Euronav NV (NYSE:EURN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Euronav NV (NYSE:EURN) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 2, 2024
Euronav NV isn't one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Dear all, welcome to the Euronav Q4 Earnings Call. Everyone is muted and the questions can be taken after presentation. I will now give the floor to Alexander.
Alexander Saverys: Thanks very much, Enya. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome to our Q4 2023 earnings call. My name is Alexander Saverys, I’m the CEO of Euronav; and I’m joined by my brother, Ludovic Saverys, our CFO, and I will immediately hand the word to him.
Ludovic Saverys: Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for dialing in on our Q4 earnings call. We’ll go through the presentation of the Q4 results, focusing on the financial highlights first and then Alexander will take over on the corporate developments and the tanker markets. And we’re extremely pleased to say that we’ve had our record Q4 in the history of the company. Since 1997, we have been able to deliver a profit for this quarter of $411 million. Obviously, that result has been skewed by capital gains out of the sales of part of the Frontline fleet of $323 million. Nevertheless, the underlying profit of $88 million puts forward a strong Q4 based on the robust freight markets. We’re happy also to include that in Q4 we’ve continued our fleet expansion within Euronav with another two VLCCs, which today still puts us with an order book of four VLCCs on order and four Suezmaxes.
The -- on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see that the Q4 results were far above our P&L breakeven, but also that the Q1 guidance is going in the right direction. Alexander will continue on that. We fixed for Q1 46% at $50,430 per day for the VLCCs and on the Suezmaxes, we have 54% fixed at $55,000. If you look on the next slide, we are highlighting obviously the key metrics of our company. We still have a leverage on book equity of about 30%. Obviously, with the sale of most of the VLCCs to Frontline, we have strengthened our liquidity dramatically. End of year, we ended the year with $1.243 billion in liquidity. As of today, as most of the vessels of the CO2 Frontline have been delivered, we are close to $2.5 billion in liquidity.
The net profits of $411 million, I’ve mentioned, happy also to include that for the full year, we are at the $862 million profit, from which $490 million is coming from the business and $372 million from capital gains. Q4 has also been highlighted by a new chapter for Euronav, which Alexander will continue to explain. We have decided not to do a dividend for Q4 until the mandatory offer is over. Many of the stakeholders within Euronav, investors, analysts and others, have asked us in the last couple of weeks what the dividend policy would be for the company. Previous management and Euronav as a standalone pure-play tanker company has aimed to dividend out 80% of its net profits. Going forward, and if the transaction with CMB.TECH will be consumed next week, the Board of Directors has decided that the dividend policy will be a full discretionary one.
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