All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us here at the Lytham Partners Spring 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner here at Lytham, and we welcome Mike Kimble from Tsakos Energy Navigation as our presenter here. As a quick reminder, Tsakos trades under the ticker symbol TEN on the New York Stock Exchange. Mike, thank you so much for your participation today. The floor is all yours.
Thank you, Robert. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. As you know, we're in the shipping business. We ship oil. A lot's been happening in oil markets, and I think untypically for our normal presentation, instead of starting with who we are, which I'll get to later, I think it's important to start with the macro view of things. Last year, spot rates, the daily charter rate for a VLCC, was somewhere around $60,000 a day at its low point. Recently, it almost touched $500,000 a day. There's a lot been happening recently. Our stock is up 90% this year. I think it's important to try to understand what's happening. Many people think that the recent events are the reason spot rates did what they did, and certainly that was the catalyst, but what you have to look at is the broader picture.
The broader picture is there simply aren't enough tankers in the world. For the past several years, we've underinvested in building new ships. This right here is the order book for new tankers. Roughly there are 5,600 tankers in the world, and it takes about three years to build a ship. Actually, we know for the next three years precisely how many ships are expected to be delivered. If you look at it's about 15% of the world fleet. Given that oil demand is growing 1%-2% a year, that might seem like a lot, but you have to look at it from another perspective. Ships don't last forever. Once a ship hits 20 years old, in dog years, basically they're dead.
Of course, a ship can run longer than that, but they're on their way out and sometime between 20 and 25 years, most of those ships traditionally have gone out of service. That hasn't happened over the past several years. If you look at this, you can see that 22% of the world's fleet is over 20 years old. We've never seen this before. Roughly 50% is over 15 years old, and so this has sort of masked a growing shortage of tankers, and those were the underlying conditions so that when you did get Iran, when you did get Venezuela, when you did get all these catalysts, rates went crazy. What's happening here? Why are there so many old ships? That's basically sanctions.
No Western ship that doesn't want to be sanctioned, doesn't want to be banned from trading, can do business with Russia, Iran, and until recently, Venezuela. These countries needed ships to carry their oil, and so what they did was they offered incredibly high rates, and they enticed people to buy old ships. Doesn't matter whether they're seaworthy, whether they're safe. Buy the oldest ship, put it in service, and run it making a lot of money. That's what's been happening for the past several years. What we've been telling investors for a long time is that these ships are going away. Even Russia can't keep a ship running forever. Our view was that these ships were going away, and the order book wasn't going to be enough to replace these ships. As well as remember, 50% is over 15 years old.
Three years from now, there's another cohort that's getting older. There was a tightness in the market, and what recent events have done is just accelerated this trend of ships coming out of the market. When the U.S. seized Maduro, and more importantly, blockaded Venezuela and stopped the shadow fleet from operating, actually seized tankers, even France seized a tanker, that tightened the market. Then the Venezuelan oil that started to come out, that goes to the 80% of the fleet. This shadow fleet is about 20% of the world fleet. The oil that was coming out of Venezuela on this shadow fleet started coming over to our side. That tightened rates, and rates shot up. Iran accelerated that for a couple of reasons. One is, again, putting more pressure on the shadow fleet to go out.
Recently, just in the past couple of weeks, the U.S. announced that it would allow scrapyards to scrap shadow fleet tankers, which they couldn't do before. If an Indian scrapyard took one of the shadow fleet and scrapped it, that scrapyard would be sanctioned and couldn't do any Western business. The U.S. just lifted that. I guess the bottom line is this shadow fleet is coming out of service, and that's what's tightening the market. Recent events have accelerated that. You have ancillary things like with the Straits blocked, Asia has to get its oil from the Atlantic Basin. Moving oil from West Africa or America to Asia, certainly the Gulf Coast, is a lot more ship miles than going from the Middle East to Asia. That's tightened things.
Underlying it all is simply the fact that we don't have enough tankers, we won't have enough tankers, and the market's going to be tight for a long time. That's why we're up a lot this year, because the market's beginning to realize it. That's why all the tanker stocks are up. Let's get back to us. We are one of the largest dedicated tanker companies in the world. If you look at number of ships in the water or deadweight tonnage, we're certainly in the top five. We are one of the oldest listed Greek companies and the oldest publicly listed tanker company, 32 years of being public, 23 on the New York Stock Exchange, and we've always paid a dividend, which is unusual for a shipping company. It's a very, very cyclical business. Some investors have learned that the hard way.
We've always been there, and we've always paid a dividend. I think that's the key difference between us and many of our competitors. We are the only publicly listed company that structures their business around long-term contracts with the majors. Exxon is our largest customer. Equinor, Shell, Chevron, Total. You can see it up here. They're over 60% of our business. Exxon doesn't want to be in the shipping business, but they need us. They need a reliable source of shipping, and they want reliable partners. We're one of them. There aren't that many. You have to be operationally excellent. You have to be financially sound. You have to be there when they need us. We are. What do we get out of it?
Well, what we get out of it is in a highly cyclical business, we have these long-term time charters that smooth out the cyclicality. That results in more stable cash flows than our competitors. It allows us to safely maintain more leverage and get a very low cost of debt. When we go into our banks and they know that a ship has a charter with Exxon for seven years, obviously that gives us a much lower cost of finance than our competitors. As I said, with the confidence of that long-term time charter, if you look at our debt levels, we run at 40%-50% consistently of our total capital structure. If you look at the rest of the universe that's relying on the spot market, that fluctuates much, much more. It also opens up opportunities.
I guess the summary, before I get into a lot more detail, is that industry fundamentals are very good, and this is a unique opportunity. Our CEO and his family have been in the business since the 1970s. They've never seen a market that was so tight with no relief in sight. As I said, it takes three years to build a ship, and the order book is not that big. Another difference is that we have the biggest order book in the business, and that's because I think we're early to see the cycle, and again, with our relationships with the majors, it's been easier for us to get financing and get slots in shipyards. Finally, our valuation is fairly attractive, which I'll get to later. We've gone over this. Here's a list of our customers. Robert, this is our fleet.
I told you that our business is driven with long-term relationships with the majors. This is a differentiating factor. We have the most diversified fleet among all the public tanker companies. That's because when Exxon calls and says, I've got a project off the coast of Brazil, and they need a specialized tanker, if we can agree on terms, profit, we'll build it and we'll operate it. It's very diversified. Another thing is that the majors have had a lot of exciting projects over the last few years, particularly deep water, we've been there. Also, we've seen the tightness in the market, so you can see the year that these ships are built, and you'll notice that some of them have years later than now. Those are new builds. They're on order.
We've got 26 ships on order, that's by far the largest order book out there. To the extent the cycle is good, we're leveraged to take advantage of it. One last thing is we have long-term contracts, they do adjust. When we build a new ship, maybe the contract is five to 10 years, depending on the type of ship. When we roll over a contract on an older ship, it's between one and three years. If you take all of these ships together, the average duration is about three years, which means on a regular basis, the contracts are rolling off and they get repriced. For example, this year we have 21 ships that are coming up to be renewed and will get repriced at higher rates. In addition, some of our ships, the dark blue here, those are traditional. It's a five-year contract.
It's a fixed price. The ones in light blue, it's something called a profit share, where we agree on a floor that always makes sure we cover our costs and we make some profit. Anything above that floor, we share 50/50. We get a bump up half way towards market, and the major gets a saving. The people doing the chartering can tell their superiors they're doing a good job. The ones in red are either new builds where we haven't fixed the contract yet or spot, which is about, of the 63 ships on the water, 11 of them are in spot. We do take advantage of what's happening in the market. We do reprice. An interesting fact, a couple of our well-known competitors, in the first quarter their net income went up roughly 50%.
Ours went up the same, and that's because we do reprice, and also we're able to maintain some financial leverage. We do have debt. Many of our competitors don't at this point. We always renew the fleet. We have to have a new modern fleet. Since 2023, we've sold 18 vessels, and we've either acquired or have contracts to acquire 34. I don't want to exaggerate the situation. This isn't NVIDIA, but we are something of a growth story in the tanker sector. I explained our time charters. Basically, even in a bad market, we have a floor and we can ride the downturn when it comes, which we've done in the past. Again, this highlights certainly in dead weight tons what our growth rate has been, over 12% over a long period of time.
You can see that we have taken a lot of the cyclicality out of the business, but we are cyclical, and we're certainly in an upswing. I think I'd go back to the original summary. I think it's a good time to look at us because the tanker market hasn't been this good in modern times, I'd say certainly in the last several decades. We have a lower risk business model than our competitors, which is worth something. We also have the best growth prospects among public competitors. Because of our orientation to long-term contracts, which a lot of people who invest in shipping for the cycle don't like, they like spot exposure, we trade at a discount to most of our competitors. I think it's a good time to look at us, and I hope you do.
Wonderful. Mike, thank you very much for the participation here today. Greatly appreciate. As Mike mentioned, if there are questions or you would like to schedule a meeting here with the company, please send me an email. That's Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com. Again, to learn more about Lytham, make sure to visit our website. Stay connected with us on LinkedIn. We hope everybody enjoys the conference here today. Mike, again, thanks so much for your participation.
Thank you, Robert