when the Atlantic Basin demand for gasoline for NASA it felt a bit due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. This resulted in a loss for us of products being exported to Asia. Now when these vessels arrived back in Asia, refineries in China, North Asia, cut their exports amidst the weak export demand and low refinery margins, meaning that taking the fleet balance increasingly became [indiscernible] as products moving back to the West were limited. Consequently, the share of MRs in the East in August peaked at 54% compared to a historical average around 45% and that was what in turn led to a strong outperformance of rates in the West market. Since then we've seen that the fleet in the East has started to normalize although in historical terms to share vessels in the West remains relatively low. Slide Nine, the market in the fourth quarter has so far been affected by the increasing new cases of COVID-19 in Europe and United States and it has stalled the demand recovery in these regions. On the other hand, if we look at countries which have not experienced a similar emergence of the second wave of infections like China, like India, these countries have seen the demand come back in recent months. This project that once a virus is under control, the vaccine becomes available to a wider population and the affected countries reopen, we will see a wider oil demand recovery and indeed the recent use of the potential coronavirus vaccine breakthrough from Pfizer gives a renewed hope for that. Slide 10 please, when we turn to post COVID-19 market for us, we cannot avoid talking about the refinery dislocation yet again. Refinery margins have been on a historical pressure as a result of COVID-19 and this has actually resulted in an increasing number of refineries announcing closures here in recent months. Consequently, around 3 million barrels a day of refined capacity will potentially be removed from the market within the next three years, most of it being located in regions that are already large importers of refined products, this being Europe and on the West Coast of US, also US East Coast, Australia, New Zealand and even in South Africa. So at the same time at this development taking place, approximately 5 million barrels per day of new capacity is scheduled to come online mainly in the Middle East and China that we can -- that are already today large exporters of oil products. Both these developments are clearly positive for trade flows and for turn mile in the post '19, the post COVID-19 world. There are only a few projects which are less positive for trade, most notably, the large-scale Dangote refinery in Nigeria, which is nevertheless not expected to come online for 2022. And here let us go to Slide 11 please, what makes the current situation different from the other destocking periods we've seen over the past couple of decades is that the order book to feed ratio for product tanker is currently at a historically low level. It covers around 7% of the total existing fleet. This has been further supported by the relativity low interest for new building ordering so far here in 2020, which is a result of the uncertainties of course due to the coronavirus, but also new uncertainty around the future propulsion system of the vessels, although we have recently seen an increasing interest especially for crude tanker segment in the form of a Letter of Intent being signed by shipyards. It is unlikely that we'll see significant additional pressure on the market for new building deliveries at a time of destocking. As proposed to the previous destocking periods and the slowing fee growth the growth rate is a key point to the fundamental positive element that we expect for the product tanker industry as a whole. Slide 12 please, to conclude our remarks here on the product tanker market, TORM expects to see volatility in the market in the short term that would be predominantly related to the COVID-19 development and this virus impact and health crises impact on the global oil market and economic issues. Apart from COVID-19 effects, we see that a number of key market drivers for the next three to five years will remain positive such as mentioned that refinery dislocation, the low order book, they will provide the support to product tankers over the long term. Slide 13 please, looking at our commercial performance, I am truly pleased that we again here in the third quarter of 2020 have outperformed the peer group average in our larger segment, the MRs. In the third quarter of 2020, we achieved rates of $15,077 per day, this compared to a peer average of $14,016 per day. On an aggregate basis, this translate into additional earnings of $36 million in the third quarter alone and $5 million for the first nine months of 2020. In general, I am very satisfied that TORM's operations platform continue to deliver very competitive TCE earnings. I should correct myself that it is obviously $5 million for the third quarter alone and $36 million for the first nine months. With that, slide 14 please. A key deciding factor for delivering this above average TCE earnings is driven by our continued focus on positioning our vessels in the basins with the highest earning potential. We have a balanced revenue where we generally do not position all our vessels in once place, but instead have some overweight in either East or West, depending on our expectation to the future market. Towards the end of the first quarter and the beginning of the second quarter, we started a general repositioning of vessels towards the East of Suez in anticipation of strong market there during the second and third quarters. This materialized by strongly outperforming earnings in the Middle East especially in the second half of Q2 at the extent of MR fleet migration from the West to the East became apparent, we started to rebalance towards West of Suez during June in anticipation of potential strong Western market in light of the thin supply side there. We had just below 50% of our MRs positioned West of Suez during the third quarter and as I mentioned earlier and market in the West has during the quarter seen significantly stronger and been significantly stronger than what we experienced in the East. The relative stronger West market have continued here into the fourth quarter although to a lesser degree than what we saw in the third quarter. Now let me hand it over to you Kim for the further elaboration on our operational leverage, the core structure and not least, the balance sheet. Over to you.