Global Ship Lease, Inc. (NYSE:GSL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Liam Burke from B. Riley Securities.

Liam Burke: Could I just jump on that final statement on rebuilding liquidity? Obviously, the balance sheet is in great shape. You had nice flexibility on the last acquisition of 4 vessels. But when you’re looking rebuilding liquidity, you pay a healthy dividend through the cycle. I don’t think that’s an area that you want to grow. How does that affect your thoughts on buybacks?

Thomas Lister: I’ll have a crack at this, Liam. Buybacks — well, let’s put buybacks in the context of overall capital allocation. And we try to be as thoughtful as possible on capital allocation through the cycle. So as you saw, we renewed the $40 million buyback allocation having worked through almost all of the preceding $40 million allocation that we put in place, I think, in April or so of last year. So buybacks will definitely remain an important part of the toolkit. I think Tassos said in his prepared remarks, but we will always look at all capital allocation, buybacks included in the context of, on the one hand, risk and on the other hand, opportunities. So which is the best way for us to put every dollar to work to build value for investors through the cycle?

Liam Burke: And in terms of Omar’s question on the spot rates, if you’re looking at shorter durations, vis-a-vis past longer-term charters, how do they — how a potential recharters look when facing shorter durations? Are they still holding up? Or do you have to sacrifice a little here?

George Youroukos: Well, it very much varies Liam it’s George very much based on the size of ship. Smaller ships can do a 12-year charters. Very small barely can do that. Panamax ships can do a year right now, maybe a bit more. Post Panamax, there aren’t many, if at all, in the market. So we don’t know, but probably they could do a year max 2. So right now, what we see is the charters have fulfilled their requirements of 2 months ago and they’re dropping the duration. It’s not a matter of giving a ship a lower charter to get a longer duration. That doesn’t work. It’s what the charter really needs in order to employ a ship, whether they need 1 year or 2 year or 3 year depending on their plan on the plan of the line.

Thomas Lister: Sorry, Liam, just to correct a slip of the tongue earlier, I think George started off by saying that feeders could get up to 12 years on charters. Obviously, that’s up to 12 months, minor correction for the record.

Liam Burke: So very that go right past just assume the 12 months.

Thomas Lister: Operator, do we have any further questions? We’re not hearing anything on this end.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Your next question comes from the line of Amit Mehrotra from Deutsche Bank.

Christopher Robertson: This is Chris Robertson on for Amit. I just wanted to ask about the 4 recent vessels that were acquired just in terms of technical specifications. Can you talk about the reefer slots or, I guess, technical differentiators on those vessels? And can you remind me the total amount of reefer slots spread out on the fleets?

George Youroukos: I don’t have in hand the total reefer slot for the fleet. But generally, I would say that we do have probably the highest. One, of the highest reefer capacity in comparison to our total capacity. Now we can look at that and come back to you. But on those 4 ships, they’re very high spec because they have been built dense Shipyard in Denmark. They were built in very high spec. They have a very high reefer capacity, and they have also high capacity to increase also the reefer so the capacity is beyond the 1,000 reefers. And they also have been modified to be economic so they have changed propellers and EST’s, there’s changes. So these ships have a very good fuel consumption and CO2 emission.