StealthGas Inc. (NASDAQ:GASS) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 26, 2022 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Michael Jolliffe - Chairman of the Board

Konstantinos Sistovaris - Investor Relations

Harry Vafias - Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Chris Robertson - Jefferies

Eric Newman - TowerView

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to GASS First Quarter 2022 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised, that today's conference is being recorded.

I now would like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Michael Jolliffe, Chairman of the Board. Please, go ahead, sir.

Michael Jolliffe

Thank you very much, Nadia. Good morning. This is Michael Jolliffe and joining me on our call today is Harry Vafias, our Chief Executive Officer and Konstantinos Sistovaris, who will be handling the Investor Relations, to discuss the financial aspects.

Before we commence our presentation, I would like to remind you that we will be discussing forward-looking statements, which reflect current views with respect to future events and financial performance. At this stage, if you could all take a moment to read our disclaimer on slide two of this presentation. Risks are further disclosed in StealthGas filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I would also like to point out that all amounts quoted, unless otherwise clarified, are implicitly stated in United States dollars. Today, we released our earnings results for the first quarter, which was also the first quarter of trading as a pure LPG company, and we saw fantastic improvement compared to last year. So let's proceed to discuss these results and what we see in the market in general.

Turning to slide three. We summarize the highlights of our first quarter. In the first quarter of 2022, we faced an improved LPG market, particularly in Europe, hence, we took the opportunity and continue to secure more vessels trading in the area on period charters.

On the other hand, the market in Asia was stable, but we also managed to secure more period charters. In terms of operational utilization of our fleet at 92.7%, it was at similar levels to last year, a figure we aim to improve as we had one vessel to dry dock and did experience off-hire days on the spot ships.

However, we marked an 18% reduction of spot days quarter-on-quarter and 65% year-on-year, managing to earn better returns on time chartered vessels than on spot ships. We now have 59% of our fleet days secured on period charters for the remainder of 2022. In total, fleet employment days for all subsequent periods generating almost $70 million and that excludes the joint venture vessels in contracted revenues.