US-listed Costamare, an owner of 76 container ships and 46 bulkers, posted a record quarterly profit of $115.4m in the three months through March — almost twice as much as the $60.5m it notched up in the same period last year.

Adjusting for one-off items, including capital gains from the sale of a container ship it announced in March, underlying profitability rose at an even steeper pace to hit $104.5m from $38m.

The Costis Konstantakopoulos-led company maintained its regular dividend of $0.115 per share. As communicated earlier this year, Costamare topped this up with a special $0.50-per-share dividend backed by a stellar 2021 profit of $404m.

Fundamentals and strong charter rates for the container ship market “remain unchanged”, said the company’s chief financial officer Gregory Zikos in an earnings release on Thursday.

“Congestion shows no signs of easing, while recent events are in fact contributing to further increases,” the manager added.

Costamare’s container ship fleet is fully booked for 2022 and almost fully booked for 2023 with a coverage rate of about 95%.

“No vessels are available on short notice,” Zikos said.

Spillover effects from the booming container ship market also benefit Costamare’s bulker fleet — which primarily consists of smaller ships such as handysizes and supramaxes working in the spot market or on short-term charters and achieving higher earnings than capesizes do.

First bulker sale

The company also confirmed earlier broker reports it sold the 57,300-dwt supramax bulker Thunder (built 2009).

It is the first bulker sold by Costamare since the company entered that arena with a splash in 2021, when it built from scratch a fleet of 46 bulkers with serial acquisitions on the secondhand market worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Thunder deal, which will be wrapped up in the ongoing quarter, is an asset play that generated an estimated $3.6m in capital gains.

In previous guidance to investors earlier this year, Costamare said that secondhand bulkers were currently too costly to engage in further acquisitions.

The company, however, stands ready to resume buying at any favourable opportunity, backed up by a liquidity pile that jumped to $644m from $552m three months earlier.

This liquidity increase is partly due to a recently signed “hunting licence” agreement with a European bank with a volume of up to $120m. The five-year facility can be exercised at any point up to the second quarter of 2023. An amount of $10.8m of that facility has already been drawn down.

The company also has four 15,000-teu and two 12,690-teu newbuilding container ships under construction.