Good morning, and a warm welcome to Höegh Autoliners' third quarter presentation. My name is My Linh Vu, Head of Investor Relations, and let me introduce our presenters today. Our CEO, Andreas Enger, who will start the presentation with a business update from the last quarter, followed by our CFO, Per Øivind Rosmo, who will give you a deep dive into the financials. As usual, we will have the Q&A session at the end of our presentation, and our viewers are encouraged to ask question by using the link under the video or by sending an email to our Investor Relations mailbox at ir@hoeghautoliners.com. With that, I will hand over the stage to you, Andreas.
Thank you, My Linh. It's a great pleasure to dive directly into the key figures, and I think all the numbers on these slides represent a record for us, produced by a team that has been, you know, extremely focused on all aspects of our operations from, you know, the vessel operations into the trade management, and, you know, the way we work with customers and our financial discipline. So, the quarter has given us an EBITDA of $185 million, translating into a net profit of $142 million, produced by a record gross rate of more than 90 $ per cube.
According to dividend policy, 50% of the base net profit is $70 million being paid in November, and our equity ratio is strengthened further up to 67%, leaving us with, you know, a strong cash position, strong earnings momentum, and a very, very strong balance sheet. Talking about what gets us there, a little bit about the market. The market is in a way stable and driven by capacity. You know, we are running flat out in all our trades. We've seen a slight volume reduction in the quarter, driven by port congestions and longer voyages, but all of that being compensated by a favorable development both on the cargo mix and on the net rate.
We have continued momentum for contract renewals, although I think it's also fair to say that, you know, the big contract run starts into 2024. The momentum on the contracting and dialogue with customers remains. We have now 3.1 million cube of, you know, long-term agreements, duration of 4.4 years, average rate above $100. You know, we are - that's the kind of environment we're working in.
But I think the important driver of, you know, further strengthening our contract portfolio lies in the fact that we actually have 5.4 million cube of contracts with a net rate below $50 per cube, with now a remaining duration of 9.5 months, meaning that we are going into a very important period of contract renewals, and our feeling is that the sentiment is strong for that. There is a steady growth in shipments of new vehicles. We talked a lot about, you know, the driver of the increased exports from China.
I'm coming a little bit back to that when we're talking about capacity balances, but we do see a solid development and also remind ourselves that, you know, these are not kind of historically, you know, fantastic high numbers, but it is recovery from, you know, a prolonged, you know, low deliveries of cars driven by first semiconductors and then pandemics and all other things. But the market on the car side remains strong. Same with high and heavy. There are some differences in terms of segments and others, but still, we have good access to high and heavy cargo.
As we mentioned a couple of times, that you know we took down as the markets on new vehicles started to strengthen, we took down some of the low-value parts of our high and heavy business. But the high-value branded equipment producers has been and remains a strong market for us. Talking about capacity, we're always talking about you know the fleet and the fleet growth. I think what we are seeing now I think is that clearly there is a fairly large backlog of new vessels, but I think it's important to emphasize that these are coming you know gradually over several years. And I wanted to...
We've had some discussions and questions on previous presentations on, you know, what is the impact of shippers, you know, moving to containers? And we've done our own sort of deep dive on that in China, and our view is that in the current market about a third of the seaborne deep-sea exports from China is carried by containers. And just our analysis of the product and our, also our conversations with some of the OEMs that do use containers, we strongly believe that is an inferior product, and that is something that will return largely to RoRo at the point when we actually offer capacity at sustainable rates.
In the current market, some of those shippers will either be offered no capacity at all, or they will be offered, you know, very, very high spot rates, simply because the capacity situation out of China and Asia is filled up. So, from that perspective, we believe that, and if you go a little bit deeper into it, what you see is that there's been almost a 50% increase in seaborne exports from China after the lockdown in the middle of 2022. And what we see is that because of lack of sea capacity, a large proportion of that has, in effect, gone to container.
But, but we, as I've said, we are quite confident that, that those volumes, will return and reflect together with the increased focus on decarbonization, reflects the stabilizing force in, in, in at least the early stage of, of the, the new build deliveries. Time charter rates remains high. That market, from what we can see, remains firm. So again, the capacity market remains tight and strong. No changes really to the fleet. We're running stable. Coming back to... we are obviously looking very much forward to our new builds.
But results for the last, I guess, several quarters is basically created by our efforts to maximize the value from an existing fleet and also created by increasingly, you know, offering what we had of available spot volumes to long-term contracts. I think our new build program remains increasingly exciting, or becomes increasingly exciting for us. We're now seeing the first vessel being built at the yard. Engine is about to be moved from Korea. We are getting the first vessel in July of next year. We will receive a total of 8 new vessels by the summer of 2026.
We believe that is, is well timed to be able to offer our customers a strong product, both in terms of capacity and in, in terms of the fact that even initially on LNG, these vessels will have half the carbon footprint for per unit produced from an average car carrier. And, and it obviously, in addition, have a clear path to zero that is attractive to the OEMs that actually have that kind of objective and wants to start working on what that, what that path, looks like. And, and we are with those 8 vessels and with the further 4 that we are still seeking to, to get in, in every—it's ordered in 2027.
We are making further progress on getting those delivered as dual fuel ammonia, but that's obviously a longer development, depending on that that is both safe and the right thing to do. But our impression is that both the fuel producers, the engine providers, and all in that chain is actually making significant progress. So our new build program, you know, starting with deliveries already mid-next year and, you know, rapidly renewing our fleet to become the newest and most environmentally friendly fleet in our segment is something that we believe will help us both in contract negotiations and in maintaining our momentum in the years to come. Sustainability update.
I think the big thing on sustainability is that we have substantially stepped up our use of biofuel. We're using 100% biofuel, meaning that we're able to, you know, provide carbon neutral transport for, you know, certain shipping legs or for cargo for certain customers. And that, that is in demand and is quite important. I think it's fair to say, just listening to the DNV Energy Outlook recently, that also claiming that, you know, the energy transition in our segment has really not yet started. We're still running on conventional fuel. We're still running with a tight capacity balance. But I think what we are doing is that we are readying ourselves to be able to play that forcefully in the years to come.
And we have a slight reduction in our CII this quarter. But the big reductions obviously require partially new assets and also modifications to existing. And just while we're working on new builds, we're also working on improving the quality of our existing vessels, having four vessels with you know, upgrades for fuel efficiency being made and 10 vessels you know, on order linked to the dry dock schedules of the vessels. So it's a massive preparation to be able to deliver the carbon efficiency that the leading customers will demand. With that, I leave it to Per Øivind to go through numbers in some more details. Per Øivind?
Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Starting with this one, showing volume development and rate development over the last quarters. You see that for the last five quarters, we have had relatively stable volumes. We saw a cargo drop in third quarter, as we have mentioned also in our trading update. This is due to delays in port and port congestion. The volume reduction is around 150,000 CBM. It peaked, the delay and congestion peaked in August. It improved somewhat in September, and we see it easing off also in October. So remains to be seen, but volumes, as long as we have a stable fleet, is hovering around 4 million CBM per quarter. All vessels are full in all trades, and they are highly utilized.
The rate development has been good. We saw another increase in the net rate in third quarter. It increased from $75 per CBM to $78.5 per CBM. That is an increase of 4.7%. Top line is the driver for the bottom line, as long as the fleet is stable and the expenses are more or less constant with the stable fleet. As we saw, our freight revenues came in at $355 million. It is more or less the same as we have had for the last four quarters, very stable, around $355 million.
Adjusted EBITDA this quarter, adjusted EBITDA is the same as the reported EBITDA, $185 million, up from $181 million, meaning that the volume reduction was offset by the increase in rates and to some extent, also reduction in expenses. That gave us a net profit of $143 million, and the increase in net profit is somewhat higher than the increase in EBITDA, because we also saw some reduction in financial net financial expenses, higher interest income, and also lower interest expenses in this quarter. As we said, reduced expenses is the main driver. Top line is the same, more or less, as in last quarter, and we see that cargo revenues was minus $1 million, and then we had a reduction in bunker expenses of $5 million.
We also had a reduction in charter hire expenses. We did no short-term charters this quarter. We had a few space charters, but compared to second quarter, where we had one vessel chartered in. No vessel chartered in this quarter, only operating our own fleet and doing some space charter on top of that. A slight increase in voyage expenses, but comparing with the second quarter, it's a very similar quarter to what we had in second quarter. Balance sheet is becoming extremely strong. We had a net interest-bearing debt by the end of the quarter of $175 million. Out of that, $150 million is leasing and time charter liabilities. The net mortgage debt is only $25 million.
If you take the cash and the mortgage debt, the net mortgage debt is $25 million only. And you see the ratio, the net interest bearing that EBITDA ratio, is down to 0.3. Equity continued to increase. It increased to $1.3 billion, meaning that we have an equity ratio now of 67%. I will show you some more details on the cash development, but cash, during the quarter increased from $306 million to $332 million on the back of a very strong cash flow this quarter. You see it here. We started the quarter with $306 million. We had cash from operating activities, $201 million, meaning that we actually reduced our working capital with more than $16 million this quarter.
Cash from investing activities, $69 million, out of which $65 million is installments, first installments to the yard for Aurora vessel number 9-12. We pay 15% of the contract price when we entered the contract in July. That was $65 out of the $69, and the difference is, for all practical purposes, dry dockings. We used $20 million in debt service, repayment of $13 million of the mortgage debt, and interest of $7 million on the mortgage debt. And then, as we have said, we paid $67 million in dividend for second quarter, and we have lease payment and others, $17 million. Out of the $17 million, $15 million is lease and time charter. We have three vessels on bareboat charter, and we also have three vessels on time charter, and that goes in that category.
Then we had a small currency gain/loss of $1 million. So that took us to $332 million. We have an unused revolving credit facility of $84 million. Again, very strong balance sheet, vessel, and very strong and very simple balance sheet, to put it that way. Vessel and new buildings, $1.3 billion, and then we have the right of use assets, the leased and time chartered vessels, $126 million. We have bunker and freight receivables of $134 million, and we have cash of $332 million. The equity, $1.3 billion. Then we have the interest bearing bank debt of $358 million.
We have the lease liabilities related to the right of use assets of $149 million, and we have current liabilities related to our trading of $93 million. And then non-current liabilities, $43 million, same as last quarter, and that is mainly deferred tax. The book equity per share was calculated to $6.7, converting that to NOK 74 per share. Adjusting the balance sheet using market value of the vessels instead of book value, give us the net asset value of the company, and we have calculated that to be $2.4 billion by the end of third quarter, and that converts to $12.4 per share, or NOK 138. So that is the main numbers.
All the details are in the reports and the fact sheets that are available on our web pages. So with that, I think. Yeah, there is one more. We have dividend, and as we have said, we will pay $ 70 million. It will be paid early November, and it is a increase from last quarter, where we paid $67 million. And you see here how the dividend have developed over the last quarters. And we have a dividend policy of paying 30%-50%. We are maximizing that, paying 50% of the net profit every quarter now. With that, I leave it to Andreas to say something about the outlook.
Good. Thank you. Then I'm going to give a brief. We don't do much long-term guiding, but I think we just want to summarize by emphasizing that we consider, you know, based on our current performance and based on our dialogue with customer and contracts, that we are still, you know, in a strong market. We have, obviously from the numbers, very healthy rate development. Q4, we're well into it, has started well, and we expect another strong quarter. Obviously, we are living in a turbulent world, and we are, you know, closely monitoring the macro picture, but that does not really change our overall view on where we are.
I have been, in the previous couple of quarters, repeatedly being asked the question about, you know, "With the current performance and the strong cash generation, what do you intend to do with the cash?" And, to preempt, you know, that question coming once again, I think, you know, we have had a clear strategy of basically balancing three objectives. We have wanted to create a resilient company, and we have defined that, by, you know, having the combination of, you know, low, very competitive cash capacity cost, having a strong, balance sheet to support it, and, you know, having a strong relationships and the contracts portfolios with, with our customers. It's the first priority.
Second, we've had a strong priority on renewing our fleet, preparing for the energy transition that we think is going to be an important competitive driver in the years to come. I think it's also fair to say that with, you know, early deliveries already from next year, with 12 vessels on order, we have, you know, made our investments for this round. I think it's also one of the things is important also to notify is that, you know, we have paid most of the equity on all of those 12 vessels. We have about $80 million of, you know, payments, and all the vessels are then, you know, on very competitive financing, producing that, you know, competitive cash-...
Capacity cost, and actually a much lower capacity cost than what we had pre-pandemic with a much weaker fleet. So we're comfortable with that picture. And we've said that at this third element of our objective is to basically serve our shareholders. And you know, as we have you know established a balance sheet and the capacity cost we desire, as we have you know made our investments for the fleet renewal, we will clearly now you know during the fourth quarter look at what the implications is for our dividend policy. We have, as you said, we gradually stepped up the dividend. We listed in 2021 with the objective of 30%-50% dividends. We started at 30%.
For the last three quarters, we've been at $50, and we will assess the way forward based on, you know, those 3 priorities that is going to drive our decisions. And I also want to emphasize on that we are strongly emphasizing capital discipline. We are proud to be a lean and very focused company, and we have no plans on diverting from that track and or investing in things outside our core business. So with that, you know, I'll leave it to questions.
Yes, thank you, Andreas and Per Øivind, and also thank you to our online audience for your engagement. We have received quite a few questions today. So the first question, from our, from our analyst, Frode Mørkedal from Clarksons. And the questions is about capacity utilization. The question is: How would you describe the current average utilization percentage for vessels, considering both headhaul and backhaul routes? Are there any opportunities for further optimizing utilizations, such as via speed adjustment or alleviating congestions?
Vessels are full, for all practical purposes, 100% utilized in all directions. Of course, if congestion and port delays ease off, we will have... That will free up capacity to transport more. I think we also saw it from the graph here, that we had a drop in third quarter, and if that situation ease off, we have capacity to take more volume. But for all practical purposes, we don't really have a capacity available now to transport more than what we have seen on the average on the previous quarters. Around 4-4.1 million is our maximum. There might be way cargo available that we can take, but we don't really have capacity now to take more cargo unless we get more vessels.
We are not there, that we will charter in vessels to do that. We have our newbuilding programs. We will get the first vessel in July next year, and another one in November next year, and then two more in March 2024. So that will increase our ability to take more cargo. But where we are now, we are maximizing the fleet.
Thank you, Per-Vincent. Yes, and the next question is about the contract renewal, from our analyst, Erik Hovi, Nordea. The first question is: For the 5.5 million CBM up for renewal the next 9.5 months, what durations was that booked on, and is that likely that the duration for these volumes also increase? Can you comment a little bit about that?
I mean, we said the remaining duration of those contracts is 9.5 months, right? So they're expiring now, starting from, you know, throughout 2024, mostly. The duration of those contracts, when entered into, I guess, was mostly in the three to five-year range, including some options. We've commented before that, you know, we feel that we've had in the past a fairly unbalanced contract, where many of them has been sort of 3+2 years, where we're now into the final stage of where customers have been able to renew at or prolong at long rates. Our philosophy is that we will go into this to seek much more mutually balanced contracts.
We will seek, you know, as long as durations we can get, and we believe it is a favorable market for that, both because, you know, there is still a number of customers having needs to fill for capacity in 2024 and 2025. And there is also a number of customers that see the benefit of having longer relationships in order to be managing their own decarbonization targets. So we are quite optimistic about that process that will run through, has started for many contracts and will run through 2024.
Thank you. And also a follow-up question on that, from, also from Erik Hovi. It seems that the legacy contract volumes has been quite similar to what we showed during Q2. So could you comment a little bit more about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say that there hasn't been much contract expirations and renewals in the quarter, you know, and we have had. You know, during this year, we've also had a substantial. We talked about this before, that you know, we took a clear position that we would not want to enter into unbalanced or short contracts in 2022, meaning that we drove up our spot share during 2023. We basically told our customers that volume is available to people that will commit long, and we had great success with that in the first half of the year, and we are rolling into the renewal.
But there hasn't been much, you know, there hasn't been any significant contract expiries and renewals in the third quarter.
Yes. Thank you. Also about new volumes. The next question is: What is the usual lead time for booking new volumes rolling off? So basically-
Usually-
Lead time for new volumes.
I think that varies a lot. Some of these processes start very early, and there are long discussions over long times because this is a core part of our customers', sort of logistics network, so they need planning horizons. We have obviously seen that some of them have been pretty short in the sense that customers have not found suitable solutions, so that there's been some last-minute, you know, needs to change approaches. But we prefer to have, you know, structural dialogues with our customers over several months in order to basically create good solutions that are mutually beneficial.
Thank you, Andreas. The next question about the mix between spot and contract. Can we comment about the current spot and contract mix?
Yeah, we can comment on that, and it has not really changed. We have said before that we have around 70/30 ratio between contract and spot. And we also see that we are very close to that in third quarter.
Thank you. The next question from analyst Peder Kristiansen, Nordea, and it's about financing. Considering the recent deals in bond market for shipping peers, is it something how other liners consider financing, considering the bond market?
Nah. As of now, we are fully financed. We have financed the whole new building program. We have a good financing of our legacy fleet. So where we are right now, we are not looking into the bond market. We are following it and we think there is an opening for us there if we like to go there, but where we are now, we are not considering issuing bonds.
Thank you. The next question's from analyst Kristoffer Barth Skeie from Arctic Securities, and it's about net rate. Do we expect to achieve premium rates for the newbuildings, given their attractiveness to the perspective of the OEM? And if so, can we comment something about the rate?
No, I don't think we will speculate, because that depends a lot on how they're used and what kind of fuels they're using and whatever. But I think what we can say is that our investment calculations and investment cases for new builds basically includes that, you know, these vessels will be more attractive, and they will most likely run full. They will be larger and have better economics, but it's not really based on premium rates, unless we deliver a premium product with you know low carbon or zero carbon fuels that obviously will be reflected in the rates.
Thank you. The next question from our analyst, Eirik Haavaldsen, Pareto Securities, is also about the contract renewal. Can we elaborate a little about how the contracts are now structured in terms of minimum volumes? And about the rate environment, are we able to firmly lock in the volumes commitments?
I think so, but I think also we have to. I mean, I think we said before that these contracts now, we have finally substantially changed the contract structure. We've substantially changed the level of commitments, but it's all individual negotiations that are based on circumstances in the individual trades, and it has, you know, several different components to it. I think the big difference is that first, I mean, there are two things that we have. We have real commitments expressed in different ways and firmed up in different ways from customers for the volumes.
And I think equally important, we have basically worked to not be having, you know, large commitments to take up volume, giving away free options to take volume that is not committed by the customer. So it's both about getting and it's a combination of exclusivity and liquidated damages for the different volumes. It's different in trades where we have parts of a customer's volume, where you know, a guarantee can be relevant, and where we have the entire volume in the trade flow, where we somewhere need flexibility.
So those things are individual by contract, and there is not one structure, and particularly also in the situation where we are firming up, putting lots of effort into firming up those contract structures. There will be differences based on simply different circumstances with customers and contracts.
Thank you. The next question from analyst Fredrik Ness in SEB. The first question about volume commitment, and I guess we've already been covered by your last answer. The second questions about the rate on the new contracts. Are rates on the new contracts flat or fixed rate, or is there a step profile in the new contracts?
I think it's generally fixed, but there are also variations there, depending on you know the specific circumstances. But most of the contracts are fixed. There are some provisions in there. There are some inflation cover in there. There is some obviously for surcharges and carbon taxes and fuels. But generally, they're reasonably flat.
Thank you. The next questions is about the dividend payments. Are we free to increase dividend payments above the 50% of EPS, or does this require the creditor approvals? Is this something we're considering?
I mean, basically, we are absolutely free to both in terms of dividend capacity and agreements to pay whatever we want in dividends within the law.
Yeah, yeah, we have no restrictions in our loan agreements when it comes to dividends.
Yes, thank you. Yes, and that was the last question we received for now. And of course, if you have further questions, please send an email to our investor relation mailbox at ir@hoegh.com, and we will get back to that. We thank you for your attention, and we look forward to seeing you again for next quarter. Thank you.