Navigator Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NVGS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Navigator Holdings Ltd. (NYSE:NVGS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 14, 2023
Randy Giveans: Welcome to the Navigator Holdings Conference Call for the Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results, live from Houston Texas. We have with us Mr. Mads Peter Zacho, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Gary Chapman, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Oeyvind Lindeman, Chief Commercial Officer; and myself, Randy Giveans, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development in North America. I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today. And as we conduct today's presentation, we'll be making various forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, the future expectations, plans and prospects from both a financial and operational perspective, and are based on management assumptions, forecasts and expectations as of today's date and as such are subject to material risks and uncertainties.
Actual results may differ significantly from our forward-looking information and financial forecast. With that, I now pass the floor to Mads Peter Zacho, the Company's Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, Mads.
Mads Peter Zacho: Thank you so much, Randy, and good morning, and thank you for dialing in to the Navigator Gas earnings call. First of all, I'd like to tell you how excited I am about introducing you to Gary Chapman, our new CFO, who joined Navigator just over a month ago. Gary’s long experience as a leader as well as a shipping and finance professionals has ensured that he has hit the ground running, and he is now already a value co-part of the Navigator Leadership team. You'll soon see and hear more from him, as Gary will review the financial results with you in a couple of minutes. I will now kick us off by reviewing the highlights of the third quarter, and what a quarter it was. We generated operating revenues of $138 million in Q3 2023.
This is up a strong 29% compared to the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA hit a new record $72 million for Q3, advanced improvement over last year's $42 million and higher than the results for the same quarter -- or the recent quarters this year. You may recall that Q3 is seasonally our weakest quarter, so we are pretty excited about this result for Q3. Adjusted earnings per share was $0.27 for Q3 2023. Our cash position remained robust at just below $108 million at quarter end, and that compares to $153 million when we entered 2023. As part of that picture, you should also be aware that this September, we bought $9 million worth of our own unsecured notes in open market using cash on hand. During the quarter, we paid a cash dividend of $0.05 per share and repurchased $3 million worth of our own shares.
We also now declare further $0.05 per share dividend plus just over $1 million worth of new share buybacks following our Q3 result. An important factor in our better operating result was fleet utilization running above 93% in Q3, comparing to just 85% same period last year. At the same time, our average TCE per day earned by our vessels were above $26,000 for Q3 2023 compared to about $22,000 in Q3 2022. Throughout -- our throughput at our joint venture ethylene export terminal were 0.25 million tons for Q3 2023 compared to 189,000 tons same period last year. The new expansion of the terminal is well underway, and we've already contributed progress payments of $27 million, made up of three payments of $9 million in each of April, August and October this year.
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