Navigator Holdings is already looking ahead to next year.
A number of one-off incidents worldwide pushed the New York-listed company into the red for the first quarter, but chief executive David Butters said other projects identified on the company's "road to 2020" are humming along.
"We believe in the milestones we identified on that road to 2020 remain achievable and essentially on our original time schedule," Butters said today during a first-quarter earnings call.
Among those are the Mariner East pipelines in Pennsylvania, which are expected to funnel 600,000 barrels of natural gas liquid to its Marcus Hook terminal by year's end and Pembina's LNG export terminal in Price Rupert Island in British Columbia slated for completion next year.
Those projects, plus the company's ethelyne export terminal in Morgan's Point, Texas developed in conjunction with Enterprise Product Partners, looks to be ready by the middle of the fourth quarter, Butters said.
"The infrastructure projects, the pipelines, the fractionators, the terminals and the plants, the PDH plants and the ethylene plants. They're all converging at once," he said. "And when they are up and running, they will be [part of] a very tight market."
The only market that appeared to be falling behind was Venezuela, where sanctions levied by the US government earlier this year forced five handysize ships into the spot market, including two Navigator vessels.
Butters said Navigator applied for a sanctions waiver from the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control, but did not expect to receive one.
Jefferies analyst Randy Giveans revised his earnings per share estimates for 2019 and 2020 down to a $0.03 loss and $0.90 respectively, given the company's first quarter performance.
But he said the second half of the year should be good and 2020 great.
"We believe NVGS shares are attractively valued, trading at a discount to NAV," he said in a Tuesday note. "We expect results to improve slowly but surely on the 'road to 2020.'"
