Good morning and welcome to the presentation of the third quarter numbers for Solstad Offshore ASA. This presentation will be held by myself, Lars Peder Solstad , who is the CEO of the company, and Kjetil Ramstad , the CFO. A practical thing first, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the chat, and we will come back with answers after the presentation. First of all, it's good to welcome you to this presentation and show you a result that is the best quarter we have had since the fourth company merger back in 2016, 2017. Things are definitely moving in the right direction. We see an activity increase looking into 2022 and also beyond that. We also see that the supply side is quite stable going forward. The combination of this gives us reasons to be quite optimistic for our industry in the years to come.
Take a quick look at the disclaimer before we move over to some of the key numbers for the quarter. We see that the revenue is up to NOK 1.5 billion in the quarter compared with just over NOK 1.3 billion last year. On the backlog, we are a little bit down compared to last year. If we compare it with last quarter, you will see that there's a quite nice increase in the backlog, and we will come back to that later in the presentation. Also on the EBITDA, NOK 500 million, which is up compared to last year and in percentage also, of course. It's also good to see that we are back into positive numbers on EBIT with NOK 152 million compared to a large negative number last year. On the balance, last year's numbers reflect how it looked before the financial restructuring we did.
We will describe these numbers in more detail later in the presentation. Looking at the cash position, it's good to see that we are building cash, and it reflects a market that is moving forward. On the next slide, the business update, we have a very strong focus on our operations and also on the commercial to make sure that we are operating well, safe, efficient. We have a strong focus on reducing the emissions from our operations. We have a strong focus on getting all the vessels that we have defined as core vessels out working on profitable contracts. We have now also a focus on building backlog as the market improves and when we can do so at acceptable terms. We have one of the largest high-end offshore fleet globally, and in the quarter, we had an average of 81 vessels working, and they achieved 89% utilization.
That is quite a strong utilization grade, and that gives us a good basis for a further improvement on the commercial terms as we move forward. As we have also presented earlier, is the very interesting alliance that we launched during the quarter called the Windstaller Alliance, together with Aker Solutions and DeepOcean. That alliance is to strengthen our position further into the offshore wind segment. We are already working on several pre-qualification processes and also on tender processes. We are very excited about this alliance, and have great expectations to what we can achieve there. It's also very encouraging to see the building of backlog during the quarter with NOK 2 billion in new orders in the quarter. We see that after the quarter end, the trend has continued. We have booked another or more than NOK 500 million also after the quarter end.
That's a very positive sign as well. On a more negative side, we still see that the pandemic is affecting our operations, particularly in some places in the world. It comes with also additional cost. We have booked NOK 30 million in additional cost in the quarter. It also comes with operational challenges. On the fleet, as also communicated several times, we are fine-tuning our fleet by selling off the oldest and the smallest vessels and to concentrate on the vessels we call as the core fleet, which are around 90 vessels serving the oil and gas industry and also the offshore- wind industry globally. As I mentioned, we had during the quarter 81 vessels operational, and we have still 12 vessels idle in the core fleet. Our process of selling off the non-strategic part of the fleet is continuing, and we have sold 24 vessels during the year.
In the quarter, four vessels were sold while another 10 have been sold after the quarter end. Eight of those were sold for recycling at Norwegian yards. We still have 12 vessels in the fleet that we held for sale. We are combining, let's say, the upgrading of our fleet or the modernization of our fleet by selling off the oldest and smallest, but also investing in new technology on the newer vessels to be able to reduce emissions and take down fuel consumption. For example, battery- hybrid systems and shore- power connections are of the investments we are doing at the moment. We have upgraded a total of 10 vessels, so we are in the process of doing number eight, number nine, and number 10. There will be more of that type of upgrades also going forward.
The market is quite positive at the moment, and we see that the demand for vessels continues to improve. It's particularly geographically, it's the North Sea with Norway and the U.K., and also in the southern part of the North Sea on the wind side. Brazil is picking up. We see that it is the CSV segment that has the most positive development. On the larger anchor handlers, we see that there is quite some demand for project work, especially moving into 2022. All in all, quite positive. We see that the backlog, as I have mentioned several times already, is during the quarter quite nice booking. We also see that the tendering activity continues to be high. There's a lot of bidding activity that is within oil and gas projects, and it is from offshore- wind activity.
As it looks now, 2022 will be a very active year for offshore vessels as we see it. Historically, if you achieve a utilization for the fleet of around 90%, that is normally followed by higher rates as well. We are quite optimistic that we will continue to see a continued improved rate level also going forward. The bookings we have made for our fleet during the quarter is about NOK 2 billion. We have now NOK 3 billion in backlog for execution for the next 12 months. The backlog we have booked is for all vessel segments, and it is in all the main geographical areas that we work in. It's widely spread. As we see it, it's a comfortable contract coverage going forward. We also have available capacity for new contracts in a market that we expect will improve going forward.
We have not by far sold all our capacity yet. We are also very well positioned for the improved market conditions that we expect going into 2022 and beyond. Kjetil, if you can talk us through the numbers in more details.
Yeah, I will do that, Lars Peder . Good morning to everyone. We will start just looking at the income statement. As you can see in the numbers as well, as Lars Peder mentioned, things are improving. We see that we have a revenue of NOK 1.5 billion in the third quarter, which is approximately NOK 200 million stronger than we saw last year. On the cost side, we are adjusted for vessel activity. We are in line with where we have been before, but we see that we have good control of both the vessel operating expenses and the administrative expenses. We had, as Lars Peder also mentioned, we are selling off vessels, and we see that there is an insignificant loss. We sold four vessels in the quarter.
On the financing side, we have a cost of approximately NOK 300 million, of which NOK 250 million is related to interest expense, and NOK 90 million is related to unrealized currency effects. We have a small gain of approximately NOK 30 million as well, causing a sale of a vessel that was booked in the quarter. That gives an EBITDA adjusted for the quarter of NOK 500 million and also significantly better than the same quarter in last year. You look at the year-to-date quickly, we see that we are well ahead of where we were last year, both on the top line and also on EBITDA level. That is good to see. If we go to the balance sheet, we see that we have a total fixed asset of NOK 21 billion.
It's down from last year, and it's basically ordinary depreciation and some impairments that we did in 2020. On the positive side, we see that cash has improved. Of course, that is partly related to the restructuring that we completed last year. We were able then to strengthen the cash position. It's also good to see that cash generation has been good in 2021. Equity was also strengthened as part of the restructuring. We have a total equity of NOK 3.5 billion. We have long-term debt per third quarter of NOK 17.5 billion. On the short-term side, you see we have approximately NOK 4 billion, which is mainly related to Norman Maximus, giving an equity ratio of approximately 13.5% at the end of Q3. We made just a simplified free cash flow, and it's basically just EBITDA less CapEx.
That is something that we look at as cash available for debt service. We see that compared to last year, we have a 45% increase for the third quarter, which is very positive. You look at the year-to-date, 42% increase compared to last year. Also in numbers, more than NOK 300 million of more cash generation in the year-to-date. That is reflecting well what Lars Peder just said. With that, I hand it back to you, Lars Peder , to wrap it up.
Yeah, thanks, Kjetil. To summarize our presentation and for the quarter, it has definitely been a positive quarter. We have had high order intake, strong vessel utilization, and significant improvement on the EBITDA level. That combination shows that we are definitely moving in the right direction. We're also doing well on the selling of the non-strategic fleet. The cleaning up and the fine-tuning of how the future Solstad fleet will look like is going according to plan. With 24 vessels already sold, there will be more of the older vessels sold in the coming months. We also continue to see that being a global operator gives us access to the most important markets where we are able to offer local content solutions. For example, in Brazil, it's a competitive advantage. A company of our size with that footprint globally is very positive and will also be that going forward.
On the market side, we believe that what we see now of activity increase coming from all offshore activities, both in oil and gas and in offshore wind, gives us reasons to believe that our industry will develop and continue to develop positively moving into 2022 and beyond. With that, I say thanks for listening in to the presentation, but we have also received a few questions. Let me start with the first one, which is, are the rates renegotiated when a customer exercises an option in a contract? That's the first question we have got. That depends, of course, for PSVs, for example.
I can only talk for our company, but if we do a contract with, for example, a one-year firm and two- or three- yearly options, we will price the options at a higher level than the term period, meaning that it has to reflect how we believe that the rate development will be going forward. That is the answer to the first question. The next one is that there is a number of CSVs, that is, a handful of CSVs with no commitment during the upcoming winter season. We are working on a number of opportunities. We have quite good expectations of being awarded contracts for most of them in the short term. Looking at, let's say, the second quarter of next year and beyond, it's not going to be a disadvantage to have available capacity on CSVs. It's more about covering the upcoming winter season.
The next is, can you elaborate on the Maximus development? Yes. There are two things there. One is the commercial and contract situation. The other one is the financing and ownership agenda. If we take the contract situation first, the vessel is now doing the five-year classing in Poland. We have not signed up any new contracts for the vessel yet, but we have quite a few things we are looking at. We expect that in 2022, it will probably be mainly project by project before we have expectations of longer-term contracts thereafter. The reason is that we also will, I mean, we have to, for the field development vessels like Maximus, it's probably from 2023 and onwards that we will see a further increase in demand. That will give us a better timing to do a longer-term contract, we believe.
Next question is, on the financing side, we have described that quite detailed in the quarterly report. I think I cannot say more about that position than is what is stated in the report. Next question is about the Wind Solar Alliance and how quickly we think that it gives us contracts. What we see is that the initiative is very well received in the market. We are already working on tendering processes and also on pre-qualification processes. We have great expectations to this alliance and expect that we will be awarded contracts going forward. Timing is, I'm not going to speculate in when the first contract will be awarded, but at least there's a very active bidding process ongoing. There is a final question, which is, could you please provide the breakdown of rates by vessel categories for the currently negotiated contracts? I think I can...
What we see is that on the CSV side, we see that there are, they are in, and particularly the vessels that are in demand from both offshore wind and oil and gas. We have a better position to negotiate favorable numbers than in, let's say, in the PSV segment, because there are less vessels and less operators. There is a nice development in the commercial terms on those vessels. While on the PSV side, for example, it's more small steps at the time on the term contracts, but moving upwards, but at a slower pace. That is also because of the nature of that business and the number of vessels operating and also on the number of owners. That was the last question we have received. By that, we conclude the presentation and say thank you for listening in. Thanks a lot.