Everyone to Noble Capital Markets Basic Industries Virtual Equity Conference, and thank you for joining us today. I am Mark Reichman, a Senior Research Analyst at Noble. It is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Tasos Aslidis, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer of Euroseas Ltd. Euroseas has a fleet of 23 vessels, including 16 feeder container ships and seven intermediate container ships. Uh, the company's vessels have a total cargo capacity of 67,073 twenty-foot equivalent units or TEU. After the delivery of two new build feeder container ships in the first quarter of 2025, Euroseas' fleet will consist of 25 vessels, with a total carrying capacity of 72,673 TEU. Euroseas trades on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker ESEA. Tasos? Thank you, Mark. Thanks, everybody, for attending our presentation. I will spend the first 15 to 20 minutes giving you some remarks about our company, and then I understand we'll have the floor open for some questions. Before I do anything, I am supposed to show you this, forward-looking statements, which I trust you will take a minute to go over, and let me jump right over into my brief remarks. As Mark mentioned, Euroseas is a provider of worldwide ocean-going transportation services in the container ship sector. We have 23 vessels on the water and two that are being delivered to us in January as part of our new building program. The company is supported by the Aristides Pittas family in Greece. They trace their roots to the nineteenth century, more than 100 and 170 years back. Currently, the fourth generation of the family is running the company, and the fifth generation is on its way in. Euroseas was established in 2005, the year that accessed the capital markets and got listed on Nasdaq since 2007. Aristides, myself, and Simos are the three executives of the company. All of us have been all our lives in shipping and have more than 20 and 30 years experience in the industry. The same is true with our board of directors. All of them are leaders in their respective industries, and all of them have long investment experience in shipping. We manage our affairs through an affiliate company called Eurobulk, that is owned by Aristides, our CEO. Eurobulk was established in 1995. It's well-respected within the shipping industry, has built strong relationships with charters, suppliers, bankers, and other players, and has been really the locomotive that drives the progress and success of Euroseas. I will not spend too much time on the fleet. Mark already described it. We have 20. Soon we will have 25 vessels with more than 70,000 TEU capacity, and this is really the result of our effort of modernizing our fleet in the recent years, while at the same time reducing its environmental impact. In 2022, we embarked on a 9-vessel new building program at Hyundai Mipo Shipyard, South Korea. We ordered nine feeder-sized container ships, six units of 2,800 TEU capacity and three units of 1,800 TEU capacity. All of those ships were very modern by with today's standards the most modern they could be, equipped with Tier III engines, had various sustainability-linked features, like alternative maritime power to reduce fuel consumption at port, and are also LNG-ready. These technologies allow them to be more than 40% more efficient compared to similar vessels of the previous vintage, 10-15 years old. Seven of these nine new vessels have already been delivered, and two are to be delivered in January 2025. The better fuel consumption and more efficiency that these vessels present allow them to command a significant chartering premium compared to older vessels of similar size. We estimate from experience that we get $3,000-$5,000 per day more when we charter these vessels. At the same time with the new building program, Euroseas has a retrofit program trying to upgrade selected, selected existing ships to achieve better performance and higher fuel savings. We have implemented such upgrades to three of our vessels, and these upgrades improve the design of the vessel. We install in many of them, in a couple of them, new bulbous bows, new and lighter propellers, LED lighting, and similar things like that. The investment is of the order of $2 million-$4 million, and in some cases, this investment is made in cooperation with the vessel's charterer. Typically, we achieve fuel savings in excess of 25% in fuel consumption terms. All these are sound investments for the company, both programs, but also underline, and I want to stress that, our commitment to reducing emissions and contribute to protecting the environment. So, that being a little the profile of the company and the recent developments, let me spend five minutes to give an overview of the sector that we're operating in and what we see as the main trends. I'm sure you have seen these charts in the past. This shows development of rates and prices in the containership sector for the last 20-plus years. If one can be said for the container industry, is that it's an industry that is never boring. If you look 20 years back, we benefited, all of us, with the China boom, China's introduction in the world stage after its admission into the World Trade Organization, and that was some great years up to 2007 when the financial crisis hit. Then we had some short rebound, and then really the industry was plagued by over-investment, oversupply, during the period from 2012 to 2020, just when COVID hit. And then COVID created a second boom, creating all-time highs for both rates and prices and allowing us all to enter in longer-term charter contracts at quite satisfactory, quite high rates. That boom also gave rise to a new spate of ordering in containerships, and after we started normalizing post-COVID, the markets corrected, dropping significantly from their peak, still above pre-COVID levels. Most recently, we're benefiting from an unfortunate geopolitical development, the wars and the uncertainty in the Middle East and the attacks on shipping by Houthi rebels that have created what I write here on this chart as the Red Sea bounce, that since the beginning of this year, have led to a new increase in rates and prices. So, as I mentioned, the record high rates we enjoyed in 2021 and 2022 have allowed us to enter in long-term contracts, ensuring great cash flow and profits well into 2025 and even beyond and providing significant earnings visibility for the company. The recent Red Sea attacks in this year have again allowed us to continue with our profitable contracts, and every new ones we happen to do recently have been quite profitable. A great example is the charter we announced last Monday about Synergy Busan, a vessel that has been chartered for three years in excess of $35,000 a day, which is a significant contributor to our earnings and EBITDA. Still, the industry, and us being part of it, are to face uncertainty regarding what will happen and when the situation in the Red Sea would be resolved. When that resolves, and we return to some sort of equilibrium, we need to deal with the elevated level of new orders that are currently being built, and the sector to be able to absorb these new deliveries. Other factors come into play as well, related to new environmental regulation that came into effect last year and this year regarding the limits on greenhouse gas emissions, which could create additional reasons for supply of the vessels to be limited. Before we talk a little more about the supply of ships, it's worth spending a slide on demand. Containerized trade, and trade in general, is naturally linked to economic growth across the world, and especially to the economic growth of the Western and more developed countries, as are the main importers of finished goods. But demand for ships is not only a function of the volume of trade, it's also a function of the distances over which those commodities, those boxes of finished goods, are traveling. So here in this chart, you can see the broad correlation, the green line to the blue line, of the trade growth to the world economic growth. But you can also see the red line, which is really the effect of what we call the TEU miles, the distance over which trade moves. In this year, because of the disturbances around Red Sea, shipping had to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, rather than going through Suez Canal, creating significantly more demand for ships than the trade volumes alone would indicate. Of course, inversely, if that reverses, then we would see less demand for shipping and negative demand for shipping, although trade volumes might still be going up. In addition to the distance over which trade travels, other factors get in the way in determining the demand for ships that have to do with the inefficiencies along the supply chain, port congestion, or running ships slower to comply with the reduced emissions requirements. Not much on the demand side, and as you can see from the last point, leading industry analysts predict a pretty decent year of trade volume growth for this and next year. On the supply side, if I can say two words, we can see on this chart, on the bottom of it, the order book as a% of the fleet over the last 20 or so years. During the COVID years, as I mentioned, because of the strength of the earnings the companies had and owners had, that increased to a pretty high level of about 30%. It has declined, but again, this year it has increased back to about 23%. That is a significant level of order book that the industry would have to absorb. In terms of what that would mean for the supply of growth of the vessels, the top part of the slide shows on the top left, the age distribution of the fleet, which for the entire fleet, it's. You can say rather uniform. The older vessels are a bit underrepresented, are a bit below average, so it would be a challenge for the fleet, for the industry to absorb the deliveries of the new ships. Except that I'm going here to break down that order book by size segment. If you look on, at the various sub-segments of the fleet, and this table here shows the% of fleet that is above 20 years of age, and the order book as a% of the fleet for each individual size segments, you can see that for the feeders, that our fleet and our company is operating, it is the fleet of the feeders is overwhelmingly older than the fleet of the larger container ships. If anything, the feeder fleet would likely come down in size over the next couple of years, as opposed to the overall fleet of container ships. Really, here is the interplay of the smaller ships with the larger ones, is what would shape the rate environment for us, and we believe that the more bigger ships are around who are doing the main lane routes, the more smaller ships will be needed to do the local distribution, the feeding of the goods. We see a positive picture supply-wise for our feeders, although for the whole container ship sector, supply is likely to grow a little more than historical levels. I won't spend more summarizing the outlook. Basically, we expect to see the remaining of `2024 still being influenced by the developments in the Red Sea. At this point, it seems unlikely that this will resolve and return to normality before the end of the year. While 2025 could face the challenges that I mentioned earlier, absorbing the supply that is coming in case the Red Sea situation normalizes, and balancing that with potential speed reductions due to the requirement to comply with emissions. The energy transition that is happening across the world is continuing also to gain traction in the container ship sector, but is moving with a slower pace than desired due to economic challenges. But at the same time, the spread that modern, efficient vessels, what we call eco vessels, earn over their older cousins, is increasing and is becoming more of a standard in the sector, and our newbuildings should be beneficiaries of that situation. Let me now turn and spend another five to seven minutes on some of the financial highlights of Euroseas. First, you can see here on this slide, the chartering profile, a snapshot of the charters of Euroseas for this and next year. We are almost 100% chartered, 95% covered in 2024. It's natural, we are almost in the middle of September, and we have very few, three or four ships opening up in the towards the end of the fourth quarter, including our two new buildings. And in 2025, on the basis of our existing charter, we are almost 50% covered, so 50% of our available days are already covered. Both are covered, all these both for both periods, the coverage is at around $30,000 per day. So we this is the average rate our ships command, between $28,000 and $30,000 a day on average. As I mentioned, as you can see, some ships are chartered in the high forties, some ships in the low teens. On the strength of these charters, we had pretty good earnings for the last two or three years. In the first six months of this year, we made more than $60 million of net income, and on an adjusted basis, more than $52 million. Annualized, that would be more than $100 million of net income. Significant contribution to our bottom line for our size. That translates to about $7.5 per share for the six-month period, and closer to $14 per share for the whole year if one makes the projection. A significant EBITDA contribution, and all of this allowed us to continue our dividend program that we initiated almost two years ago. We're paying 60 cents per share on a quarterly basis, which translates to about 5%, 5%-6% yield on our today's price. Looking forward, again, because of the contract coverage that we have, we expect to see profitability and earnings very comparable to what we've seen in the last couple of years. On this slide, you can see historically, broken down in six-month periods, our earnings, our adjusted earnings per share on the top part, and the average contracted rates on the bottom part. So you can see that, it average out contracted earnings of about $30,000 a day, give or take. We are earning about $7.50 per six-month period, and this type of profitability, barring any unforeseen development, we expected to see in the next year and a half based on the earnings we have contracted. Also, which reflect a significant part of our available capacity, but also in 2025 in particular, about half of our capacity is open to be contracted, and that could present an opportunity if the market becomes even better. Significant cash flow is generated by our fleet. This is a projection of the cash flow break-even level for the next 12 months, which is just below $13,000. So if we're earning around $13,000 a day, with $13,000 cash flow costs, the difference is their contribution to our liquidity and funds available for investment. At the same time, we are very moderately levered, about 33-35%, depending what measure of valuation one is using. And even if we include the debt that we are going to assume for our two new buildings, we will be levered below 40%, which is probably an optimal level of leverage. It's not too big to present or to introduce any risk, and at the same time, it's sufficient to significantly improve the returns to our common shareholders. So why one should be interested in Euroseas? I think we have shown a record of significant profitability over the last couple of years, and I think 2024 and 2025 should follow on the same path. We have insulated ourselves to a great degree from the market by having secure long-term contracts and providing visibility into our earnings, and we're quite moderately financed. We have a strategy to grow further and modernize the company. Both programs that I mentioned earlier, our new building program and our retrofit program, are examples of that. We have programs to reward our shareholders who are providing a pretty healthy 5.5% annualized yield on today's share price, and we do have a share repurchase program, which we execute when we seem appropriate. Still, our stock trades at 60%-70% of its intrinsic value, its NAV, although it has gone up 80% over the last 12 months. That discount represents a significant appreciation potential, and we believe our shareholders and investors will take advantage of it. Mark, that was my remarks, and I'm open to questions you might have. Thank you, Tasos. The first question I would have would be, you know, you mentioned that charter coverage is about 95% for 2024 and almost 50% for 2025. Could you just please elaborate on your chartering strategy, in terms of trying to maximize revenue? I think one element, one feature that became new for the feeder sector in the last three to four years, is the length of the charters that liner companies are offering. During the COVID years, I believe the liners, who are our main clients, became afraid of being without capacity and started securing that, offering longer, longer-term contracts. I think that is continuing and has re-emerged as a result of the disturbances around Red Sea. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to book our ships on contracts from two to three years if we find similar charters at rates that so far have been significantly above historical average rates. As our ships come for renewal, and as I mentioned, we have four existing and two new buildings coming up for chartering over the next four months. We would be looking to book them for as long as possible, I would say, at rates that are above historical averages. In terms of the fleet renewal, could you just touch on the criteria to purchase and your criteria to sell? And with regard to the purchases, you know, how you're weighing kind of second-hand vessels that you can retrofit versus new builds. I think we're looking at the project each obviously separately. For the new buildings, especially during 2022, where most of our orders were placed, we felt that investing in newer ships was the right thing to do for two reasons: One, because secondhand ships were very expensive, and secondly, because the requirements to be more environmentally friendly would be more easily met by owning new ships. There is a lot of debate in the industry regarding what is the right fuel of the future, and definitely larger players of the industry, like large liner companies, have taken significant bets on new fuels. For us, we're a smaller company. We cannot afford to be on the front in terms of selecting or betting what fuel to use. Simply, what we can do, and we think that that's the benefit of our investors, is to invest in ships that are the best ships in today's technology, the most efficient ships with today's technology, and those would earn a premium, continue to be demanded, the first to be chartered, and earn a premium over their older counterparts. The change of the fleet to more and more efficient or to a different fuel will not happen overnight. It will take a couple of decades at the very least. So we felt that having the new buildings in place was the right move for the company. At the same time, have a more immediate impact because the older ships would still be needed. We felt that it was appropriate and beneficial to retrofit ships that make sense, that have good charters, that had good charters. And those investments so far have been proven worthwhile. The case of Synergy Busan, which was a ship that was retrofitted last year, proves the point. The vessel was in high demand by its current charter, which extended the charter for three years at a pretty good rate of $35,000 per day. Could you just maybe discuss your balance sheet and your cost of funding and whether there might be any opportunities to lower your cost of capital? I think really the cost of capital has to do with the cost of alternative investments of the capital. We have reduced our exposure, our debt simply because we had the capacity to do so. We have about seven vessels that are encumbered. As we know, I mean, rates, interest rates are on their way down, and the cost of debt will come down hopefully in the near future. The cost of equity, as I said at the beginning, really has to do with alternative uses of equity. If we don't find meaningful investments in shipping, obviously we'll return more funds to our shareholders, but we try to balance the rewards we give to our shareholders through our dividend and share purchases, and also the investment opportunities we take on. New buildings is an area that we'll keep looking to find right opportunities and potentially second acquisitions with no or very little downside risk. So that is also a possibility. If we find vessels that by the end of the... with charters, that by the end of the charter, we have no downside risk or minimal downside risk, that would be opportunities that we could take on. Yeah, just my last question, and I'm gonna give you a chance to talk a little bit about Euroseas. But, you know, for investors that are new to the space, you know, there's a lot of different sub-sectors, and so I guess the question would be, you know, why should investors consider the container ship market, say, versus other sub-sectors like tankers, and how does Euroseas stand out in that field? That's a good question. Container ships, as I mentioned during the remarks, face a challenge to absorb a significantly high order book. This challenge exists for other ships, but to a much lesser degree. Dry bulk order book is much lower than the 23% we face, and the same for tankers. However, container ships sector gives you, and gives the companies the possibility to enter, to have long-term contracts. So it gives greater visibility into the earnings of the company and, in the near term, profitability. Furthermore, for Euroseas, we are one of the one or two companies, I think, that in the public sector, that we are active on the feeder container ship sector. As I showed from... With an, in an earlier slide, the table, that the feeder container ship sector is dramatically under order. There is much lower order books compared to the vessels that could exit the respective segments. So the supply pressures that the larger container ships might face might not be there for feeders. Still, that doesn't give you a clear way to say this is the best investment, but it gives you significant support that you and evidence that you found a sub-sector within the shipping segments that supply-demand could be really positive for that sector. Again, I want to reiterate, there is all kinds of other influences. The interplay of larger and smaller ships could come into the way, but fundamentally, we're very happy to be focusing on the feeder container ship sector and concentrating our ownership along the most preferred commercial sizes, the eighteen hundreds, the twenty-eight hundreds, and the forty-two, forty-three hundred TEU ships. We have roughly six, six, and six vessels, give or take, on this size groups, and those would be the arrows of the feeder sector as it tries to serve the entire needs of the industry. So maybe the answer is to build a diversified portfolio across multiple sub-sectors, picking the best-in-class in each one. Tasos, thank you so much for joining us today. It is my pleasure for the invitation, for our discussion, and my big thanks to you and everybody who has attended.