CMB.TECH Stock

Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to the earnings conference call for the second quarter of 2026 of CMB.TECH. My name is Alexander Saverys. I'm the CEO of CMB.TECH and I'm joined by my colleagues, Joris Daman and Enya Derkinderen.

We will start, as always, with our financials and some highlights. And before we do, we give you an overview of the fleet of CMB.TECH. You can see that we have 206 vessels on the water with another 26 newbuildings coming. Our contract backlog is stable at $3.3 billion. The fleet is young. We have an average age below 6 years. Our CapEx commitments, we will discuss a bit later, have now gone down to less than $1 billion. We have a market cap of $5.2 billion, a fair market value of the fleet of $11.2 billion. And for those who might not know, but we are still listed in New York, in Brussels and in Oslo.

Our second quarter financials, the title of our press release was making hay, making hay while the sun shines. These are exceptional times for shipping and also exceptional times for CMB.TECH. The company has made a profit of $364.4 million in the second quarter. This was on the back of an increased revenue of over $700 million and an exceptional profit that we made on the sale of assets of $127 million. You can see the other items in our profit and loss that stick out.

One of them is the net finance expense. We are reducing our quarterly net finance expense to $76 million, which is a 5% reduction compared to the first quarter. This is led by cheaper refinancings and also just a general repayment of our debt.

Our EBITDA stood at $552 million. Our liquidity slightly below $400 million. On total assets, book value stands at above 35% and our equity on total assets value adjusted is now above 50% at 51.5%. Other highlights during the quarter. I already mentioned our net profit and our EBITDA. The liquidity, which stands at around $400 million. We have a contract backlog, which is stable. We have added during the quarter 2, 2-year charters on our CSOVs and one 1-year VLCC charter. We have the intention to distribute an amount of $0.64 per share, which will be split in an intermediary dividend of $21 per share and a payment of $0.43, so $0.21 per share and $0.43 per share out of the share premium reserve, which is exempt from any withholding tax.

We have taken delivery in the second quarter and quarter-to-date of 9 newbuilding vessels. These were 4 Newcastlemaxes, 1 VLCC, 2 brand-new Suezmaxes, 1 CSOV and 1 CTV. We have sold quite a few ships so far this year. In the second quarter, we have delivered to their new owners 2 VLCCs, the Ilma and the Ingrid, on which we booked a capital gain of $98 million. We have sold an older Suezmax, the Sienna with a capital gain of $29 million. So total gain in second quarter was $127 million.

In the third quarter, we will book a gain of $100 million on the sale of 2 Suezmaxes. And in the fourth quarter, we will add a gain of $130 million on the sale of the Donoussa, which is a VLCC and one more Suezmax.

The sales of our tankers, we believe, are very well timed. We are at historic high prices for VLCCs and Suezmaxes. On this slide, you can basically see the 10-year average for a 5-year-old VLCC and a 5-year-old Suezmax compared to today's values and also compared to the last 10 years minimum and maximum. And as you can see, on VLCCs and Suezmaxes, we are well above the 10-year average. We are also well above the maximum of over the last 10 years that we have seen. We, therefore, believe it's a good time to sell some of our assets, particularly our older assets.

And then we have put a comparison where other segments stand like Panamaxes and Capesizes. As you can see that today's values, even though they're at the top end of what we have seen over the last 10 years, they are still in line of that bracket. Same goes for VLGCs. Of course, on the container vessels, the situation is different and also on LNGs.

We wanted to show you what we believe in 2027, our operational cash flow could be based on certain rate assumptions. So we have put the rate assumptions at the bottom right of the slide with a 10% and 20% uplift. Rate assumptions for 2027 have been based on FFAs and assumptions for next year. You can see the numbers there. What you then see is after having repaid or paid all our CapEx investments, we still are forecasting a cash flow of $700 million to $1 billion.

I would say that's a very powerful figure to see that even after all our CapExes have been repaid, our operational cash flow will be between $700 million and $1 billion. Of course, if the market changes, the numbers will change, but it gives you an indication of the cash flow generating potential of all our different divisions. The most important, of course, our Newcastlemaxes and Capesizes, our VLCCs and Suezmaxes.

I mentioned the CapEx. We still have $890 million of new buildings to be delivered of newbuilding installments to be made. Of that number, the vast majority has already been financed. We have an unfunded CapEx of $119 million, which is basically spread out this year, $43 million and then other amounts in '27, '28 and '29, which are relatively small. At the end of this year, our outstanding CapEx commitments will be between $375 million and $390 million. So we've come to the end of our large 2.5-year newbuilding investment plan.

I want to give you an update on the market and talk about Bocimar, Euronav, Delphis, Bochem and Windcat. And I always start with an overview of the different markets we operate in and what we feel is the sentiment and the state of the market.

Starting with dry bulk. Clearly, we are positive on dry bulk. We see that demand on the major commodities we are moving is growing. That goes for iron ore, bauxite, grain and coal. The order book to fleet has increased a little bit on Capesizes, actually decreased a little bit on Panamaxes. We are around the 15% mark, which we still think is something that the market can take for the next couple of years.

The age of the fleet, 41% of our Capes are older than 15 years, more than 1/3 of the Panamaxes are older than 15 years. The balance between supply and demand on dry bulk, we believe, is positive.

Moving to tankers. You can see that we have colored from positive to cautious and basically kept a positive and cautious approach. No doubt, the market is very positive today. We are seeing all-time high rates on secondhand numbers, on the freight numbers on the spot market. So the market is very, very, very strong. Reason we are becoming a little bit more cautious is that on the demand side, we don't know what the effect will be of a potential solution in the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously, we don't know the timing, but that solution could lead to softer markets.

What worries us a bit more is the order book to fleet. We are now seeing an order book to fleet on VLCCs and Suezmaxes of over 30%. This is not impacting the market right now. The order book for 2026 is still very reasonable, but as from next year and the year after, we will see a tsunami of VLCC and Suezmaxes coming to the market.

Moving to containers and the chemical tankers. We have had a cautious approach to both markets. Actually, the container market has surprised to the upside. The unwinding of the Red Sea rerouting has been postponed with the renewed tensions around Bab el-Mandeb and Houthi attacks. But when you look at the order book, we would still be quite cautious for containers going forward. But right now, the market on containers is still quite good.

On the chemical tankers, the order book is something we are watching closely. The market has actually performed relatively well. But going forward, we take a slight cautious approach. As you know, both in Delphis and Bochem, our Container and Chemical Tanker division, we have close to no spot exposure. So we are very well covered and shielded from any market fluctuations.

Our last division, Windcat, Offshore Energy, we are seeing good rates. We believe if you look at the demand for the offshore wind energy projects, but also offshore oil and gas projects, combined with the order book with the fleet that is coming, there is a substantial fleet of CSOVs coming to the market next year and in 2028. But combined with the demand that we see in oil and gas and wind, we believe that the balance is positive.

I want to zoom in on certain specific dynamics in our subsectors, starting with dry bulk. First, our dashboard, what we have done in the second quarter. Our fleet today is 40 Newcastlemaxes on the water, 37 Capes and 30 Kamsarmaxes and Panamaxes. The performance in the second quarter was very good. We earned $46,000 on our NUCs, close to $40,000 on our Capes and $20,000 on our Panamaxes. The rates for the third quarter are in line with the rates of the first quarter so far of second quarter. So far, what we have booked in Q3 is slightly below Q2 because we have positioned quite some vessels into interesting fronthaul positions, and we would normally see a bump on our rates towards the end of Q3 and into Q4.

A lot of the indicators on dry bulk are green. Some indicators like iron ore inventories and steel inventories are slightly negative. But overall, we see that the demand side of things is looking very positive.

Looking at the order book to fleet before we zoom in on the demand, one can see that the order book has grown. We are now on Capesize order book to fleet of 17%. Panamax has actually gone down slightly. We are at 14%, spread out nicely over the next couple of years. So, so far, we don't believe that the order book to fleet is an issue. The average age of the fleet is actually very positive. The fleet is aging, very little scrapping going on. So that has the potential to help the market in the next couple of years.

The volumes, we are seeing iron ore, coal actually supporting the market. So on our Capesizes, it's iron ore, bauxite and a little bit of coal. On the Panamaxes, it's coal, grain and some of the other commodities. When you look at what has been transported, we see that there is growth. Bauxite seasonally dips in the second quarter, but we have seen a very interesting pickup recently. So strong second quarter volumes on all dry bulk commodities.

When we look at the iron ore specifically, it's a China, Australia, Brazil story. And an interesting story that we are seeing is the FE content. Overall, Chinese iron ore imports and Chinese iron ore imports are reducing in FE content a little bit, and we are seeing lower production, domestic production in China on the iron ore. Both these elements, if you compare 2026 with what we are expecting for 2027, could add another 2.5% of extra iron ore imports into China. So something to watch the FE content and domestic Chinese production, which is going down and being replaced by higher FE content iron ore coming from abroad and being imported via sea.

But there's a new kid on the block since a couple of years, the importance of Africa is increasing. We wanted to highlight this on this slide. Here, you can see the volumes from some major commodities, from major export areas, some of which have been around for a long time, some of which are new to the game like Simandou in Guinea, you can see that the growth from '25 to '26 is massive, but is actually expected to grow even further at an average rate of 11%.

Why do we believe this could be a very interesting dynamic for our markets in the next 3 to 4 years? The Simandou iron ore, particularly, is being produced at a relatively low breakeven cost and could replace shorter-haul iron ore going forward. We have tried to list some of the breakeven costs of some mines on the right side of the slide. If that iron ore would be replaced by cheaper Simandou iron ore, you could get a kick of 7% in ton miles for the Capesize fleet. So Africa is definitely something to watch and particularly Simandou and the effects in the next couple of years.

I want to say a word about the El Nino as well. We have 2 slides on El Nino, and I'm sure my colleague, Joris, can talk to you about that for a little bit longer than what I will do now. But what we wanted to do here is to show that based on previous experience and the El Nino phenomenon in 2023 and 2024, we could see a positive effect for the dry bulk market and particularly for the Panamax fleet in dry bulk. And it's basically 3 dynamics. On the one hand, less water in the Panama Canal could limit the transits.

Now typically, Panamaxes carry low-value commodities and cannot compete in the auction system to go through the Panama Canal with the container vessels and therefore, don't transit anymore and therefore, have to reroute and have a longer distance. There is a grain kicker to the dry bulk market as well, thanks to El Nino, where short-haul grain trades, for instance, Australia, where it's hotter and drier, produce less grain are being replaced by longer haul grain, for instance, from South America, where better crops are being grown.

And then there's another one on the coal where hotter weather leads to higher electricity demand. And obviously, on coal, we also have the impact of Hormuz. So all combined, we think that El Nino could have a slight positive effect on the dry bulk market and Panamaxes in particular. And we try to show this and prove this with this slide here, where you can basically see the effect of the May 2023 to May 2024 last El Nino and what it has an effect on rates and basically, rates doubled, even tripled over the space of 6 months.

Moving to tankers and Euronav. Dashboard on our VLCCs and Suezmaxes. We have 5 VLCCs, 4 on the water, 1 that will deliver towards the end of this year. We have 15 Suezmaxes. You can see the results that we achieved in the second quarter, above $120,000 in Q2 for Vs already so far fixed in Q3, the same number.

On our Suezmaxes, we reached a rate of $123,000, we are slightly below $120,000 Q3 to date. So stellar numbers, very good numbers. Obviously, we have sold some vessels. The new sales are the Donoussa and Bristol, but we have delivered as well VLCCs to their new owners in the second quarter. And you can see all the capital gains that we did there, which I mentioned in the introduction.

When you look at the dashboard and all the specific indicators, one stands out, of course, it's the oil supply from OPEC countries year-on-year, which is significantly down, but I will highlight some more details in the next couple of slides.

First, talk about the order book. It is big and it is growing. You can see here year-over-year on VLCCs and our Suezmaxes, what is on order, 370 Vs, 250 Suezmaxes. This is a very, very large order book, which is not going to be an issue this year. But as from next year, in 2027, 2028, we will get a delivery of 1 V or Suezmax every 2 days, which eventually could lead to an oversupply even though we know there is still an aging fleet. But when you look at the old vessel numbers, they are now inferior to the order book, whereas over the last 4, 5 years, it was the opposite. So order book, something to watch for the next couple of years.

On the demand side, we have analyzed what happened with seaborne crude. What we can see between January 2026 and June 2026, we went from 31 million barrels per day to 22.3 million barrels per day. And it's very interesting to see where the reduction came from. All in all, when you look at the total lost export volumes to the different major destinations, you come to a number of 8.5 million spread out, China, 4.3 million barrels lost; India, 1.8 million; Japan, 600,000 barrels; the U.S., close to 400,000 barrels; and the rest of the world, 400,000 barrels.

What is interesting is that the Chinese lost import is basically a combination of less volumes from the Middle East, but also less volumes from other places in the world, whereas you see that the other destinations, they surely have lost volumes from the Middle East, but they have actually increased their exports from other places in the world.

And the reason we're saying this is that China is the single reason that we have not seen the barrel of oil at a much higher price than we have seen. They have basically single-handedly balanced the supply and demand story in oil by controlling it, thanks to their massive reserves. And you can actually see here how the stockpiles of China have been evolving and how it allows them to be picky on when they decide to import depending on the price and depending on how they position themselves geopolitically.

We believe that the power of OPEC as a producing block is now in the oil markets moving to even more to China as a big buyer, and the numbers show it. And actually, you see this on this slide as well, whereas you see that the non-Chinese Asian importers have very quickly increased their imports above the levels that we saw last year. China is still way below the levels that they had last year at the beginning of the year. And this is really something to watch because as the situation in the Middle East normalizes, it will be very interesting to see how quickly China will start restocking or whether they will wait for lower prices.

Moving to the container markets. As I said, the exposure of our company on containers is not very high. I think the one thing I can say about the container market is that it has been much better performing than what we would have expected. This Red Sea unwinding has been delayed, meaning that more vessels are rerouting via Africa, meaning more vessels are needed. Volumes have been actually also better than expected. So all in all, container markets are good.

But I said this in the previous quarters, we are cautious when we look at the supply and demand going forward because there's still a lot of ships on order.

Chemical tankers, our fleet of 16 vessels, 8 are on the water, another 8 will be delivered. Most of our fleet is fixed on 10-year and 7-year contracts. We have 2 ships operating in a pool. You can see the results there. The chemical market is actually doing relatively okay. We are watching the product tanker markets whether they will keep up at a certain level or where they will start eating into the chemical tanker market. But so far, we believe we are in an okay situation. We are watching the order book for '27 and '28.

And then finishing off with a very nice picture of our Windcat Rotterdam and the offshore wind markets. We have recently fixed 2 of our CSOVs to the offshore oil and gas for 2 years. We are seeing in the CSOV market, it's a market of the wind on the one hand, which is necessitating extra CTVs, extra CSOVs, but where projects have been a little bit slow to materialize over the past 2 years and a combination of the offshore oil and gas markets, which are actually needing modern vessels and are pulling away some of the wind vessels into their market.

If you combine both, with the order books of CSOVs that we are seeing this year in '27 and in '28, the market is very well balanced and actually, the market is quite strong. You can see that we achieved some very good rates in the second quarter on our CSOVs of $64,000. For Q3, we have already booked 2/3 of our days at $50,000, which, as you can see with the breakeven numbers are very good and profitable for our Windcat division.

That sums up the presentation. There is one point I wanted to mention, which we have not tackled, but we have received quite a few questions about our bond. As you know, on the 14th of September, our bond expires we have decided to repay the bond from our own cash that we have available. So we intend to repay the bonds on the 14th of September. We will not refinance the bond. We will repay it.

I will hand over now to Enya for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]. So now we will take the first question that is coming from -- through the Morkedal.

This is Frode from Clarksons. Yes, I think you started with the bond, just to confirm, that won't impact the dividends as you see it, hopefully.

No, we don't expect this to impact the dividends.

Yes. So the dividend has been 2 quarters right now with 50% payout. So that seems like a new trend as we expected. So yes, I guess investors should still think 50% of net profit, including vessel sales gains is the de facto policy. Of course, I understand that you have like you can change it, but it seems like a good target.

It seems like a very good target. But as you correctly say, we are not going to change our policy. But look, it's been 2 quarters where we have tried to achieve that level. And depending on our investments, depending on new projects that might come up, we believe that trying to reward our shareholders at this level is a thing we want to continue to do.

That's very good. Yes. So it seems like you're a bit concerned on the tanker order book and you have sold off ships. So how do you weigh, let's say, and you even sold this modern ship, Suezmax 2014 build, right? 2024 build?

'24, yes.

Yes. So how do you weigh continue holding on to these ships that make a lot of cash flow versus selling at this time?

Frode, there's always 3 things you can do. You operate spots, you fix on TC or you sell your vessel. And we believe that definitely on some of the vessels that we have sold, the price that we saw was something that we should do because of the extreme value that we could create. Does that mean that we will sell even more vessels? No. It's really on a case-per-case basis. We like the tanker market. As you know, we have some charter cover on some of our vessels.

We have some very modern assets still in our fleet. But I think just look at the numbers over the past 30 years, prices we are seeing today, particularly for some of our VLCCs and Suezmaxes are an opportunity we want to take and then take some money off the table.

Yes. Makes sense. And any capital gain you are -- that's included in the dividend. That's very good. Just like the last question I had, like bigger picture. It seems like some of these Middle East companies that are buying up tankers to run the shuttle services and you can pay a lot basically for tanker assets today. So how do you feel about the current, let's say, vessel value and potential for further increases?

I think it's already very high. Can it increase more? It can definitely increase more. I agree with you that some of the Middle Eastern operators are taking a strategic view where the price they pay for the ship is not as important as having the security of an access to a vessel that can shuttle out their oil. It remains to be seen how long this will last. But for the time being, there are still definitely buyers out there that want to buy secondhand tonnage at these kind of prices.

Yes. Which makes sense, of course. If you're one of these guys that can ship out oil from the inside the Middle East, you're making more than 500,000 per day or something like that, right? So obviously, the payback on any ship is quite high. And so you have a group of people that basically sets the price for the whole market. So that's very interesting dynamics. Anyway, that's all the question I had.

Then we move on. Kristof Samoy.

Kristof Samoy, KBC Securities. Congrats on the results, Alexander. Yes, it seems like the pieces of the puzzle are falling perfectly in place for you guys. I mean the recycling cash in crude tankers. Golden Ocean acquisition was very well timed. This was the newbuild ordering of the NUCs at Bocimar.

Yes. And then I come back again on capital allocation because you indicate that new builds is expensive, steel is expensive. You declared a new cash return of 60%. The loan-to-value is coming down. You have an across the cycle LTV target of 50%. But -- could you maybe like give a hint for a range at peak or trough asset values where you feel comfortable at being a diversified shipping platform? That would be first.

And then second, on bunker fuels, could you quantify the impact, if any, on vessel supply to speed reductions in the dry bulk segment that you have seen in the market over the past quarter?

And then as a follow-up, concerning the situation in the Middle East, is there any risk in a certain region that there will not be -- that there will be bunker fuel shortages that could impact your operations?

Okay. Thanks a lot, Kristof. So first, a question on the target on LTV. We have a target throughout the cycle of 50%. And your question is, if that significantly improves, will this change your capital allocation strategy, for instance, on dividends or investments or divestments? I would say that today, it's probably a little bit too early to say because we are only in the second quarter of this very strong market. We would like to see how much legs this market has, before we really want to change our capital allocation strategy. So we will keep a discretionary dividend policy. We will keep on telling you that even though we come at the end of our CapEx program, there could be investments down the line. I'm not seeing any obvious ones right now. I've said this in the last quarterly call, new buildings are very expensive. I'm not excluding one-off new buildings, interesting projects that we could do.

But it's too early, Kristof, to basically state something new than we have said in the past. If this changes, if we see after another 1 or 2 very strong quarters, more visibility on cash flows into 2027, then we might change it.

On the availability of fuels, it's a very good question. We have the general availability in the market, I think, is relatively okay. There are some places where fuel availability is more challenging. And there are certain shipowners and operators that have more difficulty accessing their fuel because they don't have the same network than we have. As you know, we are partners with TFG on the bunkering side. And definitely, on the CMB.TECH fleet, fuel availability has not been a major issue over the last couple of months.

Continuing on to your question on fuel availability in the Middle East, are we expecting big shortages in certain areas? Again, I can say what I just said on the previous question. So far, we think we will find the fuels that are necessary. You never know, of course, what the future will bring, but there's no specific shortage in a specific area where we go. We normally find our fuels.

And the next person is Climent Molins.

This is Climent Molins from Value Investor's Edge. I want to follow up on Frode's question on your stance on tankers. Should the agreement be reached with Iran, what do you think would happen with the dark fleet previously involved in that trade? In other words, to what extent would the scrapping of the dark fleet offset the potential impact from newbuilds on your scenarios?

Okay. So I'm going to give you my opinion, which you might agree or disagree with. I don't think the dark fleet will disappear overnight. I think there's 50 shades of gray now. It's not just the dark fleet and a white fleet. There's very different trades going on now from totally illegal trades to totally legal trades. All the vessels that are active in these trades will, in my humble opinion, continue to find trades even if a peace deal with Iran is achieved.

Okay. That's helpful. And we've seen a lot of containership owners ordering newbuilds in recent months, but you haven't pulled the trigger. Could you talk a bit about the reasoning for holding off on additional investments on that space despite the long-term charters attached to most of these newbuilds?

Very good question. We have not seen an opportunity that's interesting enough for us to move on, but we keep on monitoring what is happening.

Okay. Makes sense. And last one for me. I wanted to ask about the time charter you signed with Fortescue. Could you talk a bit about the underlying dynamics of the contracts?

Yes. Good question, Climent, and you're not the only one asking. So what we announced, again, there's a lot of confidential items to the deal. But what I can say, it's a framework agreement over 12 ships, which is a combination of ammonia-ready vessels, fully fitted ammonia ships and ships that we will retrofit at a later stage.

And we are working together with Fortescue within this framework as the vessels deliver and come on the water to see on which periods we will deploy them at which rates and whether we will use ammonia on board, yes or no. So it's an ongoing process under a framework agreement with Fortescue.

Then [ Li Ri ].

I'm [ Li Ri ] [indiscernible]. I'm 32 years old. I live in Belgium, and I'm really happy to be investing in CMB.TECH, which is quite a large-scale business. So my question is very simple. Would there be an impact or negative impact on the numbers when, for example, Iran and United States come to a peace deal?

Well, thank you, Li, for dialing in. Very happy that you're an investor in our company. The impact of a peace deal between Iran and U.S. is very difficult to assess because you would have to look at what does the peace deal mean? What are the consequences of a peace deal.

Now one of the consequences that you could see is that the Strait of Hormuz opens up and that tankers can again freely go in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. Now many things can happen then. You could see a very positive impact for tanker rates if suddenly China imports a lot more oil to restock their reserves. And then they would send a lot of tankers to the Middle East and ship all that oil to China. You could actually also see a negative impact if China does not do that, and countries like India, Vietnam, Thailand source their oil from the Middle East because they can go through Hormuz instead of from the Atlantic Basin, the distance the oil will travel to and from is much shorter, which means that you will see less demand for ships.

The answer to your question, therefore, lies -- there's many different aspects to it. But I think predominantly in what will China do. If there's a peace deal between Iran and U.S., is China going to massively reimport oil and go back to the situation before January 2026? Or will they wait and hold off a little bit, in which case, I think you could see the market -- the freight market cool off.

[ Toba ]?

[ Toba ] from the [ TED]. I was wondering when we expect a lot of newbuild ships coming to the market for Suezmax and VLCCs, does it mean that this is a market which will become less attractive for Euronav and that it's time to scale back operations in oil tanking markets?

Thanks for your question, Toba. It is clear that when all the vessels deliver and if at the same time, freight rates go down, Euronav will make less money than what we are making today. We are trying to counter that by selling some of our vessels at these rates that we see today and by trying to take some cover, charter cover so that when the market corrects, we still enjoy higher rates.

The big issue that we have, Toba, which I cannot predict is when will this happen. And as we don't know when it will happen, we want to be prudent and make sure that we have done some part of our homework in taking cover before the market turns.

We have also received some questions in the Q&A. So we will go to those ones now. First question, what are your expectations for the upcoming IMO meeting?

That's a very good question. Well, let me tell you first what my hope is. I truly hope that the world can come together at the IMO and agree on a clear and simple and certain framework. The uncertainty surrounding a decarbonization framework is not good for the shipping industry, whether you invest in decarbonized solutions like us or where you don't invest in decarbonized solutions. Uncertainty is not good for business. So I'm hoping that there will be clarity at the next meeting.

Now what my expectations are, I have low expectations. I don't think we should be fooled after the United States put a lot of pressure together with some other countries last year to cancel or postpone the deal. I don't think their viewpoint has changed. But we can be surprised to the upside. I do believe there's a big role for China in the discussions. There's a big role for Europe to try to see if they can make a coalition of the willing and push through some legislation. So hoping for the best, low expectations. Let's see what happens in November.

Okay. And then we have 2 questions on the tankers, so I'll add them together. First question, if we compare the spot TCE rate you realized in Q2 on your VLCC, seems to be a bit below compared to other tanker needs. Is it because the routes you have exposure to? Or are there any other factors that could explain the difference?

Then the second one, how is CMB.TECH thinking in regards to the mix between TCE and spot exposure?

Yes. Well, on the first question, we had some newbuilding deliveries. We had some positioning voyages, which in the second quarter affected our results a little bit. On the split between TCE and spot, it's just a financial exercise. If we can charter out our vessels at good rates, we will do so. If we think being spot will generate more revenue, then we will do so as well. And we've done both. We have fixed some of our Suezmaxes on period business, whilst we have kept some of our VLCCs on the spot market.

Okay. Perfect. I think this concludes the Q&A session.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Enya. And I would like to thank all the participants to the call for dialing in. As we said before, if you have any follow-up questions, don't hesitate to contact my colleague, Joris, and he will gladly answer your questions. Thank you, and see you next time.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the CMB.TECH Q1 2026 Earnings Call. My name is Ludovic Saverys, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Ludovic Saverys and Joris Daman. We will present to you the highlights of our first quarter and the title of this call is firing on all cylinders. We had a very interesting quarter, a very good quarter, and we would like to start with some financials and highlights, and I will hand it over to Ludovic.

Thanks, Alex. As usual, we will start with a high-level overview of our company. We're active in 5 different segments from dry bulk crude tankers, containers, chemicals to offshore energy. We had an interesting quarter, as Alex mentioned, compared to last quarter, our total fair market value has increased. Our market cap has increased. We've reduced our leverage. We've reduced our CapEx commitments and increased our contract backlog. Next slide, please. If we zoom in on the Q1 financials, we've ended the quarter with a net profit of $368.8 million.

Notable in these figures are obviously our increased revenue, but we've been able to -- while the quarter passed delever quite a bit and reduced our margins with the banks. And so our interest -- our net finance expenses decreased from $113 million from last quarter to $81 million this quarter, delivering a very nice profit. The liquidity of the company end of Q1 stands a little bit above $0.5 billion. And our equity on total assets value adjusted is below 50%, which is our through-the-cycle target.

So to begin, we have delevered. We are paying dividends, and we're strengthening the balance sheet while we are optimizing our fleet through well-timed SMB. Notable on the contract backlog, we have signed one 5-year time charter on the Suezmax charter -- Suezmax vessel and extended to 9-year time charters by another year. The Board of Directors has decided they would like to distribute [ $0.64 ] per share as distribution. This will be managed by [ $0.20 ] interim dividends and [ $0.44 ] distribution out of share premium. That's quite interesting because there is no withholding tax on that part. So 70% of our dividends will be exempt from withholding tax.

We took delivery of 7 new building vessels, which Alex will discuss a little later on. And we have sold quite a few ships that were announced already on 2 Capesizes and ACC 1 additional vessel this week Sienna has been sold and will be delivered in Q2. So the capital gains of the first quarter were $267 million. And in Q2, we're expecting a capital gain of $127 million.

We are a diversified platform. However, we have a large spot exposure on 2 of our promising markets, which is a dry bulk on the one hand and tankers. If you look at full 2026, we have roughly 53,000 shipping days from which 80% is spot. And from those spot days, we have 36,000 open dry bill base, which is roughly 10,000 on the Kamsarmaxes and 26,000 on Capes and new customers. These are increasing markets, and hence, we are favorably positioned to enjoy those in the coming quarters.

On this slide, we have shown a hypothetical free cash flow for our company in 2026. This is including the free cash flow from the first quarter, but putting some rate assumptions on the right bottom side, where you can see that Actually, if we take the market today, we are in the plus 20% case compared to our market assumptions, and we would have an operational free cash flow of over $1 billion. This is excluding vessel sales, but it is also excluding the remaining CapEx, which we will discuss a little bit on. On the CapEx, we've come a long way. We have a remaining CapEx end of April of $1.2 billion, from which roughly $184 million is unfunded.

If you have followed our story, you know that with vessel sales, this is more than covered for the unfunded CapEx. But this slide shows that 2026 will be the last heavy newbuilding delivery a year with the remaining $740 million to be paid to the shipyards in the coming 3 quarters. whereafter, obviously, our free cash flow could be used on other topics than [indiscernible].

Order backlog. We've increased our contract backlog roughly by $200 million. As mentioned, there is a gradual repayment -- the contract backlog reduces by roughly $100 million per quarter, but we've added $200 million of fresh charters. Of these long-term contracts, still $1.9 billion is on dual fuel-related vessels, and we have quite strong counterparts, most of the investment grade, as you can see on the right side.

I'll then hand over the discussion topics to Alex to talk about the markets.

Thank you, Ludovic. So I'll start with our normal slide overview slide in all the segments. We are, as you can see, still positive on the dry block market, the tanker market and the offshore energy market, we are and have been over the last few quarters, cautious on the container and the chemical market. High level dynamics we see in dry bulk ton mile growth for major commodities that we are transporting in our Capes and new console maxes like iron ore and bauxite, but also in other commodities and dry, we see some growth.

Looking at the supply side, we will see a growth of 1.7% of the fleet and capes today, a tick under 5% on Panamaxes. But we still believe that in balance, and we'll dig in the following slides more in detail, that the supply-demand is actually positive for freight and positive for our market. The same can be said on tankers. Of course, tankers is a more complex story with what is happening right now in the Middle East.

In terms of ton mile, it's very difficult to predict. But as it stands, analysts are expecting a small reduction in ton mile for crude oil this year, some growth next year. What is interesting on the tanker market is that the supply side even though in the short term, the fleet is not growing that much as from 2027 and particularly in 2028, we will see a big growth in the fleet. So the order book to fleet in VLCCs and Suezmaxes is coming closer to 30%. This being said, in the short term, the tanker market dynamics are positive. We'll definitely zoom in on that a bit later.

On the container side, not a lot has changed. I would say that in kind of the more negative story that we have been seeing over the last quarters, the Middle East turmoil has given some support to the market. But with a large order book and an expected contraction in TEU mile demand, we are cautious on the container side. As you know, all our ships are fixed, and we are not really exposed on the spot market.

On the chemical side, it all feels a little bit softer chemical market is less volatile. But there, we see there are some new vessels being delivered to the fleet. There is a little bit softer growth in demand for chemical tankers. So on balance, we are a bit more cautious. And then last but not least, we remain positive on the offshore energy markets. After 2 slow years of wind installation, we're expecting an increase this year and next in, for instance, the important North Sea market. But also in oil and gas, we are seeing a lot of demand for offshore energy supply vessels like our ships. And so all in all, we're expecting good markets going forward in that segment.

I want to zoom in on the largest segment and the market that is most important to us right now, which is dry bulk. On the left side of the slide, you can see our fleet. We have 36 new Castlemaxes on the water. We're adding this year another 10 maybe 1 or 2 will deliver beginning of next year. But so in the next 6 months, we will have 46 new Castlemaxes in or made of new Castlemaxes on the water. We have performed very well during the first quarter, which is traditionally a slower quarter. You can see that we reached levels of $28,000 a day. But what is even better is that looking forward for the second quarter, we have fixed most of our days, 80% already at $44,000, which is very good for that segment.

Capesizes is a big fleet as well. We have 37 Capesizes on the water. We achieved rates of $26,000 in the first quarter have already fixed roughly 3/4 of our days at $37,000 for the second quarter with the amount of ships, the amount of days, this is all very supportive for our results going forward. And then last but not least, our Kamsarmax Panamax fleet of 30 ships. The first quarter was satisfactory. We reached kind of a breakeven level of $14,500, but we have seen in recent weeks, market uptick, and we have already been able to fix very good levels, close to $20,000 for 3/4 of our days in the second quarter.

When you look at the main drivers in dry bulk, it's a mixed picture. Some very positive signals, some not so positive, but we will dig into some of the elements in the next slides and slides.

Let's first start on the supply of the vessels, which is the new buildings, the order book and then the age of the fleet. When you look at the new buildings, the order book to fleet has increased over the last 3 to 6 months. There have been more orders for dry bulk tonnage, and specifically on Capesizes and Panamaxes, you can see that we are now reaching a level of 14% to 15% of the fleet. If you put that against the age of the vessels, and you can see that we've reached kind of an all-time high average age of the fleet, there is a lot of potential for scrapping. There's a lot of potential for all these new buildings to replace the aging fleet. And actually, as it stands, there should normally be more ships leaving the fleet than being added to the fleet in the next 2 years at least and even going forward, in 2029 and 2030. So on the supply side, we are still believing that this is supportive for our market going forward.

If we look at the demand side, we are zooming in on important commodities for the capes and important commodities for the Panamaxes. On Capes, it's, of course, iron ore, bauxite and a little bit of coal, but you can see that the numbers are adding up very nicely, definitely compared to last year. We are in all segments above call is a little bit below. But all in all, it's a supportive picture in the first quarter and in the month of April.

The similar story can be said on the Panamaxes. The typical cargoes that Panamax's transport, coal and grain have been growing. And so we are seeing this being translated in, of course, better freight rates. So we say that Q1 has surprised us to the upside, has been less slow than usually and has underpinned the freight market.

Now if we look at the total year, so what to expect for the next couple of months, the picture remains supported for our Capes with the iron ore trade. The bauxite trade is a bit of a question mark. If we see some export caps out of Guinea, then this could be a negative for our market. In the numbers, we don't see it yet, but it is, of course, something to watch. Interestingly, something that could underpin our market is the coal trade. And I'd like to zoom in on that on the next slide.

We have added on this slide as well the rate forecast for a regular [ 180,000 ] Capesize for this year, including the first quarter. We are now at $31,500, which is actually a very good rate and definitely in profit-making territory.

Operation [ Epic Fury ] and the gas to coal switching. We've tried to analyze based on the information that is available, what the impact would be if certain countries that are powering their countries and are making electricity with oil and gas would shift more to coal, and this gas to coal switching is basically sketched out on this slide. Initially, on the coal side, all the analysts and including ourselves, we're expecting a relatively soft market for seaborne coal definitely going into the second half of the year. And we were looking at our base case scenario of coal power generation in Europe and in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to go down.

Now obviously, the war in Iran and the turmoil in the Middle East which have led to an increase in gas and oil prices have changed the situation. And what we are now taking as a base scenario is that over the course of this year, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan will increase their imports of seaborne coal by 27 million tons. So increase the utilization of their existing coal infrastructure. And on Europe, as it stands, expecting 12 million tonnes of coal to be added to the trade and increasing utilization from 40% to 55%.

Now there is further upside to that if Europe would import in a high case, another 60 million tons of coal, and we've tried to map this out on the right side of the slide, where you can see in green, the supply of ships and in blue gray and light blue, the different scenarios on the demand. You can see on Capes, we were looking at 1.7% increase in the fleet and a 3% base case increase in ton-mile demand. We have revised that to 3.5% tonne-mile demand. Now if you get this extra kicker on coal to Europe, in the high case, this could go all the way up to 5.2% increase in demand.

And the same goes for Panamaxes, and I think that's very interesting because obviously, coal is a very important commodity for Panamaxes. We have a pretty high delivery schedule this year of close to 5% increase in the fleet. The base case, we were looking at a bit under 4% demand growth for Panamaxes. In the current new base case, we're looking at 5% growth, but in the high case, this could even go to 7.5%. So this [ Epic Fury ], the war in the Middle East could have a significant positive impact on the dry bulk markets and we're seeing some of it already now.

And then basically to conclude, what we've mapped here is the new base case, so not a high case in numbers of volumes from Q1 to Q4. What we wanted to highlight here for those who are not very familiar with the dry bulk market is that the first quarter is always the lowest quarter in terms of volume. Usually, volumes ramp up in the second quarter, third quarter and fourth quarter, which again, we think bodes very well for our dry dock market going forward. And of course, CMB.TECH is very well positioned with our large lead of Capesize new Castlemax and Panamaxes.

I want to talk about [ Euronav ] and the crude oil markets and probably where most of you have a lot of questions on what our view is on what is happening in the world. Let me first start with a quick overview of what our fleet has done. After the sales of our VLCCs, we are down to 6 VLCCs. Four are on the water, 2 will be delivered during the course of this year and in January of 2027. We achieved very good rates in the first quarter and even better rates for the bookings that we have done in the second quarter. You can see we're at $180,000 of rates booked for 80% of our days.

Of course, we only have 6 VLCCs left. But nevertheless, this will, of course, contribute very positively to our profits going forward. The sale of the 8 ships, we have communicated on that already. We did a very nice capital gain of, in total, $360 million on the sale of these 6 older VLCCs, which have been reflected in our first quarter results and will partly be reflected in the second quarter results.

We have 18 Suezmaxes on the water. We recently took delivery of the Cap Grace and Cap Joseph. So we have 18 ships in our fleet. We achieved rates on the spot market of $91,000 in the first quarter, $122,000 for most of our days in the second quarter. Again, excellent rates in the current circumstances. And we have sold one of our older Suezmax to Siena, which is a 19-year-old Suezmax, which will deliver in the second quarter, and this will give us a capital gain of $30 million.

You can see on the right side, all the indicators. Again, these need to be taken with a big pinch of salt because the real impact of these numbers is, of course, influenced a lot on the sea going side with what is happening in the Middle East and what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz. First, before we talk about that, I wanted to show you the slide on the order book and the supply of ships and the age of the vessels. The order book has really shot up. We are now looking at a combined 500 VLCCs and Suezmaxes on order, which we believe is a lot of ships. Obviously, very much skewed towards the second half of 2027 and 2028. But you can see the numbers there.

In 2028, already more than 200 VLCCs and Suezmaxes are on order. Even though, theoretically, the age profile of the fleet would be able to absorb these vessels, i.e., older vessels should be scrapped and the new buildings could replace them. We are a little bit concerned going forward looking at the order book. But in the short term, of course, not that many vessels are coming on stream, and this is, of course, translated in good freight markets. Average age of the fleet, you can see there is getting to historical highs. We are at 13, 13.5 years. Again, this is a positive as and when and if we would need to scrap some vessels.

I want to talk about the Strait of Hormuz situation, operation Epicurean the impact on shipping in general and on the oil supply. On the left side, you can basically see the number of transits through the Strait of Hormuz on a daily basis. We are talking anywhere between 110, 150 ships a day. We are down now between 5 and 20 transits a day. In terms of tankers, we see that 115 VLCCs and 24 Suezmaxes are still trapped in the Persian Gulf. Of that fleet, 40% are dark fleet vessels, so not really vessels that we would compete with, but it's still a significant amount of ships that are trapped there.

On the supply side of oil, my colleague, Joris Daman has made a very interesting analysis on the right side of the slide, and because it's his analysis, I want to hand it over to him so that he can explain to you what he is seeing in the numbers.

Yes. Happy to run through it. So the right-hand side graph, really starts by showing the baseline. The baseline was 15 million barrels per day of crude oil. This is only crude oil, traversing the Strait of Hormuz, so being exported out of the Persian Gulf. Now that's closed. The straight is de facto closed. So we made the assumption that's lost. And then we are going to look, okay, what's the actual impact on crude tanker flows. We have a selective passage of 1.2 million barrels per day. That's the actual passage over the last 2 months divided by 60 days. That's 1.2 million barrels per day. So it's actually on Suezmax a day or every second day one VLCC.

Then we have some pipeline capacity, which came upstream and is today roughly around 5.5 million barrels per day. It's Yanbu, [indiscernible] and then the Kirkuk Sean pipeline. Then we had a temporary effect of floating storage release or reversal of floating storage and also some Russian sanctions being lifted and actually being able to be added to the tanker market. And then the real interesting part comes and that's, on one hand, the export growth out of the U.S., which is a combination of additional volumes but also SBR strategic petroleum reserve releases, roughly 1.4 million barrels per day and then also other countries stepping up the game: for example, Brazil, Guyana, Canada, Angola, and they are additionally bringing 1 million barrels per day capacity to the market.

So if you go from the 15 million barrels, we take all those steps, we end up with a loss of 5.3 million barrels per day capacity lost to be transported on board of crude oils. Now it's really important to see here that we are actually increasing longer mile transportation. So we get a ton mile kicker because of the exports out of the U.S. but also Brazil, Guyana, are actually further away than a typical Middle Eastern China transportation, and it's 2 to 2.5x more.

So if we take the 2.4 and we multiply that by 2.5 million we compare with it to 5.3, we are actually quite balanced from a ton mile perspective and that's really the reason why the utilization of the tankers are still healthy and that remains for U.S. Gulf, China transportation are actually still quite healthy. If you go 1 step further, we really look okay, what could be the potential impact on the barrel price? There, it's really important to understand that we started the operation in [ Epic Fury ] in a global situation where there was a large oversupply. So there was a bigger supply of crude oil to the market than a demand. So we had actually an oversupply of 2.6 million barrels per day, meaning that in the end, today's market is only undersupplied by approximately 2.7 million barrels per day of crude, which will have an impact on demand structure or any other means to have the balance again in the market.

Thank you very much, Joris. So after that analysis, what we just wanted to add is basically the consequences of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is that we see a lot more balusters going towards the Atlantic to pick up the oil where it is still available. And this obviously also has an impact on rates. You can see the rate from the Middle East to China which we think is much of a theoretical rate, not that many ships are being fixed at these kind of levels. The more interesting 1 is, of course, is the TD 22 route.

At the bottom in green where you can see that rates were very high, but then gradually started going down as more ballasters, more VLCCs were coming towards the U.S. Gulf to pick up the oil there. Now when I say gradually going down, we are still at a level of around $100,000 a day, which is very, very healthy for our market. But it shows you the disruption that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz also has on the positioning of the vessels.

I'd like to finish with our 3 slightly smaller divisions, Delphis [indiscernible]. On Delphis, we can be relatively short. All our ships are fixed on long-term time charters. We still have 1 new building coming this year, delivering in October. -- which has been fixed on a 15-year contract. The bottom line on the container market is that the order book is very high. We still see a huge TU mild disturbance with the de facto closure of the Red Sea. If no container ships passed by there, it's basically 12% of a demand kicker. So if that falls away including the big tsunami of new container vessels that will come on stream in the next couple of years. the market should continue to go down.

But very short term, we have seen a little uptick because of the disturbance around the Strait of Hormuz and so rates both on the spot market and also on time charter rates have gone up a little bit in recent days and weeks. But we believe, fundamentally, this should normally go down again as soon as certain things resolve themselves and as the order book starts delivering to the market.

Chemical tankers, I was mentioning a slightly softer market that is reflected in what we are earning in the spot pool. Now most of our vessels are fixed on time charter. So we are not really affected by that. But it has to be said also chemical tanker markets are much less volatile than other markets. So when we say a softening, and you look at the numbers that we are achieving on the spot market of $21,500. That is compared to around $25,000 last year. We still believe these rates are very healthy.

Finishing off with wind cuts, exciting times for our division wind cuts because we have taken delivery now of our third CSOV, which is our large offshore energy supply vessels. We still have 3 that will be delivered plus 1 larger CSOV and MP ASV as we call it. So still 4 ships on order. We have seen very healthy rates for our CSOVs. You can see an average of $65,000 a day in the first quarter. Second quarter already fully fixed at $62,000 a day. And we have further vessels delivering and are in talks with customers for both short-term and longer-term employment.

Our CTVs are doing well as well. After the traditionally slow winter period, we are now coming into the peak period of spring and summer, and you can see that our utilization is above 90%, and we are earning good rates of an average $3,400 a day. We're expecting, as I said before, this offshore wind market, offshore oil and gas market to remain supported in the following months.

This wraps up the market updates, and I will now hand it over to Enya for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions]

We will now Start with the first question coming from Forde.

Yes. Thank you. This is Frode at Clarksons. My first question is on capital allocation. So you basically reached the 50% of net loan-to-value target Yes. So you've been deleveraging the balance sheet. You have plenty of liquidity and the newbuild program looks fully funded. So basically, how should we think about capital allocation from here, specifically on the dividend, you raised it from $0.16 to $0.20 on the interim dividend. Is this a level that you would like to maintain? Or should we think about dividends as variable quarter-to-quarter? .

Frode, let me take this one. Indeed, we are, I think, working on all sites, deleveraging the balance sheet, especially with the bridge loan that we had, which was quite expensive. We were able to repay that fully, but we also reduced our margins on -- close to all our financings with our banks. And I think that was visible on the net finance expenses. The CapEx program is coming to an end. And I think on the dividend, which is -- as every quarter, the Board decides what to do, whether it's paying -- accelerating down payments on debt, capital, potential M&A or distribution to shareholders.

And I think we have made clear that once the leverage targets are more into play like we are today. Then we can start allocating more of the free dollars to shareholders. yet, we do have a full discretion in dividend policy. So we'll continue to keep that. Historically, as I mentioned on the previous earnings calls, we've always paid between 50% and 60% of the net profit distributed to shareholders. And after announcing the 50% distribution on the vessel sales, which was in December, we announced it, the Board decided that we would actually rather pay 50% on the whole profit of Q1.

Now going forward, I think there's definitely -- every quarter now is going to happen. But the less leverage we have, the less CapEx that we have, less opportunities that could arise, like we mentioned on new builds. There's nothing really interesting in the core markets, dry bulk and tankers today. I think distribution to shareholders will definitely continue to be a full focus on our sites.

To your question, we didn't go from $0.16 to $0.20, we actually went from $0.60 to $0.64. I think the parts, the $0.44 a share issue premium, it's a different way to more fiscal optimized way of reducing the withholding tax for mostly the retail shareholders and then the foreign shareholders. to do that. But I think going forward, we will see how the market continues. But we'll definitely analyze the distribution to shareholders with a full focus.

Okay. That's interesting. So 50% looks reasonable. That's what I heard from you. .

That's why we also historically we paid to the shareholders, yes.

Okay. Next question I had was just started thinking, I mean, the [ Gold Motion ] acquisition. That looks quite well time now. Clearly, dry bulk assets have moved higher. So I just have like a quick question. Do you have any sense of how much you're up on that investment so far. .

Frode, can you not do the calculation for us. Let's say that based on the acquisition price, obviously, we've done, but you have to take the full cost because we bid a semi-but Yes, we paid 50% with share, but we did pay 50% with full financing. It is true that the returns on paper today look good. But as always, I think we need to ride the cycle fully before we can claim victory on that. But the market has picked up somewhat faster than we were expecting on the medium term. And I think the spot strategy that we've entailed is definitely setting us up to reap the benefits on the short term.

I did actually do the calculation. I think you are at least 20%, but yes...

Only 20%, Frode. Oh, you are selling...

As a follow-up, I mean, given where asset values are today, do you still see value in further investments? Or is this becoming a more market to sell further assets? .

It's a good question for the -- I can repeat what I told you last time, I think or at all someone else. Everything is price today. Let's let's not lie about the facts, newbuildings, secondhand, everything has gone up. there will always be opportunities. I'm sure we will analyze these opportunities. But right now, having sold most of our older vessels, we still might sell some ships of older vintage or sell some ships, we see a very good price. But what we want to do now is really ride the cycle definitely on dry bulk and see what comes after this high cycle because, obviously, for us, the story doesn't end when the cycle turns, that's when the story begins.

The next question is coming from Climent.

I wanted to start by following up on your finance expenses, which declined significantly as you reduce debt and refinancing activities. [indiscernible] million expenses for the quarter include any one-offs due to refinancings. And secondly, is the SG&A for Q1, a good proxy for the remainder of the year?

Yes. That's 2 great questions. Climent, on the net finance expenses. I think in the $82 million, there were maybe $3 million one-offs. But so it's insignificant, I would say. So it is definitely on the current optimized debt situation, but not yet take into account some of the margin reduction we've we're actually executing on roughly $2 billion of financing, which will only come into play end of Q2. So there's more room to reduce the net finance expenses.

On the SG&A, with the $51 million we had in Q4 compared to $27 million in Q1, I think Q4 was definitely exceptional. I think we mentioned it over the last earnings call, Q1 is definitely better, but we are, as management, we keep on optimizing -- and looking at that, integrating companies is often harder than we think but we're well on way to reach our targets on the SG&A.

Okay. That's very helpful. Could you talk a bit about whether you've had any impact on the operations of the 2 FSOs contracted with Qatar Energy on the back of the contract?

Yes, cement. We have had some operational disturbances, but we are trying to get everything back on track. As you know, in the safety of our people on board is the most important one. and we are in a very close collaboration with NOC with our customer to make sure that we can restart the operations in a safe way.

Makes sense. And final question for me. You've got a $12 million profit from equity accounted investees. So what does that refer specifically?

Good question. It's reflecting the proportional profits that we made, at least that's the companies where in which we have small participations made. This is -- I would say half of it is one-offs from these companies. And it sets is a very diverse slew of small participations from ammonia logistics to basically Japanese joint ventures. But there is, I think, good smaller companies that deliver profit quarter-on-quarter. So there's definitely some of that to stay in the coming quarters.

Next one is [indiscernible].

This is [indiscernible] here in Oslo. First, well, I would like to put some emphasis on [indiscernible] on Slide 25, that the slide showing the shortfall and the partial refillment of what was lost is a very, I think, instructive way to think about this. And 1 question in this context. Would it be positive or sort of if adjusted for distances, the same slide just on Tom milestone, so to speak. Would that be still in the negative territory? Or is it in positive territory?

It's fairly balanced, and that was the main message here that if you not only look at tons but a ton miles situation is actually up until today, a balanced situation whereby that the lost volumes are being balanced out by the additional distance. Of course, that only holds as long as less exports keep the same levels in the other countries like Brazil, Guyana, Angola keep on the, let's say, the higher volumes than what we saw in the first 2, 3 months of the year. That's the big assumption of this slide.

Okay. So very balanced then, [indiscernible]. Just 1 further question. In Q3, you ordered 1 CSOV, the large vessel and also had options for 5 more. Is there any progress on those options in terms of, well, either spiking them or lapsing them?

Yes, we still have time to lift the next option. But right now, if you ask me, it looks very interesting. There's good demand for these assets. But as long as we don't need to lift the option, we will still wait, the market can still change. But it is definitely one of the segments that we are watching closely for potential new buildings because we still see value and the value at which we hold the options is interesting.

Okay. Could you elaborate a bit on what sort of employment you would potentially do on a newbuild order and also the delivery schedule for those options?

Would be in 2028, and we would lift the option most probably without any employment attached. We have decided on the CSOVs that we would operate on the spot market. And if we see long-term business, we will go for the long-term business. That's exactly what we've done with the first 2 ships. What we're doing with the next vessels always be a mix of spot employment and longer-term employment, if it makes sense. You know that in this offshore wind market, if you order some of these CSOVs with a charter attached, usually the returns are very, very low. So if we lift the options, we will most probably, I mean, never say never, we might find some customers before we're lifting the option, but it will most probably be without any employment, and then we will work on the employment as we go.

And as just to add to Alex, as a spot market today, both in international wins, but also regional and international oil and gas is actually very good. for us to do long-term charters. It really has to be grade rates. Otherwise, we just stay in the spot market and enjoy the rates we've shown on the slides.

Understood. And just then finally, the options or 5 of them. Could you elaborate on when those lapses?

I think the first 1 is in a couple of months from now, end of the summer. And then we still have time for the following ones, which is always with a couple of months interval.

We received some questions in the Q&A, so I will go to those questions. The first question the premium of [indiscernible] to Capes in Q1 seemed quite low. Any particular reason for this? What premium would you expect over time? .

I think I'll take it from a financial point of view. Alex, you can take from operational. It was -- as we are delivering quite a bit out of the yards, there's a lot of repositioning on the ships ballasting to Brazil, for instance. And so it's a more IFRS local discharge. I think the new [indiscernible] on a digital to discharge basis would have been higher. But since we had a relatively much higher repositioning of blasters that impacted the results.

Yes. And I would say in a premium, it also depends, of course, on the height of the market, but you would be anywhere between 15% and 30% depending on the market and, of course, depending also on the fuel prices.

Moving on to the next question. Do you have any plans for the $25 million treasury shares you hold. We issued to outside holders as dividends used for acquisitions to retire, I assume they do not receive the dividends.

So the casual shares, to be clear, do not get dividends. They cannot vote either. So our company has 290.2 million shares. That's what you really have to look at. Retiring them for us, there is part of the authorized capital. So they set the Board discretion to use them to dividend to shareholders or for M&A acquisitions or other instruments. But today, we don't have any plans. We bought them quite inexpensively if you see over the last years. So I think this was a good investment from a long-term investor, but we have no plans right now.

The next one, with the cost per ship massively increased. When the cycle turns, the recently purchased chips will have a much higher breakeven level that could indicate what if rates do come down, there will be a lot of for-sale signs at much lower prices.

Is that a statement or a question?

It's a question.

Just if the market comes down and if owners are under duress, they will have to sell their ships at a lower price. And it is clear that the breakeven of the whole fleet has gone up, not only because of the high new building prices but also because of the higher secondhand prices. So it will be indeed interesting to see when the cycle turns, how the market will react and then how distressed sales could potentially come to the market.

Then the next one, could you please clarify whether any CMB.TECH vessels are currently blocked in the person Gulf? If so, how many and what type of vessels are involved? .

So there's a couple of ships that are indeed in the Persian Gulf right now. We don't communicate about the details of the vessels, the vessel's names out of safety concerns for our crew, which is on board.

And then the next one, what is the ambition with respect to your green ammonia terminal project in Namibia. What is the latest status? What are the time lines and CapEx requirements?

Right now, no FID has been taken on that project. We are assembling all necessary information for the investment, and we hope to be able to say something more in the next quarterly call when we have a better view on that file. So have a little bit of patience with us, but we will definitely mention that in the next quarterly call.

And then moving on to the last question. This 1 is referring to Slide 25. It's a slide that Joris explained from Euronav. How much crude oil, if any, is coming on to the world market from Venezuela? .

So Venezuela crude oil for April was roughly 1.2 million barrels per day. It increased with 150 million thousand barrels compared to March because of, let's say, the political changes in the country. Exports are being increased. It's not the increase, which is interesting. It's rather that those barrels are now being transported on compliant vessels and no longer on any, let's say, dark or grave lead vessel. So it's a net positive for crude tankers.

Okay. We have 1 last question. Can you explain what the $20 million in other operating income booked in Q1 is?

Yes, sure. The series of -- it's an amalgamation of all small profits we took. This goes from claims we won from lawsuits or vessel claims we have over the last couple of years. It's liquidated damages that we deliver ships and then they deliver earlier or later with shipyards as well. So it's a whole slew of I would say, smaller one-offs. There's -- half of it roughly is a revaluation of some investments we hold in smaller companies. So nothing meaningful, mostly one-offs, but always nice to have when you can book that on your balance sheet.

And I think that concludes the questions.

Thank you very much, Anja. Thank you, all of you for joining in this quarterly call. and I'm looking forward to talking to you either at our general assembly on Thursday or on the next call, we're organized during the summer. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the CMB.TECH Earnings Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter of 2025. My name is Alexander Saverys, and I'm joined here by my colleagues, Joris, Enya and Ludovic.

We will touch upon our classic topics. We'll start with our financial highlights. We will then give you a market update and finish with a conclusion and a Q&A.

And for the financial highlights, I'd like to hand it over to Ludovic.

Thanks, Alex, and good afternoon, everybody. As usual, we start with a snapshot of our company, where here, we've shown you the key metrics of the fleet, roughly 40 ships with about a $10.7 billion fair market value. This is excluding the vessels we have sold already. Our market cap sits today at $4.2 billion after a nice run-up on the share. We have $1.5 billion CapEx remaining as from end of January and operate a modern fleet of 5.9 years. Dry bulk today is predominantly 60% of our total fair market value with the other divisions showing the rest of the value of the fleet.

Zooming in on the highlights of the Q4, we had a net profit of $90 million bringing the full year profit to $140 million. And the EBITDA of this quarter was $322 million to end the year on a $943 million EBITDA. Our liquidity sits at a pretty strong $560 million and our covenants for the bonds on the equity on total assets sits at 31% and for the rest of our loan agreements at 44%.

We've had a pretty remarkable Q4 where we were able to delever the company, at the same time, pay dividends again, which we'll discuss later and strengthen the balance sheet with a couple of actions that we've performed in the company. Running through it, the result, I mentioned $90 million. We had some nonrecurring one-off and sometimes even noncash impact on the results, which are mostly related to the finalization of the integration of the merger with Golden Ocean. There's IT costs, but there was also, I would say, refinancing costs that we had to take as a one-off on arrangement fees, success fees in Q4.

On top of that, we had roughly $15 million, 1-5 of nonrecurring costs on the SG&A, which is tax reversals and other, again, integration fees from the Golden Ocean merger. The liquidity stands at $560 million, which is quite strong with the good markets, with the sale of assets, and we'll discuss later, gives us a lot of capabilities to further strengthen the balance sheet in 2026.

The acquisition, if you recall, the first 50%, 49% of Golden Ocean, we bought through a bridge facility. Happy to inform that it was fully paid back end of January. There was also some costs related to that of acceleration of arrangement fees. But this will give an interest saving of roughly $42 million for 2026. So quite happy to say that we were able to do this, but that also we were able to repay it out of own cash, but also some releveraging on other dry bulk ships.

The contract backlog sits at $3.05 billion. Alex will go in further detail, but we added in Q4 roughly $304 million, primarily on Capesizes and on one CSOV. Happy to tell that there an interim dividend declared of $0.16. This is roughly $45 million of dividend being paid later in April. We feel that the balance sheet has strengthened good enough to increase from the $0.05 we previously paid in the quarters to a somewhat higher dividend. This dividend is not yet the dividend that we announced in the press release on the sale of the 6 VLCCs of 50%. So this -- the capital gain on those ships will be taken in Q1 and Q2, and the Board will decide on the dividends at that moment.

We've had a very active delivery schedule in Q4, 6 newbuildings, but Alex will talk about it later. But more importantly, for our balance sheet, we were able to, in Q4, Q1 and Q2 already secured more than $420 million in capital gains. That's profit that is locked in. $50 million was booked in Q4. But in Q2 and in Q1, we have already a guaranteed $370 million profit, which gives us a lot of opportunities for the rest of the year.

We have a large spot exposure still on tankers, but predominantly on dry bulk. If you look at 2026, we have roughly 53,000 shipping days from which 44,000 are spots. And if we zoom in into dry bulk, where we have a pretty strong feeling that there will be a good market in 2026. We have 36,000 days from which 27,000 on Capesizes and Newcastlemaxes. This means $10,000 up on our breakevens brings in $270 million in cash flow.

When we look on the right side, we always like to position on the segments we are active in compared to the order book to fleet ratio. The bottom segments are compared to some of the other shipping segments on the relatively low side on the order book. When we look at Capesize and Panamax, I think we're very well positioned to look for better markets in 2026.

Looking at the CapEx program. It's a recurring slide we like to show. As of end of January, we have roughly $1.5 billion remaining CapEx from which $216 million will come from our own cash. You can see in this slide, which is quite interesting is that the next 12 months will be a heavy delivery schedule, roughly $1.2 billion will be paid to the yards. All the financing has been secured. And if we look at the cash from the sale of the VLCCs and Capesize we've already done, the whole CapEx has been taken care of. This also shows that within 12 months, every sale, every cash flow generation we'll have will give us an opportunity again to look at dividends, delever further in an even more accelerated way.

The free cash flow, we've given an estimation based on hypothetical rates that you see on the bottom right. I think we're still pretty conservative if you look at today's markets. But should we have the estimated rates even with 20% where we're already in today, this would create a $700 million free cash flow on top of the normal debt repayments. This gives us ample capability to pay back the Nordic bonds, which we anticipate just to pay out of own cash, continue to fund the CapEx and delever the company in an accelerated way.

This was the financial highlights. I'll move on to the market update and give the floor to Alex.

Thank you, Ludovic. I want to update you on the various markets where CMB.TECH is active. You see our overview sheet where we put all our markets and zoom in on the demand side, supply side and where we see the balance. This slide has fundamentally not really changed compared to 3 months ago. We are still positive on dry bulk tankers and offshore. We are cautious on the container side and on the chemical side.

If you look at dry bulk specifically, you see that we see very nice ton-mile growth for iron ore and bauxite in 2026, which is a positive. On the supply side, the order book to fleet has grown a bit. There's been some more orders for Capesizes and Newcastlemaxes for delivery in 2028 and 2029, but we still believe it's a manageable 12.4%.

The fleet growth this year in Capes specifically will only be 2.3%, and we see the trade growing by more than that. So all in all, the balance is positive. On our dry bulk side in Bocimar, we have 87 spot vessels. There's another 9 vessels that will be delivered to us that will also be traded spot unless we have fixed the charter. And with the addition of the recent charters that we concluded, we have now 16 ships on charter, and that's another 3 newbuildings on charter as well coming later this year, beginning 2027.

On the tanker side, the figure in pure supply/demand is a little bit more muted. There is more fleet growth than demand growth at least on paper, but there's a big element of sentiment, and I'll zoom into that when we speak about Euronav that has propelled the market to very, very high levels. All in all, sentiment is good. Earnings are good. The tanker market is still very positive.

Our tanker fleet with the sales of the 8 vessels recently has reduced a bit. We still have 12 vessels on the spot, another 3 newbuildings coming. And then we have 10 vessels on time charter with another 2 newbuildings that will also be on charter, but I'll talk about that when we talk about Euronav.

Containers and chemicals, I'll handle a bit later. And then just on the offshore energy, which is both on the offshore wind and the offshore oil and gas. Specifically on the wind, we are seeing a slight acceleration again of the installation of capacity, which should support our CTV and CSOV markets. And on the supply side, we have seen basically a slowing down of ordering new vessels. The order book to fleet for CTV stands at 13%, which we think is very manageable. Order book to fleet for the CSOVs is much higher. But again, there is also a lot more demand for that type of vessels, specifically from the offshore oil and gas markets.

I want to run you through a couple of slides for Bocimar and dry bulk, starting with the overview of what Bocimar has done in Q4 and Q1. We have 36 Newcastlemaxes on the water. We have another 10 newbuilding Newcastlemaxes that will all be delivered by the first quarter of 2027. In Q4, we achieved actuals of close to $35,000. Q1 quarter-to-date, we are at slightly more than $30,000 a day. We have 37 Capes on the water. There, the results in Q4 were $30,000 and Q1 to date, we are at $26,000. These are strong rates Definitely, for the first quarter of the year, we are seeing rates that have not been as strong over the last 15 years. So we are seeing a very strong Q1.

We have sold the Golden Magnum and the Belgravia and we'll record a capital gain of $8 million in the first quarter. Our 30 Kamsarmaxes and Panamaxes are all on the water. We achieved rates of $17,300 in Q4 and $13,200 so far in this quarter. You can see the breakeven levels and what we have achieved on the right side.

Just a couple of important indicators on the right side. We see that there's a lot of green indicators, a lot of support for dry bulk demand. Just the inventories on iron ore in China are up. The coal imports in China are down. These are slightly more negative indicators. But all in all, we see more positive signs than negatives for dry bulk.

Here on this slide, we look at the order book to fleet ratio for Capesizes and why we believe that vessel values could well be supported for the next 2 or 3 years. We basically have put on the right side of the slide, the recent number of vessels that have been delivered, including the newbuilding prices that are being quoted by brokers and compare that to the last time we were in a dry bulk boom. Here, basically, we want to say that as long as the order book is around the levels that we see, this market still will be supported on asset values. We don't see an oversupply coming.

The fleet profile for Capes and for Panamaxes, again, it's a recurring theme. There's very little scrapping going on. We see that vessels are aging, aging rapidly. We are now at close to 150 Capes that are over 20 years of age, close to 600 Capes over 15 years of age, and the numbers on Panamaxes are even more important. So if the market one day would correct and scrapping would start, this would definitely be something that can balance the market.

When we look at Q4 and Q1, the 2 big themes for us, definitely for our Capes and NUCs have been iron ore and bauxite. You can see on these graphs, the rainfall and then the volume of iron ore and bauxite that's being loaded in the Atlantic, in West Africa and in the Pacific. What we have seen specifically with West Africa on the bauxite side, but now also the iron ore will start playing a very important role is that it is a bit counter seasonal compared to the weaker seasons that we have used to be seeing in the Pacific for Australia predominantly and the Atlantic for Brazil. So it is helping our market. It is balancing the market. There are more opportunities for large bulkers to load cargo even in the first quarter of the year. And as you can see, the rates have reacted very positively to these volumes.

Capesize market fundamentals this year are positive. I mentioned it when we spoke about the overview. We see a ton-mile increase in demand of 2.7% and a fleet growth of 2.3%. So we expect the utilization to creep up. We are already around the 90% utilization mark. This could go to 91%, 92% in the coming months.

The big market moves in dry bulk and then specifically for iron ore is -- well, you can see them on this slide, all the volumes coming out of West Africa, Brazil, Australia. We see that iron ore, according to the forecast will continue to grow. So seaborne iron ore will continue to grow. It will come from areas that are far away from the main customer for these goods, which is China, which is good for ton-mile demand. And you can see that the same story can go for bauxite. We have been very surprised by volumes of bauxite in January. So the number of 184 million tons could well go higher if this trend continues this year. So very supportive of these 2 commodities, both in volume and in ton-mile for 2026.

I will say a few words about Euronav and the crude oil tanker market. Starting with our fleet of VLCCs. So the fleet has been reduced. We have sold 8 of our older vessels as we have announced last month. We are left with 3 VLCCs on the water. That's one 2016 built ship and 2 newbuildings. And then we have another 3 eco VLCCs coming in the next couple of months. So our fleet of VLCCs is 6 ships in total. You can see what we have achieved in terms of rates, around $75,000, both in Q4 and in Q1 quarter-to-date.

The Suezmaxes, we have 17 Suezmaxes on the water. We have another 2 vessels delivering very soon. These 2 vessels, these 2 newbuildings have been fixed on long-term time charters. But for the spot fleet, we achieved rates around the $60,000 to $65,000 mark, both in Q4 and in Q1. The markets there are very, very supportive, watch the space because the numbers that we have been seeing over the last couple of weeks are way higher than the numbers that we are reporting here.

If you look at the key indicators, a lot of green indicators, the market is supported. We are seeing the tanker fleet growing a bit. But all in all, both in sentiment and in fundamentals, we see that the tanker market right now is very supportive, and that's probably the understatement. It is more than supported is actually very high.

The sustainability of the expanding crude tanker order book will depend a lot on the durability and the potential uptick in scrapping. The order book has risen. We are seeing more orders for VLCCs and Suezmaxes. These orders will not come through this year or next year. But as from 2028, this is something to watch because the market balance will depend a lot on how many vessels we can scrap to make sure that the amount of newbuildings that are coming to the market will not distort the market to the downside.

Demand durability of crude tankers, all the different agencies have different numbers. It's not always easy to follow. It looks like we are producing more oil in the world today than we are actually using. And so the only big explanation for that can be that someone and particularly the Chinese are probably stockpiling oil in great numbers. That as long as this continues, it is, of course, very supportive for the oil tanker markets. Depending on what will happen in the next 6 months, both with the oil price and on geopolitics, of course, all these scenarios can be rewritten. But for the time being, what we're seeing is an oversupplied oil market, whereby the oversupply is absorbed in stockpiling.

Sanctions remain a very important theme, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, what's happening or what will happen in Iran and of course, Venezuela. We just wanted to highlight one interesting graph on the right side, whereas we see that the Indian crude imports from Russia have gone down after the sanctions that the U.S. imposed in December. We see actually that probably China has picked up some of that slack, as you can see on the graphs to the right.

A few words about Delphis and our container vessels. As you know, our 4 container vessels on the water have been fixed on long-term charters for 10 years. We have one more newbuilding delivering this year, which will be under a 15-year time charter contract. So we are not really exposed to the spot market. If you look at the spot freight market, it's a downhill slope. We see that the SCFI is actually trending downwards. So spot freight rates are down. Interestingly, the charter market is still quite supported. So not a lot of charter vessels available. Some big liners still fighting for market share and chartering vessels. We expect this actually to go down going forward because there is still a very significant order book to be delivered both this year in '27 and in '28.

Bochem and our chemical tankers, we have 8 ships on the water. You can see the performance in Q4 on the right side. So there's a mix of time charters mostly, but we also have 2 vessels operating in a spot pool. Bochem still has an order book of 8 vessels. We have 2 product tankers coming this year. We then have another 6 chemical tankers in '28 and '29. All these vessels have been fixed on long-term time charters. So our spot exposure is relatively limited. And what we see on the spot market is a slightly declining market, nothing dramatic, but definitely, the rates are not what they were in 2024. So still seeing okay rates, but definitely, things are going down a little bit.

And then I want to end with a very good performing business unit recently. That's Windcat. We have taken delivery of 2 of our CSOVs last year. One CSOV has been trading for the last 4 to 6 months on the spot market, but earning very good rates, as you can see on the right side, the equivalent in Q4 of $108,000 a day. The other one has been fixed on a 3-year agreement for work in the North Sea. We still have another 4 CSOVs coming and one larger CSOV is CSOV XL this year and next, but the market is very supportive. And it's supported because the oil and gas market requires good modern offshore supply vessels. And these good modern offshore supply vessels, in some instances, were earmarked for the wind business but actually can now earn better rates in oil and gas, and that is where they are going.

On the wind market, we're actually seeing some positive evolutions as well. Last year was a bit slow in terms of delivery of new projects. But in North Sea and Europe, we are seeing new projects coming on stream this year and next, which will necessitate demand for CSOVs and CTVs. CTVs, we have a large fleet of close to 60 vessels on the water. You can see the rates that we achieved. We definitely are satisfied with the rates that we achieved and are looking forward for probably a better 2026 than 2025.

So this ends our market update. I'd now like to hand it over to Enya for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] So we will now start taking the first question. Frode Morkedal, you can now unmute and ask your question, please.

Yes. Can you hear me?

Yes. Perfect.

Okay. Perfect. On this Golden Ocean bridge repayment, is it fair to assume that the strong tanker market helped you with this? And specifically, obviously, the sale of the 8 VLCCs must have been instrumental in being able to repay this way ahead of schedule, right? So that's -- and also you could just remind us the numbers we're talking about, how large was the bridge facility? And what's the net proceeds of these 8 plus 2 Capes, I guess, you sold?

Yes. If it's okay, Alex, I'll take that one. So just to remind, we had a $1.4 billion acquisition facility given by the banks. We only drew upon $1.3 billion. So that was the actual exposure we had fully drawn to buying the first 40% and then another 9% of the market. Of that $1.3 billion, quite quickly after the merger in August, we re-levered the ships of Golden Ocean with a $2 billion facility. And we used $750 million of cash of the releveraging to pay down to $550 million. And that $550 million was what we carried since, I would say, September until 2 weeks ago, $550 million, which half of it has been paid with operational cash flow and cash from sale of vessels with a little bit of the Q3 vessels we sold delivered in Q4, but also some of the tankers, as you mentioned. And then there is roughly half of it, $270 million, which we shifted from the "expensive $2 billion facility with Golden Ocean with some Chinese leasing that we did execute last December." And that was -- so roughly $260 million that we did. So own cash, only about $260 million, $270 million on that.

And I think the sale of the tankers, especially the 6 plus 2 Capes and then the remaining 2 has even further strengthened, I think, the belief on the Board to pay more dividends, delever more and then also get a comfort on the Nordic bonds for the remaining of the year that the cash out of the 8 tankers was roughly $420 million cash. So that obviously gives good opportunities to do all of the above that we mentioned.

Right. So is it still that the target is to bring down the LTV -- net LTV to around 50%? And at that point, you could...

At that point, Frode, I think the target -- the long-term target is at 50% LTV. The LTV today end of December was roughly 55%. Now with the increase in tanker rates -- in tanker value, sorry, as everybody has seen in the market, we're probably already at those levels. But that is the target. I think it's more important to say what are the opportunities with every dollar that comes in from sale of operational cash. And then we stick to the point that it can be dividends, it can be further deleveraging. It can be accelerating the payments on some of the revolvers that we have to reduce the interest costs.

Because one thing, when you do M&A, there is a cost of it, especially when you leverage buyouts. And we have seen that in 2025, the SG&A was higher because of lawyer, success fees, refinancing. And hopefully, going forward, our interest costs in '25 should go much lower, that is because there's no more bridge because we are changing expensive or more expensive bank debt sometimes with Chinese leasing and other cheaper, I would say, instruments.

Right. So is it fair to assume that you would probably wait for the bond maturity or some type of refinancing before you step up the dividend payments, even if you are probably approaching 50% earlier than this, right?

I think the decision of the Board of the $0.16 that we paid today is testimony that I think we can do both paying dividends, both delevering and both continuing to delivering all the newbuilds.

Great. Final question is on NAV. What do you see about investment opportunities, specifically newbuilds, I guess. For example, in tankers, I mean, I'm hearing it's starting to get tempting to start ordering VLCCs, right, because you can order at $120-something million and the prompt resale is $40 million to $50 million higher. So that type of, let's say, [ arm ] is opening up and maybe that is interesting. What's your view?

Our view is that the ship you ordered today at $120 million, delivers in 2029. So today, it might look cheap. In 2029, it might look very expensive. Right now, Frode, we are not actively pursuing tanker newbuilding plans. We are, of course, opportunistic. We will look at any possibility that comes across. But right now, right now, we'd rather enjoy the spot market and not order any tankers.

The next one is Petter Haugen. You may now unmute and ask your question, please.

In terms of -- well, I suppose then turning through this question upside down. You still have tankers, although now it's predominantly Suezmax tankers, obviously. Would you consider to sell some of those in order to, well, do the combination of further paying down debt and dividends?

Yes, Petter. Look, the first thing we wanted to do over the last 1.5 years is to sell our older vessels. I think we've done a good job at that so far. So obviously, we still maybe have 1 or 2 older vessels that could be up for sale.

The second thing is if we see an exceptionally high price for any asset, we will always look at it. Look, trading ships, buying and selling ships is part of our business. And where we like to keep our younger vessels, we will never say no to a very high price. Do we need it to deliver? No. That I would say, I think the heavy lifting on delevering has been done. I think operational cash flows can bring us to a very comfortable leverage over the next 9 months. But we will always be ship traders. If someone comes with a very high price on any assets, we will look at it.

Understood. And in terms of your dry bulk fleet, sort of the same question there. I suppose we've seen how the market has appreciated your -- yes, your sales and the communicated increase in dividends. So on the Capesize fleet, there are, I suppose, more opportunities still to sell older ships. But is that done now? Or is that still on the table? I know that you say that you sell at the right price. That's true to all of us, I would say. But in light of the very strong tanker market and increasingly strong dry bulk markets. I would -- well, in interpretation of your earlier statements, I would think that you were contemplating to sell more rather than the opposite.

No, I think that is not really correct. I think on the dry bulk side, we believe we are not yet where the tanker market is right now. We think this market has a lot more in it, and we would like to let it run. So stay spot exposed unless we find some good charter parties. And as you've seen, we fixed 5 of our Capes for 5 years at what we believe are very good rates or unless, again, an exceptional price comes along. But I don't think we're there yet. So we're very happy with the dry bulk fleet we have now. We have sold some of our older vessels. And now we really want to just enjoy the market for the next couple of quarters.

Now, Kristof Samoy, you can now unmute and ask your question, please.

I have 2. One on long-term charters. You've concluded these 5-year charters for your Capesizes. Could you disclose the counterparty? And then secondly, we've also seen in the market that Vale has been ordering quite some newbuild VLOCs. Would your Newcastlemaxes have been competitive for the trade? Or were they particularly looking for 400,000 deadweight ton plus vessels for the transportation? That's the first bulk of my question.

And then secondly, on the U.S. Maritime Action Plan proposal. I recall when we discussed USTR and the impact or the potential impact of USTR in previous calls that you indicated that the impact would be fairly limited because you have little port calls in the U.S. Does this logic still apply to the now proposed U.S. Maritime Action Plan? Or are there like substantial differences there that you see for CMB?

Okay. Thanks, Kristof. So first, the counterpart of the charters, that's confidential. So we are not disclosing that, but it's a very good counterpart. On Vale and their large ore Valemaxes, typically, what they like is to do very, very long-term deal at very, very low returns. That's not something we like. Could our Newcastlemaxes have completed, of course, but then we would have accepted a very, very low return. That's usually these large projects, and we leave that to some of the specialists in Asia. And our relationship with Vale on the spot market is still there. We do business with them with our Newcastlemaxes.

On what is happening in the U.S., Kristof, you will agree with me that the only thing we know is that we don't know. Things are changing by the day. When you say that we don't have a lot of port calls in the U.S., that's actually not true on the tanker side. Don't forget, we do quite a lot of business with our tankers in the United States. But under the USTR and all the other regulations, we would have been exempt anyway because energy was going to be exempt. The new package that is there, it's too early to assess what the impact would be on our business.

Climent Molins, you can now unmute and ask your question.

I wanted to follow up on Kristof's question on the Capesize charters. Could you disclose the rate on the contracts? Or is it confidential as well? And secondly, what's your current stance on potentially adding more coverage based on your forward outlook on the dry bulk side?

Yes. Thank you, Climent. So no, again, we can't disclose the rate. But I think if you look into broker reports, how they quote a 5-year Cape rate, and add a little bit to that because our vessels are more modern and better than what brokers are quoting, then you're probably in the ballpark. But so unfortunately, we cannot disclose the rate.

Would we look at taking more coverage? Yes. Answer is yes. We have said this in this call many times. We think that, ultimately, we want to create stable cash flows in our company. We will not do it at any price. But when markets move in the kind of zones we are now, we will actively engage with our customers to see whether we can take more long-term cover.

Makes sense. And I also wanted to ask about the dividends on the gains on sales. I assumed a few minutes late, and you may have already touched upon this, but is it fair to assume you'll declare a dividend on that front on both Q1 and Q2 based on the reported gains?

The answer is definitely on Q1. And again, if you take back full discretionary dividend policy, I think every quarter, we look at it. We had a very good Q4 quarter. We were able to achieve a lot of the internal check the boxes to reinstate, I would say, a somewhat higher dividend than before. So the $0.16 was purely on Q4. Q1, we have already $270 million profit, which we announced our intention to pay a dividend on it. So that will be decided and confirmed, I would say, on that part in the May earnings release for Q1.

And as the market continues, as we continue probably to shift from sales to really operational cash flow and take out the remaining parts of the new build program and the bonds, it frees up a lot more capacity for dividends. But again, we're not going to commit to a fixed percentage. I think it will be quarter-by-quarter that we look at, but it's fair to say that it all looks pretty good.

We have 2 more questions in the Q&A. So the first one is, do you expect Sinokor?behavior to trigger a regulatory reaction?

I don't know. You should ask Sinokor.

And then the second one is, what are your expectations on framework changes after the European Industry Summit?

I think the theme of that summit was more the industry based on land and not specifically on the maritime side. But I do think it's great that our politicians are aware that if we want to make sure that prosperity continues in Europe, we need to change certain things. And that can only help our vibrant maritime industry, which, as you know, is very strong here in Europe.

We have one more question live. [ Victor ], you may now unmute and ask your question.

I had a quick question regarding your leverage. Do you intend to lower it back to pre-2025? Or do you have a figure in mind on the leverage you're looking for? Also on the equity ratio, you haven't moved a lot on this part. And just wondering how far you are within your covenants?

And last question, can you give us more flavor on the recent cooperation you signed with China for your new project there?

Yes. [ Victor ], thanks for the questions. On the leverage, we have a target of 50% loan-to-value. I think we're not far off. If you would take today's value, especially with the increase in tankers, we're there or thereabouts. I think it's about making sure that combined with the long-term cash flows that you have, but also the opportunities you see. I just recall, we did increase our leverage quite dramatically with the Golden Ocean opportunity. But I think as shareholders, we're all pretty happy that we did. That leverage has reduced. and we're now positioned with another 90 dry bulk ships in what is seemingly a strong market. So we do justify that increase in leverage tactically.

The equity ratio, just to remind, we have a pretty low book value, which is, I would say, taking a long success because we buy or order quite cheaply, and we don't re-rate our assets in book values. If you look more towards the value-adjusted equity, which we showed on slide -- on the overview slide, that has, I would say, equity ratio increased quite dramatically with the adjustment on fair market value.

The bond covenant of 31% in Q4, you don't have to be a mathematician to see that if you add another $370 million of profit in Q1, Q2 on fixed sales. I think that covenant is high and dry definitely until the maturity of the bonds in September. And so we mentioned that we will probably not issue a new bond to just pay back at maturity. So we're good in all covenants, by the way, and you'll see that in the audited financials end of March.

And then Victor, to answer your question on our investments and our joint venture in China. You know that we are building ammonia-powered vessels that will deliver this year. We have secured an offtake of green ammonia in China. And we have also invested in a company that provides the logistics for that ammonia, bringing the ammonia from the factory where it is produced to the tank and from the tank with a bunker barge to our ship. So that is the nature of our investment there.

And for everybody, we mentioned this, this is quite a small investment. We took a stake to better understand, to better control that logistics and to see how that is developing. But we we're talking a couple of tens of millions, but definitely not a huge investment.

And last question, if you allow me this. Do you have a target on the EU ETS price?

That I want to pay or that I want the market to go to.

That you want the market to go to for your investments to be more interesting for our customers.

It's a very good question, Victor. Of course, the higher, the better because then there will be more incentive for people to use our assets in European waters. Okay. Thank you, Victor.

Okay. Then Quirijn want to ask a question. You can now unmute.

Quirijn Mulder from ING. You sound quite optimistic about the wind offshore market. Can you maybe give some idea about the utilization and let me say, the future prospects? Let me say, is it more what you see from your order book? Or is it more what you see in the market happening? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that.

Yes. So I think the optimism comes from 2 sides. The first side is purely related to the wind and the new parks that will be developed in the next 3 to 4 years. As you know, a lot of projects over the last 2, 3 years have been either halted or delayed. What we do see is that certain projects are still coming through in the North Sea, which will create additional demand for offshore wind supply vessels.

But we're also optimistic Quirijn because our assets that we are deploying for wind parks can also be deployed in offshore oil and gas markets. There, the fleet has been aging, has not been renewed sufficiently. The quality and the comfort of the assets in the oil and gas markets is much less than the ones in the wind markets. So our assets that are suited for wind are actually in very high demand to serve the oil and gas markets.

And what we're trying to do over the last 6 to 9 months is basically to make sure that our ships can earn good money in oil and gas. And then once they have done their job, their transition to better wind markets.

Okay. But let me say the contract size is very different in wind compared to oil and gas, as you might know. So wind in general is longer, more -- let me say, more -- takes longer time, especially. And oil and gas short time, short time contracts, et cetera. So...

That's not really true. You see long-term contracts in oil and gas and you see spot contracts in wind. Our CSOVs have been ordered to operate on the spot market first. And as and when we see longer-term contracts, then we go for it. What we have not done, unlike some of our competitors is order these vessels with a charter attached because there the charters were very, very low paying.

It's a little bit the similar analogy with the Vale contracts that, yes, there are certain peers that accept not the IRRs we would accept. And hence, with the balance sheet that we have, the strength we have, the knowledge in the market, we order speculatively spot based on long-term fundamentals and then wait a little bit until, as Alex mentioned, we see good long-term contracts as we've done on the second CSOV, which is actually quite profitable contracts over 3 years.

I think this concludes the questions.

Okay. So I'd like to thank everyone for dialing in today. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your attention. You know that if you have any other questions, we are here to answer them. Do reach out to us if you have any further questions. And I look forward to speaking to you on our next call. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Cmb.Tech's Earnings Conference Call for the Third Quarter of 2025. My name is Alexander Saverys, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Ludovic Saverys, Enya Derkinderen and Joris Daman. We have the usual topics we want to discuss with you today, starting with our financials and the highlights of the quarter. We will then move to the Marine division market update, and we will close with the conclusion and Q&A.

I would like to start with the financial highlights and will therefore hand over to our CFO, Ludovic.

Thanks, Alex. If you move to the next slide, this is the typical overview of our company now post Golden Zhoushan merger. We have roughly $11 billion worth of assets on the water and being constructed over 250 ships. And we'll go further towards the metrics at a later time in the slide deck. But if you move to the next slide, Alex, you'll see that we finished the quarter with a result of roughly $17 million of net profit. Our EBITDA stood at $238 million, where we end the quarter with ample liquidity. We have more than $555 million worth of liquidity in the company.

The contract backlog stayed the same, which means that we added a little bit compared to the natural attrition we have quarter-on-quarter. The CapEx right now sits at $1.6 billion and our equity on total assets, book equity for the bond covenants still sits below -- above the 30.4%.

We had a pretty active quarter, obviously, apart from finishing the merger with Golden Zhoushan, but the Board has decided to declare an interim dividend of $0.05 per share, which is going to be payable early January. Our CapEx program is now fully funded. Happy to say that we have signed all new loan agreements on the remaining CapEx and the equity component has been covered by own liquidity and sale of assets.

Contract backlog mentioned still hovering around $3 billion, but we definitely took a big step forward again in our rejuvenation of the fleet where we took delivery of 7 newbuild vessels, which have been announced in our trading update. We delivered 2 ships in Q3. But more importantly, we will generate another capital gain of roughly $50 million on the delivery of the VLCC Dalma, the Capesize Battersea and Zhoushan and the Suezmax Sofia in Q4. And on top of that, we just announced the order of a multipurpose accommodation service vessel, which is similar to our CSOV, but in a bigger format, but Alex will discuss that at a later stage.

Moving towards the coming quarters. We're quite excited with the timing acquisition of Golden Zhoushan, a big increase in spot exposure on dry bulk, which is happening at the right moment. It's playing out well. We have 55,000 shipping days in '26 from which roughly 47,000 is spot. With a big focus on large tankers and large dry bulk, we're perfectly positioned to enjoy the good markets that we have today.

Moving to the next slide. Here, we've made a simple assumption. If the market today would continue going forward, we would show what the free cash flow capacity is at current rates. This is a pure assumption, but you could see that at today's rates, we would add another $600 million of liquidity over a year, on top of the $420 million that we anticipate to pay back on the bonds and on the bridge financing. Happy to say, by the way, that we'll reduce the bridge by another $300 million by end of this quarter. But this slide shows that with the spot exposure and the good market we have, we can generate meaningful free cash flow growing the operational leverage of the company. And if people sometimes don't like to spread out over a year, you can easily filter this into quarter-by-quarter. And this would mean at today's market that we would add $250 million free cash flow per quarter, which is, I think, is a pretty strong sign of our operational leverage.

I'll move the floor back to Alex on the various marine divisions we have.

Yes. Thank you, Ludovic. I want to take you through our 5 divisions and the markets in which they operate and what has happened in Q3 and is happening right now in Q4. You can see our usual slide with the 5 main markets we operate in, the tankers, dry bulk, containers, chemicals and the offshore markets. You see that we are still positive on tankers, positive on dry bulk, positive on the offshore market. We are cautious since a couple of quarters already on containers and on chemicals. And that has to do with the fundamental supply-demand numbers.

If I start with the divisions where we're a little bit more cautious, containers and chemicals, you can see the demand numbers for 2025 in containers were positive, but are expected to be quite flat or even down a little bit in 2026, combined by a huge order book in containers, 32% and the fact that we are expecting gradual unwinding of the rerouting away from the Red Sea, so that ships would go through the Red Sea again, which represents today between 10% and 12% in ton miles. We think container markets will have a difficult time next year and probably also the year thereafter.

Same can be said for chemical tankers, be it to a lesser extent. Supply-demand is a little bit overweight in terms of the number of ships coming on stream. So we're also a little bit cautious on the chemical tankers. As you know, our 2 divisions Delphis and Bochem are mainly covered by time charters and have very little spot exposure.

If we turn to the other segments, starting with dry bulk, which is by far our biggest exposure today. We see that there was an increase in tonne-mile demand growth for Capesizes this year of 0.8%. So not very meaningful, but still positive, expected to ramp up next year to close to 3%, combined with a supply figure where only 9% of the fleet is on order, where the fleet is also aging, 32% of the Capes is 15 years and plus, we believe that supply demand fundamentals on dry bulk are actually very strong.

On tankers, we are seeing demand growth this year, next year in tonne-mile. We see that the fleet is growing, but because of all the inefficiencies that we are seeing in the market, and I'll talk about that in a minute, we still believe that definitely, in the short term, the supply-demand figures look very good for tankers.

Last but not least, on the offshore, offshore wind, but also offshore oil and gas. We have seen the offshore wind markets grow even though some projects have been postponed. But therefore offshore supply vessels, there has been a lot of extra demand for the oil and gas from the oil and gas market. So we are seeing offshore wind vessels going into the oil and gas market and supply-demand fundamentals definitely in that market are also positive.

I'd like to zoom in to Bocimar and maybe go back one slide. You see here one of the vessels from Golden Zhoushan that has been renamed to the Mineral Sakura. So our renaming program is in full swing. We are keeping the Golden Zhoushan or the Golden prefix for our Panamaxes, but are renaming all our Capesizes and Newcastlemaxes to Mineral prefixes.

We have 3 large divisions in dry bulk, our Newcastlemaxes, our Capesizes and our Kamsarmaxes, Panamaxes. And we focus on the Newcastlemaxes first, what have they done in Q3. We achieved a TCE of $29,500. And in Q4 to date, we are at close to $34,000. On our Capes, the number for Q3 is $20,500 going up in this quarter at $26,200. You can see that we've already fixed quite a substantial amount of ships for Q4, but that number could still go up a little bit if the current markets stay strong.

On the Kamsarmaxes and Panamaxes, definitely a positive surprise for this year. We have seen rates better than anticipated. We achieved rates around $13,500 in Q3, but that's already up in Q4 to $17,000. Main drivers for dry bulk when we look at all the indicators, a lot of them are green. It's positive on the China steel mill utilization. It's positive on soybean imports to China. Brazil iron ore exports there are also very good. And of course, the dry bulk fleet supply is growing, but we are seeing definitely in the larger segments, more demand growth than supply growth of vessels.

Sorry for that, just was a bit too quick. Zooming in on the demand of iron ore, coal, grain and bauxite. You can see that all numbers are positive, expected positive for '26 and '27, except for coal, but we believe definitely for the larger sizes that iron ore and bauxite are compensating or overcompensating the less demand for coal. Watch the space on grain as well. Not really a big driver for Capesizes, but important for our Panamaxes. The numbers there are very positive. And with the recent lease agreement on tariffs between China and the U.S., we're expecting that demand hopefully to continue on the tonne-mile side.

If we look at the number of ships on order compared to the existing fleet, you can see that in 2026 and 2027, we are going to add some Capesizes to the market. But all in all, including '28, the order book to fleet is only 9%. The number for Panamaxes is 14% order book to fleet, but also there, with the demand figure, I think supply-demand should be balanced and definitely looking positive for that market.

An important number to highlight is the average vessel age. As you can see, both Panamaxes and Capesizes are at historical highs in terms of average age, which always bodes well for potential scrapping.

The next 3 slides are providing you more information on the Brazil iron ore trade, the Australia iron ore trade and the Guinea iron ore and bauxite trade. On all 3, I can say that we are at 5-year highs in terms of output. You can see the numbers there on the slide. And we've basically tried as well to highlight the seasonality. Seasonality in the Atlantic Basin in Australia and for Guinea is dependent on rain. The rainy season usually in Brazil and Australia is in the first quarter. However, in Guinea, that's usually in the third and fourth quarters. So we see that the guinea season can actually help our markets because when Australia and Brazil are down, they are up. And actually, in the rainy season of Guinea this year, it was less than expected. So we saw some good outputs regardless of the rainy season.

The key takeaway here from this slide and from the Australia slide and from the Guinea slide is that we are seeing volumes up, volumes at 5-year highs and seasonality in Q4 and Q1 actually supportive.

I'd like to talk about our tankers, Euronav, our Tanker division and crude oil transportation. We have a trading fleet of 10 VLCCs with another 4 ECO VLCCS on order. Some of the pictures that you have seen during this presentation highlight the new VLCC that we took delivery of a couple of weeks ago, the Atrebates. We have another 4 coming in the following weeks and months. We achieved $30,500 in Q3. So far in Q4, we are at $68,000 with 78% fixed. We believe that number can still go up, the fixings and the bookings that we have done in recent days and in the coming weeks are looking very promising. We sold 1 older ship, the Dalma, which generated a capital gain of $26 million. We've extended 1 ship by year, the Donoussa, and then we delivered 2 vessels to the new owners in Q3, the Hakata and Hakone.

On the Suezmaxes, we have 17 vessels on the water. We have another 2 ships coming in the fleet next year at the end of Q1. We sold 1 Suezmax, the Sofia, which was delivered in Q4. And the rates we achieved in Q3 was strong, was $48,000. And Q4 quarter-to-date, we are close to $60,000. But again, there, we still have some days to fix. So there is upside to that number.

When we look at the main drivers and the main indicators, we see that a lot of indicators are positive. And also on the tanker fleet supply year-on-year, it's still a moderate fleet growth.

But let's look at what's coming. Zooming in on the demand, you can see that the forecasts are that there will still be an oversupply of oil in the coming months and quarters. That leads to more storage, that leads to more oil on the water, that leads to definitely, in the short term, better rates. Because if we look at the supply of vessels, you see that this year, there's been very little new ships coming on the water, but it's starting to creep up. So next year, '26 and in '27, we will see more Suezmaxes and VLCCs come to the market. If you look at the average age of the fleet, this new supply should definitely be manageable. So in the very short term, maybe even medium term, we are still bullish on rates for tankers. What happens thereafter, a lot will depend on how many more tankers will be ordered and added to the order book. We are not at the single-digit numbers anymore. For the VLCCs, we're at 15% order book to fleet and Suezmax is 20%. So it's not what it used to be, but I would say that the short to medium term, things are still looking very good. And also the age of the fleet is supportive.

On containers, we can be quite brief. As you know, the exposure we have on containers is limited. Actually, it's 0. We have fixed all our ships to 4 vessels on the water to CMA CGM and then we have 1 ship coming next year on a 15-year charter. The market on containers has weakened. You can see the SCFI, which reflects the freight rates for containers paid. It has slipped down and is now at a level which is the lowest of the past 2 years. The high order book, more than 30% of ships on order, plus the Red Sea situation, which will unwind, lead us to being quite cautious on the supply side. Demand should also be lower next year. So container markets could be up for a bit of a rough patch.

Chemical tankers. There, our spot exposure is also very limited. We have a couple of ships operating in a spool. So that's basically our spot exposure. All the rest is time chartered. We still have quite an interesting order book coming with all ships having been fixed. We have one more chemical tanker that has already been christened, but that will deliver soon coming to our fleet. Next year, we'll have 2 product tankers coming to the fleet, which are fully fixed. And then we have our ships in '28 and '29 that were fixed to MOL that will come later. But -- so our spot exposure on chemicals is relatively limited. It's a less volatile market, but it has come off its very high levels of last year and the year before, but we are still at very healthy levels.

And then I'll finish with WindCat, the offshore wind division. Some of you might have seen in our press release but also in a separate WindCat press release that we ordered a new CSOV, an enlarged version of the CSOV, which we call an MP-ASV, and I'll say something about that in a second. But maybe first zooming in on our going concern business. We have our CTVs, we have our CSOVs. We took delivery already of 1 CSOV. That ship has been fixed on a very short-term period for business in oil and gas in Australia. It already gave us earnings in the third quarter of $27,000. The fourth quarter rates are going up to $118,000 with most of the days already fixed. We have ordered this new multipurpose accommodation service vessel, which I will discuss in a second.

And then looking at our CTVs. You can see that the seasonally strong Q3, we achieved good rates of close to $3,500 a day on average. The slower period in Q4, our TCE sits at $2,800.

Here, you have a render of the newest newbuilding order for Cmb.Tech. So we ordered 1 ship with another options for 5 vessels. It is based on our existing CSOV design for the 120 passengers on board, but we've upsized it to 150 to even 190 passengers on board. It will have a permanent gangway connection, which is better for oil and gas projects. It will be larger, so positive for our charters. When we look at the market, it will be the only vessel type that can truly operate between oil and gas on the one hand and the offshore wind on the other. Our existing ships are already suited to do that, but this one will be even better suited.

We have 100-tonne subsea crane, which is installed. And when we look at where that ship will compete, we see that the flotel markets for oil and gas is one market that we will target. And when we look at designated ships for that market that also have the crane capability, we see that there's actually not that many vessels on the water and that are being built for this.

Our markets are everywhere. But clearly, one of the markets that will be interesting and something to follow is the Brazilian oil and gas market where we see more than 30 FPSOs entering service in the next 2 to 3 years, which will need a lot of support vessels coming there. The reasoning behind this is that we want to trade in the 2 markets. Eventually, the ship will end up in offshore wind. But as long as the offshore wind is a little bit quieter, we can also go to oil and gas.

And with this newbuilding or with this newest addition to our fleet, we can end the part of the presentation and go to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first one is Frode Morkedal.

This is Frode from Clarksons. First, I wanted to ask you about IMO. They delayed the carbon pricing by a year at least. So what's your verdict on this? And have you seen any change, I guess, in terms of let's say, interest or demand for dual fuel technology after that?

Yes. Thanks, Frode. I think it's a question many people have. Well, first on the delay, whether it's going to be a 1-year delay, 2 years delay or 3 years delay, we don't know. We have, of course, not based our strategy on the IMO coming to fruition in 2028. It definitely helps our business case. But our strategy on dual-fuel engines is based on finding like-minded partners to charter these vessels and use the technology to decarbonize. We have the EU legislation, which is in place, which is definitely supportive. IMO would have been a very nice to have. It's not a must-have for strategy and for our plans.

Our opinion on whether eventually, they will find an agreement on the IMO level is that we don't know. But we do see that after the failure of IMO, there's a lot more discussion between countries on a bilateral basis to see what can be done on certain trade lanes, say, Australia to China, for instance, or trades that are linked to Europe. So the last word has definitely not been said, but it will not change anything to our strategy.

Okay. Fair enough. One question on your, let's say, investment philosophy. So you ordered a few large CSOVs, I guess, you can call it. But how do you think about opportunities in other segments like dry bulk and tankers? Are you looking to invest more there or maybe trim or sell in those segments?

Well, I think we've invested already a lot over the last 2, 3 years at the right time, I would say. We will always look opportunistically at newbuildings. But today, clearly, we think newbuildings are quite pricey. That doesn't mean we would not order if it's the right value and if we believe that it will create value for us and our balance sheet can take it. You just saw that we ordered this extra wind vessel, which is really an offshore vessel. We think there's very good value there. We think this is also something Cmb.Tech can perfectly do even if we have more options that we can declare going forward. So -- but that's on the newbuilding side.

On the secondhand, you have seen, and we will continue to do that, that we're clearing out our older vessels, because we just think rates are very good and the prices for secondhand tonnage are at a level where we're rather sellers than buyers. We still have a couple of older vessels. Don't be surprised if we clear them out. But then there will come a point where we're very satisfied with the age profile of our ship, and we're very satisfied of basically staying on the market and enjoying the good markets.

Okay. Last question on the dividend. So this is the $0.05 second quarter in a row. So that makes it tempting to think this is some type of minimum level going forward? Or should investors expect dividends are flexible going forward?

I think, Alex, I'll take it. We have a fully discretionary dividend policy. I think we've been pretty clear that every quarter, the Board will decide what we'll do with the cash that we have. And it's fair to say that with the meaningful cash flow generation that we are seeing in Q4, that we're expecting in Q1, that there will definitely be a further look at how to reward the shareholders, whether that's share buyback, whether that's dividends, whether that's an accelerated clearing out of some of the bonds. Some people have mentioned the bridge financing or just reducing leverage. I think it's -- these markets, the way we positioned ourselves in there so that it goes very fast. And that I don't think we're there to say minimum dividends. We don't say maximum dividends. We're there to balance between rewarding shareholders and strengthening our balance sheet to be positioned for opportunities when they present themselves, whether it's organically or through M&A.

And moving on, Eirik Haavaldsen. You can now unmute and ask your question, please.

This is Eirik from Pareto. Just following up a little bit on the S&P because you have -- you haven't -- I mean, do you have a sort of target list of the vessels you could dispose of? I'm thinking especially on the tanker side now where S&P markets are interesting, but the cash flows are also fantastic, right? So how do you balance that short-term cash flow versus potentially realizing some of these elevated asset values?

It all depends on the price. But I think, Eirik, you will agree with me if you're getting north of $50 million for 18-, 19-year-old VLCCs, there's a good case to say that you should sell. Other people might say, no, keep it on the spot market and trade it out for another year. We are more in the first camp. I think tonnage, which is older than 15 years old at current valuations, and again, it will depend on the bid, and it will depend on the price. We are more sellers than keeping it in our fleet. That doesn't mean we will do it at any cost.

And what about on the -- I mean on the modern vessels though, to lock some of them up to sort of derisk a little bit your cash flows. Is that something you're looking at?

Yes. So a very good question, Eirik. I think we've mentioned this in previous calls as well, and we've been very open about that. If we see good levels to take some cover, we will definitely do it. We like to have 40,000 spot days. But at one point, we also want to use the market to take some cover. Keep the young vessels in our fleet, but take some TC cover. Now as we've not announced a lot of time charters, it also means that right now, both on tankers and on dry bulk, we've not been tempted by numbers that are good enough for us to take action.

Very good. And finally, should we read anything into the fact that you're not changing the prefix on the Panamax Kamsar fleets of Golden?

No. No, it's a good question. Looking back in the CMB days, we had a CMB prefix. Look, we're very happy and proud that Golden Zhoushan is now part of our company, even though we're not using the brand name any longer, we like to respect the Golden Zhoushan history and then keep them as part of our name and our brands by keeping the Golden prefix on Panamaxes.

Then, Kristof Samoy, you can now unmute and ask your questions.

Kristof Samoy from KBC Securities. A few have been addressed already. So -- but maybe first on -- to go a little bit deeper into IMO that was already touched upon. If the conditions would be right to consider newbuild ordering, would you, for sure, order ammonia or H2-ready or fitted vessels or could you nowadays also consider LNG-ready or fitted vessels? And then secondly, just with regards to the decision of the IMO, what impact does it have on your business plan for H2 industry and Infra?

Yes. And thank you, Kristof. So we are more convinced than ever that ammonia is a very good choice to decarbonize. And the reason is not only because we are now getting very close to showing to the world that the technology actually works, but also because we have seen over the last 12 months in China and in India, tremendous evolution on increasing the availability of the green ammonia molecules and reduction in the cost of the green ammonia molecules. So on IMO, even though, as I just said, I don't think there will be a lot of movement in the next couple of years, and I hope we will be surprised, we still think that technology and cost and availability of molecules will be the main driver to convince people like ourselves, but also partners that want to decarbonize their fleet to go for ammonia.

So in short, right now, we're not looking at any LNG projects. Never say never, but our choice of fuel is still ammonia.

On your second question on H2 Infra and H2 Industry, these are very small divisions. They are supporting the business we do on the development of hydrogen and ammonia engines on the Industry side, and they are trying to develop molecules, producing molecules but also sourcing molecules on the H2 Infra side. There, we have a lot of ongoing discussions with suppliers in China and India to buy molecules for our fleet of next year. Nothing we can announce yet, but as soon as we have news on that, we will definitely let you know.

And maybe just as a follow-up, I mean any change in the attitudes or the appetite of miners to conclude long-term charters since the decision of the IMO has been made public?

That's again a very good question, Kristof. I think there's 3 categories of people, people like us that were convinced before the IMO discussion that we should decarbonize our fleet. And we have a couple of customers, as you saw in April with the deals that we announced that will continue down that path. So people that were convinced are continuing to engage with us and continue their investments.

There's another category of people, and that's still the vast majority in shipping that take a very much wait-and-see attitude and that don't do anything and basically wait to see how this will evolve. And then the category in between people that were hesitating a little bit, I think we definitely lost part of them that they are not looking at it anymore and more than the camp of wait and see. But some others still continue to engage and ask questions. So it's a little bit of everything.

The conclusion for us is simple. Had the IMO decision been taken a couple of weeks ago, it would definitely have propelled our business plan to a much higher speed, but it doesn't slow down our business plan, and it doesn't change our business plan, but it would definitely have helped.

Then the next one is Climent Molins. You may now unmute please.

This is Climent, known from Value Inestor's Edge. I wanted to start by asking about your interest expenses for the quarter. Did those include any one-offs? Or is it, let's say, a clean quarter?

Good question, Climent. There's 2 things. Obviously, when you do leverage buyouts, those bridges are somewhat more expensive. We had $1.3 billion. We've reduced that to close to $220 million end of quarter, but that definitely has explained our Q2 and Q3 figures of elevated interest expense.

Second point there is, obviously, when we did those acquisitions, both from a Euronav point of view, but also Golden Zhoushan, we had a back financing of releveraging the fleet to be able to pay back. And those refinancings, you always incur arrangement fees with the banks. And these, you have to write off over the length of the financing. So if you refinance $2 billion over 5 years, and you pay a percent arrangement fee, you're going to add $4 million of interest expense every year. And as we've been doing a lot of these, these obviously are increasing the total interest expenses.

That said, I think only in the last 3 weeks, we've been able to look at our total financing package where we had an average of SOFR plus 275 throughout all our financings. And we are actively working billion per billion to reduce that by 100 to 125 basis points. So this is more going to be a topic of 2026 of optimizing our financing portfolio and costs as part of, I would say, integrating the businesses and optimizing our balance sheet.

That's helpful. My second question is also on the modeling side. First, should we expect G&A to come in at around $34 million as well in Q4. And secondly, where do you see the run rate on the G&A front once you've realized any potential synergies from the merger with Golden Zhoushan?

Yes, I think it's a valid question. When you do large-scale transactions, you always incur a lot of lawyer fees, auditor fees, financial advisory fees and others. And we've been doing that 2 years in a row, doing multiple billion-dollar transactions. That has not helped our SG&A, full stop. It is a review that we're making while we are integrating the teams, optimizing the insurance packages, the IT systems and everything like in normal M&A processes, this will be optimized. To put the actual figure, Climent, I think it's hard to say. I think 2026, give us a couple of quarters, and you'll see those SG&A naturally normalize, I would say.

Makes sense. And final question for me. Does the $1.57 billion in remaining commitments include the CapEx on the recent CSOV newbuild addition?

No, that's a good point. So in the Q4, we'll add that. Currently, as Alex mentioned, it's 1 ship. We can't disclose the newbuild price, but somewhat higher, I would say, than your smaller CSOV. But that is going to be added to the total CapEx.

Next up is Kristoffer. You can now unmute and ask your question, please.

Can you comment a bit on when the options on the CSOVs are lapsing and when is the delivery of the optional vessels? In order to declare them, would you need to see any long-term contracts in the division? Or to put it differently, what do you need to see to declare these options?

Yes. We have a lot of time, so close to a year to declare the option. And then, of course, the options thereafter. Of course, the earlier we declare, the earlier the vessels could deliver. We're looking at deliveries in 2028 and 2029. Answer in terms of contracts, it's not a must have to have a contract to lift the option. Of course, if we get a contract straight away, we could lift the option earlier, but we can also lift without a contract.

Perfect. And moving over to the Tanker division. What type of time charter levels would you need to see in order to derisk estimates here? It's sort of -- it seems like rates are starting to move up quite fast. So -- and...

Where do you pick the 5-year -- would you pick a 5-year for modern VLCC...

Probably just below 50 or something or?

So clearly, that's not something we would do right now. I mean we can still change our mind, of course. But I think the market would need to be higher on long term, and I'm talking 5 years plus then in order to consider. So current rates are -- for us for our modern tonnage, and I stress on modern tonnage, we would need to see more.

And final one for me. In terms of the bond process you had ongoing, can you just comment a bit on how you're sort of looking to refinance the bond maturing next year? And is it still only debt instrument with an equity covenant and not value just equity?

Yes. Great question. I think we stopped the bond process because we had much cheaper alternatives, Kristoffer. So -- in that same flow, we are anticipating paying back the bonds with our own free cash flow, sale of assets and own liquidity. We don't anticipate the bond process to be reinitiated anytime soon. It's a cheap bonds, 6.25. So we'll probably leave it run until September '26. And the way it's continuing, not just the bond but also on the bridge, we feel that we can pay this with our own means. So we don't foresee any equity issuances or debt capital markets in the coming quarters.

Then next up is Axel. You may now unmute and ask your question, please.

Three questions from me. One, how do you see potential removal of U.S. sanctions on Russian oil to influence the tanker market and the tanker rates? Second question, if the Guinea volumes on the iron ore just started replaces the Australian exports to China. How do you see this outlook, or this influencing the -- your bullish outlook on the dry bulk market on the -- for the large dry bulk carriers? And thirdly, what kind of optimal financing structure, kind of leverage are you looking for after you've taken delivery of your newbuilding program?

Okay. I'll take the 2 first questions, and then maybe, Ludovic, you can comment on our finance structure. So on Ukraine, I think the easy thing to say is that before the fully fledged war started in 2022 or when you look at the effect of the war, it was definitely positive for crude oil tankers. So if we would unwind it, one might say, logically, it will be negative. In our opinion, it's way too early to say. And actually, we don't know. Maybe in theory, relief of sanctions on Russia could be negative for our market because then you unwind everything that has been put in place over the last 2 or 3 years. But in practical terms, I think there will be a lot of different levers that will play an impact on that. So the short answer to your question is we don't know what the impact will be.

On Guinea cannibalizing Australian volumes because I think that's what you mean. I think 2 things need to be said there. On iron ore specifically, you have to know that the very beginning, all the volumes are going to China and are actually being transported by Chinese ships, which is taking away capacity. So it's supporting the market in general. Going forward, of course, as we see a ramp-up and there would be any cannibalization, the logical immediate effect is that you're replacing short tonne mile with long tonne mile, so the effect is relatively positive. If on top of that, you would see that the price of iron ore starts falling, you might push out some producers that have a higher breakeven level. And again, there, we think that we'll rather stimulate the high or the long tonne mile and the short tonne mile.

But all in all, cannibalization of volumes of Australian volumes and replacing them by Guinea volumes, we think it will definitely have an impact on the market. But on a net-net basis, it could actually be positive. It's on the...

And then Axel, on the optimal loan-to-value, I mean, we are indicating a 50% loan-to-value throughout the cycle. We're somewhat north of that. So after the full delivery newbuilding program assimilated, and most of it is going to be end '26. I think out of the $1.5 billion, we're taking a delivery of $1 billion worth of ships in '26. So thereafter, it's only a few ships that are on long-term charters. We're definitely targeting the 50%. But in your 50%, I think it's important to look at what is the cost of those financings where we still have some expensive leases on board. We still have bonds. We still have bridges. I think it's also the work in the next 2 quarters to take out, I would say, the more expensive debt, replace it by inexpensive financing, which is readily available for companies like us at this stage.

Just a short follow-up. Maybe you partly answered that earlier, but could we then expect a fixed payout ratio, also an explicit dividend policy different from what you have or don't have today thereafter?

No. I think -- no, we don't have. It's a fully discretionary dividend policy. I think while our balance sheet and our company is still in transition, I think that's an important one to say, we need to keep the flexibility to decide on every dollar that goes down on debt, M&A, newbuilds, rewarding shareholders to share buyback or dividends. So we're not going to go for a fixed payout anytime in the short future.

Then we have a few questions in the Q&A. So I will ask them. The first one, is it correct that the 2026 FCF sensitivities assume $180,000 a day in VLCC rate for the whole of 2026. If so, can you provide more color on the factors behind such an assumption?

Sure. It's 118, so 1-1-8 and not 180. I think this is not a projection. We are not believing that this could hold on for a year because we don't know. We are in a kind of market where it could go anyway right now. Supply-demand looks positive, like Alex mentioned, we just want to show the free cash flow capacity. If at $118,000 a day for a full year, for VLCCs, which is relatively small in our spot exposure compared to our dry bulk, where we anticipate $34,000 on Newcastlemaxes, where actually we're at $44,000 right now. If you look at the market.

So it's just an assumption to show the operational leverage and the free cash flow generation capacity of our company. Hence, it is strengthened by the belief that we'll be able to pay back the bridges and the bonds and our newbuild CapEx just by on cash flow. We're fixing Q4 already, deep down Q4, and we're starting to fix Q1. So Q4 and Q1, there is a good likelihood that we are hovering around elevated levels. Is it going to be 118, we don't know. But is it going to be 34 for Newcastlemaxes, we don't even know as well. This could go up.

Right. Then the second question, what are your expectations for the Simandou mine opening? How important is the service to the offshore oil market OSV to you going forward? There are some very old vessels in operation by competitors. What are our depreciation rates?

Okay. So on Simandou, I think we've highlighted this already many times. That is, of course, going to be a meaningful impact as it ramps up to its full capacity of 120 million tonnes of extra iron ore. I think on the offshore market, we can be very clear. We have our CTVs for the offshore wind specifically. We have 6 CSOVs, which are a very meaningful investment of close to $0.5 billion, where we definitely want to continue to fix them well, short term and long term. We have now one extra CSOV XL. If it is successful, if we see traction with our customers, we will definitely order more. And the last question?

On depreciation rates, we depreciate, I think, 20 years of scrap. Now on OSVs, the scrap is relatively light. So you can assume close to 0, but these are depreciation that we use on the offshore oil vessels.

And we have one more question live. So Quirijn, you can now unmute and ask your question.

Quirijn Mulder from ING. I have a couple of questions. My first question is with regard to the tariffs. Have you calculated what the impact was of tariffs on your company, let me say, between 1st of April and the end of September? That's my first question. And the second question is about, let me say, if you look at your fixed contracts, 295, I think 294 in that range. What do you think it will be at the end of 2025? That are my 2 questions.

Yes. Thank you, Quirijn. I'll answer your second question first. We have the intention, of course, to increase it. I think we've been very vocal about that. We want to take more cover when markets are high. We don't have a fixed target because a lot will depend on the market and what people are willing to offer us. But we definitely want to grow our fixed contract cover.

The first question on the tariffs. Apart from the effect on the market in general, with rerouting of ships and what this has had on some of our vessel fixtures, we have actually none or very little impact on tariffs. Our container ships -- container ships are the ones that are more affected are chartered out. So there it is, of course, an issue for our customer, but not directly for us. And on the 2 other segments that would call the United States or would carry goods to and from the United States, it's dry bulk and its oil. And on dry bulk, we do very little to the United States. On oil, as you know, this has been exempted. So in short, the impact of tariffs on us, on Cmb.Tech specifically, has been close to 0. Of course, the side effects on the broader market of rerouting of ships and people wanting to have Japanese or Korean built ships to go to China and vice versa for China that we have felt a little bit. But I must say that right now, the effects are very limited.

Does that also mean that the end of tariffs is -- does not have any impact in, let me say, 2026?

Well, Quirijn, I think now I'm talking as a shipping player in general, tariffs are always bad. We prefer not to have any tariffs because then trade can flow freely, and that means more opportunities for our ships to trade. So again, I don't want to create the wrong impression. We are very much in favor of tariffs going away because that creates more trading opportunities for our ships. But if you go on a macro level, what has happened in the United States compared to our fleet, there the impact has been limited.

My final question is about the, let me say, the order ratio for the VLCC, Suezmax that is now above 12%, as I understand from your graphs. What is the delivery time of these vessels? That's mostly '26, '27. Is there anything to add to that in terms of when it is coming and what the impact might be?

Yes. So it's 15% for VLCCs and 20% for Suezmaxes, so it's actually higher than the 12% you mentioned. '26 and '27, we don't see any meaningful capacity that can still be added to the order book. But '28, we are seeing new yards or existing yards with extra capacity still coming on stream. So that number by 2028 could still go up. That's my belief.

And today, Quirijn, if you would want to jump on these slots, I mean, we had 1 shipyard in China offering early slots for end '27 and begin '28. But any conventional yard, as you see in the news flow on the specific shipping news, you are starting to talk end '28 if you deliver -- if you order today, beginning '29, even 2030. So shipyards are getting filled up with the current slots. As Alex mentioned, you can have new yards, you can have new capacity coming online as well. But definitely, the traditional delivery time for VLCC and Suezmaxes are quite long now.

We have 2 additional questions written. So the Q4 2025 bookings for VLCCs look low versus the market rates. Can you comment on why?

It has to do with the trips that our vessels have been doing. And I'm supposing people are referring as well to some of our peers. There's some creative bookkeeping, sometimes load to discharge or discharge to discharge. But there is also a fact that some of our vessels are slightly older and of course, are earning less than more modern vessels that are operated by our peers. We just took delivery of one very modern ship, but we still have some tonnage, which is 13 years old and which is logically then earning a little bit less because the vessels burn more fuel.

And then the last one, can you discuss the relationship between News and Capes historically? And going forward, will this change go forward?

Well, the relationship is they move the same cargo. One ship is just 5 meters wider and carries 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes more. Capesizes traditionally have been the workhorse of the fleet, but Newcastlemaxes are taking this over now because it is relatively cheaper just to build a slightly bigger ship than a Capesize of 180,000. So same cargo, same trades.

Perfect. I think that concludes the questions.

All right. Well, then we will close this earnings call by thanking all of you for having dialed in and looking forward to speaking to you in the following weeks, months or maybe on the next earnings call. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Bye-bye.