Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Avance Gas Holding Limited fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. Now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Mr. Øystein Kalleklev, Executive Chairman of the company. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, and welcome everybody to this fourth quarter webcast. I know it's a busy day. We have a lot of shipping companies reporting on the last day of February with BW, Frontline, Hafnia, Fulco, MPCC, and American Shipping Company. I thank everybody for taking the interest to also join the Avance Gas call. Together, I have Randi Navdal Bekkelund, our CFO, is joining me for the call today, where we'll present the latest updates on the company. Before we begin, just want to highlight the forward-looking statements disclaimer. You know, we will be providing some forward-looking statements, some non-GAAP measures, and there are limits to how much details we can cover in the presentation. Let's jump to the Q4 highlights.
Q4 TCE came in at $46,500 a day, in line with our guidance of $45,000-$50,000 per day. Please note the discrepancy here. We have two different numbers for the TCE. Usually, in a stable market, they are quite similar. When the market moves, it happens quite often in shipping, then there can be a wide discrepancy in these numbers. The bean counters and the professors in the audit community, they have decided that we are to use IFRS numbers, the load to discharge, which is not the industry norm, where we use the discharge to discharge, which is the full round trip basis. That said, you know, over time, these numbers even out.
When the market moves, you can have some big mismatch here because you only are accounting income when you are loaded under the IFRS number. Our discharge-to-discharge numbers came in at $55,800 per day, which was slightly ahead of our guidance of $50,000-$55,000 per day. This resulted in strong profits, $34.7 million for the quarter or $0.45 per share. In total for the year, we generated net profits of $89 million or $1.16 per share. Recent events, we just recently took delivery of the 3rd dual-fuel VLGC from DSME in Korea on February 9th, and she left the yard on February 11th.
We have now fixed her in the spot market for our maiden voyage, loading a cargo in U.S. Gulf Coast during March and heading then to Far East for discharge. As we announced in November, we have sold and delivered Promise to the new owners. This transaction resulted in a big gain for us of close to $8 million and a cash release of $20 million. During Q4, when we had our call on Thanksgiving in November, we announced that we had covered 2/3 of our ship on FFA. FFA is our alternative to fixing a ship on time charter, where we can use derivatives to hedge the freight. If we also hedge the bunkers fuel, we can lock in our return.
We are managed to secure the remaining part of that derivative freight. We have fully covered one ship on derivatives for the full calendar year 2023 at $47,500 per day, which is a pretty good rate. In terms of guidance, we are reporting a bit late, we are already today almost fully covered for Q1. We are 98% covered with a TCE of $55,000 a day on a discharge-to-discharge basis. Basically we are replicating the rather strong earnings from Q4. Siri is wanted also to jump in here on Thanksgiving. As I mentioned on the load-to-discharge numbers, these are lagging a bit, we expect slightly higher load-to-discharge numbers in Q1 of around $58,000 for the quarter.
We are now booking mostly Q2 dates, and we are already 61% covered. We have a fairly good TC coverage from 2023 already. It's a bit too premature to give out any TCE numbers as we have three ships on index, that the earnings for these ships are uncertain at the moment. Given the strong earnings, we have a healthy balance sheet. We have decided to hike the dividend from $0.20 the last three quarters to $0.50 for Q4. This means that the last four quarters or the fiscal year 2022, we paid out $1.1, which translates to around 60% dividend yield or actually 29% dividend yield if you're only counting the fourth quarter. Let's jump to our fleet overview.
During last year, we sold three of our older ships, two 2008 ships. Now one 2008 ship and two 2009 ships. It was the Tethys Glory and Providence in Q1 and then Promise in Q4. All of these with pretty big book gains as Randi will tell you more about shortly. These two older ships we have left are fully covered for most of 2023, with Iris Glory covered until Q3 and then Venus Glory until Q4. We are doing the special service of these ships this year. Iris Glory is currently going through docking, where we're also installing ballast water treatment system and the Venus Glory is scheduled for docking in May. We have eight 2015 eco ships in our portfolio.
The two ships without the scrubber, Chinook and Pampero, we have TC coverage on. Chinook is a variable higher time charter where the rate fluctuates with the spot market while Pampero is a fixed TC which we entered into last year when we sold Promise which had a TC with a similar duration. That means we have six ships clean spot exposure for 2023 with Iris Glory coming open end of the year. We also have two dual fuel ships delivered last year on variable higher time charters. As I mentioned, we had Regal delivery in February which is also in the spot market, and we expect our sister ship, Avior, to be delivered in May. She is also open and scheduled to trade in the spot market.
The last remaining new buildings were originally scheduled for 2023, but there are certain postponements at the yards, so we expect those two ships to be delivered early 2024. Note that the new ships, the four last ships in our fleet are also ammonia-ready. Ship number three and four, Regal and Avior, they can burn LPG subject modification of the main engine while Castor and Pollux can also be ammonia carriers, which give them a lot of trading flexibility and also have kind of put them in line to be net zero ships in the future if ammonia is the fuel for the future. Note the FFA coverage. We had a legacy FFA for Q1, about 1/3 of a ship at around $30,000 per day.
Then we have secured one ship for the full year at $47,500 as I mentioned. Then coming to 2024, we are fully open and have a very high level of market exposure. Dividends, just we have touched upon this slide last quarter. Just want to give you an update on this. In terms of the parameters, earnings per share $0.45, we are paying out $0.50 slightly more than our earnings for the quarter. For the year, it's in line with the earnings $1.16 and then $1.10 of dividends as I mentioned.
The decision factor there is, you know, earnings and cash flow which is very good, with the TC improvements in Q4 and also the bookings for Q1 where we are basically replicating the earnings from Q4. Backlog and visibility, we have three ships on fixed rate hire, three on variable hire and one ship on FFA. We have pretty good visibility this day. The market is pretty firm. We are booking ships forward with quite a lot of time. Liquidity position is strong as Randi will tell you more about, $324 million of cash. We have no unfunded CapEx with actually $6 million positive cash effect from delivery given the new building financing we put in place.
We don't have any debt maturities before earliest 2027. No issues with covenants. With that we think it's fair to pay out the full earnings or actually a slightly ahead of the earnings for the quarter. That's it for me for now. I will leave it to Randi to go through the numbers in a bit more detail.
Thank you, Øystein. Let's go to slide six and have a look at our highlights from the income statement. As already Øystein presented, the fourth quarter was a solid quarter, with an achieved average Time Charter Equivalent or TCE rate of $46,500 a day, up from $33,000 in previous quarter. This is also in line with our guidance of $45,000-$50,000. The fourth quarter results have a significant load-to-discharge adjustments of negative $10.8 million or a reduction of $9,300 in TC per day as the market moved significantly upwards and exceeded $100,000 a day at the end of the quarter compared to mid-$30,000s at the end of the third quarter.
Our commercial TCE per day, also known as discharge-to-discharge, was therefore $55,800, slightly ahead of our guidance level of $50,000-$55,000 a day. In these figures, we had a time charter coverage of 49% at an average TCE rate of $41,000 per day and a spot voyage of 51% of our vessel days, earning approximately $70,000 a day. TCE for the full year 2022 was $38,200, compared to $31,300 a day in 2021. The TCE on a discharge-to-discharge basis was $40,000 a day for the full year 2022 for comparison. Operating expenses in per day figures were $8,700 during the fourth quarter, which is slightly higher than previous quarter of $8,200.
The increase was driven by higher travel expenses for crew due to imbalance in the air freight market, combined with somewhat higher spares and services than normal. Operating expenses for the full year 2022 have come down from $8,400 a day from the $9,000 a day levels we saw in 2021 and 2020. Decrease is mainly due to roll-outs of the vaccines having a positive effect combined with a lower effect on our new building. In November, we successfully completed the sale of Promise at the 2009 build VLGC with the TC attached.
The sale resulted in a gain of $7.9 for the fourth quarter, bringing the total gain on sales to $18.7 million for the full year, which includes the sale of Tethys Glory in March and Providence in May. The net profit was tripled from previous quarter, recording a net profit of $35 million for the fourth quarter compared to $12 million for the third quarter. Net profit year to date is $89 million, is the best results Avance Gas has delivered in seven years since 2015. This is even adjusting for the gain of sale of $18.7 million for the three older vessels. Below the net profit, we have other comprehensive income, where we recognize our hedging position to mitigate the risk of rising interest rates.
We have benefited quite well on our interest rate swaps with a total gain of $26.5 million for the full year 2022. The total gain will be reclassified and recognized through our P&L until the maturity of our fleet facility in January 2028. We're happy again to share our good results with our shareholders, have declared a dividend of $0.50 per share or $38.3 million for the fourth quarter, bringing the total distributed dividend to $1.10, or $84.3 million for the fiscal year 2022. As Øystein pointed, this is an attractive yield of 16%.
Moving to slide seven, we can see that 73% of our balance sheet consists of 12 VLGCs at year-end, which is becoming 14 very soon as we took delivery of our two newbuilds, Avance Vital just a few weeks ago, and Avance Avior is scheduled for delivery in May this year. Our two last new buildings are expected to be delivered in 2024, it does currently recognized as a vessel under construction on newbuild with pre-delivery costs being capitalized in charter rate. The newbuildings were contracted in 2019 and 2021 at an average price of $80 million per vessel, is today quoted at about $100 million each, if you were to order a similar vessel today.
The quoted values on our newbuilding vessels amounts to in total $120 million in potential gains if we were to sell these today. Our cash position is and has been significantly improved during the year. It's up from $102.9 million from the last year to 2024 at the end of 2022. That leads us to the next slide, the cash position, showing the quarterly cash movement. We started the quarter with a cash balance of $188 million. As the market moved upwards significantly, it's exceeding our normalized cash break-even of about $22,000 a day. We generated $26 million in net cash flow from operations. This includes the scheduled debt repayments of $10 million.
We delivered Promise to the new owner in November as committed, releasing $20 million in net cash proceeds. We saw a peak in the interest rate market during the quarter. Therefore, we released an interest rate hedge position and cashed out a total gain of $8.4 million, consisting of $6.1 million in cash and $2.3 million being amortized over the next 30 months. Lastly, we paid out $15.3 million for the third quarter as we did for the two first quarters, this adds up to a net positive movement of $36 million for the quarter. In addition to the movements during the fourth quarter, we had a net increase of $87 million, bringing our total positive cash movement to $123 million for the year 2022.
The increase comes from the divestment of Tethys Glory and Providence, generating in total a net cash proceed of $47 million. We had a refinancing of $83 million and positive cash flow from operations of $88 million, offsetting, offset by scheduled debt repayments of $30 million, dividends of $34.3 million and newbuilding CapEx of $65.5 million. This includes the pre-delivery costs and the net cash proceeds from delivery of our two first newbuildings. Thereby, we have recorded a cash of $224 million as of December 31, 2022, which is the highest cash position recorded in Avance Gas history. The cash, the vessels on our balance sheets adds up. The share price really supports the book values here, more than last quarter, I would say.
Today it's about 85% price book ratio despite the three recent sales at well above book values. Moving to the next slide, nine, we can see that our newbuilding program has been paid by about 50% of the total CapEx at year-end. The remaining CapEx of 242 is fully financed with bank facilities for Avance Rigel and Avance Avior, while Avance Castor and Avance Pollux is financed with a sale-leaseback arrangement, which was signed in August last year. This means that we have no unfunded newbuilding CapEx. Actually, it's overfunded with $8 million at year-end, the financing of our newbuilding program is now completed. Besides concluding the financing of our newbuilding program, we refinanced our fleet bank facility consisting of nine vessels in May last year.
This significantly improved the terms compared to what we had, where we have achieved longer repayment profile from 18 to 20-22 years. We've increased our renewable capacity to utilize the flexibility to manage and optimize cash. We've lowered the margin and longer tenor, pushing our first debt maturity from June 2024 to February 2027. With a staggered debt, no unfunded newbuilding CapEx, a solid cash position and strong earnings, we are well positioned to continue returning value to our shareholders as we have done the past year. With that, I hand the word over to you, Øystein, for the market stuff.
Okay. Thank you, Randi. Let's go through some market slides here. Let's start with our overview of the market 2022. The LNG sea market, which is the big gas carriers, that market or the cargos grew with 10% during 2022. There are two main export markets. It's Middle East, North America. We saw very strong growth in the Middle East despite OPEC holding back oil volumes at a certain time. Some of the countries there increased export growth by 29%-46%. U.S. was more muted in 2022, still this is the biggest export market. Altogether, this translates to about 90 million tons, which is the vast majority of the seaborne LPG exports. On the import side, we saw widespread growth.
China, despite the zero-COVID policies, grew their imports by close to 10% for the year, despite LNG imports being down 20% for the year. Europe, with the energy crisis, also had to substitute pit stock and increase their imports by 55% although Europe is a rather small import nation for seaborne LPG. If we look at the key import nations, as I mentioned China, very strong growth despite zero-COVID policies. It's a price-sensitive market, where you have a lot of substitution and LPG prices have been at a very low level. At the same time, China is ramping up a lot of new plastics factories. We do expect the growth to China to continue to be strong in the years going forward.
Then you do see some European countries also here on the list, being big import nations. Let's jump to U.S., which is the most interesting market. U.S. have had a very high inventories. Production of LPG is very high. At the same time, we have had less domestic demand due to our warmer winter than normal. U.S. inventories are staying at very high levels, 25% above 10-year average. This has put a dent on domestic prices in U.S. and widened the arbitrage to international markets. We do expect U.S. to come out of the season here with very high LPG inventory levels.
While U.S. growth in the LPG sector was a bit muted in 2022, we don't expect that to be the case in 2023 with U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasting 16% export growth in 2023 and then somewhat lower in 2024 with 4%. We do expect U.S. which is also our export nation with long sailing distances to the end consumer market to grow very steadily during 2023. Of course, if you have about 45% of the cargos flowing out of U.S. to markets mainly in Asia, these cargos often very mostly have to go through the Panama Canal. Panama Canal has been clogged at several occasions, and it happened really quite a lot here during November when LPG rates went to all-time high levels.
We do see that the Panama congestion is affecting vessel availability, and we have a symbiosis here where lack of ships are also driving the arbitrage, not only the arbitrage driving the freight levels, but they both work in a feedback loop. If you're looking at the arbitrage from U.S. to Japan or China for that matter, the arbitrage levels have been keeping at very conductive levels for freight during the last couple of months. Turning back to Panama Canal on slide 14, just to illustrate how this works in real life. In an ideal situation, you would like to take a U.S. Gulf Coast cargo through the Panama Canal and ending up in China 10,500 nautical miles, so 58 days round trip at 15 knots. This is without any waiting time.
In real life, typically the round trip would be slightly higher. Also depending on whether you are discharging in one or very often two ports or maybe even three ports. When the Panama Canal is clogging, because usually of high demand also for container ships and LNG ships, then of course, the alternatives are either going through Suez Canal, which is adding about 4,000 nautical miles and resulting in a round trip of 81 days, or saving the canal fees in Suez going through Cape of Good Hope and you can get to 15,800 nautical miles, turning into 88 days on a efficient round trip or 30 days more. This is really driving ton mileage. At the same time, we do see the Panama Canal being clogged.
It creates a lot of uncertainty when you are fixing a ship and you have a laycan or let's call it the loading day when you have to be at the terminal. Usually when you fix a ship, you have maybe a window of two days to meet that laycan for loading the cargos. If you have a ship in Asia, it's very hard to predict how long the waiting time in Panama will be. Will it be six days or will it be up to 25 days as this was in November?
At the same time, we do see the fees for going through Panama Canal basically doubling from 2022 to 2025, which also puts further incentive to go around the Panama Canal, taking other routes, thereby also making sure you have a fixed laycan that you can guarantee. If you are not meeting the laycan for loading the cargo, and if the market drops, you are typically also dropped from that voyage, which means that you need to fix your ship again. This is creating a bit different trading pattern, which in general is positive for freight demand. Yeah, turning to 15 again, it's a bit same story. The arbitrage, if you look at the levels here, the arbitrage on the right-hand side staying at around $150 per ton.
We do see the dark blue line, which is the Mont Belvieu, the U.S. domestic LP-Propane price, and then the lighter blue color being the Far East Asia price. There is a substantial spread here. Depending on the supply and demand of ships in the market, that will affect how much of this arbitrage is ending up with the cargo owners or with the ship owners. You know, the TCE potential for 2023 and 2024 is $67,000 and $56,000 for a non-scrubber vessel. Of course, the ships fitted with the scrubber, they have access to cheaper fuel. The economics for those ships are substantially better at $74,000 and $62,000 a day. Again, these arbitrages are changing quite a lot. They are quite volatile as the freight market is.
This is just a snapshot of how it looks today. If you look at slide 16, we have had a speed reduction in the industry with the speed going down 4% in 2022 compared to 2021. This with the implementation of the Carbon Intensity Indicator from 2023, we do think that some of the older ships will continue going slower with Engine Power Limitation, which will result in less ships available in the spot market. Of course, ton-days going up. If you go to slide 17, I think one of the themes people have been talking about for a long time is the order book for 2023.
People have had in the past, especially last summer, had a negative view on the market for 2023 because of all the scheduled deliveries for 2023, totaling about 46 ships. We do see some slippage in, for our own sake, we have had four ships with contractual delivery date in 2023, and we do expect to take half of this in 2023, and then the last ones early 2024. We do expect some slippage. At the same time, we do see a lot of dry docking scheduled for the year. Energy Aspects has a number of 76 VLGC schedule for dry docking this year.
Other peoples are operating with somewhat lower numbers, but it's a big jump in dry docking this year as the numbers, depending on source, being somewhere around 65 to 76 ships, and they are skewed to the beginning of the year. Additionally, scrubber economics are very compelling, so we do see people looking at installing scrubbers which will entail the ships being longer in dry dock. We also see people installing ballast water treatment as we are doing on two of our ships, which can also lead to somewhat longer dry docking periods for the ships. All in all, I think when you are getting to 2024, order book to fleet is 7% rather than the, yeah, 24% or 25% it is today.
We do think that getting to 23 is important. That's one of the reasons why we have taken some time charter coverage this year to protect ourselves for the possibility of some oversupply of ships. We are fully open from 2024 onwards to reap the benefit of a much tighter shipping market. The highlight of today, I hope, is amidst the special VLG edition. We have from time to time, some investors having some concern about the VLG market, we have kind of made the top 5 worries that people are concerned about when they are investing in the sector and try to address those concern and give some data to them.
Let's start with number one, the most typical concern, which is the order book is too big. As I mentioned, 24%-25% order book compared to fleet depends a bit on whether you're counting in the deliveries already for the year. In historical perspective, it's about average. We have had situation where order book has been a lot higher. These are typically also driven by technology changes. We have the Eco class in 2014, 2015, which resulted in this big spike in order book and coincided also with U.S. becoming our exporter. We had this sort of spike 2006-2009, where we also had a lot of deliveries. At the same time, the fleet is also aging.
That's hardly been any scrapping in this sector the last couple of years. We do have today 58 older ships which are expecting to be scrapped. One of the reasons they have not been scrapped is the shadow fleet of ships being in captive trade between Iran and typically China. These numbers of shipping in this trade is just increasing month by month. As I mentioned on the last call in November, the number was then 44 ships. This number is increasing and is leading to scrapping being delayed. The order book today, 69 ships, compares favorable to the older ships. Point number two, it's also maybe important to take into consideration this is not really a zero-sum game.
One thing is order book compared to kind of the scrapping candidates, but, that is more the sense in a flat market where you don't really have any growth. Seaborne trade in LPG is growing quite steadily, so the growth will take care of the new building demand with a CAGR since 2012 of 7% average annual growth. Even in COVID, you do see that there was very limited decline in growth for LPG. 2019, 106 million tons, going down to 105 in 2020, and then bouncing to 112 in 2021. It's a fairly resilient fuel because it has a lot of uses and it's generally also cheap. Of course, as I mentioned, seaborne trade share of LPG consumption is increasing.
One of the main reasons for this is U.S. becoming a huge exporter, the biggest, and they are very far away from the end consumers, and they then tend to trade the LPG exports on very large gas carriers. That was number one and two. Another concern that typically pops up is people think the rates are volatile, and I don't disagree. We have seen this year rates going to far above $100,000 at the end of last year, falling down to in the 30s, before bouncing back now to, let's say, call it around $80,000 per day. For sure the rates are volatile, but you know, that's fine, but what you also have to measure is what are the rate levels compared to your cash break-even?
We are here kind of showing the VLGC rates last 10 years compared to cash break even of assumed $22,500 per day in line with our cash break even levels. How often are you then underwater on the earnings compared to your cash break even? Actually it's just 1/3 of the months. If you're looking at kind of the distribution of earnings, and then comparing these to other commodity shipping segments, VLCC, the very large crude carriers and big bulk driver ships, Capesizes. We look at the distribution of this, you will see that the VLCC is more even.
You see that on the VLCC, you have periods where you can make a lot of money, but also periods where you are underwater more often, where you basically have positive cash flow, 46% of the months the last 10 years, and even less so for Capesizes, which have had positive cash flow 30% of the months last 10 years. Of course, the market is not stupid, this is also one of the reasons why VLCC and Capesize order books today are very low, and why I don't think the cash flow projection for the last 10 years can be projected into the future. The outlook for VLCC and Capesize, I do think look a lot more compelling today because they have been through a cycle of scrapping.
While the VLCC, as I mentioned, order book is on par with what this has been in the past, and we have a growing sector. We always have number four, which is a bit more technical. It's more that if, of course, Naphtha is a substitute for propane, so if the economics are too good, you could always have Naphtha coming in, replacing propane and killing your economics. If you look at the numbers the last, since January 2022, actually in this Q4 when we have had very favorable freight rates, the spread from Naphtha and propane has not been really good. Despite that, the earnings for VLCCs has been fantastic.
We haven't really seen that Naphtha has been replacing propane and killing kind of the VLCC market, at least for the last cycle. Last item is, it's more the, am I too late to buy the stock? It's about calculating what is the net asset value. Yes, our stock has gone up quite a lot the last year or so has also the new building prices. New building prices, as Randy mentioned, we have ordered six ships at more or less the bottom of the cycle, $80 million. If you have read TradeWinds, they just had a story about VLCC new building prices now being quoted at around $100 million. That is for ships delivery 2025, 2026. You are tying up a lot of capital then until you can take delivery.
Now having a ship in the market is very positive because the rates are really good. If you look at the resale numbers, resale numbers have gone up quite a lot. It's been a good and liquid secondhand market. We, as I mentioned, we have been selling three ships the last year. We also have BW coming out today announcing quite a few ship sales, where we are looking at $50 million-$60 million for 15-year-old VLCCs. If you put in $50 million for our two, the last remaining VLCCs, the secondhand values for a five-year VLCC is at around $80 million according to Clarksons.
If you're putting in $70 million for each of the 2 15 VLCCs, and then $100 million for the usual VLCCs we have, maybe it's a bit on the low side if new building prices for delivery 2025, 2026 is $100 million, then maybe this number should be higher. But for simplicity, let's assume $100 million. You have a fleet value of $1.26 billion. We have some working capital. We are trading, as Randy mentioned, about half of our fleet on time charter and then half of the fleet on voyage charter. On voyage charters, you typically have some working capital where you are getting paid in after you discharge your cargo rather than in advance like you have on a time charter.
We have some derivative, you know, we have a derivative book which is pretty good in the money. That is $31 million. We have remaining CapEx of $242 million. As Randi mentioned, this is fully covered by debt of $250 million, regardless, it's still remaining CapEx. On net debt, it was $228 million. The net value here is $821 million it would be costing you to replicate Avance Gas either through new buildings or resales. We have 77 million shares in the company, and that gives the kind of cost of making a new Avance Gas at around $11 per share. Our share price today is, I believe, $6.6.
means that there should be plenty of upside despite the stock going up because new building prices and secondhand prices also moved up quite a lot the last year or so. That's it for me. Just repeat the highlights. Strong quarter. We had a big mismatch on the load-to-discharge and the discharge-to-discharge numbers, $46,500 in line with guidance on the load-to-discharge, $55,800 on the discharge-to-discharge, slightly ahead of guidance. Turning into a profit of close to $35 million for the quarter or close to $90 million for the year. We have taken delivery of our third VLGC, Avance Regal, sister ship coming in May, both ships dedicated to the spot market. We recently sold a ship at a healthy book gain.
We have taken out some more coverage for the year, and we are 98% covered for Q1, and we expect Q1 to be on par with Q4 on a discharge-to-discharge basis and a much better numbers on a load-to-discharge basis. We're already booking Q2 numbers at good levels, and we have decided to hike the dividend to $0.50, which gives our investors, hopefully a compelling yield. That's it for me. Let's check whether we have some questions.
Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, simply press star one one again. Once again, if you have a question, please press star one one on your telephone. I'm not showing any questions at this time. I'd like to turn the program back to management for any further remarks.
Thank you. Nobody wants to talk on the phone anymore. Everybody wants to chat. We have two chat questions there. I think I'll start with Øystein from Fearnley Securities, which is asking us, "Given your cash position and no unfunded CapEx," et c., et c., "is it fair to assume 100% of earnings being paid out going forward?" I think as we said it in the Q3 report in November, you know, I think I said something like this, some shipping companies are bragging that they are paying out 50% of earnings in dividends. We are not planning to do that. We are planning to pay out everything. As long as we have a fairly good outlook and a good financial position, we don't see any reason to be holding back all that cash.
Cash today has a much higher value than it had before Fed started to raise interest rates. You can now put your money to 5% with the U.S. government, or you can put it to us at 16 or 29% yield. We are rather paying out full earnings. We are actually paying in excess of earnings for this quarter, despite some of the earnings coming from our asset sale. Yes, I think it's fair to assume 100% dividend in terms of earnings, at least as long as we have a positive outlook. I think, you know, the financial position is super strong, so nothing's gonna change there any day soon. Yeah. Yeah. Then we have one more question.
Jon Nikolai Skåland, could you give some more color on the 63% booked on good levels in Q2 2023? I was maybe expecting that question. I think I touched upon it in the introduction here that it's too early for us to give our assessment of the TC. We have three ships on variable higher rates, we have no idea what that number is gonna be. The spot market rates will decide the earnings on those three ships. What we know for sure is we're gonna have 100% utilization on the ships. I would say two of the ships we have, we have a fairly good floor level on in line with cash break even.
Those ships tend to perform better in a worse market where we, despite more rates going very low, we will still be able to get a cash break-even level on them. The other remaining ship has more upside than downside protection, which I think is a good combination. What we are doing now is, of course, we are fixing ships where the voyage is going well into Q2. Of course, as I mentioned, our rates today are at around $80,000 per day, which means that you can book pretty good coverage for Q2. Additionally, we have three ships on fixed higher TC, and we have these three ships on variable hires. I think I have to quit bringing my iPhone to these calls because Siri is annoying me all the time.
We have three ships on variable hire rate and one FFA coverage. That's why we have such a high coverage for Q2. It's three ships fixed TC, three ships variable hire, one FFA. It's too early to give our TC rates, but once I'm back here in May, we will give you more details on the expected TC. Last question, which is not really an investor question. There's a guy who wants to join our group, asking us if there are career opportunities, and he would like to get employed. Whether it's possible to get directly hired by the Avance group rather than through a ship manager. Just to tell you a bit about that.
In order to kind of be cost efficient, we have a pretty good OpEx, as Andy informed you about, and even more so on the general administration cost. In order to be able to deliver such good OpEx numbers, we are reliant on having good ship managers. In the office there in Oslo where we are running the shipping companies the day-to-day, we have around 250 ships we're operating on our platform. It's tankers in Frontline, it's more than 100 Capesizes in Golden Ocean. It's a lot of ships in SFL. They all together, they have around 75 ships. The third in LNG ships in Flex LNG, and then there are 16 VLGCs in Avance.
We have a kind of scale of economics to run shipping companies but we use outside managers to run our ships in order to have access to crew pools, purchasing, maritime IT. We have today two manager of our ships, Northern Marine and Bernhard Schulte. They are operating our ships and that gives us a way to kind of level the kind of the sea tanker platform despite Avance Gas being a fairly small shipping company. I hope that gave you some input. We got one more question while I was talking here. With your effect evaluation relative to the calculated value of Avance Gas, do you consider share buybacks? I don't really agree.
I do think I calculated a cost of replicating this company by buying or ordering new ships. That's $11 per share. Our share price today is about $6.6-$6.7. I don't really see that the value being attractive. I think maybe what you're meaning, the stock is attractive to buy back. In that sense, I think it's a bit hard for us to buy back shares. I've said this in the past. We have one dominant shareholder, Hemen Holding, who owns 77% of our shares. We have an exemption from Oslo Stock Exchange, which typically require a fee flow of 25%. We have less than 25%.
We have an exemption from the Oslo Stock Exchange to still be listed, that makes it hard for us to buy back the stock. Instead, we are maximizing dividends to you guys who are our investors, if you think the valuation is attractive, you can reinvest that dividend in buying more ships. I think that's it for us. Yeah. Okay. Thank you everybody for joining the call. We will be back in May with our Q1 numbers, I will dig in more details on what we mean with attractive bookings for Q2. Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.