Nordic American Tankers Limited (NYSE:NAT) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call March 7, 2023 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Herbjørn Hansson - Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Bjørn Giæver - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Omar Nokta - Jefferies

Liam Burke - B. Riley

Thomas Steed - Private Investor

Ken Davidson - Private Investor

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Nordic American Tankers Investors Conference Call. I would now like to turn the call over to Herbjørn Hansson, Founder, Chairman, CEO. Please go ahead.

Herbjørn Hansson

Thank you. Thank you, Mondi and good morning to you. It’s a pleasure to be together with you. And we today will talk about the future of our company and the way forward. As an introduction, I will make some observations on the general position of Nordic American.

And I will ask, in a way, the first question, what is happening in the marketplace? Our view is clearly at this time that there is scarcity of ships, there are too few ships in the marketplace. And when there are too few ships, rates go up and value of ships, go up. Our main focus is on so called ton mile, which is the same as transportation work. And we are seeing at this time that the transportation work is increasing. And we do see that very clearly in our worldwide operations. Nordic American is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and we have been listed there since 1975. And we have business all over the world. We have business in Japan, in China, in Korea and also in India. Collectively, I would call it East. I can tell you that we have a ship in China, about if not necessarily every week, but every 2 weeks or so, we are often in China.

And we also have a presence in other parts of the world. And there is one interesting development I would mention to you is that if we had started lifting oil from Guyana in South America. That is an oil field, which essentially is managed by ExxonMobil. And we – our main focus and our main customers are what I call big oil, the big oil companies, ExxonMobil, Shell, British Petroleum and the like. And again, we focus on transportation work. And evidently, we have a lot of business in the Middle East and also in Saudi Arabia. One of my closer friends, he was living in Saudi Arabia for 13 years and he has been helping me a lot in understanding the country. We lift oil from the Port of Yanbu, in Saudi Arabia and we have close links with Saudi Arabia. Alexander Hansson, he is Head of our Operation in Monaco and he has closed friends in Saudi Arabia at the very top of that country.