Frontline plc (NYSE:FRO) Q2 2023 Results Conference Call August 24, 2023 9:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Lars Barstad - CEO
Inger Klemp - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Jon Chappell - Evercore
Chris Robertson - Deutsche Bank
Omar Nokta - Jefferies
Chris Tsung - Webber Research
Operator
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Second Quarter 2023 Frontline plc Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Lars Barstad. Please go ahead.
Lars Barstad
Thank you. Dear all, thank you for listening in to Frontline's second quarter earnings call.
In the second quarter, we had a very untypical spike for VLCC and Suezmax towards the end. And this puts us in a position to make some extra cash and also to carry some value into the third quarter. Most interestingly, this spike was caused by minor weather delays, telling a tail of how narrowly balanced our market is. The macroeconomical headwinds seem to have a very-muted impact on our little part of the global macro puzzle, and we'll get to that later in the presentation.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the markets like these, Frontline’s efficient and transparent platform comes to shine and effectively turning revenues to shareholder returns. Our running cost remains fairly stable, as expressed in our cash breakeven levels and all the incremental income goes straight to the bottom line and back to you, shareholders.
Before I give the word to Inger, let's look at our TCE numbers on slide 3 in the deck. In the second quarter, Frontline achieved $64,000 per day on our VLCC fleet, $61,700 per day on our Suezmax fleet and $52,900 per day on our LR2/Aframax fleet. I hope you're all fairly comfortable with these numbers. And we are back to a somewhat reverted earnings relationship between our segments, where the VLCC makes the most. We have secured quite firm numbers as we progress into Q3, with 74% of our VLCC days booked at $53,200 per day; 67% of our Suezmax days fixed at $48,800 per day; and 57% of our LR2/Afra days at $40,500 per day. And again, to remind you, all these numbers are on a load-to-discharge basis, and they will be affected by the amount of ballast days that we end up having towards the end of Q3.