Frontline Ltd. (NYSE:FRO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Frontline Ltd. (NYSE:FRO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 30, 2023

Frontline Ltd. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.36 EPS, expectations were $0.46.

Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2023 Frontline plc Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lars Barstad. Please go ahead.

Lars Barstad: Thank you. Dear all, thank you for listening in to Frontline’s third quarter earnings call. To start off, I believe it’s prudent to mention that Q3 this year started challenging, and remind the audience of July, August, and Sept is normally called the summer lull in the tanker industry. The excitement in June did give us high expectations for the fall market. And although not jaw dropping, we have seen worse. The tanker market continues to be firm with risk rather on the upside than the downside. But there are many pieces to this puzzle. I will get to some of them in this presentation. Before I give the word to Inger, let’s look at our Q3 numbers on slide 3 in the deck. In the third quarter, Frontline achieved, [Technical Difficulty] a day on our VLCC fleet; $37,600 a day on our Suezmax fleet; and $33,900 per day on our LR2/Aframax fleet.

We saw the more normal split between the segments. But this converged again as we progressed into Q4 with 81% of our VLCC days booked at $48,100 per day, 70% of our Suezmax days at $50,300 per day and 70% of our LR2/Aframax days at $51,300 per day. Again, all numbers in this table are on a load-to-discharge basis and they will be affected by the amount of ballast days we ended up having at the end of Q4. We would also like to highlight that these numbers exclude the ‘24 VLCCs that are delivered during this quarter and next. Further as you can only account for revenues when the vessel is laden, the new vessels are not likely to affect revenues for Q4 materially. I would now like to let Inger take you through the financial highlights.

Inger Klemp: Thanks, Lars, and good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Then I think we can turn to slide 4, Profit Statement. Frontline achieved total operating revenues net of voyage expenses of $232 million in the third quarter and adjusted EBITDA of $173 million. We reported net income of $107.7 million, or $0.48 per share and adjusted net income and net profit of $80.8 million or $0.36 per share in the third quarter. Adjusted profit in the third quarter decreased by $129 million compared with the previous quarter. And that was mainly driven by a decrease in our time charter equivalent earnings due to lower TCE rates in this quarter, which was partially offset by fluctuations in other income and expenses. The adjustments in the third quarter consist of $17.9 million gain on marketable securities, a $1.7 million share losses of associated companies, $400,000 unrealized loss on derivatives, and $11.1 million of dividends received.