I am Nicolas Bornozis, President of Capital Link, and would like to welcome you to the Global Ship Lease Corporate Webinar. Our discussion today will highlight the company's current operations, business development, growth prospects, and the container shipping sector outlook. We have with us today the Senior Management Team of Global Ship Lease. We have Mr. Thomas Lister, Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Tassos Psaropoulos, Chief Financial Officer. Global Ship Lease is a leading independent owner of container ships with a diversified fleet of mid-sized and smaller container ships. As of December 31, 2023, the company owned 68 container ships ranging from 2,200 to 11,000 TEU, with an aggregate capacity of 375,000 TEU. 36 ships are wide-beam Post-Panamax. Now, Global Ship Lease shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol GSL. In terms of logistics, we will begin with a brief company presentation. As Thomas and Tassos will explain, we will use the deck of the most recent deck, but we will highlight certain parts of it. Please note that after the company presentation, we will open to live Q&A from our participants. Please note that participants can submit their questions through the Q&A button on your screen during the webinar. Your questions will be answered during the Q&A session after the brief company presentation. Now, before we begin our webinar, kindly note the standard disclaimer that this discussion is strictly for informational and educational purposes and should not be relied upon, and the webinar does not constitute an offer to buy or sell securities. It's not investment advice or advice of any kind, and Capital Link bears no responsibility for the content. With that, I will welcome Thomas and Tassos and pass the floor on to them. Thank you very much, Nicolas, for the introduction, and thank you to Capital Link as a team for having us on this panel. I'm going to just switch my camera off briefly to provide more room on the screen while we go through the presentation, and I'll switch it back on for questions. So, some very quick housekeeping points first. As always, the disclaimer and safe harbor slides in the presentation remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements. They're based on current expectations and assumptions and are, by their nature, inherently uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to many factors, including those described in the safe harbor section of the slide presentation. I would also direct you to our most recent annual report and most recent earnings release, both available through our website, for a list of relevant risk factors and any reconciliations of non-GAAP figures that we may cite today. With that, let's please go to slide 4. And I mean, Nicolas has already sort of introduced us. So first and foremost, we're an owner and operator, a lessor, effectively, of mid-sized and smaller container ships. We own 68 ships, as Nicolas said, and we charter them to leading container shipping lines. In other words, to the logistics companies who actually carry the containers, such as Maersk, CMA, MSC, Hapag-Lloyd, and others, typically on a medium to long-term basis under industry standard fixed-rate time charter contracts. These contracts insulate us from the volatility of the freight and charter markets and provide good forward visibility on cash flows. This is really what our business model is very strongly focused on. While we manage the operation of the ships, our customers determine where they trade and also pay for the fuel. We're insulated from fuel price volatility as well. Our business model is fundamentally conservative and risk-averse. We allocate capital on the basis of relative returns adjusted for risk, and everything we do is focused on generating long-term value for shareholders through the cycle. That means being resilient enough to weather the ups and downs of the cycle itself and having the opportunity and the discipline, crucially, to jump on the right opportunities when they do arise, which is often during the down cycle. I won't spend time on our results for 2023, but you can see them here on the right-hand side of the slide. Broadly, strong revenues, an EBITDA margin in the high 60s%, and robust earnings per share, allowing us to pay an annualized dividend of $1.50 per common share, which is a dividend yield of 7%+ at today's stock price. Oh, and by the way, on top of that, we've also been buying back shares opportunistically. Container shipping itself, so the industry in which we operate, is the conveyor belt of trade. It's cyclical, seasonal, and subject both to macroeconomic trends and to geopolitical events. Paradoxically, sand in the gears of the global supply chain tends to be supportive of industry earnings as inefficiencies in the system suck up effective supply, which tightens the supply-demand balance, which in turn supports pricing. Tragic as the root causes may be, in fact, as they are, disruptions to navigation in the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal are very clearly in this category of creating inefficiencies and thus supporting earnings in the market. But we'll come back to this point later. Let's turn to slide 5 for a quick overview of our well-diversified charter portfolio. Most of the top liners are represented here with $1.7 billion of contracted revenues over a weighted duration of 2.1 years as at year-end 2023. We're continuing to add to those contracted revenues this year, making use of the currently supportive market conditions. Slide 6 provides an overview, or at least an illustrative view, of our future earnings potential under different rate scenarios. I should emphasize here that these figures are not forecasts in the case of 2024, but you can see the clear upward trajectory from 2022 to 2023, which is based on actual results for these two years. Moving on to slide 7, here I'll quickly recap our capital allocation strategy, which is always foremost in our minds, is always under review, and always guides everything we do. Big picture, we try to take a balanced approach focused on building shareholder value on a sustainable basis in a cyclical industry. And that cyclicality is key as it contains both risks to be managed, but also, very importantly, value-generating opportunities to exploit, to jump on. So what does that mean in capital allocation terms? It means that delevering to manage balance sheet risk and build equity value. It also means allocating capital or CapEx to meet the evolving regulatory and commercial demands of decarbonization. It means returning capital to shareholders, which we do via our $1.50 per share annualized dividend, which is sized to be sustainable, and I'll say that again through the cycle, and also via opportunistic buyback of shares, which over time has reduced our share count by about 8%. Coming back to the cyclicality point, which is one of the reasons to be exposed to shipping in the first place, it means having cash liquidity both for resilience and to have the optionality to buy ships on a selective, disciplined, and value-accretive basis. As our Executive Chairman, George Youroukos, who isn't on the call today, but nevertheless is here in spirit and who is also our largest shareholder, likes to say, "If you want to keep milking the cow, you also have to feed the cow." The right time to buy ships or to feed the cow in this analogy is often towards the bottom of the cycle when access to capital, especially non-dilutive capital, can be constrained. Slide 8 builds on this point by showing both the cycle itself and our highly disciplined approach to acquisitions. You can see in the orange section of the chart a period of time when the price of container ships went through the roof, and you can also see that GSL did not purchase a single ship during that time. Instead, we returned capital to shareholders by buying back shares. Oh, and by the way, importantly, on this same chart, you can see from the, I think it's the blue line, the dark blue line, that when asset prices spike, in contrast, the green line, charter rates spike even higher, charter rates obviously being a proxy for earnings. So that's exactly why we hold on to our ships rather than selling, because you capture a disproportionately higher earnings level than you would necessarily capture from the divestment of the asset. Anyway, a normalization in asset prices brought us back into the market in May 2023 when we purchased four 8,500 TEU ships with attractive charters attached. These are exactly the sorts of deals we like: well-specified second-hand ships combining strong contracted revenues right out of the gate, minimal downside risk, and significant onward upside earnings potential. I should emphasize again, lots of deals cross our desks, but we do not move on them unless they meet our very strict risk and return criteria. Hence, no additional acquisitions since May of last year for the time being. Slides nine and 10 foreground our 2023 financials and balance sheet management. I won't go over every point here, but a few important takeaways are the following. One, our 2023 earnings and cash flow were up on 2022, and 2022 itself was already a record year. So it's a record beating a record. Two, our gross debt and financial leverage has continued to reduce even after we purchased and partially debt funded the four ships in mid-2023. 3, we've kept our interest rate exposure, meaning that our blended cost of debt is around 4.5%, and we actually have additional headroom under our 0.64% SOFR caps to supercharged levered returns on vessel purchases in due course. Number 4, and this is obviously closely related to the previous point, our cash position covers working capital needs and covenants and also provides some room to move quickly on the equity element of the right purchase opportunities. And 5, our quarterly dividend share buybacks have already been touched on. I won't spend more time on that now. So finally, number 6, concluding this section, our credit ratings from the various rating agencies are strong and materially improved in recent years as we strengthened our balance sheet and demonstrated a clear track record of managing our business prudently through the cycle. Notably, our outstanding senior secured notes, which are due in 2027 and were placed in 2022, are rated investment grade. Next, we'll move on to the market. So let's go to slide 11, please. There we are. Perfect. Here we reiterate our clear focus on high specification, mid-size, and smaller container ships ranging from 2,000 TEU at the bottom end to about 10,000 TEU at the top end. The top map on the left-hand side illustrates the deployment of ships within our preferred size range, highlighting their operational flexibility, which is an excellent structural hedge in uncertain times such as these, and also their widespread reach. Basically, they can be deployed anywhere. In contrast, the lower map shows the deployment of larger ships at 10,000 TEU and higher, which tend to be more constrained to the main east-west arterial trade routes with suitable deep-water port infrastructure. Slide 12 presents a view of idle capacity and ship recycling, which is a sort of barometer for the health of the industry and the tightness of supply and demand. So idle capacity, you can see in the top chart, bottomed out at just under 1% during the third quarter of last year. From that point of already effectively full utilization, we saw idle capacity trending up in the fourth quarter, but subsequently, it's tightened again quite markedly as a result of disruptions to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, which I'll give you more data on very shortly. Anyway, logically, the uptick in idle vessels was accompanied by the return of scrapping activity for essentially the first time since 2020, albeit at a limited scale thus far. The record-breaking charter markets of 2021 and 2022 saw the lives of many older and lower specification container ships extended and scrapping pushed back due to their phenomenal earnings. However, as the market normalizes and that normalization has been deferred for the time being by the situation in the Red Sea and Suez, there's an expectation that there will eventually be a catch-up in scrapping. Also, regulatory dry dockings, which ships are obliged to go through typically on a five-year cycle, prompt owners to consider whether investing $2 million is justified by the forward earnings potential of the ship. So if a ship is old or poorly specified or both, the answer to that question may well be no, particularly if there's a challenging forward market outlook. And the ship, as a result, likely gets scrapped. We'll come back to what this means on the next slide, which is slide 13, please. So here we look at the order book, which is heavily weighted towards the larger ship sizes. In other words, the over 10,000 TEU segments in which, to be very clear, GSL does not participate. However, with an order book to fleet ratio of 13.4%, the order book for mid-size and smaller container ships, which are the segments relevant to GSL, is much smaller but still, of course, meaningful. And here, the older age profile of the mid-size and smaller fleet peer group is important context and ties in with what I was saying earlier about deferred scrapping and specifically about the scrap versus invest decisions that may be driven by regulatory dry dockings. So extrapolating this point, if we were to assume the scrapping of all ships over 25 years old and net those numbers out against the order book for mid-size and smaller ships delivering through 2027, which is the forward visibility on the order book, our focus segments would actually shrink. They would contract by about 2.2% through 2027. Now, we realize this is an extreme scenario, but it is illustrative of the supply-side safety valve for the industry in the event of a protracted downturn. Slide 14, please. Okay. So this, as promised, is a slide to put some data around what disruptions in the Red Sea actually mean for container shipping. Under normal circumstances, so until roughly sort of October or November of last year, roughly 20% of global containerized trade volumes transit the Suez Canal, which sits at the northern end of the Red Sea. However, if anything, this 20% figure understates the real dynamics at play as much of the container volumes transiting the Red Sea and Suez are on long-haul trades. The longer the trade, the more capacity you need to service it. Incidentally, they also tend to be on the really big ships rather than the mid-size and smaller ships, but that's a different conversation which we can address maybe in Q&A. Anyway, so if you look at the Red Sea and Suez in terms of global containerized fleet capacity, overall one-third, in fact, 34% to be precise, would normally pass through this waterway, which is the routing shown with the yellow line on the map. If you're forced to divert this traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, as shown with the blue line, then the impact is very significant. Indeed, MSI, and these are the sort of independent data providers and analysts who provide a lot of the analysis, the data analysis in our deck, so they calculate that holding all else equal, if all Suez-related containerized trades were to be diverted around the Cape, it would absorb around 10% of effective global containerized fleet capacity. So stating the obvious, this is a very big deal, especially as an estimated 80%-90% of formerly Red Sea and Suez-related containerized fleet capacity is being diverted in this way. So this brings us to slide 15, which looks at the charter market. And I promise we'll be wrapping these prepared remarks up fairly soon. Anyway, slide 15. After the super cyclical highs of 2021 and 2022, both charter market rates and asset values have been normalizing, with downward pressure accelerating in the second half of 2023. However, this decline was arrested towards year-end 2023 and has been converted into positive momentum year-to-date 2024. Market rates are currently trending up, indeed, even from the levels indicated on the right-hand side of this slide. Charter durations are also extending, particularly for larger ships. By larger ships, I mean ships towards the upper end of the mid-size segment upon which we focus, call it 7,000-10,000 TEU ships. Anyway, how long these supportive conditions will last is anybody's guess, of course, but we're doing our best to lock in charter cover and cash flow while they do. Right. Slides 16 and 17. These, I promise you, are the summary slides. The main takeaways from these are, number one, we've grown our earnings and EBITDA and continue to work on securing good forward cover to support debt service, CapEx, and sustain the dividend. 2, our balance sheet's in good shape with conservative financial leverage, ongoing amortization, and very competitively priced debt thanks to the interest rate caps we put in place a couple of years back with coverage through 2026. 3, macro uncertainty continues to exert downward pressure on market sentiment despite all of the data I've given you so far, although the current Suez and Red Sea situation has reduced and for a time has even reversed downward pressure, certainly on charter rates. In freight rates, it's a more difficult situation to call, but we'll be watching that closely. They're certainly higher today than they were towards year-end of last year, but they have come down from peaks. Anyway, it will be very interesting to see how this impacts the forward guidance from the liner operators in their Q1 earnings calls, which we will be listening to very carefully. And finally, we will continue to be tightly focused on allocating capital in such a way as to maximize our resilience and generate long-term value for shareholders. This is a cyclical industry that tends to reward players who have strong balance sheets and access to non-dilutive capital when others do not. And we aim to keep GSL in a position to jump on attractive purchase opportunities when they arise. Right. Hopefully, that's provided some useful context. And now we'd be very pleased to take your questions via Nicolas. So Nicolas, back to you. Nicolas, you're on mute. So I will say thank you very much for this succinct but very insightful remarks. I have to tell you, I'm delighted to see the strong participation, and I was very surprised to see that we started getting questions through even before you started speaking. But I'd like to remind everybody that you're welcome to submit your questions through a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, and I will address them to Thomas and Tassos. So we have a number of questions. I will try to group them into several categories. Obviously, some of the questions have already been addressed in your remarks, but I think we'll give us the opportunity to highlight some of those. So I will try to group the questions in terms of the company, company initiatives, the sector, and the effect of geopolitics on the sector and the company. Starting with the company. One of the questions that came is on the charter cover that you have. You have 2.1 years of charter cover. You gave us the scenarios for the rechartering of the ships opening up. What does this charter cover mean for your earnings going forward and for your ability to execute your business? Well, I guess it provides forward visibility. So you talked about 2.1 years of TEU-weighted contract cover. We try to keep that comparatively stable because our business is, as I described at the outset, very conservative and risk-averse in nature. So we're very strongly focused on trying to put forward contract cover in place so that we have a stable platform from which to execute. So 2.1 years, $1.7 billion of contracted revenues provides precisely that stable platform within an otherwise cyclical and very unpredictable market environment. Another question that has come through is you showed the order book and the deliveries and actually that in your particular segment, you expect sprinters in 2027. The next two years are expected to be apparently the more fluid, to put it that way, for the container ship industry, and you have the charter cover which insulates you from it. Is that a fair statement? It is, although I would just be a little bit careful on characterizing our expectations that the fleet will shrink by 2.2%. What I'm trying to say there is that in the event that there is a weak market, and at the moment, the market is quite firm, but who knows whether it's going to change from one day to the next because just as Suez has sucked up 10% of effective capacity, resolving things in the Red Sea, which obviously from a humanitarian perspective, we all want to see, would actually release capacity into the market. So there could be quite a swift change in supply-demand dynamics driven by political events on that front. So we want to have contract cover that insulates us from those sort of shock events to the extent possible. So I'm not saying that we expect our segments to shrink by 2.2%. All I'm doing is demonstrating what could happen in the event of weaker demand, which takes the steam out of the charter market and would prompt owners as their ships approach their 25-year Special Survey and this decision of, "Okay, do I invest another $2 million in keeping this ship trading to get her through her Special Survey?" Do they take that decision? If the forward earnings environment looks weak at that stage, some may say, "Yep, we'll hang on to the option value of the asset," but others may say, "No, it's not worth it. We'll scrap the ship out," in which case the net fleet growth, which would be fairly striking if you were only accepting ships from the order book and you weren't scrapping out, would be quite big. It actually gets moderated quite significantly. But it's not a prediction. It's just emphasizing that there is that safety valve. Of course. So now turning to the fleet expansion, you took us through your strategy in terms of ship acquisitions over time. What are the plans going forward for additional acquisitions? Well, the plans going forward are basically the same as the plans that have always been in place. In other words, we will continue to be extremely disciplined when it comes to deploying our capital into the acquisition of ships. And we will only do so when ships hit the risk and return combination that we're comfortable with and the risk and return combination that was sort of quite well illustrated by the acquisition we performed back in May of 2023. So contracted cash flows, a low residual value risk at the end of the contracted charter period, largely covered by scrap at that stage, and also with attractive onward earnings potential. Those are the sorts of deals we're looking for. And if we don't find deals that meet our criteria, then we don't do deals. So we see a huge flow of prospective deals crossing our desk at pretty much every point in the cycle. So it's not a question of not seeing anything. We're seeing, I would say, most, if not all, of the deals that come up, but we're choosing not to move on them or we're being outbid on them. So we're hanging on to our discipline. We think that's absolutely fundamental to surviving and creating value over the long term in shipping. So more of the same, Nicolas. Sorry, Tassos. No, no, just to add that since 2018 and the merger, we've been consistently following the same strategy, investing when it actually makes meaning and there returns in something, which is the most important in our decision, whether to buy this or not. We're not going to grow in the sake of growth. And this has actually proved the chart that Tom has already directed you when we have actually made the acquisitions and the period when we were totally off the market. Yeah. And just sorry to add to that and to round out this sort of capital allocation point, Nicolas. I mean, everything we do, and I said this in the presentation itself, but it's not just words. This is the maxim that we live by. Everything we do, we weigh on the basis of risk and relative return. So relative risk and relative return with a view to protecting value for shareholders through the cycle and building over the long-term value for shareholders through the cycle. Now, we can pivot or reweight allocation of capital depending upon where we are. So when asset values were super overheated in 2021 and 2022, so the orange section of the chart that we showed in the presentation, we didn't buy any ships. Instead, we were buying back shares. So that's how we were allocating our capital, buying back shares because asset values and thus risks were unattractive. We bought back shares. Now, when we were on what we thought was a normalization of asset values, the risk and return weighting changed, and we acquired the ships in May of last year. What we're doing at the moment is making sure that we have enough cash liquidity available to us to move quickly on opportunities, the right opportunities when they do arise, and while at the same time continuing to sustain the dividend. That's very important to us, $1.50 per share, sustainable dividend through the cycle. We've continued, as we've shown, to opportunistically buy back shares. We try to be nimble but balance the risk and building a value through the cycle by moving between these different possibilities. We usually talk about fleet expansion and growth. Here we have a question asking if you would be likely to sell ships if you could get good prices for them. I think the answer is actually, sorry, you have actually answered. If the price is appropriate, so why not? It's an easy answer in that case. That's absolutely right. So if the numbers are right, then yes, of course, it's something that we would look at. However, I would again point back to that chart looking at the way in which asset values and charter rates tend to interplay over the long term. When you see asset values spike, you see charter rates spike a lot higher. Now, what that tends to mean is that at that point in the cycle, the big liner companies, and we saw this during COVID when things went through the roof, the biggest buyers in the market weren't people like us. They were the liner operators. MSC, particularly, was an astronomical buyer of container ships. Now, obviously, what is good from an economic perspective for the liner operators, in other words, they're seeing it as being cheaper to buy the asset than chartering the asset. The flip side of that coin is if you actually own the asset, as we did at that point in time, it's better economically to hang on to the ownership of the asset and charter it. But as Tassos said, if someone would come along with an offer we couldn't refuse as a potential sale and purchase candidate, well, we wouldn't refuse it. The pretty sure thing is that we always run assessments in order whether it makes sense to sell a vessel or keep it and receiving time charter. We always do this assessment. From this chart, as Tom mentioned, it has been proven that for the time being, at least, and for the last couple of years, it was more prudent and the returns were much more worth just keeping the vessel. So I will go back to capital allocation. This is not a softball question. It actually came through. I will phrase it in the following way. On one hand, what do you have to say about the current valuation given your current share price? Are you happy with it? And given where the share price is today, could that affect your capital allocation, maybe being a bit more aggressive in buybacks and so on? Okay. I'll have a crack at this. I'm sure Tassos will have views as well. I would challenge you to find a single CEO or CFO when asked the question, "Are you happy that your company is properly valued?" is going to say, "Oh, yes. In fact, maybe we're even overvalued." That's never, ever going to happen. Then the next question is, how do you put a pin in where the right value should be? There's an endless debate about whether companies are trading at a discount or a premium to net asset value, which is an easier question to ask, but a more challenging question to answer because it's very difficult to put a pin in net asset value, particularly for a leasing company where the net asset value has to be calculated on a charter-adjusted basis. And we've found that you go to three or four different brokers and ask them for charter-adjusted valuations, you're going to come back with three or four different numbers. So it's a very difficult easy question, difficult answer. So then it's a question of trying to find the right metrics to come up with a sensible approach to valuation, which, given that we're focused very heavily on trying to build our forward contract cover and forward earnings visibility, would suggest that valuation metrics associated with precisely those parameters would be more appropriate. Anyway, sorry. Long story short, would I like to see our stock price higher? Yes, of course. And do we think about share buybacks as part of our capital allocation and whether or not to how to move the dial on share buybacks? All the time. Capital allocation is what we're thinking about all of the time and trying to take a balanced approach that allows us to protect the resilience of the company while at the same time putting us in a position to exploit the opportunities of the cycle. Because it's easy to buy back shares. It's less easy to raise incremental equity, particularly when you want to jump on opportunities which are most attractive from a pure shipping value perspective at the bottom of the cycle. The problem with that is that the opportunities at the bottom of the cycle also coincide with when valuations tend to be lowest from a share perspective because sentiment is under pressure. And absolutely no one wants to be diluted at the bottom of the cycle. So that's why we have to calibrate this capital allocation position really very, very carefully. But Tassos, onto you. The only thing that I wanted to add into the pod is that usually we see that in a number of shipping companies listed is that the price or the discount on the price is not so company-specific. It's probably part of our industry of how it's been valuated or whether it's been discounted. So this can also be taken under consideration. And as Tom has already mentioned, our biggest always concern is to maximize the capital allocation in the best interest of all stakeholders. This is what we're always trying to do. But the reality is where the fair market value of the prices right now is not only dependent on us. It depends on the market, the perspectives in the industry, or the general market of the financial situation of liners, customers, even country geopolitical situations. So there are a number of factors that you need to address. Well, I will add here, and again, this is not a softball statement coming from me to you. This is actually two or three people asked this that there is a disconnect between the company quality and the outlook and the share price. And they were asking exactly what are the initiatives to try to adjust that. And I presume that exactly part of this is the consistent implementation of your overall strategy as you elaborated very much in detail. And also things like what we're doing today, communicating to what you're doing to a broader audience. Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And by the way, I don't think I've noticed a single softball question from you so far. But anyway, maybe I'm missing something. But you're right, actually. Yeah. So I mean, to that point, Nicolas, I think shipping, there are a number of issues that we have to tackle in the shipping sector. The first is that collectively, as a sector, we're really quite small. So I don't know what the combined market cap of all of the publicly listed container ship lessors might be, but I would suspect that it's probably less than $5 billion, probably materially less than $5 billion. So we're just $700 million. So in that respect, we are not only a sector made up of smaller micro-cap companies, but collectively, we're a comparatively small sector, which has its impact, I think, in terms of familiarity for investors, hence the value of doing events such as this. And also means that whatever we're doing as a sector will tend to be influenced from a stock price perspective, as Tassos said, by what's happening in the broader capital markets, regardless of the fundamentals of what we're facing. Now, that presents opportunities on the one hand, potentially that we can capitalize on through share buybacks, but it also presents challenges and risks that we have to manage. So I wish there was a simple answer to the question that you and the listeners have posed, but there isn't. So we have to, again, try to take this balanced approach and tweak the dial here and there to try to stay resilient, be in a position to jump on the right value-accretive opportunities, allocate capital as thoughtfully as we possibly can, and stay nimble. Thomas, you mentioned that during your remarks two or three times about access to non-diluted capital, which I think is very important. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that? What do you mean by that? Sure. So I mean, I suppose partly what I was getting at there is the point I made earlier, which is raising capital at the bottom of the shipping cycle when the most attractive opportunities to deploy that capital exist. You're buying assets cheap. That's challenging, dilutive or not, right? It's not so easy to convince lenders to come in at the bottom of the cycle. But it's also a surefire way to upset equity investors. You don't want to be raising capital when, okay, asset values are low, but also almost by definition, share values are likely to be compressed as well. So we've had, maybe it was on one of the events that you organized, there was a question raised by a listener who said, "Look, if you've got a good project, capital will always be available," which in our experience isn't necessarily the case or certainly isn't available on the terms that would make its deployment attractive. Capital is always available for the right projects, but maybe not on terms that would be interesting for shareholders in GSL. And given that management of shareholders in GSL, that keeps us honest too. Thank you. Now, let me move forward to one last question. You mentioned about the reefer cargo being a very fast-growing segment and very important for you. And I think you are one of the few companies that are focusing on this. Can you elaborate on the significance of this segment for your strategy? Sure. So container shipping was once a very rapidly growing industry as a whole. If we go back to when China joined the WTO, we were seeing demand growth year-over-year in double digits, sort of 10%-15% demand growth per year, phenomenal growth. Now it's a more mature industry, and it tends to grow in terms of cargo volumes broadly in line with GDP growth. So if you've got global GDP growth of a couple of percent, you're likely to see global containerized trade growth of roughly a couple of percent. Occasionally, you'll see actually containerized trade grow more slowly than GDP growth. However, within that, there's a fast-growing segment or faster-growing segment, which is refrigerated cargo. And what's happening there is that as reefer containers, so these basically 40-foot-long fridges, as the technology behind those refrigerated containers becomes more sophisticated, it means that refrigerated cargo, which previously had to be carried by air in order to remain attractive, can actually now be carried by sea because the maturation process can be suspended, and it's much cheaper. You can carry much higher weights via sea, etc., etc., etc. So that transfer from air to sea means that refrigerated cargo is a faster-growing segment. And there's also more, as a result of technology, just simply more refrigerated cargo being shipped around the world. Now, in order to carry refrigerated cargo, you have to have ships equipped to do so, which means that they have to have very well-developed or high-installed power, the ability to generate electricity to supply all of these reefer containers, number one. They also have to have sufficient plugs, and there are various other requirements as well. Anyway, so we're very much focused upon high-specification ships that are capable of carrying an elevated volume of reefer containers. Now, that's attractive for the liner companies themselves because refrigerated cargo, because of its requirements, also tends to be more lucrative cargo for them. So people pay higher freight rates. And so for the transport from A to B of a reefer box, the liner company is going to be making more money. So a ship that can carry more reefer cargo is more attractive through the cycle to the liner companies, and that's absolutely consistent with our strategy. Thank you. Now, moving towards the sector, I mean, the regulations and decarbonization that is on top of everyone's agenda. I'm combining two questions here. Given the regulatory developments regarding decarbonization, what are you doing in that regard? And I'm combining that with a question, how do you see liner companies impacted or acting in this regard? Apparently, they need to deploy more energy-efficient tonnage. So how do you see that playing into your sector? Yeah. That's the multi-billion-dollar question, possibly a trillion-dollar question. So you're absolutely right. Regulations being implemented not only by the IMO, which is the global regulator for shipping, but increasingly by different national and regional governments, of which probably the EU is the one that springs most readily to mind. Regulations related to emissions are tightening. They're tightening, and they're tightening quickly. And that makes sense because as an industry, not just container shipping, but across all of shipping, roughly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from shipping. It's roughly the same size as Germany's emissions footprint. So to decarbonize the industry, it's going to really move the needle. The regulators are onto this, and quite rightly. So to give you a sort of sense of the regulations that are being rolled out, we've got from the IMO, we've got two regulations. Sorry about all of these acronyms, but there's one called EEXI, which implies that the asset level, it's comparatively easy to comply with that. You have to install a governor on your engine to put a range limit on the power output of the engine, and as a result, a range limit on the emissions, number one. Number two, CII, another IMO-introduced regulation, which is applied at the operational level, which means that you need to change the way in which the asset is operated, is driven. And that's largely controlled by the charter rather than by us. But broadly speaking there, because the relationship between speed and fuel consumption is non-linear, it's in fact sort of logarithmic or possibly exponential. It means. That just to explain something, is that this has to do with CII and the operations that bunkers is not our cost, it's actually a liner's cost. So that's why the CII and the decarbonization applies to them, not to us. Yeah. No, that's a good point. And also the way in which ships are actually operated is determined by the charters. So again, going back to the sort of the speed and fuel consumption curve, you slow a ship down a little bit, you reduce consumption a lot, and as a result, you reduce emissions a lot. Now, that's important, and I'll come back to it in a moment because if you slow ships down, it's the same as taking capacity out of the market. So I'll put a pin in that. I'll come back to it in a moment. And then next, you have EU ETS, which is the incorporation of shipping beneath the umbrella of the emissions trading scheme in Europe. So that basically means if a ship comes into EU waters, burns fuel, and emits greenhouse gases, it's pinged, meaning that in order to emit, you have to purchase what's called an EU Allowance, an EUA for each ton of emissions that come out of the funnel. Now, going back to Tassos's earlier point, because fuel is purchased by the charterers and because the trading of the ships is determined by the charterers, it's the charterers who are effectively on the hook for these EUAs. So they have to buy the EUAs. They have to submit those EUAs to us, and then we surrender them to the European authorities. But what it means is that I don't know what the price of an EUA is today. It's probably EUR 65, EUR 63, EUR 65 today. So every ton of carbon dioxide produced costs EUR 65 in addition to the fuel cost. So there's a real incentive to reduce those emissions, which is precisely the thinking behind the regulation. Make it too expensive to emit. That way, people will invest in reducing emissions, and ultimately, things play out well. Now, the quickest way and most effective way to reduce emissions, which gets you a better CII rating, but crucially, in the case of Europe, also reduces your exposure in financial terms to EUAs, the quickest way to do that is to slow ships down, which is great news environmentally. And it's also good news from a supply-demand dynamics perspective because it removes effective capacity, tightens the supply-demand balance. Now, what are liner companies doing it, which was the sort of the second part of your question? Well, there are different strategies from different liner companies. Some, including some of our clients, are retrofitting ships to make them more efficient. You can change the propeller, change the bow, change some of the physical characteristics of the ship to improve the hydrodynamics of that ship, reduce friction, and as a result, reduce energy use and emissions. Others are trying to find ways in which to use high-frequency data captured from the ships to improve the operations of those ships. We're doing this sort of collaboratively with some of our charterers too. Others are looking to use biofuel. Again, back to Tassos's point, fuel is purchased by the charterer. Biofuel is lower carbon, but it's also more expensive. It's going to be driven by the charterer if they calculate that biofuel economics are offset by being able to capture a higher freight from their customers who are wanting to move on a low-carbon basis. That's the availability of the biofuel, which in this case, the infrastructure and the availability is not something that you can count on for the future, at least the near-term future. Yeah. So I mean, there are so many moving parts here, but at least let's park the liner companies for a moment. From our perspective, which both Tassos and I can talk about in real terms, what are we doing? One, we're retrofitting ships, as I just said, and we're doing that in conjunction with our charterers. So we work closely with them to enhance the characteristics of the ship. And because they're paying for the fuel, they're capturing the economics. And as a result, they either pay a higher charter rate or they contribute to the CapEx. We're obviously also getting a more valuable ship at the end of the day. So it works for both of us. It's a win-win. So that's one thing, retrofits. Second thing, high-frequency data. We're installing systems on all of our ships to capture high-frequency operational data that we can share simultaneously with the charterers, the people who are controlling the operating instructions of the ships in order to try to smooth out the operating profile of the ships. Because if you're accelerating a ship, decelerating, accelerating, decelerating, the fuel consumption is enormous. If you can smooth that out collaboratively, you save fuel and you also reduce emissions. So high-frequency data. There's probably going to be a bonus in due course of being able to apply AI to that high-frequency data. We don't know where that will lead, but unless you have the data, you don't have the option of the AI. So that's something that's promised in the future. Third point, biofuels. So almost, well, we intend to complete the biofuel compatibility for our full fleet all going well by the end of this year. I think we've got roughly 60% of it already done, 70% already done. So it can burn biofuel. And we are seeing some of our charterers fuel our ships with biofuel. So that's happening as well. And then finally, we've invested in a carbon capture and storage startup, Aqualung. We invested in that a couple of years ago, I think. And if someone can crack the nut of carbon capture and storage, the prize is going to be enormous because that way you've got a very effective bridge between the current mono or dual-fuel environment to potentially a multi-fuel green fuel future. But carbon capture and storage, although immensely promising, it's not proving straightforward. We've invested. We're trying to get it done. Hopefully, we get there. And if we don't, hopefully, someone else does because the prize for the industry and for the planet would be huge. Thank you. I have three more questions to ask you before we wrap up, and I hope we can keep this within the hour. The first question going now to geopolitics. By the way, thank you for this very detailed explanation. The first question on geopolitics now, how do you see things developing, the impact of the current geopolitics, Red Sea, and so on on container shipping? And also besides the geopolitics, we have the Panama Canal. Now we have the Baltimore Bridge, that disaster. How are these likely to affect trading and freight rates and goods? I'll try to give you another softball question. No, you're right. Definitely not a softball question. I'll try to give a general answer, and then I'm sure Tassos will have some thoughts as well. But look, I think generally speaking, disruptive events, be they the Red Sea, which we've provided you some data on, or very much at the margins, the Baltimore Bridge, or the Panama Canal, or Suez and other strikes, or COVID, or the list can go on. But if you've got something which is disrupting the supply chain without, importantly, disrupting fundamental demand, then that tends to be supportive of the supply-demand balance within shipping. So inefficiencies, weirdly, are positive if you're providing ships into the space, which we are. Now, how long the Red Sea situation will last, anybody's guess. When the Panama Canal will be sufficiently refilled, there are positive signs that it's coming back, but I mean, who knows? Baltimore Bridge, I mean, Baltimore from a obviously, it was a horrible event. All of these are horrible events, but Baltimore as a container port is one of the smaller ports, I would say, on the U.S. East Coast. And from what we understand, containerized trade at least is being redirected quite readily to other East Coast ports. So I don't see a big impact from that. Tassos, I don't know if you've got anything to add. I definitely don't have a view on the event where the. Finish or something like that. The only thing that I can say is usually these disruptive events may have also some subsequent other events that can create an additional disruption, like for example, the tariffs in the past. In the previous year, they have some subsequent events that also create a disturbance in the supply-demand equilibrium. But yes, any inefficiency, as Tom has actually mentioned, it's creating prospects in the market. Yeah. To pick up on Tassos's point there, actually, that's a very interesting one. So when trade tensions between the U.S. and China were at their peak, what we actually saw was that manufacturing started to relocate. So cargo volumes that had been coming out of China and out of the really big ports like Shanghai aboard the big mainline carriers, the really big ships, they started to move towards Indonesia, Vietnam, other parts of the world to sort of provide the same goods but out of alternate non-Chinese locations. And that, again, oddly or counterintuitively, was a stimulus in demand for mid-size and smaller ships because the really big ships couldn't trade directly to the ports in these new locations. And so cargo had to be carried aboard ships like ours to reconnect with the mainline trades elsewhere. So it's odd. Inefficiencies, however counterintuitive, tend to be supportive, but they're super unpredictable. Tom, it's very interesting that you brought this point up, which is very correct, by the way, because we had a question that's this question and one more, and we'll wrap up. This question is exactly the opposite, meaning it says, particularly with the longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope and so on, are you seeing less demand for mid-size vessels from liners who may be inclined to use larger ships to meet the demand because of the longer routes? Do you see that happening or? No. I mean, we certainly haven't seen that yet. Actually, I would say we've seen not quite the reverse, but what we have seen is because there wasn't actually a huge amount of slack in the system, meaning the global fleet, the deployment of the global fleet at the time that the Red Sea disruption began, the only way, excuse me, the only way that the liner companies could offset the need for going around the Cape of Good Hope without completely disrupting their liner networks and in the absence of sufficient additional capacity to sort of inject in to support their networks was to speed up. So what we have seen is longer distances being partially offset by faster service speeds. Now, that's bad news for the environment for the reasons that we've already told you. But ultimately, it's not great news for the economics of any one of the liner companies or cargo interests because if you burn more fuel, you've got to pass that cost on to someone. But because there aren't enough ships at the moment to avoid speeding up, that's the way to do it. So it's not quite a direct answer to the question you raised, Nicolas, but it's a slight twist upon it. Just to simplify a little bit, the longer the distance, it doesn't mean the bigger the vessel. The size of the vessel depends on the needs of the line, the demand, the regularity that you want to move the cargo. So the miles, probably as far as we have seen, doesn't have any impact on the size of the asset. Actually, that's a very good point. And the other thing to remember is that in order to make the scale economics of a really big ship work, you've got to fill it. So regardless of distance, you also need to have the cargo volumes to fill the ship to enjoy the economies of scale. Otherwise, you'd be better off with a smaller ship, better suited to the volumes of cargo that you're moving from a unit cost perspective. Sorry, Nicolas, I interrupted. No, not at all. Not at all. Now, I'm coming to the last question. It's been a tremendously insightful discussion. The last question is, on a recent panel, you mentioned the relationship between Global Ship Lease and Bayes Business School in the U.K. So can you tell us a little bit more about what this is all about? Yes. Happy to. So we formed, backing up. Bayes Business School, formerly known as Cass Business School, which is a very well-known name in shipping. A big part of the Greek shipping community has flowed through Cass and now Bayes in the past. They have a very, very well-respected shipping trade and finance master's. They're based out of London, and I think they're generally considered to be one of the thought leaders academically, at least, and research. I'm very proud that I was a visiting lecturer there for 10 years. Excellent. Even better. So I'm preaching to the converted, Nicolas, at least in your case. So anyway, thought leaders in shipping, and they're attracting a lot of bright minds. And they have been. They put forward a proposal to the UK government to work in the UK Clean Maritime Research Hub. They were successful. We were a project partner supporting them in that. What we give to them is data, real-world experience, I suppose. What we get from them are smart minds, access to clever people, research, bright ideas concerning different ways to solve old problems. They're particularly strongly focused on decarbonization and the challenges that that presents. So it's a great exchange. It's a win-win relationship with them. We're so pleased with that relationship, actually, that we've—I'm not sure if this is public yet, but anyway, it will be. We're sponsoring a new scholarship on the master's program with them, which will be dedicated for women in shipping. The idea is that shipping is historically a male-dominated industry, and we and others want to actively help diversify that. I would say that George, our chairman. We need women minds, actually. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If you've got a male-dominated industry by gender diversification, you've already doubled the talent pool into which you can dip. Actually, that's something that George, our chairman, has been very forward-thinking on. Our heads of commercial, or at least within Technomar, heads of commercial, legal, insurance, the list goes on, are all women. This is following on through the public company, GSL, an initiative that is already well-established within Technomar as a strategic partner. We really like the idea of supporting Bayes in that respect. Sorry, probably a longer answer than you were expecting. Congratulations. That is a great initiative, and congratulations for your commitment to support it. Oh, pleasure. No, we're really proud to be doing so. If you allow me, I will bring this discussion to a close. It's been a tremendous discussion. I have to say, I'm very impressed that people stayed during the whole hour of the valuable information that you've shared with everybody. So thank you very, very much to our My pleasure. Leads, to Thomas and Tassos. And as a reminder, this webinar will be available as a replay on Capital Link's website at www.capitallinkwebinars.com and also on our YouTube channel. Thank you very much to everybody. Thank you. And Tassos and Thomas. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye. Good.