Star Bulk Carriers Corp. (NASDAQ:SBLK) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Hamish Norton : Yes. So let’s answer your last question first. If we sell vessels, that cash is excluded from the dividend for at least a year, and we could use that to buy other vessels to buy back stock. But look, it might make sense to sell older vessels that might, in the future, have trouble with the IMO emissions standards. But we are trying to be very creative in terms of making sure that our older vessels actually will get through these IMO regulations with flying colors. And we are doing a bunch of things that are some of them very creative, some of them standard, but maybe Nicos you want to talk about some of the things we’re doing.

Nicos Rescos : I mean I do think we have much time to discuss everything we’re doing, but basically, there’s a big team of people here working on optimizing the existing fleet and basically extending the life span of the vessels whether that is by accelerating dry docks and deploying new technology, whether that’s the energy efficiency life that we all read about or whether it is low friction paints, or other technologies that we still cannot talk about that we are actually testing now. We are now going to be installing our first carbon capture equipment on a vessel in January. So basically, we are trying to disassociate the CII index and how this will impact the industry for the majority of the vessels instead of combining of where market prices are and having to make a decision simply on CII performance in the coming years.

The existing operating speed for the fleet and our ships, we do not foresee any issues for any of the vessels at least until 2026, when we’re going to see the next part of the IMO regulation.

Amit Mehrotra : Right. And then my last follow-up, if I could. So were coming up on the Chinese New Year, and that’s typically obviously a seasonally weak period of time in the first quarter. Several years ago, you started kind of moving away from the spot market and contracting out over that period. I mean we’re sitting here in November 17. So maybe even there’s some fixtures that are bleeding into the first quarter. I don’t know if there’s like a baseline that you think you can achieve in the first quarter as it relates to that kind of temporary pivot and chartering strategy or just where we are in the year right now.

Petros Pappas : Amit, unfortunately, the market fell relatively early this year. And we were not able to follow our using strategy, which was fixing forward somewhere in July, August, September. The market started dropping like around May. And then there, we had the option whether we could fix for a year at much lower levels or state spot at much higher levels. So we decided to stay spot, earned the higher levels, expecting a better quarter during Q3. This is been materialized. And therefore, the coverage for Q1 is not there.

Operator: And it looks like there are no further questions. Therefore, I’ll hand the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Petros Pappas : No further remarks, operator. Thank you very much.

Operator: And this concludes today’s conference, and you may disconnect this time. Thank you for your participation.

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