Hello, and welcome to the Stainless Tankers earnings call. My name is Richard Taylor, and I will be the moderator for today's event. Please note, this conference is being recorded. You will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation through the orange Ask a Question button on the right bottom corner of the player. I will now hand you over to your host, Alex Karakassis, CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.
Thank you, Richard. And welcome, everybody. Good afternoon, and welcome to this earnings call. Before I dive into the presentation, let me also note that this morning we issued a notice for our shareholders meeting that's going to be held in two weeks' time. There we put in front of our shareholders the dividend proposal, which you will have seen in our presentation, but importantly, also the election of a new independent director to our board. The director, the candidate we're putting forward is called Nikoleta Panayiotopoulos. She's a very experienced ship financing professional with Crédit Agricole, and she will be replacing Irene Michael on the board. Irene, I have the pleasure of having here with me. She will then take on the position of CFO of Stainless Tankers ASA immediately thereafter.
I think she's perfectly positioned to do so, 'cause Irene has been with us from day one, when we started the, the company, knows the company inside out, and it's my pleasure to have Irene join us very soon, in the management team. Having said that, going to our highlights. So you will have seen, we have generated net income of $3.2 million on net revenue of $13.5 million. That includes almost $1 million from the new vessels we purchased, $1 million in net income on $1.8 million of net revenue. We had the ships in our fleet for a total of, combined 88 ship days. That came on the back of a strong spot market, which, we're quite encouraged by, and, a very positive, COA, renewal season.
However, our Q4 pool TC came in a bit lower than than we had expected and and planned, and that was though due to some short-term operational issues, which were caused by the ongoing, very slow transits through the Panama Canal, and I'll elaborate a little bit on that later on. On the capacity side, you see the order book is responding to this positive market environment but moderately and the order book has been growing a little bit. Also owners of older tonnage are also responding by trading their vessels for longer than 25-year age, and therefore creating a rather large backlog of candidates for scrapping.
We actually think this is a very positive development because in due course, over the medium term, there's a lot of capacity that can be taken out of the market when, when it weakens a bit and, and will, and will stabilize the market at a higher level. So we're, we're quite positive about this. The dividend we're proposing is for $3 million. That's $0.225 a share. That's, on an annualized basis, a dividend yield of 18% on the originally raised equity. We will pay that around 1 March, once it is approved in the EGM that I mentioned earlier on the 21 February. Overall, the outlook for this year is a good one. We remain positive.
We do expect, as things look right now, to gradually increase earnings and capital return to our investors. On the next slide, we show you the pool performance and the TC performance. We see the spot market currently at roughly $22,000 a day. Our pool results or the Womar pool results for the Q4 have been about $1,000 a day short of that level, and that was because we had, you know, some disruptions with regard to the Panama Canal that I'll talk about in a minute, the ones that I mentioned earlier. So the pool came in at about $21,000 a day. We expect, however, the result of the pool to move up to this $22,000 a day by next month.
You will see that red line is the Womar pool performance, and the dotted line shows you that's the forecast for February and March, and you see we're planning to be roughly at $22,000 a day, which is where we think the market is. The Womar pool has had a very good, so far, very good COA renewal season. At the moment, 27% of the capacity for this year is fixed on COAs at an average TC of almost 25, 24 thousand dollars a day. That's over 10% higher in terms of TC than what we saw last year, and that should give us some support in our forecast and in our expectations. We believe that will help keep rates at least where they are at the moment on average.
We also have a strong product tanker market. You will know this. That means swing tonnage in our market is relatively low. So overall, we see quite a positive earnings environment, and at the moment, not many reasons why that should be, or not hardly any reasons why that should change, at least in the near term. I'd like to spend a couple of minutes longer on the next two slides to outline how we see the disruptions we see in the market currently are affecting our generally the chemical tanker markets. So on the left side here, we've shown you the transits through both the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal in terms of deadweight tons.
And that's for chemical tankers only, and there you will see a fall off in the transits, the data goes to January of this year. If you look at it across all segments, the decline is actually even bigger. The top line, the blue one, is the Suez Canal, and that steep decline will not come as a surprise to anyone on this call with the issues that we see out in the Red Sea. So there's a significant decline there. However, the Panama Canal doesn't get as much attention lately, but the situation is not really improving. If anything, it's even getting a little worse based on the January data. We see the traffic through that canal you know declining further for the chemical tanker market.
That leads to an increase in freight rates. On the right-hand chart is an index we composed from the 23 global trade routes that we see in the chemical tanker markets, and that is a dollar per ton index. In other words, a revenue line. So you see that the spike right at the end there in January is again a direct result of what's happening in the Red Sea. When you have to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, it's a much longer trip, so you charge your customer more dollars per ton that gets transported on longer routes. It's a logical development. So what you do have, however, is we call that maybe the second-order effect.
So the first-order effect is when these disruptions happen, you know, you have some logistical issues, for example, on existing voyages that are ongoing, which have to be rerouted, and that creates additional cost or voyages that have already been fixed, and those are fixed on assumptions of a shorter voyage, and you may not always be able to recoup that additional cost, bunker cost in particular, in order to reroute vessels. In addition to that, you have factors like, you know, your entire network needs to be readjusted. You know, follow-on voyages that were planned maybe need to be rescheduled or put on cargos on other vessels.
So there are some logistical challenges in the very near term that all or most operators have to go through, and these are the type of disruptions that I was mentioning that also were the case or what Womar had seen at the end of last year. I should point out, though, that the Suez Canal, the lack of Suez Canal transits here or the decline, has not caused us the same kind of problems, and we also do not transit this canal. It's not a key trading route in the Womar system, or it's not a key route in the Womar system. The second-order effects of that is, of course, as I mentioned here on the right, the increase in revenue in $ per ton charged to the customer.
And then if you take this effect, the combined effect, the third-order effect, which comes then afterwards, if these disruptions persist, as they have, for example, with the situation in Ukraine and where sanctions on Russia have restructured the global trading routes, and that was a, I would say, at least for now, a permanent reset. When this happens and you have to travel longer distances, that takes capacity out of the market, and therefore, an even tighter market will lead not only to a revenue per voyage increase, but also a profitability increase, i.e., voyage profitability goes up. So we see that as a third-order effect, which right now, at least, in the very recent one here with the Suez Canal, we have not yet observed.
We see the second-order effect of customers being willing or prepared to pay for longer voyages, the additional cost of these longer voyages, but, the third-order effects, not quite yet. And then I would like to spend a few more minutes also on this chart, where we have the freight index line, which is the blue one. It's the same one as on the previous chart, but we've also indexed the pool TCE performance. And there you see that generally speaking, the two are quite closely correlated. And if with stable trading patterns, stable voyage costs, and a balanced supply-demand situation, normally, these two are very closely correlated.
Here, it's worth pointing out, for example, that in 2021, when the bunker price and the oil prices went up quite a lot, you see the, let's say, the blue line, let's call it the revenue line, move up, i.e., some of it was passed on to the customers, but not all of it, and you see TCEs dropping. Then came 2022, and the market became a lot tighter, and the dislocation that I just mentioned with regard to the sanctions on Russia, and you see both lines moving up in tandem. And then this correlation was near perfect over the past year. And then again, you see the recent spike. That's the January data that we have available. That's mainly due to the Suez Canal.
And we've you see our February and March forecast that I was just talking about earlier on, on the pool TCE, that is going up to about the $22,000 per day for March, but that not yet affected by, by these, by these disruptions. However, you know, where, you know, were this line to continue going up, I believe it would put some pressure or some support at least, to the, to the market TCEs. We don't like to see that, for obvious reasons. We would like that to be, normalized again. And, and it will not affect, such normalization will not, will not affect the, that red line that we're showing you there. That's just going back to where, let's say, current market is.
Then on the supply side, I mentioned the order book has responded. Last time we showed you this chart, we were at about 6% of the global fleet, the size of the order book. Now it's up to 7% or a little bit over 7%. That's in that size segment we're showing you here of 10-25,000 DWT segment. That's a total of 43 ships, of which 17 are J19s. Delivery times are not getting any shorter from what we see. Stainless steel vessels, we're talking up to 3 years for them to get delivered, so the situation is still difficult, and prices remain high. And you see, we had very low scrapping activity in 2023, almost non-existent.
It is projected to pick up a little, but not significantly. But some data that we have read and we have seen show that the average age of scrapping for stainless steel chemical tankers now is around 28 years. And that creates, you know, that creates a lot of, we call it a pent-up demand or a backlog of scrapping candidates for the next few years. So we see this as a, as a positive trend, and we're not, we're not concerned at all, to the contrary, as long as, you know, the fleet growth here is at around 2% per year, which are the current forecast. Apologies. Which are the current forecasts, that is still below demand growth. And we are in a, in a tightly balanced market.
So, we see, you know, very few reasons that we can find why this market should not remain at a healthy level, at least for the foreseeable future. Finally, I'd like to point out a few things on our financials. I mentioned earlier, we had our new ships in the fleet for 88, total of 88 ship days. We had 2 vessels on TC, time charters, legacy time charters, in Q4. One of them transferred to the Womar pool right at the end of the year, so we have one vessel remaining, and that vessel will transition to the Womar pool right around the end of April. You see a net pool. Well, before I go to that utilization, I want to point out which has been very good.
You see, we've only had 5 off-hire days in total, a utilization of 99.3%. Our realized net pool TC for our fleet is below the $21,000 that I mentioned earlier, which was approximately the level of, of the pool. The reason for that is we had 2 ships for a total of 46 ship days in the legacy pool before we transferred them into the, into the Womar pool, and in that pool, they, they performed significantly below those levels. That dragged down our TCE a little bit, but they are all now in, in the Womar pool, and there is now a very close correlation between what the Womar pool is, delivering and then, and our results. On another note, you see the book value of our fleet.
We had two valuations that we obtained at the end of the year. We show a market value of our fleet, which is about $13 million higher than our book value. We expected that to some extent. Secondhand prices have been slightly firming over recent months. No big changes, but they have been firming a little bit. And at the same time, we depreciate our vessels on the books, so you see a bigger gap opening up. If you take the book value of $142 million and the difference to market value, we're talking about $155 million, approximately, of the value of our fleet.
With the net debt that we have outstanding at the moment of about $84 million dollars, we're talking about a leverage ratio of around about 40.54%-55%. So then we're proposing a dividend of $3 million. You will note that is almost all of the net profit we generated in the quarter. We do maintain sufficient liquidity for us to be able to do so, but also, I think it shows that we are reasonably confident that the next few quarters will be positive as well, and we will continue to be able to gradually increase that dividend. That completes everything I wanted to say in this presentation, so we're happy to take your questions from now on.
Okay. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please send your questions through the Ask Question button on the right bottom corner of the player. Our first question comes from Ewan Kolsgård: "How should we think about the fixed rate coverage in the Womar pool? Is it expected to remain at 27%, or is Womar looking to increase it at these rates?
Well, that's a very good question. Thank you. We're currently at 27%. I think the coverage that Womar is looking to achieve is a little bit higher than that, ideally up to 35%. I mean, at these rates, that would be a good level to fix at. You know, it never goes much beyond 40%, overall, the coverage. So somewhere around the 30%-35% is the target. It's still ongoing. The discussions are still COAs that are expiring now and in the next couple of months. But at these rates, you know, the incentive is there to lock in a rate.
I mean, $23,000-$24,000 is a very, very healthy rate for our market, and we would be happy if they lock in more. But yeah, that is the 27% is just the snapshot of where it is right now.
Okay. We don't have any further questions so far, Alex.
Okay, so now- Yeah, we will give it a minute.
Sure.
Well, hopefully that means I've addressed any all of the questions that perhaps you had in the presentation. I'd like to reiterate that we are, you know, we feel good about this market. We're not overconfident here. We are cautious, but we do see, you know, the market gives us very few reasons not to be optimistic. And therefore, we're looking forward to a good 2024. So thank you from my side.
Okay. As there's no more questions, we can end today's call. Thank you very much for joining today's call, and you may now disconnect.