Danaos Corporation (NYSE:DAC) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Evangelos Chatzis: Omar, if I may add, this is obviously opportunistic. And it’s a small scale compared to the containership business, right which will continue to be the dominant business. I mean, we are now first half — have EBITDA of — we are on track for $700 million plus of EBITDA for the full year, $356 million for the first 6 months and the contribution of the dry bulk where rates are is going to be very small. And the investment in dry bulk versus the fleet value containers is, again, small, right? So to your point, still, this is a small — this is going to be a small part of the business that we will seek to maximize, of course, returns but containers will continue to be the dominant ingredient.

Omar Nokta: Understood.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question will be from Chris Wetherbee of Citigroup.

Chris Wetherbee: I wanted to touch on the Eagle investment and sort of see what your thoughts are now. So what would be your intention going forward with Eagle from here?

John Coustas: Well, Chris, for us, we were interested in building, let’s say, a sizable investment. We were blocked, so there is nothing really. We are waiting for, let’s say, management’s next actions to see what they can do about the actual operations which are going to be very challenging in the next couple of quarters, at least and we’ll take it from there.

Chris Wetherbee: Okay. Are you — so the position is static? Or would you add to your equity position? Or do you have the ability to add to the equity position?

John Coustas: Well, we cannot add because we are already above the 15% poison pill level. So we cannot add.

Chris Wetherbee: Okay. That’s helpful. I appreciate that. And then, I guess in terms of your thoughts on where you think incremental capital is deployed most effectively? Is it — are there opportunities on the container side still that could be interesting? I certainly understand the counter cyclicality of investing in dry bulk and that certainly makes sense to us. Want to get a sense of how you think about where that incremental dollar should go from here? Is it dry bulk? Or is it container? Or would there be potentially opportunities for other avenues?

John Coustas: We do not see any interesting opportunities in the container — in the container market. There are opportunities about all those ships but I believe that we need to look at the future and look only at very modern tonnage and possibly we will use and that’s the reason also. But we have placed these additional 4 ships for deliveries in the next 2, 3 years.

Chris Wetherbee: Okay. So then dry bulk would be the place where the incremental dollar would go?

John Coustas: For the time being, yes. The only thing is that, as I said, dry bulk, we are very sensitive to cost, so we’re not just going to change the market up to build volume. Yes, sorry, go ahead.

Chris Wetherbee: No, please continue. Go ahead.

John Coustas: Okay. Thank you.

Chris Wetherbee: All right.

Operator: We have no further questions at this time. Now, I’d like to turn the call back over to Dr. Coustas for any further comments or closing remarks.

John Coustas: Okay. Thank you all for joining this conference call and your potential interest in our story. Look forward to hosting you on our next earnings call. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s teleconference. We now like to thank everyone for the participation. Have a wonderful afternoon.

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