Pangaea Logistics Solutions, Ltd. (NASDAQ:PANL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Poe Fratt: Great. And then Mads, if we could talk about, one, how is the Ice-Class market looking for the rest of the year? And then two, you really scaled back the chartered-in fleet over the course of the fourth quarter. Can you give us an idea of where you are on the chartered-in fleet right now? And how you – how the charted-in fleet looks for the rest of the year? And then just layer on top of that, just where you might see the one to two assets? Is it Ice-Class or non-Ice-Class? Sort of what you’re looking at to continue the fleet renewal program?

Mads Petersen: Happy to do that. I think assets, starting with your last point there in terms of the assets we’re looking at for – to add to the fleet to the own fleet. Our focus is on our sort of conventional fleet, the Supramax and Ultramax. That is probably €“ you know, that’s why we have our focus and that’s why we look to that to the fleet. We’re not looking to add to the aircraft fleet at the moment in any size really. In terms of the chartered-in fleet, I mean, that number will fluctuate in accordance with the market, our customers, how busy they are and ultimately, of course, our view on where we think the market will be. So you’re absolutely right. That number did go down throughout the latter half of last year. That’s the way that this part of the business is designed to operate.

It – when the market is dropping like it is, the last quarter last year, we can re-price the fleet. We can redeliver the challenging fleet as we go and then we fix and ship cheaper, right? So that means that rather than having maybe some short period shifts in the fleet, we will just execute on time to have trips to extract the most value out of whatever market is at the current time, right? We have done that before. We didn’t want to load up on peer times going into Q1. That proved to be the right decision as the market kept trending lower. But as things are improving now, I imagine that this part of the fleet will actually sort of will grow a bit over the next, yeah, three to six months depending on what happens in the market. We’re always seeing the early signs of better value in the short period market, and we are trying to extract that.

We don’t have a fixed number of ships that we need to employ in this part of the business that it is designed to be dynamic and contract and expand in line with the market. And then on the Ice-Class front, the ships have been predominantly engaged in sort of the North Atlantic market at the moment, and we have been doing some business out of the San Lorenzo. We haven’t done really anything in the Baltic following our decision that was already taken last year to not engage in any trade from Russia or the Russian with cargoes bus in origin. So that did impact the earnings of that fleet compared to where normally would be this time of year. But it is an efficient fleet, it’s a modern fleet. It can do conventional driver business. So – and it is for the quarter, right?

And of course, we are still – we still have our Baffinland contract that’s coming up over the summer, where all sand ships will be engaged in that business. So yeah, does that answer your questions?

Poe Fratt: Absolutely. Great color. Thank you And Mark, not to leave you out.

Mark Filanowski: Thank you.