Hi, welcome everyone. I'm sorry for the delay. We had a bit of technical issues, but we are ready to start now. My name is Rasmus Kolbo, and on behalf of HC Andersen Capital, I have the pleasure of welcoming CFO Martin Badsted from NORDEN, who will take us through the quarter three report from yesterday. A warm welcome to you, Martin.
Thank you very much, Rasmus.
Before I hand over to you, I would also like, of course, to welcome all of those who have signed up. Again, sorry for the slight delay. You can ask your questions in the chat as usual. You can either do it in English or you can do it in Danish, and we will do the translation. With that, I'll leave it to you, Martin.
Thank you very much, Rasmus. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you to all of you listening in. Thank you for hanging on despite these small technical hiccups here at the beginning. Let's rush right into it. We came with our third quarter report yesterday, showing a net result of $243 million for the third quarter of 2022. You will see the fantastic development in the graph on the left-hand side here with strong increases over the last many quarters. A lot of the earnings was actually still in Freight Services & Trading, which delivered a net result of $190 million. Assets & Logistics also delivered a nice result with $53 million.
When you look at the values in the Assets & Logistics, the NAV of the portfolio of own ships and long-term leases, including our cash position et cetera, went up by DKK 69 per share to DKK 446 per share. That actually disregards the DKK 30 dividend that we paid out in August. Actually, the NAV increase was closer to DKK 100 per share just in Q3. I think what actually is really unique about the quarterly performance in this case is not so much actually that we were able to capture the upturn in tankers. That is very nice. Actually, we made a lot of money also in a declining dry cargo market.
I think that really shows the power of the business model that we have built in NORDEN, where we are actually able to be really agile and manage our position in these very volatile markets. That did also lead to good profits on the tanker side, where we benefited from a deliberate high exposure to a surging tanker market. We are benefiting from that both in the Freight Services & Trading division, but also in the asset management part where we have substantial assets on the tanker side. We kept our guidance at the interval that we announced earlier in October of $650 million-$730 million for the full year.
Based on the strong performance and cash flow, the board decided to issue a new dividend of DKK 30 per share and actually also initiate a new share buyback of $50 million. This graph really shows what we are doing with the active management of our portfolio. You will see here the blue line, which is increasing to above 80% over the period, illustrates the weighting of exposure that we have decided to have in our portfolio between tankers and dry. If you remember back in Q2 or April, the dry cargo market peaked at the time, and the tanker market was only beginning to improve. We flipped our book around and reduced exposure to what we thought would be a declining dry cargo market and added exposure to a strong anticipated tanker market.
I think the speed with which we were able to actually manage that portfolio and change the exposure is a testament to the strength of the business model that we have built. This actually comes after 2021, where it was the opposite, where the red line was highest because we had a lot of exposure to a strong dry cargo market at the time. Running a fairly asset-light business also means we don't need a lot of cash to reinvest in the business. Over the last couple of years, we have really paid out a lot of the earnings, and we continue to do that. Our dividend policy says to pay out minimum 50% of net earnings.
You will see here that in combination of dividends and share buybacks, we have actually paid out a lot more than that over the last couple of years. Of course, we hope to be able to still reward shareholders with strong distributions going forward. Looking a little bit into the two different business units, first Assets & Logistics. You will see on the graph on the left-hand side here the strong improvement in net asset value per share, up to now DKK 446 per share. And that is to a large extent in Q3, driven by higher tanker values and higher tanker forward curves.
It's important also to stress that even though in the table down here, it says that the dry cargo portfolio value is about $632 million, that should not be read as an indication of our exposure in dry. As I showed you on the graph before, our exposure in dry cargo is actually quite limited, and we are fully covered for 2022 and 2023, actually in both our business units. By far, the majority of our exposure is on the tanker side, where we continue to expect future upside. In Freight Services & Trading, we generate very high margins measured on a per-vessel day basis.
I think the impressive thing, as I said in the beginning here, is not so much that we had very strong margins early in the year when the market was strong, but actually that we maintained very strong margins also in this quarter when the market has been a lot weaker. It's actually a position that we are maintaining, being short in the near term in dry cargo and remaining long in tankers. When we look at valuation of the NORDEN share, our viewpoint at least is that it's a different way of evaluating the two business units. On the left-hand side is the NAV that I have talked about, which is, I think, appropriate for the Assets & Logistics part because it's a more asset heavy business.
On the right-hand side it is an attempt of illustrating how the valuation of the Freight Services & Trading business could be given that it's completely asset free business. Looking at the bottom here, we do some mathematical examples, if you will, using the average profit for the three-year period 2019 to 2021, or the average since 2019 including this year. It's, of course, up to you to make an assumption about what is the sort of normalized earnings going forward. If you think that's $100 million, as it says here, for the 2019 to 2021 average, that would with the multiples of either 5x earnings or 10x earnings equate to an additional a hundred krona or two hundred and twenty kronas per share on top of the NAV valuation on the left-hand side.
I think there's an easy way of thinking about the earnings based valuation that we think is appropriate for the Freight Services & Trading unit. Looking at the market, which is of course very important in this industry. Our outlook in dry is that in the near term we think there is further downside. When you look at the overall global volumes transported as is shown in the graph on the left here, you will see that there's actually no growth compared to last year. It's not a strong weakness, but it's also not growing. When you then have a little bit of fleet growth and you have lower congestion tying up fewer ships, that will give pressure on rates.
We have seen a lot of pressure on forward rates already in dry, but not so much pressure on asset values. We are actually still looking to sell a couple of ships, taking advantage of the remaining high asset values. One positive thing when you look a little bit on the longer term horizon is that the order book and the supply side in dry is quite healthy. Very few new buildings are coming in the next couple of years. Even with a little bit of scrapping, you should actually see very limited fleet growth. That means that once demand comes back to the market, the supply growth will not sort of put additional pressure on freight rates.
There's a chance at least that the downturn that we expect will be fairly shallow and fairly short. On the tanker side, it is a different outlook here. We do expect a very strong market going through a large part of 2023. The drivers here are to a large extent really the dislocation of trades that is happening due to the sanctions put on Russian oil exports. Some of these sanctions will only officially come into force in December and February. We have seen the effect on trade flows already, and we think there is still an effect to come in December and February as the full sanctions could come into force.
Also here we see a fairly low order book below 5%, which also basically means that, with the strong demand picture that we are seeing, it shouldn't be sort of eroded by strong fleet growth. We expect only fleet growth of about 2% per annum in the coming years. We think there's good reason to believe that the tanker market will remain very strong going forward. That brings me actually to my final summary slide. $243 million in net profit in the quarter. Actually nice to see both business unit contributing to earnings. Especially unique as I emphasize the trading profits and Freight Services & Trading, also including strong performance in dry cargo despite decline in rates.
NAV for asset management increasing to DKK 446 kroner per share. We continue to cash in on our high tanker exposure. We are starting to ease that exposure a little bit in both business units, but will remain very exposed to the market. Of course, rewarding shareholders with both new dividends and share buybacks based on full year guidance of $650 million-$730 million. That was the conclusion of my presentation. I hand back to Rasmus for Q&A.
Very good. Thank you very much, Martin. Yes, if you have any questions, please type them in on the chat and we will take them. There's already a few questions that came in during the presentation here. There is one. I think it's something we touched upon before Martin, but it's the risk or the answer. The question goes, any or what kind of risk if you misjudge the markets, for instance, going short in the tanker market and it continues to go up. I think it's people are probably have the understanding from the financial market that usually when you take a risk, of course there's an upside, but you usually also have a downside.
I guess that's also present here in your market. But could you put a few words on those things so we could better understand?
Yeah. It's a very, very relevant question, and I will stress that risk management is a core part of our whole business model. We have built over the last couple of years very sophisticated systems to measure our risk, both in terms of upside and downside and managing the authorities that we are delegating down through the organization. It's true that some of these decisions to manage the portfolio, of course, sometimes we will be wrong. An example of that was actually in the beginning of 2021 where we were more inclined to think the market would remain weak, so we had very limited exposure to dry cargo.
Once we actually then saw the market starting to take off, I think it's important to note how fast we were actually able to then build a strong, long position in that market. I think that is a testament to the strength of the business model. This is not something you do by pushing a button, like trading in the stock market. This is where you actually need to book ships and book cargos, and you have to have the organization ready to execute on all those positions. We can certainly, I think, do that in dry. We have demonstrated that on multiple occasions very quickly.
I will say that on the tanker side, it is a bit different because the market is not so liquid, so we couldn't just decide today to close down the entire position. We could over a couple of months probably, so that would be the lead time, and we are actively developing the tools in the market using both FFAs and TC. It is something that is important to us, but it's less liquid on the tanker side. That of course is a risk. Right now we are long, so the risk now is that you maybe are afraid the tanker market will decline. I think you should expect us to be a little bit more cautious maybe than some traditional owners that would prefer to be 100% spot oriented.
I think we would work more to take a little bit of profit along the way when we think the risk-reward justifies that.
Very good. Maybe I could have a follow-up on that. What kind of visibility do you sort of have into, for instance, 2022, 2023 now? How long are these contracts and if you need some, you know, certain liquidity in the contract, contracts that you might be trading, going into the next year, how far ahead can you see?
Could you repeat the question? I missed the first part.
Yeah. Yeah. What I was just wondering, what kind of visibility you have for the next year, and if you have different kind of contracts that you can trade with counterparties, how long ahead are they sort of liquid into the coming season?
Yeah. In terms of liquidity and the instruments, on the dry side, I would say it's fairly liquid about sort of one to two years out. Whereas on the tanker side it is more of a problem once you go beyond six months, I would say. If that is why you are asking about the contracts in the market. When you look up and you talk about visibility in terms of our earnings, I would say they are fairly high on the asset management side since we tend to operate with very high cover there. Of course, lower and more volatile on the FST side.
Very good. A question sort of relating to this, that is sort of what is your view on global recession's effect on oil demand and product tankers? Does your starting to cover high tanker exposure suggest you expect a rollover in spot prices?
We do think that the world economy will be struggling next year. That is part of the reason why we expect weakness on the dry cargo side. It will also do a little bit to erode the tanker upturn. Here we do think that the effect on distances on the overall demand picture will far outweigh any demand weakness on the oil side. I think it's actually interesting to note that when you look back through history even fairly strong global recessions have had quite limited impact on oil demand. Of course, it has an impact, but it's not like oil demand has been very volatile driven by global economy except perhaps for the COVID-19 outbreak in the early parts of 2020.
Again, we think the modest effect on oil demand will be far outweighed by longer distances and will still lead to support for tanker rates.
There's also a question here related to sort of the full EU sanctions on Russian oil that I think will kick in here in early 2023. How do you see that affecting the market?
Yeah. I would say there's still more than 1 million barrels a day that is being exported from Russia to the EU, which when the sanctions come into force, should actually no longer be moved. There will be a big effect of these barrels actually moving to other regions of the world, and then EU having to import barrels from outside, not Russia, from longer regions longer away. We do think there will be actually a pickup in rates related to the December and February sanctions packages. We should also be aware that there are risks in this. Some of the barrels may just not trade. Maybe prices will be elevated and destroy some demand also.
There is also the opportunity, the possibility that Russia will do something that we're not anticipating at the moment. I think the way we see it is the base case fundamental market outlook is very good on tankers, but you should be aware there are some political risks and event risks that could happen that could lead to a less favorable outcome. We intend to maintain our exposure to the market. Did we lose you, Rasmus? I can't hear you anymore.
Sorry about that. Yeah, I just went back to one of your first slides you had with your sort of earnings capabilities and your return of cash. Because there's a question here that goes, you stress you have very good business opportunities in today's market for both product tankers and for bulk when you go short. Why don't you increase the fleet far beyond the sort of 400-500 vessels that you have in your portfolio today?
Yeah. That's a very interesting question. Measured in number of vessel days, we have grown by more than 50% over the last three years, so about 15% on average. I do think actually we have grown our business quite aggressively. We aim to continue some growth, but I think it will be harder and harder to add such growth rates. There is of course a little bit of a trade-off between volume and the size of the margins that we can generate. Of course, a risk that if we were to aggressively pursue further growth, we might erode our margins.
I think the pace of additions going forward will be slower in an effort to actually protect the profitability of each trade.
Also still looking a bit into the oil market, is there a risk that the sort of the U.S. could ban the export of oil and oil products from the U.S.? I think we've seen that in the past when they had low inventories themselves and when their strategic reserves are at a low level they sort of do a ban. Would that be a risk again?
I would say to me it's not a big risk. I think there are some very important constraints on doing that even though some politicians keep talking about it. The problem is that the U.S. cannot just do what it is that some politicians are actually talking about because then they would have some severe regional problems in distributing the oil within the United States and actually getting the gasoline that they need. I don't think that will actually happen. I think it's fair to say as I talked about before there are political risks involved in this. Sometimes even though something is difficult or something shouldn't happen, it does happen and that can be either U.S. decisions, EU decisions, Russian decisions, whatever.
Things can happen, so that every investor just needs to be aware of that, to put nuances at least on the base case. I don't think that the U.S. will ban crude exports.
Very good. I think we have sort of moved through most of the questions, Martin, but of course it's interesting looking at also this slide again with your cash returning abilities. People might ask, you know, could they expect sort of dividends again when you have the annual account next year? Do you see any sort of larger investments, any transforming M&A activities or anything that could be attractive to you while you have the cash flow now or do you sort of look at your business where it should be?
Of course, when we decide later how much dividend to pay out, we both look at sort of our payout capacity, what is cash and debt on our balance sheet, what are the CapEx needs going forward. Into that would also go sort of likely or desired big investments. But I do think that we would probably not withhold a lot of cash on the balance sheet just sitting and waiting for potential opportunities that might arise.
I think we can go fairly much you can say to the dividend policy and further, because as a stock listed company it could also be relevant if there was a big transaction to come and ask for money and I think that would be more efficient rather than sitting with the cash for a long time. When you just look at the dividends that we have announced on an interim basis so far there is still room for a dividend within our dividend policy come February, March of next year.
That sounds very good, Martin. We're about to end today's presentation. Thank you very much Martin and NORDEN for being part of this event and of course congratulations again on your excellent results here for Q3 and looking forward to see your Q4. Also thanks to all of you participated again and sorry for the delay in the beginning and the technical issues we have but thanks a lot for the questions you had. With that I'll just wish you all a nice day and a nice weekend later. Thank you.
Thank you.