Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Global Ship Lease third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now like to hand the conference over to your host, Mr. Ian Webber, Chief Executive Officer of Global Ship Lease. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Good morning, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Global Ship Lease third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. The slides that accompany today's presentation were posted to our website earlier today, www.globalshiplease.com. Slides two and three of that presentation, as usual, remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and assumptions and are, by their nature, inherently uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to many factors, including those described in the Safe Harbor section on the slide presentation. We also draw your attention to the risk factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 20-F, which is for 2020 and was filed with the SEC on March 19, 2021.
You can obtain this via our website or via the SEC's. All of our statements are qualified by these and other disclosures in our reports filed with the SEC. We do not undertake any duties to update forward-looking statements. For reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to which we will refer during this call to the most directly comparable measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP, please refer to the earnings release that we issued this morning, which is also available on our website. I'm joined, as usual, by our Executive Chairman, George Youroukos, our Chief Financial Officer, Tassos Psaropoulos, and our Chief Commercial Officer, Tom Lister. George will begin the call with a high-level commentary on GSL and on our industry, and then Tassos, Tom, and I will take you through our recent achievements, quarterly results and financials, and the current market environment.
After that, we'd be pleased to take your questions. Turning now to slide four, I'll pass the call over to George.
Thank you, Ian, and good morning or good afternoon to all of you joining us today. I have in recent quarters described the container ship market as red hot, and with both freight and charter markets continuing to set record high levels, that has certainly remained the case through to today. We see ample reason why this heat should continue for some time, and we will come back to this theme throughout today's presentation. Let me first highlight what this amazing market has meant for GSL. Year to date, we have grown our fleet by more than 50%, acquiring 23 ships for just under half a billion dollars, with the last of those vessels delivering to us and commencing each charter in mid-October.
We have signed a total of 48 new charters, adding a total of $1.25 billion of contracted revenue and approximately $930 million of expected adjusted EBITDA, providing additional long-term support to the $0 .25 per share dividend that we introduced earlier this year. We have remained highly accretive active in managing our balance sheet, refinancing a total of just under $400 million of debt this year alone, bringing down our cost of debt from 6.3% to 4.9% and addressing all debt maturities through 2024. As our industry, our fleet, our charter book, and our balance sheet have all continuously improved, we have received yet another round of credit rating upgrades, the most recent of which was to BB- from Standard & Poor's.
I would like to highlight the increase in normalized earnings per share, which at $1.74 for the quarter, is nearly 4 x the prior year period, and at $3.01 for the year- to- date, approximately two and a half times the prior year period. While we're of course very pleased with our results for the third quarter, which you can see in detail on the right side of the slide, the full cash impact will really only be on display in the quarters ahead. Moreover, our focus on locking in the present market conditions into long-term charters means that GSL will benefit from these actions for years to come, even before the impact of any further acquisitions, which we are well-positioned to continue pursuing on a disciplined, selective basis.
In the meantime, we're working on some significant charter extensions, which we hope to conclude in the relative near term. These, together with the growth we have achieved year to date and our contracted cash flow for the next couple of years, will help determine an increase in the sustainable dividend from Q1 2022. We will make an announcement as soon as we can. If you now turn to slide five, I'll describe the big picture for our industry at this moment. As you have undoubtedly heard, the current market environment in the container shipping industry is truly extraordinary. Contrary to early suggestion that that economy is opening back up following COVID lockdowns would undermine containerized freight demand with the expectation that consumers would spend again on services rather than goods. We have actually seen an additional acceleration alongside economic recovery despite that recovery being uneven.
Nevertheless, 2021 cargo volumes are expected to increase by 8.2%, up from the projection of less than 7% that we were already very pleased to share with you on our last quarterly call. This strong fundamental rate of demand growth is double the rate of nominal cellular capacity growth. That is the supply of container ships. This imbalance is set to increase further through to at least next year, even before the significant impact of supply chain congestion, which absorbs capacity and amplifies the tightness of supply and demand, and looks set to be prominent feature of the market for quite some time.
Now, very important, when you zoom in on the segment of the market where we focus, the sub-10,000 TEU container ships, the order book is even more limited, and the advanced age of much of the global fleet is going to drive significant scrapping in the years ahead. Particularly as scrapping of the global fleet's oldest vessels is currently being deferred due to the strong market, building a backlog of very old ships. Tom will provide more detail on this later, but this is something I really want to emphasize upfront. 100% of container ships on the water today, which are 25 years old or older, are under 10,000 TEU. The midsize and smaller ship segment on which we focus are aging.
In fact, by the end of 2024, roughly 7% of sub-10,000 TEU capacity on the water today will be at least 25 years old. This almost exactly mirrors total capacity on order through 2024 for sub-10,000 TEU ships. Now what this means is that if all ships older than 25 were to be scrapped out, which is the normal thing I would say, net growth of the sub-10,000 TEU fleet between now and the end of 2024 would be under 1%. That is without taking anything in account about cargo growth year-over-year for the next three years. Meantime, earnings and asset values are on a clear upward trajectory, with the liner companies delivering record earnings that continue to reach previously unthinkable levels.
As we look forward, the drawdown of U.S. retail inventories to far below their normal levels suggests that the vast amounts of restocking that is required will provide further support to container ship demand for some time to come. Speaking to you one week after the COP26 conference and the many related announcements from industry regulators, financiers, and operating companies, it is very clear that ESG in general, and decarbonization in particular, is going to play a growing role in shaping the future of all industries, including shipping. As we have mentioned before, we expect that the EEXI regulation coming into effect from January 2023 will force the global fleet to slow down, and a one knot reduction in global average container ship sailing speeds equates to a 5%-6% reduction in effective capacity.
Similarly, while there has certainly been some ordering of new vessels in our sector, the significant uncertainty about which green fuels will become the standards of the future has continued to constrain speculative ordering. This is a major difference from previous bull markets in container shipping. Finally, while we have dramatically increased our fleet already this year, we continue to see the potential for selective growth that meets our high standards for vessel specifications, forward visibility on employment, overall risk management, and returns. We have no intention of compromising our acquisition criteria or our required returns in order to pursue growth for growth sake. We continue to see potential for selective growth in a highly fragmented sector with many subscale players and with a continuous exodus of financial sponsors.
Where the opportunity exists to serve the long-term interests of GSL shareholders by pursuing growth, our operating platform, industry relationships, and balance sheet puts us in an excellent position to seize that opportunity. I cannot emphasize this enough, guys, if we don't like the risk-return profile of a deal, we will not do it. With that, I will turn the call to Ian.
Thank you, George. Please turn to slide six. 2021 has provided numerous opportunities for us not only to grow through vessel acquisitions, but also for us to fix much of our existing fleet on significantly longer charters at charter rates that are in many instances 2x or 3 x their previous levels. This slide shows those vessels that were in our fleet at the beginning of the year, with the dark blue bars indicating where we have signed new or extended charters in the year to date. On this status quo fleet, we've agreed 18 new charters so far this year, adding a little over $600 million of contracted revenue cover. As you'll notice, a number of these new charters have been agreed to commence in the months ahead.
New terms have been agreed well in advance of expiry, meaning that we've got good visibility on continued increased cash generation from this part of the fleet in the remainder of the fourth quarter this year and into first quarter next year, even if we don't take any further action. On the next slide, we show something similar for the 23 vessels that we've acquired this year. They've all now been delivered. The last one came two or three weeks ago, in the middle of October. The majority have commenced new charters agreed under our ownership, succeeding charters in place at the dates of acquisition.
These new charters are again at considerably higher rates, and the 23 ships grow our on-the-water fleet by more than 50% and add over $640 million of contracted revenue. The dark blue bars on this page are those legacy charters that were in place when we agreed the transactions. To our considerable benefit, these below-market rates translated into below-market purchase prices for the vessels. The red bars, on the other hand, show the charters that we've agreed in the red-hot market subsequent to acquiring the vessels, capturing significant upside potential for GSL. Once again, these new charters are at multiples of their prior rates and extend well into the middle part of the decade.
All in all, with the new charters for the pre-existing fleet and existing and new charters on the 23 vessels acquired year- to- date, we've locked in an additional $929 million of total adjusted EBITDA so far this year. Total contracted forward revenue cover at the 30th of September stands at $1.6 billion spread over two and a half years. As George mentioned, this substantial additional multiyear contracted cash flow has allowed us to revisit the dividend for common shareholders. With the conclusion of some significant charter extensions, which we expect within the next short number of weeks, we look to increase the dividend on a sustainable basis for quarter one of 2022 and beyond. Moving on to slide eight.
This is a slide that we introduced this last quarter, and we think it's helpful in illustrating what all of the new charters and vessel acquisitions mean for our revenue and cash flow. We show this in three different forward rate scenarios. These three scenarios are that for any vessels that come open in the next two years, they're put back at rates prevailing in the market today, or alternately at 15-year historic rates, or alternately, the third option, at 10-year historic rates. To be absolutely clear, these are not forecasts of what will happen, but rather illustrations of how a number of different scenarios would flow through to GSL's financials.
I'd encourage you all to spend some time with this slide, and for those of you who want to get into the finer details, we spelled out the assumptions and the relevant factors, in detail on slide 21 in the appendix. For now, though, I'd like to make just a couple of points. First, you'll notice that there's only a negligible variation for us across the different scenarios for 2021, the current year, as a remaining charter market exposure is less than one month on a single 2,200 TEU ship. This high proportion of already contracted revenue days persists through 2022, next year, where we have only 4% or so of our total days open at the moment. The adjusted EBITDA in each scenario for 2022 shows a dramatic increase from the 2021 levels. I'll say that again.
With adjusted EBITDA in each scenario showing a dramatic increase from the 2021 levels. To remind you, every incremental dollar of spot revenue flows straight through to adjusted EBITDA and cash flow. Second, for historical context, our annual adjusted EBITDA in the years since our 2018 merger with Poseidon has been around $160 million. Now, we've already exceeded that level in the first nine months of this year, 2021, and we're well positioned to move dramatically higher, once again in 2022, based on our fully delivered fleet of 65 ships.
In fact, based solely on those charters already agreed, assuming literally zero revenue from additional spot days, open days, while still assuming OpEx on all of our fleet, our adjusted EBITDA would be approximately $380 million for 2022 and $272 million in 2023, significantly up on what we were earning before this year. This expansion of our cash flow is both transformative and lasting. Moving on to slide nine, I'll summarize our strategy and focus. We continue to believe that the sweet spot in the market is in existing ships rather than new builds, and particularly in the midsize and smaller sections.
We've put nearly $0.5 billion towards acquiring 23 such assets this year, and we've already secured nearly that entire amount in adjusted EBITDA over the coming years related only to these newly acquired vessels. We've been disciplined and selective in our acquisitions for both fleet renewal and growth, maintaining a risk-averse approach that has consistently yielded compelling returns. We focus on immediately accretive deals and have secured transactions with an estimated purchase price to average annual adjusted EBITDA ratios of between 3.6x and 4x. We've also ensured that the charter-attached acquisitions that we've made have not been reliant upon rosy residual value scenarios. Between the charters agreed and scrap value of vessels, we have in many of these instances already fully covered the cost of the acquisition.
Where we have been able to purchase older vessels, the charters that we have agreed subsequently at highly attractive rates have demonstrated the extraordinary upside potential of that strategy. As George mentioned in his remarks, both GSL and the shipping industry in general are increasingly focused on decarbonization. Our environmental commercial strategies are well-aligned by taking a full lifecycle approach to the carbon footprint of ships. We consider the impact of building and operating the ships, as well as just simply operating them. We see expanding the economic life of existing ships and optimizing their operation until next-generation sustainable fuels and propulsion technologies become well-established and commercially available and economically viable as both being environmentally sensible and financially prudent. Relatedly, we look to make sure that we're flexible and agile, avoiding speculation or long-term bets.
We focus instead on a short to medium-term horizon to drive returns, which in turn enable us to respond as appropriate to an evolving decarbonization environment. We also look to position the company to be in a strong cash position so that we can move quickly and decisively in capitalizing on opportunities ahead. I'll turn the call over to Tassos to talk you through our financials.
Thank you, Ian. Our first nine months of the year has been very active, with a significant number of moving pieces in the financials, so we have summarized the key points for you on slide 10. Revenue for the first nine months was $294.4 million, up from $212.8 million in the first nine months of 2020. Similarly, adjusted EBITDA for the nine months was $166.5 million, up from $124.5 million in the same period of last year, including a material impact on total operating revenue from amortization of intangible liabilities arising on below-market charters attached to vessel additions.
Normalized net income, which adjusts for one-off items, was $104.6 million for the first nine months, up approximately 170% from the $38.3 million in the prior year period. I would like to spend a moment on the material one-off items within this quarter. We have completed the refinancing of the last 2022 debt maturity, moving the next earliest to May 2024. We have also completed within this quarter the scheduled purchase and finance of 16 vessels, and with the last to be completed in October, out of the total 23 new vessels we acquired this year. Moving to the balance sheet items, there are various points to highlight. Our cash position at September 30, 2021 was $113 million.
As I have mentioned above, in the quarter, we have successfully refinanced our last 2022 maturity debt of our $5.8 million Hayfin facility and concluded the $140 million facility of 12 Borealis vessels and the $120 million for the four 5,500 TEU Panamax. Meantime, we have raised in the third quarter under our ATM programs $16.9 million of our perpetual preferred, further increasing our flexibility. Regarding our acquisitions, for the seven post-Panamax ships we have concluded in July the delivery of the last vessel with purchase price of $17.6 million and draw down the last $10.7 million of the arranged facility.
In addition, within July also, we have concluded the purchase of 12 container ships from Borealis of an aggregate purchase price of $233.9 million, which we financed with the issuance of $35 million of the 2024 notes to the sellers, a new senior secured loan of $100 million, and cash on hand. Finally, for the 4, 5,500 TEU Panamax container ships we contracted to purchase for an aggregate price of $148 million, we have arranged financing of $120 million, of which we have drawn down $90 million against the three ships delivered by September 30, 2021. The last vessel was delivered in October. Now, our detailed financial statements appear in full in slides 11 through 13.
On the basis of our strong contracted revenues, our board has declared a dividend of $0.25 per common share for the third quarter to be paid on December 2nd to common shareholders of record as of November 22. On slide 14, you can see in the upper left our scheduled amortization in the coming years on the basis of our third quarter results. Our total gross debt to annualized adjusted EBITDA is approximately 3.7x, and it is scheduled to come down meaningfully from there. On the upper right, you can see the dramatic reduction in our cost of debt from 7.7% at year-end 2018 to 6.3% at the beginning of this year to 4% now.
On the lower left, you will see that the trading liquidity in our stock has increased dramatically over the last year, making it far easier for investors to take a position in GSL since our public flow now accounts just under 80%. With that, I will turn it over to Tom.
Thanks, Tassos, and hello, everyone. Please turn to slide 15, which is intended to highlight the ship sizes on which we're focused, which will help put the subsequent slides in better context. GSL is focused on mid-size and smaller ships, which is shorthand for ships ranging from about 2,000 TEU up to 10,000 TEU. The top map on the left shows the deployment of quote-unquote, "our sizes of ship," i.e., ships under 10,000 TEU, and emphasizes their operational flexibility. As you can see, they're deployed everywhere. The bottom map shows where the big ships, in other words, those larger than 10,000 TEU, are deployed, which tends to be on the east-west main lane trades, where the cargo volumes and shoreside infrastructure can support them.
It's important to note that roughly 70%, 70%, of global containerized trade volumes are moved outside these main lanes in the north-south, regional, and intermediate trades served by ships like ours. George covered the demand side in his opening remarks, highlighting the rebound in containerized volumes driven by a progressive reopening of economies and ongoing restocking, with continued supply chain disruption amplifying all of the above. The next slides are mainly supply-oriented. Slide 16 shows supply-side trends that tend to be a barometer of health for the sector. The top chart shows idle capacity, which at the end of September, was at 0.888%. This is pretty much full employment, which is a strong baseline. The bottom chart tells a similar story. Ship recycling, scrapping, has been almost nonexistent for container ships this year. Why?
Because the charter market and earnings environment is so hot. Why scrap even an ancient ship if you can squeeze a few more millions of earnings out of her? I'll come back to this point on the next slide 17, which looks at the order book. Here you can see on the left the composition of the order book by size segment. As I'm sure you will have read in the industry press, the order book has expanded during the course of 2021, reaching an overall order book-to-fleet ratio of around 23%. However, and this is an important however, this overlooks the fact that the order book is very heavily weighted towards the bigger ships over 10,000 TEU. If you look at our focus segments of 2,000-10,000 TEU, highlighted in the red box, you can see that the dynamic is very different.
For these sizes, the order book-to-fleet ratio is a modest 6% or so. Another point to emphasize when discussing the order book is that the delivery schedule is backloaded. What I mean by this is that the order book deliveries tend to be weighted more heavily towards 2023 and 2024, rather than 2021 or 2022. This backloading is significant, as 2023 marks the implementation of the new environmental regulations, which we expect to cause a slowing down of the global fleet, and slowing down the fleet reduces effective capacity. It also ties in with the point George underlined in his commentary on slide five, that the midsize and smaller container ship fleet is aging.
As you can see from the chart on the right, if scrapping were to continue to be deferred, by the end of 2024, around 7% of sub-10,000 TEU capacity currently on the water would be at least 25 years old and potential candidates for the recycling yards. Net this out against the total order book of sub-10,000 TEU due to be delivered from the fourth quarter of this year through to the end of 2024, and you would get implied, and I emphasize implied, net growth in these sizes of just 0.7%. Negligible. The long and the short of this is that we continue to see supportive supply-side fundamentals for our focus size segments. Which brings us neatly to slide 18, the charter market.
The chart here provides an index covering charter market rates for a basket of container ship sizes and shows the general direction of travel for the market as a whole. The index is up by almost four times on where it was at the start of this year, and staggeringly, between nine and 10 times since the lows of 2Q 2020. On the right of the slide, we provide an indication of where market rates stood in October of this year for 3- to 5-year charters in our various size segments. This is a bit of an art really, as the market is so tight at the moment that reference fixtures have been pretty limited. In any case, for simplicity, we have grouped some size categories.
For example, the 2,200-2,800 TEU feeder category shows a rate of $34,500 per day. Rates for the smaller vessels in this category would be lower than this, while for larger vessels, they'd be a bit higher, hence the recent fixtures of two of our 2,200 TEU ships for $32,000 per day. Anyway, returning to the big picture, any way you look at it, we're seeing a truly fantastic market. With that, I'll turn the call back to George to wrap up.
Thank you, Tom. I will briefly summarize, and then we'll be happy to take your questions. As we have grown our fleet by more than 50% over the course of 2021, and also signed a large number of long-term charters on attractive terms, we have expanded our contracted revenue to over $1.6 billion, with an average remaining duration of 2.5 years. While we see further upside potential in our fleet when certain vessels come into the charter market in the months and quarters ahead, our extensive contract cover means that we are in a great position in any charter market. We have very strong balance sheet with $82 million on cash following the delivery of all of our recent acquisitions.
Our credit ratings have been upgraded yet again, most recently to BB- stable, and all of our 2022 debt has been successfully refinanced with no further maturities until May 2024, while both our leverage ratios and cost of debt continue to move in the right direction. We have demonstrated our ability to utilize diverse capital sources on better and better terms to fund accretive growth, and we have firmly established a virtuous cycle in that regard. Midsize post-Panamax and smaller container ships with higher reefer capacity continue to be the sweet spot in the market with highly supportive supply-side fundamentals as the vast majority of new vessel ordering continues to be for very large container ships that cannot compete in the majority of trade lanes where mid-sized and smaller vessels are the workhorses.
The current hot market is causing a growing number of owners to defer scrapping of their older ship, creating a large backlog of ships ready to be scrapped whenever the market eventually normalizes. We also expect total effective container ship capacity to shrink from January 2023, when new decarbonization regulations lead to reduced speeds. In the meantime, though, charter market rates continue to be truly extraordinary, up 3.8 x since the beginning of the year and almost tenfold since the lows in second quarter 2020, with far longer durations that were previously available for anything but a new build. We expect this market tightness to last well into 2022 and potentially straight through to regulation-driven supply reduction in 2023.
Our success in growing the fleet and adding substantial contracted cash flow over a multi-year period allows us to revisit the dividend, which we expect to increase from Q1 2022. Our liner customers continue to set records for profitability and are rapidly improving their balance sheets and credit profiles. The safety and welfare of our personnel remains our top priority, and we are working to embed an ESG culture in everything that we do. Our charter portfolio provides great support to the quarterly dividend that we introduced earlier this year. We bought back a large block of stocks during the quarter, both GSL and I personally making a great investment in GSL's future while also reducing our large legacy shareholder, Kelso, to below 5% of shares outstanding.
Having already grown our fleet by more than 50% this year, we continue to evaluate additional growth opportunities in a disciplined, highly selective manner. Rigorously sticking to our principles and being risk-averse have served us very well to this point, and we will not begin now to chase growth for growth's sake. Rather, we will keep our focus on using our platform and our balance sheet to maximize the long-term benefit to our shareholders. With that, we'll be happy to take your questions.
Thank you, sir. Again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question over the phone, simply press star one on your touchtone telephone. We have our first question from the line of Kevin Uherek with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hey, guys. I just had a quick question. You guys were talking about your dividend policy and thinking about potentially increasing it. How are you guys thinking about that? Are you guys thinking of more of it like a fixed increase, or thinking about doing something where it depends on the available cash that you might have?
Kevin, let me take this one. It's Ian. No, we're not convinced that sort of special one-off type dividends are right for us in today's circumstances at least. As we kind of said in the prepared remarks, and we've got a couple of quite significant, at least to our mind, charters that we're negotiating, charter extensions that we're negotiating right now, and we want to get them in the bag before we absolutely determine the new level of sustainable dividend, and then we'll announce it. Sustainable is important.
At the beginning of the year when we announced a $0.125 dividend, we stressed that it was sustainable in those circumstances. The market improved, we acquired ships, and we doubled the dividend when we actually paid the first one from $0.125 to $0.25. You know, we're in a different environment now. We've grown a little bit more, and we think it's right that we allocate some of the extra capital to return to shareholders.
Sustainable, and also, you know, wanting to preserve financial flexibility for the business, so capital for growth, as we've explained in our prepared remarks, that is, continues to be a plank of our strategy going forward, and maintaining the strength of our balance sheet.
Okay. Gotcha. That's all I have for questions.
Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Randy Giveans with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Howdy team GSL. How's it going?
Thank you, Randy.
Good, Randy. How are you?
Doing very well. All right, two questions for me, maybe a third. First on the share repurchases. Nicely done there. Very good use of $10 million or so. Now your balance sheet's clearly in great shape. Charter backlog, I think it's like $1.6 billion or something, provides you with substantial, right, free cash flow visibility. I guess my question, why raise the $17 million in preferred at 8.75%, which seems maybe like an expensive capital raise, although the repurchase of the common would still be accretive at these levels? I guess why doing that? And then going forward, what are your plans for further preferred ATM usage, and then common share repurchases?
Yeah. Do you want to take that?
Sure. Hi, Randy. Well, as you know, we've tried to make clear, I guess, on the prepared remarks, this has been a period of tremendous growth for us. We've grown the fleet by 50%
Yeah.
In that regard, the pref has been a helpful source of non-dilutive capital that has helped fund that growth. In that respect, we see it as extremely flexible capital. Whether or not we'll continue to raise it going forward, we'll keep it under review, but we think it's extremely helpful to have access to various different pockets of capital.
Okay. On the share repurchase side?
On the share repurchase side, I think that's once again something that we would look at, sort of selectively. As we've shown, it's something that we're willing to execute if we think the circumstances justify.
Okay. All right. Secondly, on the fleet, you know, the past year, very active in growing it. Now all your acquisitions are fully delivered. Where do you go from here in terms of acquiring additional tonnage versus maybe taking advantage of the high asset values and selling some older assets?
Yes. We always look at all the options. So far it has always been the case that keeping assets and chartering long-term, it's far more accretive. Now on the acquisitions, we are looking at various fleets of ships, and we are evaluating. So far we have not reached any, let's say, point where any of the fleets that we are currently looking and negotiating meets our criteria. So far we haven't moved towards any of those in certainty. There are plenty of those fleets out there, which are fleets that many financial sponsors are exiting the sector and maybe there are ships with charters and stuff like that.
Deals that can make sense for us, but we're definitely not there to pay a huge price or take a big risk for the company. We would only do so if these deals are equally accretive to the deals we have been doing so far.
And, and if I may add just a quick.
Yeah.
Quick note to that, Randy. As you may recall, we did in fact sell one of our older assets. I think she was a 20-year-old, 2,200 TEU asset.
Yep.
At the beginning of the third quarter because we saw the opportunity to, as you say, capture, you know, the high values and reinvest that immediately in a deal which we felt rendered even more promising economics. The equity surrendered from the sale of that ship was immediately reinvested in the four high reefer 5,400 TEU ships that we acquired with charters attached to Maersk.
Got it. All right, I have one more question, but I asked two, so I'll hop off, but I'll get back in the queue. Thank you.
Thanks, Randy.
Thank you. We have our next question from the line of Frode Mørkedal with Clarksons Securities. Your line is open.
Okay, thank you. Hi, guys.
Hello.
You mentioned, I think you mentioned like you had secured EBITDA of $929 million so far this year. I'm curious what's the EBITDA backlog as of end of Q3, if you have that number?
We haven't put that into the public domain, Frode, so I'm not sure we can provide that number now. You could probably infer it by taking, you know, the revenue to EBITDA ratio for what we've contracted this year and applying it broadly to the $1.6 billion of forward contracted revenues that we have. I'm sorry, I can't pin a direct number on it now.
You can also go to page 21 in our investor presentation in our adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow calculator when actually you can make small math because the fixed revenue net is already there in the historical OpEx, so it will be easier.
Okay. It seems to be at least $1 billion probably, given that you have more already secured contracts from last year, I would assume. I'll calculate it. You mentioned that you are looking at securing a number of charters or waiting to conclude it. How many vessels are you looking at? Yeah, that's the first question.
Sure. Hi, Frode. This is Tom again. I mean, if you look at the charter cover slides in the presentation, you can see that actually we've got comparatively few ships coming open during the course of the next you know six to nine months, let's call it. The most obvious candidates would be a couple of our high value nine thousands.
Okay. Well, when I look at your chart on page eight, at least, it's quite clear that next year would be very strong. You're basically saying if you secure at the current market rate, you would have an EBITDA of roughly $430 million next year. That's basically just above $300 million net profit, if I'm not mistaken, which is $8.50 per share. It's half debt repayment and CapEx is basically $200 million free cash flow, which is $6 per share. Which is great.
Even more interesting probably is if I look at 2023 on that same slide on page eight, if you apply the ten-year historic rates, if I'm not mistaken, that's like 14,000 per day or something on the Panamax versus more than 50,000 today. You still would have $380 million EBITDA in 2023. That's roughly $7.3 EPS and $5.5 free cash flow. Like, so my point is like you have basically $15 EPS next two years. Looks quite attractive and cheap. I understand that you basically announced this already, but how do you think about this very secure cash flow when you are going to decide on buybacks really versus dividends?
Yeah, thank you for doing that analysis. As we've already said, you know, we're open to share buybacks. We've done it. It was to a degree opportunistic. But clearly we're prepared to execute on those sorts of transactions. Difficult to sort of program share buybacks into the future. We've also indicated as we've discussed, and you know, we can't go into any more detail at this stage, but we've also indicated that we're looking to increase the dividend from Q1 next year, waiting on those charter negotiations that we've also touched on. We've also indicated that we continue to have aspirations for growth.
It's an art not a science, and we keep capital allocation under review, and where it's appropriate, you know, we'll allocate more to returning capital to shareholders, whether that's in the form of increases in regular dividend or special dividends or share buyback. You know, it depends on the circumstances at the time. I don't think there's very much more that we can say.
No, that's fair enough. It's a great position to be in, I guess. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Frode.
Thank you. Again, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question over the phone, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. We have our next question from the line of Liam Burke with B. Riley. Your line is now open.
Yes. Thank you. How is everybody today?
Lovely.
We're good, Liam. We're good.
Thank you. Ian, your utilization rates were off year- over- year. Is that just a function of the lag between taking deliveries and actually getting the vessels to generate revenue? Or was there anything else in there?
Let me just remind myself. Yeah, a little bit off. I mean, in the three months utilization quarter. This quarter, 93.6%. Last third quarter, 94.8%. But more importantly, you know year- to- date, utilization 95.4% this year against 92% last year. So a touch, a touchdown quarter-over-quarter, but up year- to- date on year- to- date. Some of this is just the way scheduled dry dockings fall. As the fleet increases, then you'd expect that to average out.
We did have, for us, quite a substantial amount of unplanned off hire in the third quarter of this year at 137 days, which relates mainly to a couple of unusual incidents with main engine type problems, which took some time to resolve. These things happen, I'm afraid. Again, as we get bigger, the impact of these odd
Rare occurrences becomes proportionately less.
Great. Thank you. There have been some announcements in the industry about liner companies actually going in and buying secondhand, smaller vessels, container ships. Does that affect at all how your opportunities to selectively go in and add assets?
I will answer that. No, it doesn't because liner companies, they're looking for ships that they can promptly take delivery and employ quickly and load it with boxes under the stress scenario they are with these disruptions. We are more focused on ships with employment or, you know, we're not right now following charter-free opportunities because we feel there is a bit of an asymmetric risk/reward. We're more focused on structured transactions when the market is red hot. Right now in the sell and purchase market, you know, in the acquisition market, it's a monopoly of all the ships that are without charter-free ships between the liner companies.
They're fighting between them, who's going to get any available charter-free ship, as their economics, having the freight instead of the charter rate, are substantially different than our economics, and they can afford to pay substantially bigger numbers than any ship owner would.
If I can just add a footnote to that, Liam. I mean, if you look at the 23 ships that we purchased during the course of this year, the 11 of them, so seven that were acquired at the outset of the year and the four most recent acquisitions were in fact ships that were purchased in the secondhand market by liner operators and then were spun back to us by way of sale and charter back transactions. We can actually draw deal flow out of the lines themselves acquiring ships. I don't think it really moves the needle one way or the other.
Good. That was the next part of my question as to whether or not that creates an opportunity for you, because some of your most recent acquisitions were from the liners. Thank you.
Thanks, Liam.
Thank you. The next one, we have a follow-up question from Randy with Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Hey, fellas. Didn't want to ask like 12 questions there, so hop back on real quick. On the chartering front, you have two bigger ships coming available in mid-2022 it looks like. We've heard of four fixtures beyond that, right? When do you expect to secure new charters on those?
As you can imagine, Randy.
Begin to come in.
For reasons of confidentiality and competition, yeah. We are obviously working on all of our ships that we have open, currently, and we hope to have good news in the foreseeable future. You know, sometimes we might even be able to fix forward ships that don't look, don't seem the obvious case. You know, we have a large fleet, and there's a lot of combinations and permutations that we can reach with our customers as we have a direct relationship with all of them. We mostly talk directly with the liner companies. That allows us to have, you know, a bit of a, let's say, different approach than other competitors.
Okay. I will stay tuned. Thank you.
Thank you. The next one, we have the line of Brett Hendrickson with Nokomis. Your line is now open.
Hey, gentlemen. Thanks for taking my question. Thanks for all your hard work, building up the free cash flow and building up the fleet here. I just want to touch on kind of a topic that's been brought up from a little different angle. I know there was a worry among maybe investors and maybe some people in the industry at the beginning of the year that, you know, well, these charter rates are much higher than the old normal, but they're really for much short-term rates. A lot of them were 12 months and/or 18 months or less, and the highest rates were for the shortest ones.
I remember when you guys rechartered Dolphin II from $7,000 to $24,500 a day, people were saying, "Oh, that's great, but it's a short-term charter." Now we fast-forward to today, and that $24,500 that people thought wouldn't hold up, you just rechartered that or extended that out in time at a rate of $53,500. The rate tripled in December, and then it doubled again. That's great, and we're seeing, I want to talk to you more offline, I'm seeing other ships in that 5,000-6,000 TEU range from your competitors get three-year charters.
I guess one, do you agree with this, that concern about only this being a COVID-driven shortage and these are only going to be 12 months of these high day rates? That's obviously gone now. If it is, I just want to throw my name in the hat in terms of agreeing with the argument for more share repurchases. I applaud, George, your personal purchase and the company's purchase there, and you helped clean up the overhang from Kelso.
Even if we double the dividend from $0.25 to $0.50 a quarter, there's still tons of excess free cash flow here, and you've got it—you're increasingly locking it in, and your assets that aren't locked in. I don't think I'm gonna jinx us by saying that when they do come up, they'll get at least rechartered, at least the rates that they are now in the coming 18 months as things come up for recharter. I would just ask that you continue to keep the pedal down on the share repurchase. I think it can benefit you, George, and all of us, and can be accretive to free cash flow per share. I think if we wanna get this stock to $45 or $50, that's the path to doing it.
Doing nothing will get you close as it is, but taking down the share count while we can, I think, is... I mean, it seems like the closest thing to a no-brainer that I see. Anyways, we can talk more offline about some of the things I'm seeing from your competitors and some of these off-market things that haven't been announced, but the charter rates are just astonishing, and they're in the $50,000-$60,000 range. Let's talk more offline, but I just wanted to get that in there. And let me know if you agree or disagree with my thought on long-term charters becoming the norm. Thanks, guys.
All right. This is Tom. I'll just give you my 25 cents on the sort of sustainability of the charters. You know, who knows what's gonna happen with demand going forward. So far, it's sort of surprised again and again to the upside, which is fantastic. But what we do have forward visibility on are the supply side dynamics, which we've tried to provide some data around, you know, in the guts of the presentation. Looked at from that perspective, the supply side, we do see reasons to be optimistic.
You know, this is a business that we're building for the long term, and so obviously prudence informs absolutely everything that we do, rather than making a big bet one way or the other. I'll leave it there just in case anyone else from the team wants to add anything.
Yeah. If I may add in, you know, what we really care, when we look at an investment and when we looked at all of our investments, is the fundamentals. I am not so sure. I mean, yes, there is a COVID element, definitely. Maybe that element is a percentage of today's charter rates, but it's not all. Fundamentals, which we showed to you in our presentation, point to the fact that right now we're undersupplied from ships in 2021, 2022. We are not gonna get oversupplied in our sector, for the foreseeable future, I mean, up to the order book that exists as of today, and I don't see this order book growing any dramatically going forward. We are still undersupplied.
I mean, as we've shown the order book effect to the end of it, whatever the end of it as we speak is 2024, there's no further than that, is +0.7%. Now, if you take a modest cargo increase year- on- year, historically, you're looking at least for 2% to 3%, 2.5% usually. That's three times, you know, 2022, 2023, 2024. You're looking at something between 6%-8% when you only have a supply of 0.7%. That is without taking into account any at all the slow steaming that is coming from the EEXI rules. These are great fundamentals.
Now, to what extent these fundamentals, if you remove the COVID effect, which, by the way, I don't think COVID effect is gonna get away very soon, as we all understand that the supply of the goods is coming from countries where COVID is not as regulated as the end user, right? Europe, United States, there's a lot of vaccination, but not in the rest of the world. The vaccination is not at these levels that we would expect for COVID to be, you know, removed. So I don't think COVID is gonna go away at the end of 2022. I don't even think that COVID is gonna go away by the end of 2023 in a really a hundred percent way, which would bring everything back to normal.
I'm not sure, given all these numbers I gave you, how much COVID plays into all of it, whether the charter rate of $50,000 for three years is gonna become $40,000 for three years or $35,000 a year or $30,000. Who knows? You know, how much out of this $50,000 is COVID and how much of this is fundamentals. It's a difficult one, but I feel very comfortable knowing that even we're not overbuilding the fleet. That is important always in shipping, any type of shipping.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. Mr. Ian Webber, please continue.
Thanks everybody for listening to our remarks and for your questions. We look forward to giving you an update, a further update on GSL, with our fourth quarter results. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This concludes this conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.