Your questions will be answered during the Q&A session. Now, just before we begin, kindly note that this discussion is strictly for informational and educational purposes and should not be relied upon. The webinar does not constitute an offer to buy or sell securities or investment advice or advice of any kind, and obviously, Capital Link bears no responsibility for the content. Now, before I turn the floor over to Dr. Tsakos, I would like to congratulate Dr. Tsakos and the team that for a third year in a row, TEN has been named Energy Transporter of the Year in TIME Magazine, as we can all see on your screen. With that, Dr. Tsakos, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Nicolas, and happy new year to everybody. It's been, I would say, an exciting end and an even more exciting beginning of the year, so geopolitical events not only are keeping us really on our feet looking at developments, and we had a good mention, as you said, for the third year in a row for the company's award in renewable environmental record, and going back, TEN, as you said, and you can, for those of you that you can see us, has been the longest running and most seasoned publicly traded tanker or shipping company on the New York Stock Exchange, or almost on any other stock exchange. We started back in 1993, and we've been weathering crises, being good seafarers, and we are able to navigate as steady as it goes.
The company has been using the difficult parts of the market to reinvest, to buy vessels at good quality vessels, modern vessels at economical levels, and at good times, having a very big fleet, not beside on actually renewing our fleet and selling some of our very good quality older vessels and hugely renewing them with very modern ships. The last five years that were just concluded last month have been the most turbulent and most challenging since the beginning of the company. And we've been through the big oil spill, the OPA 90 in Alaska, back to, I think very few of you might have been born when that happened and we started the company. Then we had the Far East crisis where newbuilding prices collapsed, gave the company an opportunity to substantially grow. Of course, the events in 9/11 that really stalled world trade.
As things were normalizing, we faced the financial crisis after the big boom of 2008. From 2020 up to now, we've been going through crisis after crisis. COVID reduced oil and demand for oil and energy substantially. On top of that, the Ukrainian war changed completely the map of energy transportation, putting new routes that did not exist in line. On top of that, of course, we've been facing tariffs, which is something new since we've been trading as a public company. Of course, the crisis in the Middle East and all the navigating restrictions that happened. Early in this year, we didn't have time, I think, to update this, Harrys. We had the events in Venezuela. We have turmoil in Iran. So everywhere that oil is being produced, I think we have geopolitical events that change almost on a weekly basis our rates.
However, the market has been, for the first time, not overbuilt. The tanker market or the shipping market in general is really affected by the supply of tonnage. We are like floating real estate. The more square feet you put in the market, the worse the market gets. In this case, there's no quality square footage in the market. A very big percentage, or close to 30%, of the tonnage out there has been moved into gray zones, between gray and black zones, which gives opportunities to companies like ourselves who trade only with the blue chip major oil companies to take advantage of the big void that has been left. And we have not stood still. Among one of the most turbulent five or six years, we have made a huge renewal of our fleet.
I mean, we have sold 17 vessels with an average age of 17 years and a total deadweight of 1.4 million, replaced them by 33, so almost double. We have to get one more ship, so it's double. So we have doubled the fleet, tripled almost our deadweight capacity, and reduced the average age to 0.6 years. So it has been a very, very busy year. 2025 has been a milestone year for the company's growth. We have been awarded one of the largest ever contracts for deep sea excavation of oil from Transpetrol and Petrobras in Brazil, making us one of the largest DP2 shuttle tanker owners. And we've been taking, we already took delivery. We were very proud to take delivery last summer of two of those ships or similar ships. And the next one is going to be in July and then every quarter onwards.
It's been a very productive, busy, and profitable period. I think as our CFO and our President will say, we have been able not only to triple the size of our deadweight from the ships, from the renewed assets, but we had been able to maintain our debt well under 50%, increase our dividends significantly. We've been paying dividends since inception. We have never stopped paying dividends, which is something that we are very, very proud of. We're very happy to reward our shareholders with good dividends. At the same time, we have been able to keep very healthy reserves, cash reserves, and grow the company further. I think it has been a very exciting period. It has been a milestone, and hopefully 2026, we will be able to continue in the same manner.
The beginning of the year seems to show this. The market has gone from strength to strength. VLs are in excess of $100,000 last year. Last year, which was a great year, it was in the 50s. I think we are out for a good start. With that, I would ask our President to give us a bit more details of where the things have been going.
Thank you very much, Nikolas. Here we see, we list the pro forma fleet of the company as it stands right now. You see the crude and product tankers. This is the conventional part of the fleet. We have three different colors to distinguish. With the red color, we see the vessels that are trading in the spot market and enjoying these great rates that Mr. Tsakos mentioned earlier, plus the vessels that we have as new buildings, and we expect to take delivery from now until 2028. With light blue, we have the vessels that are on time charter but have a profit sharing element in the rate formula, and therefore they also benefit from the good fortune of the spot market. And finally, with dark blue, we have the vessels that are on fixed employment and form basically the backbone of our financials and our success.
The next slide, we list the specialized part of the fleet, mainly two categories, LNG carriers and shuttle tankers. We list our two LNG vessels there and our strong 16 shuttle tanker fleet. We are maybe one of the largest shuttle tanker operators in the world as we speak today. Certainly, we have one of the most modern and technologically advanced fleets, as we have won a tender in Brazil to build nine shuttle tankers, which will start getting delivered to TEN from 2027 every quarter until the end of 2028. We have six vessels in the water as we speak, with one more coming in July of this year, all of them against very long time charters. Our clients, as you see here, these are the biggest names that you can find in our industry.
Really, the who's who of oil majors, energy majors is clients with whom we do repeat business thanks to the industrial model that we have built through the year. Our number one revenue client is ExxonMobil, followed by Equinor, Shell, Chevron, Total, and BP. We have become the carrier of choice for all these big names thanks to the fleet that we have built through the year, tailor-made to their transportation requirements, the operational and safety records that we have through the years, knock on wood, the discipline, the financial discipline and approach that we have in shipping, and also the very strong balance sheet and solid financial performance. With that, I will ask Harrys to walk us through the financials.
Before we go into the financials, this is probably the most important slide of the presentation. This comes after what George had just said on how we employ the fleet and how we operate and the reason we operate such a diversified fleet in terms of vessels and the diversified approach in terms of employment. If you recall, George mentioned that we have vessels in fixed time charters, time charters with profit share and spot.
The idea behind that breakdown is that we need to make sure, being a U.S. public company and trading to the names that George mentioned in the prior slide, we need to make sure that irrespective of what happens in the world, and Nicholas went over that slide of the various crises that we had to kind of negotiate over our kind of life as a company and as a public company for that matter, we need to make sure that the fleet will generate enough revenue, the fleet on fixed employment contracts, meaning time charters, fixed rate for a fixed period of time, plus time charters with profit share and again, a fixed rate to cover the vessels all in break even, which you see on the left. The plan, the approach is to have a minimum floor rate that covers those expenses.
And everything over and above that, we usually split on a 50/50 basis with our clients. So the concept behind that is that all those vessels that generate revenue will generate enough capital, enough revenue to cover the entire fleet expenses. And in that way, we safeguard the company from the certain cyclicalities and regularities that we see happening in the world every now and then. So this is kind of the gist of our operations. We do not play the spot market. We do not have 100% market exposure. We do not want that. However, through our vessels in the spot market and vessels under profit share and agreement, we do have a foothold in that market as well.
So the way you should see the company is that it's a company that safeguards the downside, but also has a foothold on the upside and is not losing out in markets like the ones that we're going through over the last few years and recently. You saw how big our fleet is. We are one of the largest independent oil tanker companies in the world. How do we go about buying vessels, financing vessels? Obviously, the first port of call is bank debt. We have access to capital, very attractive terms, both in terms of general terms, but most importantly, the spreads that we get. However, we don't get carried away, and we always try because of the cyclicality and the nature of the business, we don't over-leverage the company. We always like to maintain very healthy leverage ratios when it comes to debt.
And as you can see over the years, even during the 2016 period, when we reached the peak of our newbuilding program at the time and the debt that the company had, it was still at very low levels at 52.5%. And we have managed to reduce that meaningfully over the years. And today, even though it has edged up from a 24% just by virtue of our newbuilding program, it's still well under 50%. And these are the levels that at any point in time, the company is trying to maintain. Well, this slide kind of looks like an eyesight test to you, but I think I should point to the cash and cash equivalents line, which is the third from the bottom, something very important for us.
It's, again, been in a cyclical industry and been offered every now and then opportunities to grow either through the newbuilding on the newbuilding front or the second-hand market. We need, you need. A company needs to have readily available cash. On the one hand, to make sure that the company at any point in time will not be under any situation not to be able to honor its bank obligations, both in terms of interest and payment. I highlight that because on various occasions in the past, we had seen a number of peers not being able to meet their interest payments, something that is unheard in our case.
Also, we need cash in order to, as I alluded earlier, to pounce on opportunities that come our way, and some recent acquisitions that Nikolas mentioned earlier. We have been able because of our healthy cash reserves to kind of jump the queue and move in quickly and also have ample liquidity to pay healthy dividends, and again, as our record shows, irrespective of where we are in the market, in the cycle, the company has always paid a dividend, a healthy dividend to shareholders, and this slide kind of puts this in perspective. This year, we announced a $1 dividend back in November. 50% of it has already been paid in the middle of December of last year in 2025.
Another payday coming in the middle of October, I think the 19th of February, the 19th of February 2026, another $0.50, the rest, the second half of that $1 dividend. It's very important for us to maintain those dividend streams for shareholders. However, we're not a company that will kind of blow out its cash reserves to pay everything as a dividend because, as I mentioned, we need to have healthy cash reserves to maintain the flexibility that the company has, both in terms of growth strategy and meeting its bank obligations. The market remains very strong. We are at record oil demand levels, over 103 million barrels per day. Expectations for 2025 and 2026 are for further increases. This happens at a time when the fleet has been bifurcated and remains so today because of the war in Ukraine.
A good number of vessels have departed the western, if you like, fleet. It's where the theater of operations that we operate. They do all the sanctioned trades. And this leaves companies like ourselves to carry those barrels and additional barrels that are coming into the market because of the U.S. becoming the substitute for Russian oil just by virtue of the sanctions of Russia. Also, supply is very positive. It's something that has destabilized the market in the past. However, you can see on this slide that the current fleet, which stands just under 5,500 vessels compared to the order book, is, or rather the order book compared to the current fleet is very limited. It's still at low levels, about 14% of the fleet.
However, more importantly, you need to focus on the middle bar there, which are the vessels over 15 years of age. These vessels over 15 years of age will depart the fleet one way or another over the next two to three years, and they need to be replaced. What vessels will replace those departing ones? The newbuilding s. As you can see, there are not enough. We could end up being in a situation where oil demand will continue to grow. There will need to be barrels of oil that need to be transported and not enough vessels to carry them. This translates to the maintenance of very healthy asset prices and also the very high, very healthy rates, both in the spot market and the time charter market that we currently see.
Over the next, from what we know today, I think we have a runway of at least two to three years of a good, healthy market ahead of us. Scrapping has, again, something very important because vessels are departing the fleet, are getting scrapped. They are not getting replaced. The ones in the water need to do the job for them. We have seen an increase, a pickup in activity of scrapping. We expect this to continue. Whichever way you look at it, the supply is turning into owners' favor. I think with that, we are done with the corporate side of the presentation. I think it's the right time to open the floor to any of the questions that you may have.
Good time, buddy.
Good time.
So let's.
Good time, buddy.
Good time, buddy.
So, okay, let's read some of the questions in the Q&A. Okay.
I mean, we've been the oldest publicly traded company. We've tried every trick, as you say, to make it more investor-friendly. One of the things I would say that is very, very important and the current President of the United States is a big supporter of is semi-annual. He wants to go to semi-annual reporting too, but we will stick to quarterly reporting, but semi-annual dividend. I think a buyback is something we've tried. We spent more than $100 million in buybacks back in the era of 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 period. Having a small float, if we keep on buying the company back, it doesn't really work.
So the answer is that we will maintain continuous and uninterrupted dividends, and we will increase the dividend, but we are not planning to do any buyback because a buyback is like a divorce. You have to pay your wife to leave, which we're not in that process yet, none of us in our state of mind. So we like to reward our friends, partners, and shareholders.
Next question.
Yes, I mean, we are on the. I'm seeing some very well-educated questions on chartering. We use the TD20 as much as possible because it has been traditionally the biggest earner, but TD6 has been also, is also. We make a basket. Of course, we have Black Sea trading, Mediterranean trading, and West Africa trading. Yes, we have a basket in which we use the profit sharing. Since I think we are not seeing much more or until something else pops up, I would like to say that we, as a company, are feeling that the company is right now in a milestone period. It has a big base. The majority of our new assets will be starting to come in in 20, I mean, a couple of them. We had a couple last year, which is very good, renews the fleet.
Then we're going to have another two or three vessels this year. And then the majority is in 2027. So we expect 2027 and 2028 to be pickup years for the company. In the meantime, we are not shy. You might see us not far down the road divesting in this tremendously strong environment. I think it will be not correct. It will be irresponsible for us not to divest of some of our first-generation vessels, which will give us a tremendous cash, which we'll be very happy to dividend out, and also a lot of huge profit.
Have a question?
The shuttle business is one, I would say, of the most demanding high-end and high-barrier businesses operationally. We are one of the very few companies that we are accredited not only to operate shuttle tankers, but our Naval Academy, together with the Greenwich Naval Academy in the United Kingdom, are the only two Naval Academies that can provide diplomas for shuttle tankers. We're very proud of that. Actually, we educate higher and have our officers and crew grow within the company and with the company's ships.
I see another question popping up.
A lot, a lot. Yeah, good.
A lot of them. Yeah, I have a lot of them there. But one to ask you is we have seen.
Yes.
That's fine. Okay, Moderator, I'm just saying just not to fill up. I think whatever we try to.
I think next time, Nico, because we have many questions, you have to make it like my kids in college, multiple-choice questions. So we don't have to say that much, A, B, C, D.
So let me read this question. We have seen that the flow of U.S . LNG to Europe has been increasing. It's the theme of energy independence and energy security. And Greece is going to be the gateway for U.S. LNG. So, what does it mean for shipping? And what does it mean for TEN being one of the major energy transporters?
I think the question is a very good question as far as LNG, but also as energy because Europe has been taking a huge part of its needs for energy from Russia. That can be a two or three-day trip if it's in the north. That's Nico, if it's in the north, or it can be a week voyage if it's from the Black Sea to Italy, France, Spain, Greece, the time. This has all been replaced by three or four times the duration in ton miles, twice if it comes from West Africa, three times if it comes from the U.S. Gulf. Venezuela might be becoming, with a little help, it can become again a major exporter, and that will be additional ton miles. I think in energy general, and the same, of course, has to do with gas.
I think the market that we have seen so far not performing, but the expectations could be there, has been the gas market. I would say that the crude, the products have gone from strength to strength in the last 24 months. I mean, you have a strong point, then you have a small comeback, but then you're back on a higher level, so it's been a very growth market. The production of gas yet usually takes much longer than building the ships. Our Korean friends are very, very efficient in building ships, but in order for LNG plants to be ready, it usually takes a delay. Hopefully, by 2028, 2029, there would be more gas coming out, and of course, Greece has been placed very correctly so to play a big role in that.
One of the questions that has come up is exactly the newbuilding program, not only yours, but also the industries in general, in contrast to the ambiguity regarding the regulatory environment, so now we have the IMO, we have a year to come up with solutions. How do you see things evolving and how would that impact? I mean, you already have a big newbuilding program yourself. You voted already with your dollars in terms of how you see the industry moving, but how do you think the regulatory ambiguity will impact the industry? and where is it heading?
Ambiguity sometimes is not a bad thing. When I say it's not a bad thing, it's not a bad thing because people right now cannot, I mean, investors, ship owners, in all this ambiguity, they do not have a clear vision of where they want to invest, what type of ships, what size of ships, what age of ships. That has kept the newbuilding market relatively, I would say, I'm talking about tankers because you have a huge newbuilding replacement in containers, which is unprecedented. For tankers, it's still, as I think Harrys pointed out, way under control, even taking into consideration a calm geopolitical environment. As far as the leverage, I see a question. I think we have never, and I think if you go back to this slide, TEN has never gone ever over a 50% debt-to-equity leverage.
I know people consider us too conservative, perhaps too boring, but that's why we're still around after 32 years, paying dividend after 32 years. Most of us have not had to change the names and live in different countries for 32 years. So it has been business as usual. We do not have the ups and downs that some other of our colleagues do, but it helps us. It helps us pay our dividends, pay our banks, and sometimes we sleep at night. So that's the way we're going.
There's one question that came up. It's focusing on the Suezmax, but I will make it more broad. The question is, will you extend your time charters on the Suezmax coming up for renewal this year, or will you go spot? Let me put it in broader terms. Given the current market strength, do you see more demand for charter cover, or do you think that it's a good time to continue spot?
I mean, as you know, we like the profit sharing arrangements. Every time I've tried to push our chartering department to keep things spot, they get very good offers from the clients. And so for some reason, they find me in New York between meetings, and they convinced me to do a profit sharing arrangement. But I think joking apart, there is a huge appetite right now from all the major oil companies to have tonnage under their control for the next 18 months because people, as I said, we depend on geopolitical events. You never know what could happen to Iran. I mean, that would be. A Venezuela is a game changer, but I think if something happens in Iran, that would be really redesigning the export routes to the West in a big way.
As far as I see a question about the lenders, I think for companies, for the peer group that we are in, we're enjoying big competition. We just concluded one of the largest, I would say, syndications for the acquisition of our shuttle tankers in excess of $1.1 billion. That was done by a club, by five or six banks at very, very competitive rates.
Perfect. Well, we have come, I think, to the end of the Q&A session. I'd like to thank Dr. Tsakos and the management team for your presentation, your insight, and for replying to all these questions. So thank you to everybody for taking the time to join us today, to those who participated. Please note that this webinar will soon be made available to access upon demand on Capital Link's website at www.capitallinkwebinars.com and, of course, on Capital Link's YouTube channel, to which we urge you to subscribe. Thank you to everybody, and thank you, Dr. Tsakos, and the management team.
Thank you. Thank you very much, and happy New Year, and as I said, our share price has moved from $7 to $27, but it's still very, very, very cheap. So all the best. Thank you.
Thank you.