Frontline Ltd (NYSE:FRO) Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call May 24, 2022 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Lars Barstad - Chief Executive Officer

Inger Klemp - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jon Chappell - Evercore

Chris Tsung - Webber Research

Chris Robertson - Jefferies

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Frontline Q1 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator instructions] Please be advised, today's conference is being recorded. [Operator instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Lars Barstad. Please, go ahead.

Lars Barstad

Thank you very much. Good morning, and good afternoon, everyone, welcome to Frontline's first quarter’s earnings call.

I think I'll start off with saying its safe to say that this has been a busy quarter in many respects. The conflict in Ukraine has been demanding on our organization. First of all, in order to support our crude, both Ukrainian and Russian nationals, in some instances, working together on our ships.

Our legal and compliance team have worked relentlessly in an ever-changing sanctions environment, making sure we are staying compliant. But it's also very satisfactory to see Frontline has managed to maneuver all these challenges and traded our ships very competitively at the same time.

To top it all, we announced the proposed combination with Euronav early April, and we’ve since then been working diligently together to finalize and appropriate transaction structure for this combination.

So let's move to slide three and look at the highlights. In the fourth quarter, Frontline achieved $15,700 per day on our VLCC fleet. We achieved 19,900 -- sorry, $16,900 per day on our Suezmax fleet and $19,000 per day on our LR2/Aframax fleet.

So far, in the first quarter of 2022, we booked 74% of our VLCC days at $22,600 per day. We booked 70% of our Suezmax days at $32,700 per day and 58% of our LR2/Aframax days at $46,300 per day. All numbers in this table are on the load to discharge basis as usual for Frontline.

Also, this quarter, I would like to draw your attention to slide four to explain the differences in returns depending on the vessel characteristics. You can clearly see on the figures on the right-hand side of this slide, that the earnings differentiate a lot in respect of what type of ship we're trading.