Omar Nokta: Okay. Thank you. Thanks for that market color Petros. And then maybe just kind of a follow-up perhaps with the new building. As Chris was asking, you’ve obviously disposed of the 13 ships this year. You raised a good amount of capital doing so. You used it to buy the big chunk of the Oaktree position. I guess in terms of where Star Bulk is today, in your market footprint, you’re down to 115 ships, still substantial critical mass. But how do you think about the fleet footprint as it is as we kind of think about where you’re going into next year? You have the Kamsarmax new building that you just announced. Should we be thinking of Star Bulk continuing to be a seller in this market of older tonnage and then perhaps replacing them over time with more of these new buildings?
Hamish Norton: I think we’ll do the right commercial thing. Obviously, our fleet is getting older every year and it can’t get old indefinitely. So, we will look at the right opportunities to sell ships that are not going to have a long life and get ships that will have a long life. And as always, we also continue to look at merger possibilities, and we see — we’re seeing opportunities all the time. As we’ve said in the past, these are always hard to close.
Christos Begleris: And just to add, Omar, this is Christos. We also have the seven charter in vessels, which effectively are young vessels and further renew the fleet.
Hamish Norton: And of course, those vessels give us a lot of optionality.
Petros Pappas: Yes, and they are all delivering this year, right?
Omar Nokta: Got it. Okay. Well, thank you. That’s it from me. Thanks guys.
Petros Pappas: Thanks Omar.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ben Nolan with Stifel. Please proceed with your question.
Ben Nolan: Thanks. I’m a little bit curious on the new builds. Obviously, you’re selling assets there historically a little bit higher priced. And I appreciate the need to replenish the fleet and so forth. The new builds are a bit more expensive than they normally would be, too. Do you view this as just sort of a necessary evil in terms of paying a little bit of a higher price in order to make sure that your fleet is new? Or do you think maybe we’re in a new paradigm where just asset prices are higher and the price that you’re paying for the new builds is reasonable on that basis?
Petros Pappas: Well, Ben, first of all, we’re buying these — these vessels are actually — the speed and consumption is actually similar to that of the best Japanese vessels. And we made sure that this would be the case otherwise we wouldn’t have gone forward. And Japanese vessels are similar. Japanese vessels are being sold like $6 million or $7 million more expensive than these ones. So, we do not consider them that expensive. Secondly, vessels like that, that burn like seven, eight tons less fuel than the other Kamsarmaxes actually save you almost $4,000 a day– a sailing day. So, you recoup the differential very, very quickly. And at the end of the day, we do not think that new building prices are going to go down. There’s very little availability right now. And if one so wanted, I’m pretty sure the closer to the day, the delivery dates, one could sell these vessels even more expensive.
Hamish Norton: And also since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, US dollar inflation has not been small. It’s over 10% change in prices. So you have to expect that nominal dollar prices of new buildings will go up.
Petros Pappas: Plus we are seeing that decarbonization will probably take longer than what we initially thought it would. And that will mean that best-in-class vessels will have the chance to trade for a lifetime.
Ben Nolan: Got it. That all makes sense. And then my next question was around the buyback and then also the ATM activity. And I appreciate that you’re buying at a lower price than you’re selling with respect to the share price. Although again, at least according to my math, the shares are still trading below NAV and you slice it. Just curious this thinking may be behind not just selling a few extra ships in order to help fund the share repurchase versus being active on the ATM below NAV?
Hamish Norton: Ben, basically, if you have a shareholder coming to you and saying, I’m afraid that when Oaktree sells, the overhang is keeping your share price down. When Oaktree sells, the price is going to collapse. Can you do something about it? And then we sell shares at $0.81 above where we buy them in, obviously, the shareholder is better off. It would have been even better if we could sell more ships at a very high price. But what we did basically was we wanted to buy 20 million shares. And we funded that with debt, equity and proceeds from ship sales, and we did what we could do in each of those areas. And in each case, we think it was beneficial for the shareholders.
Petros Pappas: The ATM was like 3.5% of the buyback.
Hamish Norton: Yes. But basically, we sold the ships we could sell. We issued the equity that we could issue at prices that we knew would be profitable. And we try to limit the borrowings to the extent we could, but all of it was good for the shareholders, we think.
Ben Nolan: Right. Okay. No, I appreciate the color there.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Nathan Ho with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.
Nathan Ho: Hey, great. Thank you for taking my — I think I would just want to continue a little bit on Ben’s train of thought there. And I guess I’ll just ask this question a little differently. I mean you spoke a little bit about buying back shares from Oaktree, the discount to — a significant discount to NAV and right with the share issuance. And now I think like with the disposal vessels that all seems to align with the same framework. But now with this new build, I’m just kind of curious on how the team is thinking about capital strategy in context of where you’re currently seeing your net asset value. Like how are you deciding what to do with your cash, given where your asset value is relative to your share price?
Hamish Norton: Well, thanks for the question, Nathan. I think we looked at these new buildings, frankly, as being a chance — an opportunity that we would not have the chance to duplicate. We think these are — this was an exceptional situation where the shipyard wanted us specifically as a client and offered us slots that were not going to be available anywhere else for a ship that has a quality that we couldn’t get, frankly, in other shipyards. They worked with us to put an engine on that isn’t available yet generally and to put a shaft generator on and generally tweak their design to our needs. So, we’re not planning to go out and replace our fleet with new buildings if that’s sort of the point of the question. This we thought was, frankly, an opportunity that was too good to let go.
Nathan Ho: Got it. Just to follow-up on that. For a like-for-like vessel, what would the lead-times look at — look like in, say, a Japanese or Korean yard?
Hamish Norton: Lead-times.
Petros Pappas: For Korean yards.
