Earnings Labs

FLEX LNG Ltd. (FLNG)

Q4 2020 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 17, 2021

$31.82

+1.28%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Flex LNG Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Presentation. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today on the 17 of February 2021. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today Øystein Kalleklev. Please, go ahead. Øystein Kalleklev: Thank you and welcome to today's Flex LNG webcast where we are presenting the fourth quarter 2020 and full year 2020 results. My name is Øystein Kalleklev and I'm the CEO of Flex LNG Management. I will be joined today by our CFO, Harald Gurvin, who will go through the numbers as well as providing our financial update. Our presentation today is a bit longer than usual, as we are reporting not only fourth quarter, but also the 2020 numbers. So we thought it would be appropriate to touch on some topics in greater detail. Today's presentation will be the last with Harald, as he will step down from his position. Harald joined Flex LNG as CFO on January 1, 2019, and have done a fantastic job for us, securing attractive long-term financing for all our ships and successfully listing the company on New York Stock Exchange. Harald joined from our related company SFL, where he's been since 2006, serving as a CFO in the period from 2012 until he joined Flex. We have recently recruited senior banker Knut Traaholt to take over the CFO role during second quarter. Knut is a veteran shipping banker with experience from both Swedbank and ABN AMRO and he will be in the fortunate position to inherit a super strong balance sheet and a fully financed company from…

Harald Gurvin

Analyst

Thank you, Øystein. Looking at the income statement on Slide 8, revenues for the quarter came in at $67.4 million, up from $33.1 million in the previous quarter. The increase is due to improved markets with time charter equivalent rate for the quarter of approximately 74,000 per day, up from 47,000 in the previous quarter and also the increase in the fleet following delivery of three vessels in the third quarter and Flex Amber in October, which also impacted vessel operating expenses. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $50.2 million, up from $21.9 million in the previous quarter. Interest expenses were up due to a full quarter of interest on the debt related to the three vessels delivered during the third quarter and execution of the $156.4 million, Flex Amber sale and leaseback upon delivery of the vessel in October. Net income for the quarter was $25.8 million or $0.48 per share, up from $3.8 million or $0.07 per share in the previous quarter with adjusted net income of $24.2 million or $0.45 per share, up from $1.2 million or $0.02 per share in the previous quarter. Looking at the full year 2020, reported net income of $8.1 million or $0.15 per share. As Øystein mentioned, we took delivery of our first vessel three years ago in January 2018 and this is our third year in a row delivering that numbers. Adjusted net income for the year was $34 million or $0.63 per share. Then moving on to our balance sheet, as per December 31 on Slide 9. We had a solid liquidity position of $129 million at year-end, an increase of $53.1 million during the quarter, which we'll get back to on the next slide. During the year we took delivery of a total of four vessels, of which…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from line of Greg Miller [ph] from BTIG. Please ask your question.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Yeah. Hi. Thank you and good afternoon. Harald, congratulations we're going to miss you. Guys, I have a little bit of questions around the dividend. Obviously, we like to move higher in the dividend. We talk about it being related to Q4. But as we -- guidance -- clearly that's exceptional guidance. I guess I'm just curious how we should think about dividends going forward now that we're going to have the final vessel be delivered in May. And really what I'm getting at is if Q1 is going to be a nice strong quarter, but as we move in towards the April-May period and we see seasonal weakness. Any way we should be thinking about -- how we should be thinking about kind of bracketing the dividends just given that there is still some cyclicality, seasonality around LNG ship pricing? Øystein Kalleklev : Thanks, Greg. I don't know have you got married because usually before at least in 2020 you were named Greg Lewis. So –

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

That's a new year. We should try new things I guess. Øystein Kalleklev: Okay. But okay Greg Miller. Yeah, the dividend. So our dividend is always, I think some companies they tend to have more like call it a structured approach to this where they either have like a minimum dividend and then they pay out 70% above that level or something like that or they say we're going to pay out 70% of earnings. For us it's – we're thinking a bit more common sense about it. We don't want to manage the dividend too much. We wanted to reflect how much money we are earning and how much money we have in surplus. So right now with the legacy of Harald's financing, we have a very good financial position. We have more money than we need in the company and at least the short-term outlook is good. So it's natural for us to increase the dividend. So it's more a question at what level should you put it. I think I held this presentation in September on the Pareto Conference because we get a lot of questions about the dividends. And people are – have been waiting for dividend, because we have been in investment mode now for about three years. And now with kind of the investment done we spent more than $20 million on CapEx last year despite having the ships financed. So how to think about the dividend? So we have $840 million of equity and this is all common equity. So there's no fancy equity here with some preference on dividends. So in order to give people a fair return you could say that you should have maybe let's say a 12% return on your equity that's the typical number analysts are putting in…

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

No that's great. That's great to hear actually. And then just, obviously, you mentioned the balance sheet, you're wrapping up the initial new builds well maybe that was the second phase of the new build program where you're taking delivery of our last new build next quarter. Obviously, new builds are always an opportunity. But on that -- one of those on the slide in the back where you talk about, obviously, the committed vessels and the uncommitted vessels I think there was around 30 uncommitted vessels that maybe they were ordered on spec maybe not. Is there going to be -- do we think there'll be a potential for some of those uncommitted vessels to end up being resales over the next 12 months? Øystein Kalleklev: That might very well be. But I -- if you look at those, we have to compare our stock. Our stock is basically our ownership stake in our ship, a brand-new ship and some cash. So 13 ships, $130 million of cash. So if you buy a stock, you're buying a slice of all those shares and then you get $10 million of cash attached to that ship. We also get financing attached to it. And financing is not very easy to replicate the process we have done raising that financing. It's -- banks are a bit more hesitant lately about committing financing unless you have long-term charters. So we think that our slice of all ships should be more worth than our ship on the yard where you don't have that financing attached and where you don't have that cash attached and where you don't have a setup for managing the ship because building, you know, ship management time -- management system do take time both the technical and also the commercial. So forced to, kind of, go buying some of those on resale. They have to be more attractive than buying the stock and right now and lately that has certainly not been the case.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Okay. Thank you very much for the time. Great presentation. Øystein Kalleklev: Thanks, Greg.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Øystein Kalleklev: I think if we have some questions from the web we can always take a couple of those. Okay. So you -- are you checking? Yeah. I think we were talking for like an hour here. So I guess everything is very clear and evident hopefully. If not we are back with presentation in May. We will have more clarity as I mentioned to Greg about economic development, how this recovery will play out. And hopefully we then -- not hopefully we're very confident we then will deliver fantastic results for Q1 and provide more guidance on the future. So thanks a lot again for joining and I wish you a good day.

Operator

Operator

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect. Have a nice day. Speakers please standby.