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

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How does the paper market look compared to it? So the answer is there’s very little liquidity and the liquidity that is there is usually quite unattractive. Sometimes simply from a point of view of pricing or counterparty. Maybe, one point I wanted to add on the question of where did the demand come from last year. And of course, Russia, Ukraine really was captivating the headlines. And of course, it also drove a lot of psychology in terms of that angst around where do we get our product supplies from and what does this really all mean. If you go back and dissect the ton-mile data for last year, you will see that there was a lot of things happening in the market that had really nothing to do with Russia, Ukraine. There was a lot of ton-mile demand coming from South America.

Refining system is still fairly inefficient there, a lot of economies reemerging from COVID and requiring a lot of mobility, industrial demand from South Africa. But just to make the point again, also new streams of demand €“ ton-mile demand coming into play around non-petroleum-based commodities used for biofuel or biofuel blending. I think an example that is probably now attracting a bit more visibility in the market is used cooking oil. Really think of it as used cooking oil that gets shipped in more lots from Asia to Northern European refineries to produce and blend biofuel with. So there’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s happening that goes beyond just Russia, Ukraine, even though, of course, that did have an impact. But I feel like it’s easy to overlook those and I wanted to briefly highlight those elements.

Unidentified Analyst: Just to actually briefly follow-up on that. If €“ looking at the other side of that, if the conflict ended tomorrow, how does that change your medium-term outlook or short to medium-term outlook? Did it €“ does the conflict essentially tighten the market faster than it would have naturally? You still have the supply/demand imbalance going forward even?

Gernot Ruppelt: Yes. I think, certainly, it has done something has created a lot of extra volatility and that’s helped shift the momentum increasingly in the owner’s favor. But even if you look at trade patterns today, there’s a lot of demand in places that really have nothing to do with what goes on in Europe. But I think it’s also important to point out that even if they were to end tomorrow, I think these changes in supply routes are probably here to stay. And I would be very surprised if politically or for all the other reasons, Northern Europe would shift back quickly towards using Russian diesel or Russian crude oil. And equally, once some of these street lanes get established also they kind of stick. So as some of these people in Middle Eastern and Asian countries are used to actually importing Russian diesel, the distance really is negligent. It’s about the price incentive, pretty strong.

Unidentified Analyst: Thank you. I wanted to dig into the energy transition investments you guys have been making. You mentioned in the slides, cover investments, the 60% IRR. Can you sort of talk about what has changed relative to when IMO 2020 was implemented, like why now? Why are you investing in scrubbers now? And then kind of second part of that is you mentioned 12 ETP investments. Any degrees of success? But are those sort of all the low-hanging fruit outside of full fuel, O&G, methanol, et cetera, ammonia, sort of do you believe that the low-hanging fruit has been picked on?

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