Ardmore Shipping Corporation (NYSE:ASC) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Anthony Gurnee: So the first question, we don’t typically talk a lot about the asset values because that’s what research analysts do. But we do think today, our net asset value is still €“ I would say, way ahead, but kind of meaningfully ahead of the stock price keeps going up, and it’s not going up right now because of asset values, but because of accrued earnings, holding building of equity in the companies. It’s probably around $700 million, $720 million. It just feels like the stock price has been chasing NAV all the way up right now. So the other question is where would we be without Ukraine war, I think we’d all be a lot happier. And €“ because it does €“ in spite of the fact that it’s had a positive impact on our business, it does really trouble us.

Gernot pointed out that at the beginning of last year, we were pivoting anyway to spot because we felt it was going to be a good year. And we thought by that, we thought maybe high teens. I think we would have been in the high teens today without the Ukraine war, which is still quite good.

Unidentified Analyst: You throw a few multi parts there. You just mentioned you pivoted the spot. But MR is typically in a market where you have long-term contracts, is it bit of customer behavior, they’re looking at the same data you’re looking at? Are we going to see the emergence of an attractive five-year kind of contract market in MRs, and how would you approach that? And then totally different question. I couldn’t help but notice on your sensitivity page started out with $35,000 and went up from there. Is there something we should be reading into that? Because normally, you would have put a few years ago, $35,000 around other side of half of the page.

Anthony Gurnee: Yes. Okay. So in terms of €“ I think I’d like to ask Gernot to comment a bit more about the market structure, but I would just make the observation that forward rates in our business are not so much a predictor. I guess where people think it’s going. It’s very often a degree, it’s a measure of risk aversion, a little bit like interest rates. But I’ll hand it over to Gernot. In terms of the sensitivity, look, the fact is that we fix ships at $125,000 a day a few months back, okay? So, when you go from fixing a few ships at $125,000 a day to all your ships at that level, not very much, okay? And that’s how inelastic this business is. So that’s why we wanted to show that. Gernot, do you want to comment on?

Gernot Ruppelt: Yes. The longer you go out in terms of duration, liquidity really becomes quite thin for time charter contracts. It is discounted quite heavily. But more importantly, you really have to start to wonder about kind of quality of counterparties as well. So obviously, looking at that as a bit of an insurance, many ways for people to try to lease out of contracts, and this has been done before, and these are not financial contracts. These are physical contracts, where it could be physical situations beyond any owners’ control that give the charter abilities to repeat those certain fixed pay contracts. That’s just as a general comment, right now, most liquidity is around six months to 12-month periods. I think I just asked my notes back €“ it’s mostly on six to 12-month period, and then you really have to look at what is the position of the ship, what’s the relative strength, the spot market.

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