Thank you for standing by. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tsakos Energy Navigation Conference Call on the Second Quarter 2022 Financial Results. We have with us Mr. Takis Arapoglou, Chairman of the Board; Mr. Nikolas Tsakos, President and CEO; Mr. Paul Durham, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. George Saroglou, Chief Operating Officer of the company. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today. I will now pass the floor over to Mr. Bornozis, President of Capital Link, Investor Relations Advisor of Tsakos Energy Navigation. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. I'm Nicolas Bornozis of Capital Link, Investor Relations Advisor to Tsakos Energy Navigation. This morning, the company publicly released its financial results for the second quarter of 2022. In case you do not have a copy of today's earnings release, please call us at 212-661-7566 or email us at ten@capitallink.com and we will have a copy for you right away. We will send a copy to you by email. Please note that parallel to today's conference call there's also a live audio and slide webcast, which can be accessed on the company's website on the front page at www.tenn.gr. The conference call will follow the presentation slides. So please, we urge you to access the presentation slides on the company's website. Please note that the slides of the webcast presentation will be available and archived on the website of the company after the conference call. Also, please note that the slides of the webcast presentation are user controlled. And that means that by clicking on the proper button you can move to the next or to the previous slide on your own. At this time, I would like to read the Safe Harbor statement. This conference call and slide presentation of the webcast contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may affect TEN's business prospects and results of operations. TEN is celebrating this year its 20th anniversary for its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. During this 20-year period the company has the enviable track record of uninterrupted dividend payments, regardless of market cycles. Including the current dividend, TEN have distributed $0.5 billion in dividends to its shareholders. At this moment, I would like to pass the floor on to Mr. Takis Arapoglou, the Chairman of the Board of Tsakos Energy Navigation. Please go ahead, Mr. Arapoglou.

Thank you, Nicolas. Good morning, and good afternoon to all. Thank you for joining us today for our second quarter and six months 2022 results presentation. Once again, our results and their evolution throughout the first half of the year, justifies our business model. In bad markets, it offers a stability and downside protection and allows us to perform far better than all of our peers, to continue to pay dividends and all our obligations uninterruptedly, maintaining impeccable relationships with our banks, reducing debt, raising capital cost cyclically and all these nice things which we always say. And in good markets, the model allows us to immediately benefit from market recovery as is the case now, which in turn allows us to continue all the previous mentioned actions to a higher degree and paying substantially higher dividends rewarding our shareholders in line with our increased profitability. This is the model, this is how it works. It has been tested many times and congratulations once again to Nikolas Tsakos and his team for these excellent results and for perfect -- a perfectly designed and executed strategy. Thank you. Nikolas Tsakos, over to you.

Chairman, thank you very much, and first of all, we will deliver our deep condolences for our all our UK and British investors and friends and colleagues to all [charters] around the world for loosing Queen Elizabeth II. And we hope that her memory, and I'm sure to all of us who never had the -- ever had any other Queen that we knew of, but -- and long live the King, England. So please accept all of our condolences to all our British and Commonwealth friends. And thank you Chairman for your good words. Our predictions in the last couple of quarters have been that the market only because of exiting the pandemic and returning to normality and with a very low and further shrinking order book of ships was going to turn. The unexpected events at least for us, of March and February 2022 have actually also surpassed our expectations and our forecast. The geopolitical events that dislocated the energy routes have given us many, many more ton miles -- perhaps more 10 miles than the current tanker fleet can actually cope and that's why we are seeing rates since the first quarter, second quarter. And I would say, the third and the fourth quarter seems that -- the best according to rates is yet to come. So the first six months of the year have been positive as we were expecting, but we expect the second half to be even stronger as we're going forward. And with this right now, I would like George to give us an update of where we have been and what the company has been doing and then Paul take us through the numbers. Thank you.

Thanks, Nikolas. Good morning to all of you joining our earnings call today. Let's go to the slides of our presentation, and let's start with Slide #3, where we see that TEN since inception in 1993, we have faced five major crisis and each time the company has come out stronger thanks to its countercyclical operating model. This time is no exception. When we started the year, it appeared that we were finally near the end of the COVID pandemic and we expected the post-COVID oil demand recovery to materialize gradually through the year. But since the end of February, we are facing another crisis, a war in Europe with tragic loss of human life. The war created new challenges for the world and our industry. Voluntary self-imposed but also many rounds of strict western sanctions against Russia, which is a major commodity exporter, changed pre-war trading routes for all commodities including oil, oil products and natural gas. Europe started replacing its short haul Russian crude oil imports with longer haul barrels from the United States, Brazil, West Africa and the Middle East, significantly increasing ton miles for European crude oil imports. Europe's sanction plan is to stop importing any Russian crude oil from December. Substituting these Russian barrels, we have an even higher multiplying effect on ton mile growth, which should keep the good freight market going stronger for longer. At the same time, Russia is trying to find alternative customers for its crude oil output, most likely in Asia, China and India in particular. India recently reported the Russian barrels and their import mix increased from 2% before the war to 12% currently. And European oil product imports like for example diesel, where Russia was also a main exporter, which stopped going to Europe from February of next…

Thank you, George. In quarter two, TEN earned a net income of just over $46 million after generating voyage revenue of over $217 million, which was $80 million more than in the prior second quarter, a 60% increase in revenues. Operating income in quarter two amounted to over $57.4 million, a positive turnaround of $70 million from the prior quarter two. While our Time Charter vessels generated over $97 million, the market environment created by geopolitical issues since February, allowed us spot vessels to add a further $120 million to total revenue. This in turn provided over $91 million of EBITDA, a threefold increase. The six months performance was also impressive within the period with EBITDA reaching over $133 million, double the previous EBITDA, while the company achieved a net income of $51.7 million in six months. Our fleet in quarter two, enjoy that high utilization of 93.6% partly due to a reduction in the number of dry dockings in the quarter with only three vessels competing dry dock in quarter two. Daily TCE per vessel in quarter two averaged close to $29,300, a 70% increase from the prior quarter two. While in the six month period, daily TCE was on average $24,500. Voyage expenses which include fuel costs increased due to rising oil prices caused by the market conditions relating to energy supplies throughout Europe. However, total operating income -- expenses rather, remained fairly stable with an increase of about 1%, nudging average daily OpEx per vessel to about $8,300 partly due to a modest fleet increase. The six month daily OpEx also remained at $8,000, partly due to a stronger dollar. Depreciation fell $2 million due to the value reductions last year of certain vessels offset by a similar amount of deferred amortization. Quarter two finance costs remained…

Thank you for the good news. And hopefully, we can report better news in the November quarter or as good at least. And with this, I would like to open the floor for any questions. Thank you very much.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Ben Nolan with Stifel.

I guess my first question relates to asset prices, which you guys are just discussing a bit. Obviously, asset prices are a lot higher, both for secondhand and new builds. With a few exceptions, most of the growth recently has come through the new building market. Can you maybe just talk through sort of your appetite there and how you feel about ordering ships, given how much of an increase there's been in the cost of doing so?

Thank you. Well, I believe our timing so far has been quite on target. We try to always keep a good cash position and as the Chairman says, very close relationships to our financier so we can move when prices are lower. And then in that view we have started the green ship initiative ordering for dual fuel vessels. So I would say at the direst times of pricing a year and a half ago or a year and a bit ago in the summer of 2021 in the middle of the pandemic, and also our LNG and shuttle tankers were ordered about the same time. So we have a significant profit -- book profit from our investments there and there we will be enjoying a very good market with low operative and of courses as Georgios Saroglou, the COO said. In the meantime, we're looking at an order book, which I have never seen an order book also, such a low order book in my 30 years in business. So we believe that the earning capacity of our existing fleet is going to be maintained relatively strong to be conservative for the next couple years. You cannot have enough vessels right now as we see it, and we expect some of the ships with maintaining high scrap values physically to have to leave the market. On the pricing, we will be only looking at dual fuel vessels going forward. I think we said this in a couple of calls in the past, and nothing has changed on that. On the new buildings, we will be looking at dual fuel ships. We know that the value of those ships with inflation will be increased, and we will be looking to do those ships together with one of our clients, which we are discussing, as we've done in the previous one. Our model of profit saving that will cover all our obligations and gives us a small profit and profit saving above that with the major oil and end users, we will maintain it. So we will not stop looking or rebuilding the future as long as the figures make sense.

Okay. I appreciate the color there. And then my second one, and I'll turn it over, relates to the ATM. I know you guys did sell a little over $4 million, almost $5 million worth of shares on the ATM during the second quarter in the release. And obviously, the share price is materially higher than it had been. Just trying to get a sense of what are you thinking about that. Are you making a lot more money, so you don't need the ATM. It wouldn't appear as much as you did, but the flip side of that is the cost of capital is meaningfully better than it had been. So how are you thinking about the use of that going forward here?

Well, that was actually completing a program that the Board of Directors have authorized within the second quarter. So I think that's why we have this small amount just to do some housekeeping from our side. And as you rightly saw, there's a significant daily cash flow building up as we speak today. And so we will not be using the program in any significant manner going forward as we see things today.

[Operator Instructions] We will just pause for a brief moment to see if there's any final questions. There are no questions. I will hand the conference back over to management for closing comments.

Thank you. Well, I guess when we have good news, you don't need any more news. So I think that is a good sign. Again, I would like to thank all of our long-term shareholders for supporting the company. We have been here quarter-after-quarter maintaining and having a stable hands through the storms that we really went through. I think George mentioned that we have been through five major crisis and every time the company came out stronger. I think a year and a bit ago in one of those calls we said that, there is a storm happening out there, but we are navigating the ship steadily and we are looking forward to take measures to take advantage of the storm on the other side. And it seems that we are out of the -- we can see the horizon now. I think there is some more good news to come forward. I get the feeling from the appetite of our clients, which are out there looking to put their hands on good quality management, good quality ships. So our model, as the Chairman said, has not changed. We are not changing our views depending on each quarter. We have a long-term view of where we want to go. And with a mix of our spot and Time Charter employment, we know that we can sleep at night whatever happens by repaying all our obligations and leaving a little bit to pay dividend even in the worst market conditions. So I think a few companies can have this model, I can say that, from many really successful. And when things are strong, we still have a lot of ammunition to be able to take off the market immediately as it has seen in the last couple of quarters mainly.…