Navigator Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NVGS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mads Peter Zacho: So Ben on Page 15 in the presentation, I don’t know if you have any — that’s the one that shows the earning stays and where the ships are employed and which segments. And if you see in October with a big spike there, you have ammonia time charter, LPG time charter, petrochemical time charter is the fair chunk of those vessels. So they’re mostly on time charter. So we have been working on some of the logic that you’re talking about. You can see that LPG spot is not really there. Petrochemical spot will typically be there, because that is amore of a spot play, not as structured as some of the other segments. So that but that is where you can capture upside and so forth. So, I think, that graph, if you look at October kind of explains our journey towards kind of the topic that you’re talking about.

Ben Nolan: Okay. And assuming that ammonia continues to be a bigger piece of the pie, you would expect, let’s say, next year or into the future better utilization across the fleet, is that fair?

Mads Peter Zacho: I mean, if you’re generally the larger time charter portion you have — generally you have a higher utilization. So that is correct. We believe that ammonia is going to grow, is definitely not going to reduce for us, how we see the world, and what’s happening in Europe and everything with energy prices. So, I think, that is there to stay, which will obviously prop-up utilization overall at a higher level than had we not. So, I think that’s the road forward.

Ben Nolan: Okay. And then lastly for me, just strategically, I appreciate that you sold one of another one of the older planet vessels. As I think about sort of where the business is in your shifting a little bit more towards or increasing your footprint on things related to infrastructure and connecting the dots with respect to supply chains, et cetera. And then I compare to let’s say, the LNG business where especially in the last number of years you’ve seen a number of LNG carriers of being converted into things like floating storage or re-gasification units or whatever. Is there any possibility of being able to do that with your fleet — with the — maybe even some of those older vessels? Or are the dynamics too dissimilar and it’s not really practical?

Randy Giveans: Mads, will you take and go?

Mads Peter Zacho: Yes. When it comes to our overall strategy about the mix between shipping and terminal kind of business, it is certainly an area that we are looking into and that we would like to expand on. We see some very, very good synergies between in this vertical integration you could say, so that we are able to deliver better service through having a broader piece of the total supply chain. So, we would be working with some of our existing partners to see, if we can explore further opportunities for doing more of this kind of business. And I think, it’s we’ve talked about this also before, Ben, that there will be opportunities coming maybe more than we can see right now on the import and the export side, and I think Navigator would be really well decision to engage in those discussions, and we see it as attractive business. And then maybe I’ll leave it to you to talk a little bit about how we can use our existing time for that.

Niall Nolan: It’s definitely opportunities for using assets even older assets for infrastructure project. So for instance just to give an idea, we are in discussions within a location whereby you can use the tanks, the gas tanks in a ship, one of our older ships as storage either floating or you take them out and put them as shore because the ship hole has a finite life, but the ship tanks can live for a very long time. So, there are added value, I suppose, in those — in having that, those assets with our link on the, or interest to develop infrastructure on some of the older assets.