Western Bulk Chartering AS (WEST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Welcome to the investor presentation for the second half of 2025 results for Western Bulk. I'm Torbjoern Gjervik, and with me today, I have Kenneth Thu. I'm the CEO and Kenneth Thu, the CFO. Disclaimer first. Then just to explain those of you who are new to Western Bulk basics of our business model. It is about providing our customers an efficient transport solution, but also managing their risk. So what we do as an asset-light dry bulk operator is to match vessels and cargoes. So the agenda for today. First, we'll talk through the 2025 performance. Then we'll move on to strategy and a bit on positioning and then round off with the market outlook. So the indexes, the Supramax index increased from the summer lows of 10,000, 12,000 up to close to 19,000 by the autumn. And that showed us that the market has a relatively tight utilization rate. And after a brief seasonal dip in December, the rates rebounded quickly, and we have gotten a pretty strong start to 2026. Also, the FFA market indicates a belief in the market for 2026, trading at relatively healthy levels. Looking at the basin spread, we could see for most of last year that it was trading within range, the difference or the spread between the Atlantic market and the Pacific markets. Q3, Atlantic was trading a bit in the upper range and Q4 a bit in the lower range. But overall, it was relatively normal year when it comes to the basin spreads, which we are tracking quite closely. This year, though, we can see -- you can see the thick blue line on the graph to the right. You can see that we have broken out of trend, and this is very much in favor of the Atlantic market, which is trading at really strong levels for this time of the year, driven mainly by grains out of U.S. Gulf and East Coast South America. So that's quite noteworthy. 2025 was a year with improved results, but also focus on delivering on the strategy. So as you can see from the key figures and the net TC ended at USD 27.7 million. Second half, up from $9.3 million in '24 to $20.1 million in '25. We were well positioned to benefit from the dry bulk market upturn in the early second half. The admin expenses came in around $22 million, which is a reduction of $4.5 million from 2024 and also in line with previously communicated figures. Net profit, $5.4 million, second half, up from minus $4.6 million in '24 to $7.8 million in '25, an average of 110 vessels with a net TC margin of close to $700 per day. So we can see we are progressing. We believe some of the initiatives that we have ongoing to improve the operating business is slowly starting to work. More about that on the next slides. Strong liquidity and book equity with available liquidity of $65 million, free cash, $30 million, undrawn bank facilities totaling $35 million. Working capital requirements, $10 million to $15 million, mainly driven by accounts receivables and bunker stocks. So the book equity, almost $51 million. So plenty of ammunition to use as we go into '26, looking for new opportunities, whether it being on the asset side, co-investing, people, other initiatives, tech, things that we believe can enhance the margins of Western Bulk going forward. Strategy. Broadly put into 2 categories: strengthening and grow our core trading business, less dependent on market cycles, scale a fleet of partnership-owned vessels commercially managed by Western Bulk. This is to bring additional revenues and synergies to the trading business. So it's all about really strengthening the platform in as many ways as we can. Looking a bit more into the first point, improving the core trading, we are of the strong belief that it's about the people. We need to retain the best people at Western Bulk. We need to develop the employees, all the employees we have. And we need to build and continue to build a performance culture and a winning mentality. It's tough competition in the operating space still, and it will be for years to come. So only the strongest will really do well. Also, data improve the data we have, but we also need to have a culture where our chartering managers, our operations managers and everybody in the organization also are curious about using data and see how we can become better by using data, attract complementary skills and networks to the platform. We have gone through the whole organization to see what's our strengths and where can we become stronger. We are humble to say that there is obviously some of our competitors out there that are doing stuff, making money on things that we don't do today. Some of those trades are very interesting niche trades with a slightly higher base margin, which requires certain skills and network. And we want to attract more of those individuals and teams and skill sets and competency into our platform and build on that and want that to be complementary to the bulk business that we are doing today and all the excellent traders and operators and people that we have doing bulk business in the company today. So that's on improving the core trading, mainly about people and culture. Assets and commercial management, we want to co-invest. We'd rather own 10 ships, 20% than to own 2 ships 100%. We want to build something. We want to build a service. We want to show our partners that we are creating good value for them. By gaining access to Western Bulk platform, we want to show them what that means and how well they will be taken care of. So that's the way we want to invest and also co-investing over time, we think it's a more sustainable business model. It's something that would give you a decent average price over the cycle. It's something that will spread your risk over time. So there's plenty of reasons for us to like that way of thinking. Commercial management, it's a bit of add-on in terms of -- but it's a similar thinking. We want to open up the platform of Western Bulk and invite selected partners in to work together with us to maximize the return on their assets. So that is that on this slide. I can take a little moment to sort of also pause and if there is any questions from people here since this is a bit of a new angle. All right. There will be a chance in the end to ask questions after the presentation as well. Here, we show an example around -- a practical example of how we are thinking as to complementary skills and networks. We brought in an experienced lumber and projects team of 3 individuals based in Bergen. They were commencing operations from the 1st of May 2026, and they have extensive experience in the niche trade and breakbulk in general. So that's a way for us to build. And I think also just making sure that we integrate new people, new teams into the culture. We will spend a lot of time on the due diligence part, having numerous chats with the various people involved on -- to making sure that there's a best possible chance of a good cultural fit as well. So we are not rushing this. We want to do things step by step. Yes. Another example is increasing the focus on the Handy business we are doing in Asia. So we hired Dan Cox to set up a small office in Sydney, 20 years of handy experience. We were lacking Handy experience in Pacific, something we identified a gap that we have now plugged, and we will build around it and sort of build activity around him and the team out there. Practical example, again, this time from co-investing, we bought Kamsarmax, as some of you might know, together with 3 great Norwegian partners, where we took a 22% ownership stake, and we are responsible for the commercial management and vessel management in the project. So that's ensuring the partners, obviously, access to customers and supplier networks, chartering and operational expertise and also a broad range of in-house support functions. So this was sort of an important milestone for us to set the structure and get it up and running. And from here, we hope to build on that. One thing to mention there, though, is obviously the asset prices are steaming hot at the moment. So we are sort of having a lot of discussions around that. And we are not going to -- we're going to wait our investments carefully. And also that will depend sort of it will also be an important factor for the pace of how fast we can grow this new leg to [indiscernible]. It will also be market dependent. We have not just -- we're not just blindly going to go out and execute on it without taking the market into consideration, obviously. Yes. And that brings us to the market view. And as we have been saying for some time, we are relatively positive for the market in 2026, mainly based on the ton-mile story we see from the larger sizes from Capesize and the trickle-down effect we can expect to see on the Kamsarmaxes and again, the Ultramaxes. But also, we think we see an underlying high utilization rate in the dry bulk market, and it does not take market -- does not take much for the market to spike. So there's just a bit of inefficiency coming in from either there is being geopolitical shocks or other things that leads to sudden spikes in the market. So I think it's a dangerous market to, over time, sit short in. That being said, we will obviously be agile and our usual sales when it comes to changing our positions quickly around when we have a view. A bit cautious that things have already moved up quite fast. So we're already up to relatively high levels. Also worth mentioning the underlying order book is still somewhat high on Ultramaxes and also keeping in mind that we, as a company, tend to use the first quarter to position ourselves for the remainder of the year. So that sums up our presentation for today. As normal, we try to -- we keep it rather brief, but fully open for questions now if there is anything on your mind. Okay. Then thank you very much for the presentation, and I wish you a great week ahead.