Okeanis Eco Tankers (NYSE:ECO) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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The full earnings call is available at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/446194895
Summary
Okeanis Eco Tankers Corp reported a record-breaking Q1 2026 with high time charter equivalent rates and significant earnings, resulting in a $2 per share dividend, which is 88% of their net income.
The company highlighted strategic fleet growth with the addition of new vessels and successful refinancing efforts, reducing interest expenses significantly.
Management expressed optimism about future earnings, projecting Q2 to potentially surpass any previous annual earnings, driven by strong market conditions and strategic positioning.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Welcome to OET’s first quarter 2026 financial results presentation. We will begin shortly. Aristides Alafouzos, CEO and Heracles Varvitsiotis, CFO of Okeanis Eco Tankers Corp will take you through the presentation. He will be pleased to address any questions raised at the end of the call. Matters that are forward looking in nature will be discussed and actual results may differ from the expectations reflected in such forward looking statements. Please read through the relevant disclaimer on slide 2. I would like to advise you that the session is being recorded. We will begin the presentation now.
Aristides Alafouzos
Thank you for taking the time to join our Q1 2026 call. Q1 was a record quarter for our company and Q1 plus Q2 combined will be stronger than any previous year in our company’s history. In fact, the potential distributions tied to this half year are approaching our original listing price in 2018. It definitely was and is an exciting, stressful, challenging and demanding quarter. This cumulative pressure surely overshadowed the pleasure of earning so much for our shareholders, which is regrettable. Q1 began with a sell off in freight into mid January where the market turned by the continued exquisite fundamentals Venezuela reopening, India, diversifying imports and most importantly the extremely rapid consolidation of the VLCC market by CMACGM or Aponte Joint Venture. This strength continued until February 28th where the war in Iran began and set off a 2, 3, 4 week period of unprecedented strength in the tanker market overall. Following this explosive and unbelievable period, the market found a balance at extremely elevated rates where the loss of cargoes from Hormuz closure is offset by ton miles inefficiencies, vessels trapped inside and vessels outside waiting for the Hormuz to reopen. Earlier this week there were over 55 VLCCs and ballast waiting outside the high risk area for a potential reopening. This doesn’t include vessels waiting around Sri Lanka, off India, Singapore and the Sinokor fleet. Values and time chart rates have also seen consistent and profound strengthening throughout the quarter. We’re in a period of record income and the anchoring bias on values freight time chart rates from 20 years ago doesn’t hold anymore. The market needs to recognize this. What is the natural ceiling where rates and values can go internally? At OET and looking at Q2, one of our greatest challenges going forward is keeping tonnage available for the immediate exposure to a Hormuz’s reopening while optimizing our performance. I hand you over to go through the financials.
Heracles Varvitsiotis
Thanks. Let’s have a look at this record quarter we achieved 50-foot wide time charter equivalent of about $93,000 per vessel per day. That’s 106,000 per day on our spot and 104,000 on all operating VLCC days and 82,000 on our Suezmax operating days, all being spot. We report adjusted EBITDA of 110 million, adjusted net profit of 89 million and adjusted EPS of $2.33. This is basis our average share count for the quarter. Our board declared the 16th consecutive quarterly dividend of $2 per share. This represents 88% of our reported net income. On our current fully diluted share count post our January equity transaction. This is the highest quarterly dividend amount since the company’s inception, although I assume everyone is already modeling our second quarter. Over the last four quarters we have distributed per share or 96% of our reported net income. For the period in January we executed another successful and accretive equity raise of $130 million in gross proceeds against. Slide 5. Since our IPO in Oslo, we have distributed approximately two and a half times our initial market cap with over 550 million paid in dividends. Since we have had a fully delivered fleet in 2022, we have paid out 91% of our reported debt income, demonstrating clearly demonstrating our commitment to distributing value to our shareholders. Slide 6 We show the detail of our income statement for the quarter. TCE revenue stood at $132.2 million. At quarter end we had 176.5 million of cash that included a portion of the equity earmarked for the acquisition of the Nisos Campos boost. We also had almost $80 million in trade receivables. Our restricted cash figure as of March 31 includes an amount of 45 million we have deposited on short term against one of our loan facilities which has the feature that it reduces the interest pay just half a percent in on a net basis providing a better return than what we can achieve under time deposit rates. We may roll forward such cash characterized as restricted or a different amount on a short term basis depending on our cash flow needs and applicable rates. Our balance sheet debt was 683 million. Our book leverage stands at 41% while our market adjusted net MVP basis, latest broker values and pro forma for the acquisitions in recent transactions is now just over 30% on slide 8 looking at our fleets, I’m pleased to show the addition of our most recently acquired modern and high spec vessels. We have a total of 16 vessels on the water, eight Suez Maxs and Navy SSDs with an average age of only six years which will further improve once we get delivery shortly of the Nigami and N Boos currently under construction pending. As a reminder from a maintenance capex perspective, our only driver for 2026 is that of the middles 10 years earlier. Slide 9 Moving on to our capital structure, this is a quarterly update that have been personally looking forward to for a while. We recently announced new financings for four vessels as follows. We purchased back from insane leaseback and refinanced the Misovra with a new 50 million dollar bank loan maturing in 7 years priced at SOFR plus 125 basis points. This transaction closed last week. We will purchase back from its sale and lease back and refinance the Nisos Despotic co with another 50 million bank loan maturing in nine years priced at SOFR plus 130 basis points. This transaction is expected to close in early June. We have also signed a 90 million backlog for the Nisos Tigani and Nisos vous maturing in 8 years priced at SOFR plus 120 basis points. The Tigani will close in a couple of weeks and the VUS in early July we have taken advantage of the very competitive financing market and our financiers appetite to transacted us. Our most recent transactions have demonstrated the relationships and track record we have developed in two key banking markets for us in Greece and in Thailand. We now have staggered maturities all the way through 2035. Extremely attractive pricing and we have finally put behind us all our legacy saving lease plans. On slide 10 we look at our pricing on a vessel by vessel. All our loans are not priced below 2% with an with a weighted average margin of 1.47%. That’s an improvement of more than 200 basis points compared to where we were prior to the Libor to software transition in mid 2023 on a consolidated debt of over 750 million that’s performed for the upcoming drawdowns. That’s an impact of more than 15 million a year straight into the bottom line, quarter on quarter. For a while we have been seeing the material improvement into our interest expense and starting in Q3 of this year when all this will have concluded, we expect to see the full effect. We’re extremely happy with where we are today, but of course by nature we continuously monitor the market for opportunities that may further optimize our structure, trying to improve one or all aspects of our debt structure whether it’s pricing, tenure, amortization profile or other terms that might add flexibility and agility. I will now turn it back to our statements for the commercial market update.
Aristides Alafouzos
Thank you Rakli and great job on the refis. Now as I said during the intro, Q1 was a record quarter for the company. Amazing fundamentals. Venezuela reopening, the consolidation of the VLCC market and likely the biggest shock to oil trading in the past 50 years all converged in the same three months we concluded fixtures in Q1, mostly realizing Q2 that we could never have previously fathomed. Absolutely remarkable. Fleetwide, TCE came in at $93,100 per day with 106,400 on our spot VLCCs and 81,600 on the Suezmaxes and we achieved perfect utilization across the field. One commercial mistake I want to flag was fixing the nisos Nicoria for one year at a net rate of $90,000 per day. With hindsight, the market gave us much more spot market that is Separately Denise’s Queiros is currently stuck inside the AG and we haven’t added an additional line for her on the table. She is being compensated on a commercially agreed rate while she waits to get out. We took delivery of the Nisos Piperi, Nisus, Serico, Hula also in this quarter the market was so firm that we were able to fix a car. We were able to fix cargoes from West Africa on our first voyages and get them into our trading patterns. But the ballast voyage from Korea to West Africa was far longer than the lay in, which did negatively impact our Suez Max earnings. On the Suez Maxes we focused on trading the ships in the Atlantic Basin. We did not fix any vessels into the east and kept the voyages shorter while focusing on optimization and our preferred trades on the BLCCs. Early in the quarter we committed to longer voyages to lock in higher ends, balancing with some shorter voice in the east to keep our fixing exposure intact within the quarter. The strategy is what ultimately led to porkidos being trapped inside the Hormuz, but the same strategy is what set up the Q2 numbers. Comparing our Q1 against the peers who have already reported we are at 28 and a half percent higher on our BLCCs and 20% higher on our suit. Looking at our guidance for Q2, I believe …
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