Frontline Ltd. (NYSE:FRO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Lars Barstad: I’m not that sure about employee Analysts. I must admit. But we have seen China quite aggressive in periods where they feel that the oil price is discounted and they’re preparing kind of for increased demand domestic demand. It’s, I believe, the highest we’ve seen from China is around 13 million barrels per day of imports in a sustained period of time. It’s difficult to say what I’m hearing a little bit is that I did allude to some of the oil production growth for oil export growth that we’ve seen and we’re back to pre-COVID levels. China is not back to pre-COVID levels in terms of domestic demand. They actually have a very big and high consuming airline market internally in China. And as we kind of go towards the summer where Europe is going to recover, we’re going to go on holiday to store the Americans and so our than the Chinese.

I think that’s going to be quite exciting considering the fact that the oil production levels are not really higher than what we had and we’re missing a couple of years of more and more demand growth, which historically at least has been between 1% and 2% per year. So I do subscribe to those that are quite bullish oil prices in the second half of the year. And I’m a bit worried about how the supply and demand picture is going to look once it’s fully up and running again. Obviously, OPEC has spare capacity, so they can still supply China with more barrels. But, yes, I’m looking forward to see how that story evolves. We also need to keep in mind here that although China has imported a lot of volume, they’re also exporting a significant amount of products that will obviously stop when domestic demand catches up.

So, yes, it’s going to be interesting.

Chris Robertson: Yes, definitely, very interesting. Thank you for that. That’s it from me.

Operator: Thanks, Steve.

Lars Barstad: Thank you, Chris.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. And I would like now to hand the conference over to our speaker, Mr. Lars Barstad for closing remarks.

Lars Barstad: Yes. Thank you very much for — again for dialing in and listening to our Q4 presentation. Frontline management is always available should you have further questions over the coming weeks. And I would like to obviously thank the Frontline organization for a fantastic result on a fantastic quarter. Thank you.

Operator: That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.