Hello, welcome to Pelagic Credit's Q1 2026 earnings presentation. My name is Tobias Backer, I'm the CEO of Pelagic Credit, I'm happy to take you through the results of the first quarter. Before we go on to the presentation itself, I wanted to turn attention to the disclaimer. This presentation includes forward-looking statements and expectations that are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties. Many factors can cause actual results and developments to deviate substantially from what has been expressed or implied in such statements and expectations, no assurance can be given that they will be met or the actual results will be set out in this presentation. I'll leave it at that, you can just pay attention to the disclaimer. Today, we will go through the following agenda.
We are a new company, I will talk a little bit about what we are and what we do. We'll go into the first quarter review and the financial summary, I will leave you with some final thoughts on where we see the path going forward. Finally, we will have a Q&A session and, at that point in time, I will be joined by my colleague, Max Debatin, our Investment Manager. Pelagic Credit is a maritime credit platform with contracted cash flows. That means most of our revenue and expenses are fairly predictable, and most of what we do are sale leaseback transactions in the maritime space. We are listed on the Euronext Growth, and we're headquartered in Limassol in Cyprus. Although I am personally sitting in London, the rest of the organization is based in Cyprus.
We are sponsored by an alternative fund manager, Pelagic Partners. Pelagic Partners, in addition to being our sponsor and majority shareholder, also manages alternative investment funds in the equity funds in the maritime space. This is a broad maritime-focused investment vehicle. Our business model is to structure credit-like products, primarily sale leasebacks, but also potentially pref and loans. At the end of the day, we seek to generate equity-like returns with credit-like structures. This is something that we've been doing since 2009, and with a consistent track record to point back at. Current portfolio has four vessels. We have two different segments, two different transactions, and they were each done with a firm period of five years. The goal of the company is to pay quarterly dividends. The first dividend payment will be made after the release of next quarter's results.
After Q2 results, we will declare a dividend at that point in time. The investment strategy itself is to, especially at this point in the market, to be fairly conservative on how we structure our transactions, have robust structures in our sale leaseback transactions. Through that, you end up with a solid product not assuming a lot of risks in what is otherwise a fairly volatile market segment, being shipping and offshore. Through that, we've been able to generate equity-like returns, as I mentioned, going back from 2009. How do we get there? It seems too easy to be true. We focus really on what kind of clients we want rather than what kind of segments we're going to go into.
With the right clients, the right transaction structures, we can take a lot of the inherent volatility of shipping out of the equation and make sure we have a stable cash flow that can pay dividend quarterly. This has been an exciting quarter for us, the first quarter of 2026. We closed our second transaction on March 6th, a sale leaseback with a German owner for an offshore supply vessel. Three days later, we went public with a $75 million gross equity raise. This quarter, just to emphasize, only has a few days of trading and earnings as a public company, which should be mentioned for this release. For the quarter, we had gross earnings of $2.3 million. As of the end of the quarter, we had a gross backlog of $65 million. That is the firm charter backlog that we're sitting on.
That charter backlog over the next average 4.7 years would generate a 13.5% project level IRR. This is the return prior to expenses and management fees. It should be mentioned that when we structure these transactions, we rarely see deals go to the full end of their project life. Of the volatility in shipping, our clients often will look to refinance or sell vessels. When you refinance the deal early, you generate a higher return for us as the investors because you have to pay prepayment fees. The two deals that we have closed to date. First deal was closed in October of 2025. This is a project for three multipurpose vessels pictured here on the left. That has a five-year fixed term ending in October 2030.
At that point in time, the owner, the client, has the option of exercising a purchase option and could also exercise an option to extend the charter by one year. However, if that's done, then there will be no further purchase options. That generates then, that's at the end of the quarter, remaining charter backlog of $38 million for the firm period and $46.6 million including the option period. In March 26th, we closed the second transaction. This, again, this is a fairly standard five-year sale leaseback transaction with a purchase obligation at the end. Here, too, the firm charter backlog at the end of the quarter was then that's $26.9 million. Pretty predictable given that there is a purchase obligation at the end. That will not change much.
If these particular deals are taken out early, if an early purchase option is exercised, then you would see the project level IRR on the blended basis go from 13.5%, which will then move to 18.8% if it's exercised halfway through the transaction period life. We also, when we went to the market for our IPO, we raised excess funds to close on three additional transactions. These are developing nicely. The first transaction is for three bulkers. This will likely close in the next few weeks as has been commercially agreed, and we are in the process of documenting the transaction. It has been improved somewhat. This was originally a five-year deal and has now become a seven-year deal, and it was backed by a three-year contract of affreightment before now has been replaced by a five-year time charter to an industrial end user.
It's a better risk-reward on this transaction, so we're excited about moving this forward. The next project is still being developed. However, there is somewhat of delay with the shipyard, so we are likely to see this close in the second half of this year and the vessel delivered then early part of next year. We would fund it this part of the second half of this year. Lastly, with Pelagic Wind Services, this is a CSOV. This is a vessel pictured behind me under construction. This is also developing on track. We are a little bit delayed because of shipyard delays as well. The time charter associated with this project has been then upgraded from a two-year employment in the oil and gas space to a two-year employment in the offshore wind space, which we think is exciting.
There are two of these vessels under construction. The contract that had been discussed earlier will be moved to the second vessel, and we had then an option to refinance that project as well. We chose to focus on the nearest delivering vessel with this particular contract. It should be mentioned here on these three vessels that we are actively working to close these transactions. We're excited about them. We are also working on a number of new transactions with other parties. If we believe it's better for the shareholders, for the company to close those other transactions, that is something that we will do. Then we will push out the execution, well, in particular on the latter two projects here that we're showing you. Keep that in mind as we move to the next page.
This is a forward-looking projection of how the deployment of capital will be. Again, this assumes that these three vessel investments are executed on schedule, as laid out. This might change materially if we deploy in other market segments. If we stick to this particular projection, you will see that most of the money raised will be deployed within this year on the projects outlined. If you go back then to the key financial figures of the first quarter, we had a net profit of $900,000. We are sitting on a cash balance of $48.7 million. That's the end of quarter, and that's an equity ratio of 65%. That equity ratio is clearly unusually high, because we raised the money up front to deploy.
We would expect in a normalized market where we are fully deployed, that that will be more of a 2/3 debt, 1/3 equity kind of arrangement. This portfolio has a project level dividend yield of 11.9%. After costs, the company should be able to pay an annualized dividend in the high single digits to the investors, I guess, again, paid out quarterly. The key takeaways I will leave you with for the quarter is that the company is performing pretty much in line with expectations. That's not surprising since most of our income and expenses are contracted. We generally are not in the business of taking market risk, foreign exchange risk, or interest rate risk. We would expect that to continue going forward.
We have also had some questions about how are we affected by the ultimate, the underlying market and what's happening in the Middle East. Generally, we're very well protected from those kind of risks and our particular vessels, not only are they financing arrangements rather than market-related transactions, but our particular vessels do not trade in the Middle East today. As mentioned, we're very happy to complete the listing, the capital raise in the first quarter. We are seeing very exciting deal flow. We are focusing on executing on the transactions that we've had identified for the IPO and a clear pathway to build a pipeline that we can then go back and raise further capital for when that is necessary. Finally, quarterly distributions will start to be paid after the release of the second quarter financial statements later on this year.
With that, I'm happy to take any questions that you may have. Also, as mentioned, my colleague, Max Debatin, will also join us to answer any questions in that regard.
Thank you, Tobias. We do have a couple of questions coming in from our online audience. First one regarding shareholders list. As Pelagic Credit is Cyprus-based, top investors aren't easily available. Would it be possible to publish it in quarterly reports or, even better, make available on company's website with more frequent updates?
Yes, the plan is to make that available on the company's website. That is something we're working on. I can't give an exact timeline for it, but it is something that is on top of our list.
What has changed from the three deals mentioned from the IPO until today?
As alluded to, I think the biggest change has really been that the timeline has slipped a little bit. We're still on track to close these transactions. I also think, especially the first one coming to a close, is a little bit better in the way it's being structured, and it was worth it to take some time to make sure that we optimized the structure for that particular transaction. We also thought it was exciting that these vessels that are pictured behind me, that we can get them working in the wind space, which they were built for. I think it was worthwhile to make sure we had the right contract in place to secure that contract and allow the financing to proceed on that basis.
Thank you. A follow-up question on Project Holly. Why did the contract terms for Project Holly change, and how have the purchase options and obligations changed?
The economics have changed a little bit in terms of the type of contracts associated with it. The Hartmann Group was able to secure newer, longer-term contracts, and we then shifted the type of vessels that we are financing in this transaction. The return on investment that we have is the same or better, and the ultimate end user here is an industrial end user that will be using the vessels for at least five more years. That ultimately is an improvement to the overall structure.
What other types. Sorry.
Sorry. Just to add to that, I think in terms of the option structure, the slide we're showing was a little bit conservative because it shows a five-year time charter and a seven-year bareboat charter. In reality, it's a five-year time charter with a two-year extension option. That is mirrored back to back in the bareboat charter. If the time charter isn't extended, then the bareboat charter would only run until five years as well. The bareboat charter is fully covered by time charter earnings.
Yep.
What other types of deals do you see in the markets?
Similar type of transactions. I think ultimately we are focused on our clients, and if we have clients with specific needs for long-term contracts, then we will come in and do something that banks or other financial institutions do not do, which is a combination of giving flexibility, but without taking on additional risk or equity risks that we don't believe is necessary. We're pretty much seeing opportunities in every market segment, probably Not so much on the container ship space, but other than that, we're seeing opportunities in pretty much every market segment. I'm a little surprised by how good the market, the pipeline is. Of course, then it's up to us to deliver on that and close on these transactions.
Furthermore, I think it's worth adding that the IPO as a added side benefit has really increased Pelagic Credit's name in the market and awareness of market participants for Pelagic Credit, which has led to a lot of inbound requests as well. That's further contributing to a strong pipeline.
I think you alluded to it in your presentation, but how would you describe the impact from the Iran war and the geopolitical situation?
Yeah, this is the funny or sad thing about the maritime space, in general, disruption is good financially for the business. Even though this is bad for the world, generally, our clients do better in disruptive events, and we've had a lot of them in the last few months and years. It doesn't directly affect us. On the project itself, as mentioned, our particular vessels don't trade to the Middle East. Three of them trade in the Atlantic, and It's not doing projects in the Middle East. We're not really affected by it directly.
How do you assess the risk for further delays in your execution pipeline?
You never know with shipyards, of course, but I think at this point in time, the vessels are nearly complete. The contracts are in place, which was another thing that was getting delayed. We believe that we are on track to deploy this capital this year. Then, of course, look to invest in other further transactions beyond that.
What is your vision for Pelagic Credit after 2026?
We've been doing this for a long time, and I think I've worked in many different environments. I think what we have with Pelagic Credit is what I view as the optimal structure to deploy this kind of capital, this kind of strategy. We have the right team, we have the right shareholders, the right sponsors that have built an infrastructure and culture that allows us to significantly scale this business. We believe we should be the preferred option for alternative finance in the maritime space. If you build at scale, you can then further create benefits through enhanced capital cost, capital back leverage structures that we can then feed back to our clients. We're very ambitious, very excited about building this business, and we can't wait to get going.
That's great. At the moment, there are no further questions. I will now hand it back to you, Tobias, for your final remarks.
Well, thank you very much. As mentioned, we're very excited about what's going on at Pelagic Credit. It's only been a short period of time for this first quarter to be complete. We want to build this business, and with that, we need good shareholders on our side, and we look forward to continuing to update you on our performance as we go forward. Thank you very much