Earnings Call Transcript - FLNG Q1 2024

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Management and I will be joined by my colleague, Knut Traaholt, our CFO, who will present the numbers later in the presentation. We are presenting live from Nydalen, Oslo, and after the presentation, we will hold a Q&A session where you can submit questions via chat or email us at [email protected]. As usual, we will have some appealing gifts for the best question, including a Flex LNG Summer kit, which features caps, sunglasses in pink and black, a water bottle, a Flex T-shirt, sunscreen, and a large bathing towel. I hope you can ask some great questions as this is the most enjoyable part of our presentation. Before we begin, I want to remind you of our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures, which may not provide complete detail. We also recommend reviewing our earnings report published today. Let's start with the highlights. Our revenues were $90.2 million, which aligns with our guidance of approximately $90 million. Our net income was $33.2 million, and our adjusted net income was $37.9 million, leading to earnings per share of $0.62 and adjusted earnings per share of $0.70. Knut will elaborate on these figures. The adjusted numbers only include realized gains and losses on interest rate derivatives, while net income and EPS encompass both. This year, we've significantly increased our backlog. We extended contracts for two ships with a supermajor: Flex Resolute and Flex Courageous, which have been with the charter for about two years of a three-year period. The charters announced extensions from the end of Q1 2025 to the end of Q1 2027. Additionally, Cheniere, which has been chartering Flex Endeavour for over three years, has now extended the contract by 500 days from Q3 2030 to Q1 2032, making it the second longest contract in our portfolio. Furthermore, we secured a new 10-month contract for Flex Constellation, which we transitioned from a previous charter and is now set to operate until the end of Q1 2025, with an option to extend to 2026. As previously mentioned in our Q4 presentation, we remain cautious about the market, given the high number of ships scheduled for delivery this year compared to a low number of molecules entering the market. Thus, we are pleased to secure a good contract for Flex Constellation to remove it from the spot market this year. We have two drydockings this year for our sister ships, Constellation and Courageous. Constellation's drydocking was completed successfully by the end of March, and we are now wrapping up the final modifications for Courageous, which we expect to have back in operation at the end of May. Q2 typically sees a seasonal slowdown, so we anticipate a slight reduction in our Time Charter equivalent earnings, which have historically been around $72,000 to $74,000. We expect Q2 revenues to be close to $85 million with two ships undergoing drydocking and some exposure to the spot market. The Board is pleased to announce a dividend of $0.75 per share for the quarter. We've changed our payout method to draw from contributed surplus, which may affect shareholder taxation depending on their investment location. Over the last four quarters, we've distributed a total of $3.125 per share, providing a yield of around 11%. The stock increased slightly in Oslo this morning, reflecting a 1% rise. However, liquidity in the Norwegian market is limited, as most investors participate via the U.S. market. We are in a robust financial position, having added more contract backlog than we've consumed this year, supporting our dividend capacity. Regarding guidance, our delivered revenue of $90.2 million aligns with our forecast of around $90 million. Adjusted EBITDA was slightly above our estimate at $70.6 million, compared to a guidance of approximately $70 million, and other metrics are in line with expectations. With two ships in drydock this quarter, we anticipate lower revenues and adjusted EBITDA. Typically, Q3 sees the ships return to operation, positively impacting our variable higher contracts, and Q4 is expected to be the strongest as we approach the winter season. Our CapEx related to drydocking is expected to be around $5 million, to be depreciated over five years at about $1 million annually. Reviewing our fleet, we currently maintain a minimum charter backlog of 50 years, with expectations for that to increase to about 69 years as options are activated. Contracts extend as far as 2033 and include strong agreements with supermajors through various years up to 2029 and beyond. Flex Constellation, which had a short stint in the spot market, is now under a 10-month charter with an option to extend through the end of Q1 2026, ensuring 100% coverage for this year and consistent cash flow. The financial outlook remains positive, with a strong cash position of $383 million and no debt maturities until 2028. Before handing over to Knut for financial insights, I want to emphasize our dividend decision criteria. Despite a cautious view of the spot market due to a high volume of vessels available, we are confident in our earnings and cash flow. We've continued to build backlog and increase earnings visibility through new contracts. Our financial health is solid, with no CapEx liabilities beyond our drydocking projects for this year. Now, I’ll turn it over to Knut.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

Thank you, Oystein. Let’s review the financial highlights for the quarter. Revenues for the first quarter reached $90.2 million, translating to a Time Charter per day of $76,500. The decline in the first quarter compared to the fourth quarter is due to the seasonal softening of the spot market affecting Flex Artemis’s revenues, along with some off-hire days for Flex Constellation while it underwent drydocking. Operating expenses decreased to $16.7 million in the first quarter, which is attributed to the timing of when certain operating expenses are recognized. As a reminder, the fourth quarter included several swing sets expensed on our fleet, while there were none in the first quarter. Operating expenses may fluctuate between quarters, but we maintain our guidance of $14,900 per day for the full year. Interest expenses remained stable quarter-on-quarter, but we recorded a net gain of $7.3 million on derivatives in the first quarter, which includes $700,000 in unrealized gains and $6.6 million in realized gains. We also amended one of our interest rate swaps, reducing the duration of a $50 million swap and receiving $5 million in cash proceeds. Consequently, net income for the quarter amounted to $33.2 million or $0.62 per share. For the adjusted figures, we remove unrealized gains from interest rate derivatives and foreign currencies, totaling $700,000 for the interest rate derivatives and a $400,000 FX loss. We then add back the $5 million received from the interest rate derivative amendment that shortened its tenure to July 2025, yielding an adjusted net income of $37.9 million or $0.70 per share. Regarding cash flow for the quarter, we generated $49 million from operations, with slightly higher net working capital resulting from prepayments related to two drydockings. We paid $26 million in debt amortization and noted that we spent $7.5 million more on debt reduction compared to fleet depreciation. Additionally, the $5 million from the swap termination and $40 million in dividends brought our cash balance at the end of the quarter to $383 million. Our funding portfolio remains unchanged apart from scheduled amortizations, and we emphasize the mix of financing through leases and term loans from diverse geographical sources. We have a $400 million revolving credit facility for cash management during this high-interest rate environment. With $383 million available cash, we repaid our RCF over the quarters to minimize interest costs. It’s important to remember that our first loan maturity is in 2028. Our interest rate hedging portfolio consists of derivatives with a current book value of $45 million, along with nearly $200 million in fixed-rate leases, providing us with a solid hedge ratio in this high-interest rate context. During the first quarter, we reduced the duration of a $50 million swap, resulting in $5 million in cash proceeds, and subsequently, in the second quarter, a similar reduction for another $50 million will yield an additional $5.4 million in cash proceeds next quarter. We also just released our Sixth Annual ESG Report for 2023, detailing our initiatives to reduce emissions and our approach to environmental impact, business ethics, and health and safety for our seafarers and onshore staff. A significant highlight is our 7% reduction in emissions compared to 2022. This report should be reviewed alongside our CDP report from last quarter, where we received a B rating, an improvement from B- in 2022. That wraps up the financial overview, and I’ll hand it back to you, Oystein.

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, let's look at the market. Best way to start looking at the market is to look at exports and imports. As you can see here on the left-hand side of the graph, there are three major exporters of LNG, with the US now becoming the largest one, 29 million tons in the first four months of the year. Australia and Qatar are neck and neck, both of them at 28. So those three countries are the major exporters. Despite Russia and sanctions on Russia, there's really not any widespread sanctions on Russian LNG, although there are sanctions on the new project from Russia, Arctic LNG 2, which I will cover more. Despite this, Russia is still growing and maintaining the fourth largest exporter of LNG. Malaysia is the fifth, and then there's a lot of other countries in the other bracket, including Norway. On the import side, we have seen a marked shift this year in where the cargos are flowing. Europe entered storage levels at a very high level and has been lucky two winters in a row in terms of the winter temperatures and thus the gas requirements. With ample storage levels in Europe, Europe has been pulling back from the market, which has also sent prices down to very competitive levels. This has opened up a lot of demand in Asia and especially emerging Asia. China, despite somewhat disappointing growth in China after scrapping off the COVID policies a bit more than a year ago, is growing very healthily, up 15%, and has become once again the biggest importer. Japan is flat, together with South Korea and Taiwan, which are the more mature Asian economies. India has seen a lot of economic growth and optimism lately, growing at the same pace as China, at 15%. As you can see, the highest growth actually is in the other package, which includes a lot of emerging Asian economies, up 28%. The biggest outlier I would say is Thailand, where we see growth this year, 1 million tons, up 25%. Thailand actually also grew 25% for the full year last year. So we do see that the prices are spurring demand in Asia, which I will cover on the next slide here. You can see the graph of the price of LNG has come down a lot. August 2022 was the peak when European gas prices hit $100 per million BTU, on par with $600 per barrel of oil. Today, we are stabilizing around $11, $12 for both the LNG in Europe or the gas price in Europe TTF, and then the JKM, which is the Asian spot prices, where we actually now see a situation where spot LNG is cheaper than contracted LNG. About approximately one-third of this market is spot market, where people are contracting the LNG on a spot basis, while the other part of the market is contracted, the LNG, which is typically priced towards oil prices at a discount of around 20%. Henry Hub is flatlined at around $2, which makes it very profitable for US exporters to export natural gas out of the US to international markets. I would say as Stephen from Bloomberg covered in our article recently, these prices are spurring demand in Asia, and of course, it has a huge impact on this price drop, especially as I will cover in Europe, which is very dependent on spot prices. When they fall, the importers get a lot more LNG for their money, and it's almost like a tax relief. European LNG imports lagged, as I mentioned, 20% behind last year because of the ample storage levels and demand subversion, although we do see some green shoots in terms of demand coming back in Europe with these prices and then also some more contribution from renewables. While in Asia, we see much higher demand than last year and in the high range of the last couple of years. I mentioned Europe, the region most dependent on spot cargoes. Natural gas storage levels came out very high into this winter. Out of the season, we are around 67% full storage level now when we have started the injection season. The target for Europe is to get to 90% fully storage level by the end of November. I do think we will be on track to meet that target. But as I said, Europe is very dependent on spot cargoes. For the last couple of years now, they have been the buyer of first and last resort; now they are pulling back from the market. They're leaving room for emerging markets. As we have said in the past, Europe's energy policy is a bit like a Jon Bon Jovi song. It's living on a prayer, hoping that the weather will be good. If not, they have to pay up in order to entice those cargoes to go to Europe rather than Asia, which also means that when you see the contracting of new LNG, it's not some of the rather European superpowers signing up for flexible portfolio contracts. This includes ENI, Shell, Total, Equinor, buying flexible LNG from especially the US, where they can trade that worldwide as there is so much political uncertainty about the regulatory framework for natural gas in Europe when you have a 20-year horizon. Looking at bottlenecks, it's been a lot in the media lately, most recently with the Suez Canal. So traffic through Suez has been very limited, more or less non-existent this year after the Houthi rebellions started targeting marine traffic. We see Qatar is starting to divert cargoes through the Cape of Good Hope, 3 million tonnes this winter season, which is up basically infinitely. We've also had congestion issues in Panama, especially end of last year, but now we also see it with auction prices in Panama being very high. We've seen close to $2 million in auction fees for Panama. We see a huge drop in US LNG going through Panama, and they are rather being sent a long way from the US to Asia via Cape of Good Hope, as Suez is not really a very viable alternative. Both of these two trends are dragging out sailing distances and thus requiring more ships than if the canals were working properly, which is in general good for the shipping market as ships have to stay longer, and that you require more ships for each cargo in order to move the cargos. We have had a couple of questions lately about two topics, so we will just cover them briefly. What we see a lot is questions about, what about closure of the Strait of Hormuz, what will the impact be for the LNG market? Of course, there are two big LNG exporters in that region. While in oil, it's a lot about Saudi Arabia, about 20% of the oil is flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, which is rather a narrow strait. It's a bit similar for LNG. Here, the bigger producers are Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. While on oil, it's about 20% of the market; it's quite similar for LNG. About 20% of all LNG is traveling through this narrow strait. Of course, a closure of this would be devastating, not only for the exporter but also for the world economy, as energy prices would soar. We think that is a very, very low probability, but it's a high impact. On the right-hand side here, you can see the two major exporters, Qatar and the UAE, where those cargoes have gone in the last 16 months, from January 2023 until the end of April. You see a lot of these cargoes going to Asia, which makes sense; it's the shortest route, especially for India, which is very closely situated to these two countries. We don't think this will happen. The effects for the world economy of closing this strait are too big, both in terms of oil and LNG. Actually, Iran is also very dependent on getting their oil cargoes, especially sold, which are typically being sold to China. So China also has an interest in keeping the traffic through this strait open. Then the second question we get quite a lot is about Russia and what will happen with Russia. As I mentioned, Russia is the fourth biggest exporter and they're planning to ramp up Arctic LNG 2, which should be up and running. This project has been hit by sanctions, which are postponing the startup of this. The Russians state that the first train should be operational, but they are planning also to add further trains to this project, two more trains, which could bring up the capacity for the project from 7 million to 20 million tons, and they do have some other projects. This is big uncertainty. However, we have seen in the past that the Russians have been able to get surprisingly many hydrocarbons on ships. If we look at the oil and the petroleum market, we see now that for the EU, this week have not been able to sanction Russian LNG. It's really just the US and the UK which are not importing Russian LNG. The EU has let the member states decide whether they want to ban Russian LNG. In general, we think that all the cargoes here will be produced and we will have a bit of a similar trading picture that we have seen in the product and the oil side, where the BRICS are supporting each other. We do think that if Europe is not taking the Russian cargoes, the other countries in the BRICS, being Brazil, India, China, South Africa, are willing buyers of the Russian LNG, which will result in longer sailing distances. The limiting factor for Russia is, of course, the number of ice-breaking vessels they have. They will have to do more ship-to-ship transfers. Getting this Arctic LNG 2 project running is more challenging with all the sanctions. But we do not expect any shutting of Russian LNG. That has not been the case. On the oil side, we don't expect it to happen on the LNG side either. This could potentially be the start of an LNG Dark Fleet, and TradeWinds has a good article about a lot of activity on the steam side, with a lot of unknown buyers. If you don't have a subscription to that, I think we can cover this a bit here in our presentation. We believe the Russians are planning to do something similar to what we have seen on the oil and petroleum side, and that these cargoes will flow; they will be maybe soaking up some of the steam tonnage that would otherwise be scrapped. Looking at another driver here is of course coal. With the high LNG prices, coal has been coming back a lot. We have seen that in the EU during the energy crisis; coal really grew quite a lot, despite this not being the intended policy of the EU. With gas prices now coming down to earth, the EU has been able to reduce their imports. But China and India, the big coal consumers, continue to grow their coal consumptions. There's been a lot of talk about LNG and emissions. A good report recently from BRG Energy in April measured the GHG emissions from various sources of both LNG, pipeline gas, coal, etc., to measure the greenhouse gas emission intensity of these various sources. What they find is US LNG is quite good in terms of GHG emissions and thus reducing coal by around half in terms of emissions. The EIA also released a report recently this year, where they found that the methane emission from coal is slightly higher than the methane emission for the natural gas value chain. We do think that LNG is a good way of reducing emissions, not only the greenhouse gas emissions, but also the pollution emissions, being the SOx, the NOx, and the particle matter which are detrimental to people's health. We find LNG as a good solution, but that doesn't mean we have to be complacent. We still have to bring down emissions from the LNG value chain. We believe our ships, being the most modern ships, with a lot of these ships in our fleet—9 out of 13 being mega ships—hardly without any methane emissions, are a good solution in order to bring down emissions in the value chain. Before concluding, just have a look at the LNG shipping market. Newbuilding prices have been on an uphill path the last couple of years, gone up about 40% from the bottom, have stabilized now at around $260 million. This, together with a long lead time—lead time now typically four years, and high interest rates—has pushed up the long-term rates needed in order to invest in new ships to around $100,000. With the softer spot market, we see now shorter-term rates, where the five-year term rates are actually lower than the 10-year charter rate. Typically, shorter duration Time Charter rates tend to be higher than the long-term, but right now the whole rate curve is in contango, given the near-term weakness in the spot market. This is driven by what we see here on the next slide, where a lot of ships are coming for delivery in '24 and '25, while the new volumes to the markets are typically coming at the end of '25, into '26, and onwards, which I will detail shortly. We, however, see that with these high prices, contracting activity has been a bit more subdued lately. Qatar has been the most active, buying more of the ships they have reserved as they are rapidly expanding their capacity and need ships. We now have a situation where our order book stretches all the way out to 2031. That said, even though there's a lot of ships for delivery, more or less, all of these ships are contracted. They are not contracted on speculation. Two reasons for this: the high growth, which I will cover shortly in the market, requires more ships to meet that growth, and the fact that we have a lot of older steam ships that are economically uncompetitive, and we need to renew the fleet and scrap these older ships. Hence, we need new ships to replace those older ones. Rates today, with spot rates for modern tonnage at around $50,000, mean that the steam ships are making rates in the low $20,000 range; considering the cost of docking these ships, which are very expensive to dock because they are old. This means that these ships are running at operational expense levels, and if you add installment and interest costs on top of that, these ships are not making any money at all. Together with the number of these ships coming off long-term contracts, we think, as described in TradeWinds today, this will result in more steam ships being scrapped in the coming years. This, along with more growth, will rebalance the market sometime from the end of '25, '26, '27 onward, when we have ships available again in the market. To conclude, as mentioned, revenues are in line with guidance, net income and adjusted income, $33 million and $38 million, respectively, giving us $0.62 or $0.70 of EPS, depending on the measure. We have done a lot of contracts this year for three extensions and one new contract as mentioned, drydockings are going according to plan. We expect Q2, as usual, to be the softest quarter for the year. But once we get both ships back in operation in Q3 and the spot market typically gets tighter in Q3 and even more so in Q4, we expect revenues and earnings to bounce back in Q3 and Q4. With that, and the strong contract position, we are declaring a dividend of $0.75, an 11% yield. As Knut has mentioned, we have a very strong financial position to keep on paying this dividend, which has been $510 million in the last three years. Let's see who is winning the Flex Summer gift in the Q&A session.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

Thank you for the questions you have sent in. You mentioned, maybe you should kick off with one of the comments you mentioned at the end here. There's been a number of comments regarding the dividend and sustainability of the dividend.

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

I think there are a couple of items. Of course, we look at earnings. I think you know the best measure, and that's why we have the adjusted numbers, is the adjusted earnings per share of $0.70. There we only include the realized gains and not the unrealized gains. So we are paying out slightly more in our earnings today, but it's not much. It's slightly more in terms of how we look at it. Of course, we have a contract portfolio. As I mentioned, we do have ships coming off charters later in this decade from '26, '27, '28 onward, where we do see the ability to possibly recontract those ships at higher rate levels. Another factor is, we have $383 million of cash, and every quarter we are paying down our debt. Once your debt gets lower, your interest cost also gets lower. So that means that when you have $383 million of cash, we could do either two things: we could do what you would call a dividend recap. We don't need to have $383 million on a balance sheet. We could probably pay a huge one-off dividend of $250 million or so and then rather stay on a lower cash balance level. However, we have structured a lot of this cash as a $400 million revolver, so we don't really pay the cost of having it, the cost of carrying it. We reduce the revolver during the interim of quarters, where we are paying around 70 basis points to have it on standby until '28. It's more about those kinds of factors. We do think options will be declared. A lot of these options have higher rates. We think that eventually, over time, our earnings will grow, and then over time, our interest expenses will fall once we are deleveraging. As Knut showed in his graph, we are deleveraging $7.5 million more per quarter than our depreciation. We are quite comfortable with that. We can run this company with less than $100 million of cash. We don't have a lot of working capital. We saw this quarter, we had a bit of build-up on working capital, mostly due to prepayment of drydockings, but we are in a time charter business, which means that all charters are paying us higher the first day of the month at the latest, and then typically, we are paying our expenses later in the month and then debt in areas. This means that we have a negative working capital to run the business, which makes it quite easy to model the cash flow. Right now, we're paying out a bit more because we have the money to do it, and down the road, we think this will stabilize at the level where earnings will be up and interest expenses will be down. If you look at it, our OpEx $14,900, most of our cost is finance cost is installments and interest. I believe one time here, the Fed will pivot. It's only one time that we have had Fed hiking interest rates at this kind of level without having any effect on the real economy, and that's been in 1994. I do believe we will see a pivot where rates will be coming down as well. We have anticipated that by cutting a bit on the duration of our hedges, in order to be able to benefit from that as well. Then, of course, we have the decision criteria, which we shown in the slide deck.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

And Sherif Elmaghrabi from BTIG asked, with no maturities until 2028, have you given thought to prepaying some of the debt to increase financial flexibility? As we discussed in the presentation, we have the $400 million RCF. In between quarters, we use that, we prepay it down to reduce the interest rate cost. Essentially, this is a reduction of that in between quarters. But we have maintained the commitment, which, in our view increases financial flexibility if there are investments that can be made but also to support the business case in general.

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

It's like having a checkbook ready with very limited cost. We can jump on any opportunity. We have in the past provided bids on several ships, a lot of ships to be honest. We can then put a bid in on those ships without having to go to an investment bank or some bankers to underwrite the financing for us. We can bid because we have the revolver there, and this gives us a lot of flexibility. If we pay it back, we don't get it back, so it reduces the flexibility.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

And that segues exactly into the next topic of how to spend it and investments. Certain questions are more specific. We've been sort of muted on newbuildings on the speculative side, but the question is more regarding the opportunities to order newbuildings backed by a long-term contract.

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Lately, it's been mostly Qatar being active in the tender market, ordering more than 100 ships based on these tenders and contracts. We have not participated in that for reasons we have explained in the past. So there have been very few tenders for new buildings. Also being a reflection of the fact that new building prices are high. Lead time is high. Once you have a risk-free rate at 5.3% and you have to wait four years to get the ship, that also drags up the cost of that ship. So that $260 million might easily become $280 million and $285 million when you're also adding in supervision costs. If you do a calculation on it, that's why you get to these rates of $100,000. Today, there's a lot of modern ships on the water MEGI/XDF, which means that instead of doing tenders for new builds, more people are looking at existing tonnage. We find it more favorable to bid on all ships. We have Constellation coming up in '25 or '26. We have Ranger coming up in '27. We have Aurora, Volunteer coming up in '28, which means that we can rather bid on the basis of those existing ships and probably be more competitive than building a new ship. That said, we are looking at it from time to time, but we find it more interesting to market our existing ships. We sometimes look for buying second-hand tonnage. So far, we have not been successful. Being successful in bidding and buying ships is really about having the highest bid. That doesn't necessarily mean making it successful if you win. We try to always measure if we are buying other ships, we don't want to impact our dividend capacity negatively. So if buying ships and getting a lower return, then paying our dividends is what we have to do, we'd rather pay out the dividend.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

There's a specific question on ship technology and size. Would you consider 180,000 cubic for any advantages by that size?

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Yeah, our advantage is it's 6,000 cubic bigger. That's the main upside. There are downsides; however, it makes it slightly less tradable possibly. You have to do Ship Shore Compatibility Studies. It's a bit easier when most people are doing the 174,000 size, which is the kind of the market standard. But for sure, we're open to look at 180,000. There are pros and cons. What we are most focused on is price. We'll measure that against the price. If buying 180,000 is a lot more expensive, then maybe not. If it's basically the same price, well, maybe we do it.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

It was a general perception that newer is better, but commercially there's not too much of a difference between a newbuilding today versus our vessels. Can you say something about the commercial attractiveness of our vessels versus a newbuilding?

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Yes. You're right. There are like three or four different technologies. You have the steam and then you, of course, have new steam and old steam. Then you have the tri-fuel, and in that tri-fuel segment, you also have a bit, the first-generation tri-fuels and then the second generation, plus some size difference. Once you get into the two-stroke, you have a modern diesel engine for our ship, which can burn LNG. The thermal efficiency of that engine is basically the same as all ships as the new builds; it's around 50% to 52% thermal efficiency. On the ships being built today, it's more about adding more equipment. So maybe they're adding a full relic. We have full relic on three out of four ships. We have partial relic on four out of four ships. That is a factor. Maybe you add this air lubrication, which is kind of a compressor pushing bubbles under the hull to reduce drag or friction through the water, which optimizes speed a bit. Some energy-saving devices, but a lot of energy-saving devices, we are retrofitting to our ships. There are very few differences in terms of our new build today and the new buildings we have today. Efficiency is more or less the same. I think there's one benefit of having a ship that's been trading for a while. It's been to a lot of ports. It has already checked all the boxes in terms of the Ship Shore Compatibility Studies. You don't have to do that work all over again. New ships sometimes have new hiccups when you take delivery of them. We have found out of those hiccups and we have corrected those, which means you have a ship with a proven track record in terms of operational performance. People always like new, but all ships are as good as new. If you look at the pictures from some of our drydockings, these ships look brand new once they're getting out of the dock after a five-year special survey.

Knut Traaholt, CFO

I think that concludes the Q&A session for this time.

Oystein Kalleklev, CEO

Yeah. Okay. The gift. Let's give it to Scott then because it's a good question. So, Scott, you will be the lucky winner of all the stuff I showed earlier, as well as this bathing towel, Flex on the Beach. I wish you a very good summer. I hope you enjoy it. Remember to use the sunscreen. We will be back in August, hopefully, when it's still summer, with our Q2 numbers, which we have guided today. We do think Q3 will be stronger because then we have all ships in operation. Rates will typically be higher in August than they are in May. Historically, we have started to approach six-digit numbers once we get into late August-September. For us, it doesn't matter that much. We're fully covered for the year. 12 of the 13 ships are on fixed higher, but we have one ship linked to the spot market, so we want the spot market to be good. A good spot market typically drags up the term rates. With that, thank you for joining and have a good summer.