US-listed Safe Bulkers, an owner of 50 bulkers in the water and under construction, entered 2022 on the same heady pace as in the previous year.
Net income for the first quarter, a traditionally weak earnings period for bulker owners, rose to $36.4m, a 71% leap from the same period of 2021. The result was underpinned by a 24% increase in net revenue to $77.7m.
As a result, Athens-based Safe Bulkers reiterated a dividend of $0.05 per share.
That is the same level as in the previous quarter, when the company distributed its first regular dividend in six years after its full-year profit soared by a factor of eight to $65.2m.
Rewarding shareholders, however, isn’t Safe Bulkers’ only priority.
“We continue to focus on fleet renewal and expansion,” president Loukas Barmparis said.
That primarily concerns the nine high-specification newbuildings the company has ordered in Japan. Earlier this month Safe Bulkers, one of Greece’s earliest bulker newbuilding contractors in the current cycle and certainly the most prolific, took delivery of the first of them — the 82,000-dwt kamsarmax Vassos (built 2022).
Another five kamsarmaxes and three post-panamaxes are to gradually follow through to 2024.
In another priority, Safe Bulkers cut its debt by about a third year-on-year to $409m. That debt is almost entirely covered by the scrap value of its fleet, which the company estimates at about $395m.
Multi-year deals
Benefitting from charterers’ growing appetite for longer charters, Safe Bulkers considerably increased the share of its fleet on medium- to long-term employment.
As of 20 May, 12 of its 42 bulkers in the water were on time charters lasting more than a year. Another 10 were even fixed for more than two years.
In one characteristic example, the 176,000-dwt Pelopidas (built 2011), will be chartered from June onwards for three years, extendable at charterer’s option for a fourth, at a gross daily charter rate of $25,250 per day.
Safe Bulkers estimates its total contracted charter revenues at more than $400m in total.
Covid-19 weighed somewhat on results in the first quarter, adding about $500,000 in crew repatriation and related costs in the first quarter.
The Ukraine war has not hurt the company either. Safe Bulkers reiterated a statement it also made earlier this year that it has no Ukraine or Russian crew, no vessels currently in the Black Sea and “otherwise conduct[s] limited operations” in Russia or Ukraine.
