Tsakos Energy Navigation Limited (NYSE:TNP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Climent Molins: Good morning or afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start by asking about your fleet renewal efforts. You have been clear on your intention to continue to sell older vessels and reinvest proceeds on modern tonnage. However, there haven’t been many transactions on the eco side of the fleet. Do you expect liquidity to increase going forward? And secondly, how do you think about the trade-off between high asset pricing and need to renew the fleet?

Nikolas Tsakos: So that’s a very, very good question because what you usually see in shipping is that you should not be selling at the same time that you are buying. So I think your point is very well timed. However, we are a client-driven organization, we are a — we’re more of an industrial play owner. We have sold at least eight vessels since the beginning of the year at very healthy prices. And then we decided, instead of buying vessels in the spot market, to order our future with a very modern ship. So I mean as long as we are able to have good employment cover for the vessels that we will be buying that will have very good returns going forward and amortize those ships. We will still continue with this model selling all the vessel at this market and looking at good quality, perhaps dual-fuel or other vessels with solid employment that will, first of all, reduce significantly our rate profile which is already young and reduce our footprint.

Climent Molins: That’s helpful. Thank you. I also wanted to ask about operating expenses on a per day basis, which increased quite a bit quarter-over-quarter. As we think about the run rate going forward, should we expect them to trend to closer to $9,000 or $9,500 per day? And secondly, could you give us some comment on what were the biggest drivers behind the increase?

Nikolas Tsakos: Yes. And Paul can take you more into details, but I will give you the basic ideas. First of all, is that we are right now running a fleet of much larger vessels. So I mean, that has the last year’s fleet. We had our vessels were — eight vessels of the Handysize that brought our daily operating expenses lower. This year, we had the dry docking of our larger ships in Portugal. And of course, we are having a fleet of much larger vessels. So the average naturally will go higher, but it will normalize, I think, within the year.

Climent Molins: Makes sense. That’s all from me. Thank you for taking my questions.

Nikolas Tsakos: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will hand the floor back over to Dr. Nikolas Tsakos for any closing comments.

Nikolas Tsakos: First of all, thank you very much for asking. I know you’re all very, very busy wrapping up for a very exciting and hopefully peaceful family Thanksgiving, and thank you for taking the time to be with us today. We’re looking forward to report even better results and a very exciting full year in sometime early in the first quarter. We will be — we are happy to have Christmas holiday dividend for everybody in December that our President has said on the 20th of December. And with that, I will ask also our Chairman, Takis, for your closing remarks, and I wish everybody a very happy Thanksgiving.

Takis Arapoglou: Thank you, Nikos. As you said, in view of the continued buoyant market, we expect to have very strong results for the year and equally strong results going forward. I hope that all these good prospects described today will soon be reflected in our stock price. And best wishes for a happy Thanksgiving to all. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

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