We begin with a company presentation followed by a live Q&A. Please note that participants can submit their questions through the Q&A button on your screen during the webinar. Your questions will be answered during the Q&A session. As a reminder, before we begin our webinar, kindly note that this discussion is strictly for informational and educational purposes and should not be relied upon. This webinar does not constitute an offer to buy and sell securities or investment advice or advice of any kind, and Capital Link bears no responsibility for the content. Let us now begin with our discussion. I'd like now to pass the floor over to Mr. Aristides Pittas. Please go ahead, sir.
Hello, everybody. Thanks to Capital Link for organizing this presentation. They do it regularly every year, and we are used to it, and we thank them very much. As Paul said, the company has been a public shipping company, and I'm going through the slides here, which I have shared on the screen. So the first slide, of course, is the forward-looking statement, which takes a couple of minutes to go through if you want to. It's the usual stuff. I'll go over the slides and make some comments on them, but the presentation will be there for you to see even at a later stage. So after the forward-looking statements, we go on to talk about Euroseas and who we are. Paul described the company quite well. We currently have 21 vessels on the water. We have four vessels under construction.
We are active in the feeder and intermediate sectors of the container market. We have been listed since 2005, so we have a long history of more than 20 years as a public company. My family controls more than 50% of the shares within the company, so it is fully aligned with our various shareholders. I am part of the fourth generation of the Pittas family that has been in shipping.
Even the fifth generation is coming in and assisting, but we have extremely qualified managers within the group that have been with us for many, many years and have helped develop and shape Euroseas to what it is today from a very small company when we started off in 2005, which had seven vessels practically and seven old vessels to where we are today, and with a market capitalization that was about $50 million when we first listed, and which today is about $500 million. So the company has grown a lot. A lot of this merit goes to the very well-educated professional team that supports the company. Tasos Aslidis has been with us for 30 years. He has worked for 20 years ever since we got public, and most of the managers have been with the company for many, many years.
The management of the day-to-day is done by Eurobulk, which is a family-owned company. But as I said, the reputation of Eurobulk, I think, has been proven throughout the years to be helping Euroseas achieve what it has achieved. So let's go further and just show you in the next slide our fleet. It consists of six intermediate vessels, 4,300 TEU vessels, which are about 18 years of age on average. These ships have been contributing significantly to the earnings of the company over the last five years that we've owned those ships. Our feeder fleet is 15 vessels. Six of them we've had for many, many years and are relatively old, but nine of them are new vessels that we built ourselves in Hyundai, one of the best shipyards in the world, between 2023 and 2025.
So they are modern, efficient, economical vessels, which are also contributing significantly to our bottom line. In addition, we have also ordered another four intermediate vessels, which we will take delivery of in 2027 and 2028, which vessels will further contribute to the growth of the company and to the growth of our earnings. This slide, the next slide, shows you our initiatives over the last three years, which have been one, to order newbuilding vessels, which are very economic, very efficient, very low emissions, and the best ships in the sector today. So that was one focus: to renew the fleet with all these modern ships.
The second focus has been to put energy-saving devices on our existing ships to make them also as efficient as can be and less fuel-consuming, therefore more sought after by the charterers, succeeding in two goals: one, making them earn higher charter rates because they are better ships now, and two, helping protect the environment, which is something that we feel that we have to be doing as much as we can because the environment needs our human protection as much as we can do that. So this is what we have been doing with all these ships over the last three years. You can see here in the next slide how we have employed our vessels. And as you can see, we are covered for 2026 already, the majority of the ships. We have a huge coverage.
I think it's about 90% for 2026 of our weighted average operating days are covered. 2027 is also fully covered. It is also covered to a significant level, and 2028 as well, and these charters that we've been able to fix on these vessels for this duration, they are at very high charter rates. We're talking on average around more than $30,000 a day. Actually, the coverage for 2026 is at $31,000 per day for 83% of our open days. We are negotiating currently to re-charter one of our ships for another two years, which will help bring that charter coverage to the 90% I said previously, but it hasn't been finalized. Our charter coverage for 2027 is at $32,600 per day for what we fixed, and which is two-thirds of our open days.
And even in 2028, we have covered at the same level, above $32,000 per day for 2028. So a really good picture there, and we believe that we will be fixing some of the ships that open up in 2026 within the next few months at still very high rates. So let's look at how these charter rates translate into our financial statements. We are preparing our Q4 financials right now. I can't talk about them because we haven't yet concluded the exercise and published the results, but they will be extremely good results for sure because all the ships are employed for 100 days at the rates that we have shown previously. But for the nine-month results, which have been out for quite some time, you can see that we had 22.6 vessels owned at the time on average at $28,735 per day.
That is a total net revenue of $170 million. The net income is close to $100 million. It's $13.8 per diluted share just for the nine months, $13.8 per share. The net income attributable to common shareholders was $85 million or $12.2 per adjusted earnings per diluted shares. The EBITDA was $115 million. We paid out a dividend of $0.70 per share for the third quarter, which is equivalent to $2.8 per share on an annualized basis. Remember, I told you our earnings were $12.2 just for the nine-month period, so for the full year, it's going to be in excess of $16, but based on our current $53 stock price, this is a dividend yield of about 5%, and for the last few years, our dividend yield has been 5% or higher, and this is something that we want to continue doing.
We want to continue paying our shareholders a significant dividend as our current dividend shows. And this we do. We pay this dividend using only 15% of our earnings. So you realize that we are keeping a lot of our earnings to fund our further growth. I think this is an important factor to remember. Looking a little bit forward into 2026 and 2027, as I told you previously, we have significant forward charter covered at rates in excess of $31,000 per day, both for 2026 and 2027, which will, of course, allow us to continue funding very meaningful dividends and funding the equity portion of all our newbuilding program and still have considerable liquidity for further investments. You can see here in the next slide what our average contracted time charter rate has been since 2022 up till today. So you see it's always been close to $30,000.
It will be for the fixed employment that we have for 2026 and 2027. It will be even higher. We think that we will be able to fix within the next few months at similar levels some additional capacity. So we do expect that our earnings per share will continue to be significant within the next two years. And in fact, if you look at the bottom part of this slide, which shows our earnings per share, you can see that for 2026 and 2027, even if we were to charter all the ships that open up at a rate of zero, we would still have positive earnings. Obviously, this will not be the case.
We will fix the ships at some higher revenue, of course, and the earnings will be much higher than the absolute minimum if we were to keep all the vessels idle, which, of course, is not going to happen. So the forward visibility that one has is that earnings per share will be at a very high level as they have been for the last three years, for the next two years at least. This slide, slide number 10, just shows what our break-even cost is, which is $12,000 per day per vessel. So I told you that our average charter rates are at 30 or more than $30,000 today. All this extra $18,000 per day is net earnings. We have very considerable margins right now, and we expect to have so in the next two coming years as well.
Let's also have a look at our balance sheet, which I show in the next slide, which gives us a position of our assets and our liabilities. First thing to note here is that our bank debt is quite low. Our bank debt is about $224 million, which is about 33.3% of the total book value of assets. Of a fleet that has become quite modern. This is a low leverage if you compare with the book value of the assets. If you compare with the actual value of the assets today, which is significantly higher than the current book value, you can see that the leverage is even lower. We estimate ourselves that our charter adjusted market value of the vessels in our fleet is about $680 million, while the book value of our fleet is $510 million. Our actual NAV is considerably higher.
If we use the NAV instead of the book values to determine what the NAV of the company is on a per share basis, we come up to $85 per share. We are trading at $53 per share. So this represents a 38% discount to the value of the company. So I would say that we are cheap compared to the value the company has if it was to be liquidated today, which, of course, is not what we intend to do because we intend to continue growing the company in the same manner that we have been doing the last 20 years. But it's a good metric to have. And here on the next slide, slide 12, you can see the evolution of our share price since 2021.
We've increased from below $5 per share to over $50 per share in these five years, so a tenfold increase in the share price, and as we see, we hope that this continues, so this wraps up the presentation on our company alone. But of course, all the shipping companies are always acting within a market, and that is what influences the bottom lines at the end, in addition with all the moves that management can take, so I'll go extremely briefly through the market presentation just to give you an insight of where we are. I hope most of you are familiar with the markets, so I'll be very quick on this because I want today's discussion to focus on our particular company rather than on the market more generally, so yes, slide 14 shows how charter rates vary. Shipping is a never-boring market.
We had 10 years of extremely low rates between 2010 and 2020. These were difficult years for the container market. This happened because there were too many ships that were ordered between 2005 and 2008 and hit the market. And therefore, there were more ships than needed. And that kept the market at terribly low levels. With the COVID crisis, things improved dramatically because everybody needed more finished goods, and there were all these inefficiencies in the trade, which caused rates to skyrocket and which contributed to a very healthy accumulation of further cash and equity in the company. We had a correction to levels around $20,000 a day, as you can see here, for intermediate-type ships, which $20,000 is a good rate, right? Remember, I showed you that our break-even rate is $12,000 a day.
$20,000 a day is a profitable rate for us and a nice profitable rate. But then we had the events in the Red Sea and the Israeli-Gaza conflict, and that caused rates to increase again significantly. And that's why we are currently seeing extremely high levels. Of course, looking forward, one can expect some kind of normalization. I'll go in the next slide a little bit in what we expect to see, but still at good levels. The right-hand side of this slide shows vessel values, which obviously follow charter rates with a small lag. So in the good times, prices increase, then they drop. In a bad time, you can see how they correlate these two graphs significantly. So what is our outlook in a nutshell for the next couple of years?
We would see if we have normalization within the Gaza-Israel conflict and trade through Suez continues and starts again, we will probably see rates falling a little bit, time charter rates falling a little bit. Also, there is quite a high order book of vessels in the container sector, which is another factor supporting the fact that we should see a correction to more normalized levels. Of course, it is extremely difficult to predict the geopolitical situations and the inefficiencies that come into the market. The inefficiencies help charter rates. When everything is working smoothly and everything is optimized, you need less vessels. So all this is a factor helping the market. But looking ahead, we expect that both 2026 and 2027, we will see a normalization in charter rates and a reduction from today's levels, but to levels that are still highly profitable for shipping companies as us.
All this is important for somebody who enters the market today. But as I said, we are covered for most of 2026 and 2027, so that's not that important for Euroseas today. I'll skip the next few points because I'm running out of time. I'll also pass the analysis on the trade demand growth. You can read it at your ease. I will stop for a second on slide 17, which shows that the order book has risen again to 34%. It's a significant order book, and we're building quite a few ships today. Of course, it's significantly less than what was built between 2006 and 2009. As you can see there, the order book was 50% to 60% to 65% at that time, and that led to the correction we saw in the next 10 years. Now it's not that steep, but it is relatively steep.
However, in the sector where we are active, it is much, much better. In the sector where we are active, more than about 25% of the fleet is over 20 years old, and the order book is just half of that. So one can expect reasonably that the subsector up to 6,000 TEU vessels will be a shrinking fleet. And that gives us great optimism that we will not see significant corrections to the charters that we are attaining. And with that, I really want to conclude the presentation, just pointing on this last slide, the eight reasons why I believe somebody should look at Euroseas seriously if they want to invest in container shipping. First is ourselves. My family owns more than 50% of the company.
We are fully aligned with all the Euroseas shareholders, and we have a 20-year track record to prove our prudent management and also the fact that we really know the markets. Second reason, the company is largely insulated from short to medium-term market developments as we have long-term charters secured for the majority of the fleet at highly profitable levels. Third thing, the profitability for 2026 and 2027 is expected to be comparable to that that we had the last three years, no matter what happens to the market. Fourth point, our leverage is low. Our liquidity reserves are high. This provides a substantial buffer to support further growth, which we're planning. Five, the feeder to intermediate container market in which a company operates has positive fundamentals, particularly with respect to fleet growth, as newbuilding orders are about half the number of vessels over 20 years of age.
Six, our shareholders are consistently rewarded with a meaningful dividend, which at the current share price represents an annualized yield of about 5.3% and in the past has been even higher. Seven, a share repurchase program is in place and will be utilized at management's discretion. Eight, the company shares trade at approximately 60%-65% of NAV, representing significant discount and appreciation potential. With that, I would like to go to the Q&A section and answer any questions you may have for the next 10 minutes. I'm looking here at the questions that I have seen. First question, how strong are your counterparties? Our counterparties are all extremely strong companies. They have been Maersk, CMA, OOCL, ZIM. They are all very, very strong, big companies, and we feel extremely safe with them.
They have made windfalls of money over the last years, and we are not worried that they will not be able to pay the charters. Second question, are there any opportunities to acquire competitors which also trade at discounts to NAV? The truth is that there are not, I mean, we are not one of the biggest container ship operators, and there are not other smaller container operators in the market. There are four or five names only which are trading in the market, and they are also big companies and also bigger than us, most of them. So I don't think this is an option open to us. Next question, what in your opinion could derail the current rate environment?
As I said, I expect to see a normalization in charter rates if the world reaches a new balance, if the Suez opens up again and we trade through Suez constantly, if the networks become again efficient, if there is less growth in demand. However, having said that, what we saw just today was that the IMF came up with its new projection about global GDP growth, which is 0.2% higher than what it previously was. So they were predicting that the world will grow by 3.1% in 2026 last time they reported. Today, they came out predicting that the growth will be even stronger at 3.3%. This 0.2% does not seem very high, but it is actually when you translate it in what that can mean in demand for transportation. So the market, you know, if the economy does well globally, it's a positive for us.
If the economy does badly, it will affect the need for transportation, obviously. What kind of fuel do you believe will prevail into 2028 and beyond? This is a very difficult question. The ships that we have ordered, we are making them LNG ready. LNG ready means that we are taking the precautions so that if LNG ends up being the fuel that is preferred in the market, we are able to transform all these newbuilding ships that we have ordered and taken delivery most of. All these will be able to upgrade into LNG vessels. So that will require an extra cost, a significant extra cost, but we will be able to do it if LNG is the fuel of the future. I doubt it will be. I think that conventional fuel will be here for quite some time.
We've seen what happened with the efforts to decarbonize shipping. The IMO postponed its decision on some measures that would assist decarbonization because of the resistance, mainly of the U.S. I think decarbonization will proceed, but it will proceed slower than originally anticipated. But we will have the most modern ships in the market, so I'm quite sure that we will be able to employ them at least throughout the 2030s, throughout the whole 2030s. What do you consider to be the greatest potential headwind to your projection plans for 2026 and 2027? I think the greatest potential headwind can come out of geopolitics if the world economy stops growing. We really depend on the global economy growing to see better results, but not for 2026 and 2027, as you say, because as I've already said, 2026 and 2027 are already very well covered through charters.
I'm, you know, highly positive that nothing can really derail us right now, but for 2028, 2029 onwards, of course, a slowing economy will affect us as well. I think I have time for one final question. How do you see share buybacks with Euroseas trading below price to NAV of one? Share buybacks is something that we've done in the past. We haven't done it lately because we saw that the price was rising quite steadily, and we had reached about $63 and were rising. But at current levels, I think that management will continue doing some buybacks. We are trying to balance buybacks with meaningful dividends and keeping strong cash reserves to assist further company growth. With all that, I think I would like to thank everybody that participated in this call. I don't think we have much time.
I want to go back to Paul for his closing remarks. So how do I do that?
I'm right here. Thank you, Aristides. Great webinar. And I would just like to remind everyone that they're going to have a chance to listen to the recording on our website, capitalinkwebinars.com, and on Capital Link's YouTube channel. Thank you, everyone, again. You may now disconnect.
Thank you. Goodbye.
Thank you. Goodbye.