Atlas Corp (ATCO) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the Atlas Corp. First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded today, May 12, 2022. I would now like to turn the call over to Will Kostlivy, Head of Investor Relations at Atlas Corp. .

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today to discuss Atlas Corp.'s first quarter 2022 earnings report. We issued our earnings yes -- release yesterday evening after market close. We will refer to our quarterly earnings release, accompanying earnings presentation and earnings supplemental workbook today in this conference, which all can be found on the Investors tab of our website, atlascorporation.com.

I would like to remind you that our discussion today contains forward-looking statements, and I draw your attention to the disclaimer on Slide 2 in the accompanying earnings presentation. Please note that we report non-GAAP measures which we believe provides investors a clearer understanding of the performance of our businesses. The earnings release contains supplemental financial tables and information pertaining to our quarterly earnings report and includes definitions of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most closely comparable U.S. GAAP measures. These definitions may also be found in the appendices at the back of the earnings presentation, which we may refer to in our call and can be found on our website.

Please turn to Slide 3. On the call with me are Bing Chen, President and CEO of Atlas Corp.; and Graham Talbot, Chief Financial Officer of Atlas Corp. Joining us on the call during the Q&A session is Seaspan's Chief Commercial Officer, Peter Curtis; and Seaspan's Chief Operational Officer, Torsten Pedersen. Following our prepared remarks, we will open up the forum to a question-and-answer session. With that, I'm pleased to now turn the call over to Atlas Corp.'s CEO, Bing Chen.

Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Today, my comments will focus on key developments at Seaspan and APR and then I will hand over to Graham Talbot to present our Q1 2022 results and financial update.

Please turn to Slide 4. I would like to start by reviewing our major developments at Seaspan. In the quarter, we continue to benefit from a robust market as up to 15% of our fleet is based on floating index rates, and we continued to develop our long-term strategic partnerships with our customers. Leveraging our creative customer solutions, we forwarded-fixed 18 vessels with a global liner customer contributing over $150 million to our gross contracted cash flow of $18.1 billion. This leads to no charter roll-offs in 2022, only 8 in 2023 and 16 in 2024 as of the quarter end.

We continue to diligently execute our newbuild program. In April, we delivered the fourth resource of our 40 vessel newbuild program, all of which have been delivered ahead of the schedule. With our track record of successfully delivering 114 newbuilds since our IPO in 2005, we are confident in delivering this unprecedented program on schedule and on budget with possibilities of some early deliveries despite all the logistic challenges. We also continue taking advantage of the current market to recycle capital through the divestment of nonstrategic assets. We completed one vessel sale in Q1 and 3 additional vessel sales are in advanced stages of divestment as of the quarter end.

Going forward, we will continue to seek opportunities to optimize our fleet and recycle capital, which Graham will share more about later. During the first quarter, our vessel utilization rate was 98.5%, slightly below our average historical rate. This is due to the unplanned off-hire of one vessel and minor COVID cases on 3 vessels. We also achieved historical low lost time injury frequency of 0.26 as we continue to focus on the safety of our people. Our teams seen this execution differentiated business model, together with our consistent operational excellence and strong container shipping fundamentals drove our strong performance in this quarter.

Please turn to Slide 5. Now let's review some key developments at APR. In the first quarter, APR entered into 3 new deployments, which includes a renewal of APR's IID contract in California of 3 turbines for 74 megawatts, a new market contract for 8 turbines in Brazil for 226 megawatts and the dry leasing of 5 turbines for 120 megawatts for a total of 16 turbines deployed. We continued to transform the business by strengthening APR's business development focus on long-term contracts. The recent extension of APR's Brazil contract from 12 months to 44 months evidences the successful execution of its strategy to migrate to long-term cash flow contracts.

As mentioned at our Investor Day, APR completed its 5-year contract in Argentina in January at its Zappalorto plant and as of today, demobilization is materially completed. Our other plant in Matheu will commence demobilization upon finishing its contract in late May. We expect successful demobilization and redeployment of all Argentina turbines by the second half of this year.

And similar to Seaspan's strong safety culture, APR achieved a historically low lost time injury frequency rate of 0.23. With the increasing demand of grid stability, APR continues to enhance its platform by expanding its customer base with turnkey solutions and to remain disciplined in evaluating potential long-term power opportunities across multiple geographies and industry sectors. Thank you for your time today. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Graham.

Thanks, Bing, and good morning, everyone. I hope you're all well, and thank you for joining us today. Could you please turn to Slide 6. So in Q1 2022, we continue to deliver strong results, following on from our record year in 2021. During the quarter, Atlas achieved the following performance relative to Q1 2021. Our revenue growth was 9.5% to $408.1 million, adjusted EBITDA growth of 16.5% to $277.1 million, FFO growth of 28.1% to $204 million, FFO per share growth of 21.7% to $0.73 per share and adjusted EPS growth of 56% to $0.39 per share. At the end of the quarter, we had liquidity of $951.3 million.

Performance continues to demonstrate the resilience of our fully integrated business model by delivering these strong results alongside the operational challenges presented by both the pandemic and the ongoing supply chain disruption. Thanks for the diligent efforts of our operations team and our seafarers, we continue to navigate the ongoing supply chain disruptions with minimal impact. Our service to our customers and operational efficiency remain at a high level with asset utilization of 98.5% in the quarter.

Please turn to Slide 7. So we continue to focus on strengthening and optimizing our balance sheet throughout the quarter, both in terms of our asset composition and our capital structure. As we monitor the industry and how our fleet composition is positioned, we look to enhance our fleet to align with our long-term strategy. As we communicated at Investor Day, we're actively recycling capital through the sale of our 4,250 TEU vessels. These vessels are noncore to our long-term strategy due to their age, design and predicted future demand. We sold 1 vessel in Q4 2021 and we sold another 1 in Q2 2022. In addition, at the end of Q1, we had an additional 3 vessels contracted and pending handover scheduled to close in Q2 2022. These 4 vessels are forecast to generate approximately $80 million in proceeds.

We have a further 6 vessels under contracts that's subject to closing conditions, which we expect to close in Q2, Q3 of 2022. As the market continues to evolve, we'll continue to look for opportunities to optimize our fleet and recycle capital into higher risk-adjusted return opportunities. As previously communicated, we're continually working to optimize our capital structure. In Q1, we closed our new $250 million unsecured revolving credit facility. This was upsized by $100 million from $150 million and its tenor extended from 2 to 3 years. The facility includes several new lenders and improvements driven by Seaspan's improving credit quality, greater liquidity and longer-term debt profile and improving cost of capital.

We continue to monitor our interest rate exposure with the aim of aligning our fixed revenue and interest rate exposure. We, of course, locked in a significant amount of long-term fixed rate contracts over the last year. And in parallel, we have locked in a significant amount of fixed rate debt, about $1.8 billion of fixed rate debt secured and unsecured notes in 2021 alone. Given the acceleration of inflationary pressure and rates, we entered into an additional $500 million long-term floating fixed interest rate swap at the end of January in 2022. In addition, we are closely monitoring our residual floating to fixed rate position, and we'll continually to proactively manage our exposures.

We're pleased to see a strong vote of confidence from our strategic shareholder, Fairfax Financial, who exercised warrants to purchase 25 million common shares of Atlas in April. This resulted in proceeds of over $200 million which will be used to repay outstanding debt and for other general corporate purposes. This is yet another demonstration of our shareholders' continued confidence in our capital allocation platform and their commitment to our long-term growth strategy. We place a high importance on quality growth and strengthening our financial profile. We'll continue to actively manage our balance sheet as we remain focused on our goal of achieving an investment-grade credit rating.

Please turn to Slide 8. I'd like to summarize our strong quarterly performance by leaving you with 4 key takeaways. Number one, Atlas continued to deliver strong financial results and quality growth in the first quarter with strong performance across all metrics with $18.1 billion of high-quality, long-term gross contracted cash flows. Number two, we've consistently delivered operational excellence across our businesses despite the challenges presented by the pandemic and supply chain congestion. Number three, our newbuild program is fully financed through innovative structures with favorable terms, and we continue to diligently execute construction and delivery of vessels to our customers. To date, we've delivered 4 vessels under our newbuild program, all ahead of schedule.

The remaining 66 vessels are progressing as planned with 7 more delivery scheduled for 2022. And number four, we're continuing to optimize our capital structure and strengthen our balance sheet in line with our target of achieving an investment grade credit rating and further improving our cost of capital.

So thank you once again for your interest today. And operator, we'd now like to open the line to questions.

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Liam Burke with B. Riley.

The 4,250 TEU vessel classes, you announced the sale of roughly [10]. You have more to go. This is not a strategic anymore. What is the demand for that particular vessel in the market?

Liam, I answered this question. The demand, in general, I think it's as we expected. People are looking at what the remaining contract of the chartered with the vessels. So one thing that we want to highlight is that all the vessels that we are selling or we are going to sell, they all have long-term contract attached to it. So these are not the spot vessel.

And secondly, we are looking at opportunistically to sell these vessels with those future owners who will be able to provide the kind of service to our customer that meets their requirements. We have currently about 11 vessels in the process to be concluded in terms of the sale process. For the remaining, we were looking at them on a case-by-case basis. We actually always evaluate that based on the situation, what happened if we will continue to operate these vessels because one of the key strength of Seaspan is our ability to be able to continue to deploy these vessels under all circumstances, which is why we have an average 99% historical utilization rate through all the market cycles. And that's the baseline we're looking at in terms of continued operating.

On the demand side, the current market, I think, is roughly about the same with slight -- I think a slight less interest than before, which is correlated to the freight rate in general. But overall, I think that there's still demand, we are very selective. You make sure that we maximize the value.

Great. And on the APR, you announced some new projects and deployments. Are those -- what are the terms of those contracts? Are they longer, more in line with trying to do or more of the existing type of arrangements?

Yes. For APR, the deployment that we have secured over the past quarter is one, as we said, is IID, which is a repeat of what we have done last year because the strong customer trust and relations has been built with their demand. We meet their requirement to have this repeat of a 3-month contract. That is for the IIE.

For the Brazil contract, this is the new market and this is 44 months. And initially, we signed for 12 months, and our team was able to demonstrate our ability and as a result of our turnkey solution. Our customers actually demanded for longer of our service. So as a result, this 12 months contract has been extended to 44 months, and the other 5 turbines, which is started at the beginning of the year, those are the 12 months contracts for now.

And your next question comes from the line of Chris Wetherbee with Citi.

This is Eli (inaudible) on for Chris. So maybe just a clarification. On the containership side, did you have any deliveries this quarter? Maybe I missed that. Just quickly clarify that there.

You're talking a -- you're talking about the newbuild delivery, right?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. There was -- there's one newbuild in April. In the month of June. We actually will have -- delivery is supposed to be 3, but some 1 or 2 of the vessels might be early delivered. So for this year, 2022, that we have 3 to be delivered in June and then the remaining 3 to be delivered throughout the year.

Okay. Got it. And then -- so the case of early deliveries, obviously, it's harder to look out when you get to 2023 and beyond, but can that extend into the out years as well where everything gets pushed forward just a little bit?

And this is a good question. What we would like to highlight is that, so far, we have taken 4 deliveries since last year until this April. All of these vessels has been between 2 to 4 months ahead of the schedule. Looking at the rest of the delivery for this year, as I said just now, we still expect possible early deliveries ranging from -- initially was, for example, one of the vessels supposed to be delivered in October this year and because our team and yard's cooperation, we were able to advance them to June, and we see potentially that we will be further advance them to May.

So these are the possible early delivery -- to answer your question for the future, down into 2023 and 2024, we so far do not anticipate maybe early -- the late delivery, this is your question. If we're looking at the track record that we have and the ability of our team, that is where the experience and expertise and also the partnership that we have with the shipyard where they will be able to allocate their resources to prioritize the deliveries that I stated before. We are very confident that we will be able to deliver the rest of the newbuild program on target and on schedule, if not earlier.

Got it. And [Graham], you and I have talked about this before, but you said that the rate environment is maybe not as important for Atlas as maybe some of your competitors. But I am just curious when you guys look out are you seeing some normalization right now in the market for the rate environment? And if there is normalization, how does that change the way you think about your business?

And maybe, Graham, if I can chime in here. It's Peter. Look, we've the volatility in the first part of this year in rates. They're still very high. I'm talking about trade rates, which then trickles down to charter. So we've seen some volatility but again, it's on a very high level. Almost anything that floats and can carry a container is employed. And we see that remaining strong through the rest of the year. The covered lockdowns in China are not helping unlock anything. The deployment of tonnage and the back orders also are not helping unlock anything right now. So until we start getting the supply chain unlocked and moving again, I think we're going to see continued high demand for tonnage. That said, it will happen and I expect that probably this is something maybe we'll start seeing coming into 2023.

One more from me. Liquidity, $951 million asset value still high. What does it look like there from that cash side? Are you guys when you should be sitting on cash being opportunistic? Any other plans? Any way we should be thinking about that extra liquidity right now?

Yes, the we touched on this. We always sort of carry fairly high liquidity to be able to be agile in the market and respond. The 70 newbuild program wasn't a one-off under. I mean, I don't think we're going to be doing developments at that scale, but there's still quite a bit of activity in the market. And our customers have still got the challenges in terms of transitioning their fleets, both to newer, more modern vessels but also meeting the upcoming compliance requirements. So there's still a lot of opportunities in the marketplace. And I think certainly, together with management, be a lot more comfortable carrying more liquidity than required rather than less given the financial volatility in the markets at the moment as well. So I just think it's prudent, and I'd like us to be in a position to be able to move fast should the right opportunities present themselves.

(Operator Instructions) Your next question comes from the line of Ken Hoexter with Bank of America.

So just following up on the newbuild question there coming in ahead of schedule. Are you -- I just want to understand, are you saying the yards now have excess capacity? Or are they moving up Atlas within their order book just given your scale? And if it is a freer build process, could we see supply then hit water a bit faster than we all expect? And does that put more pressure on market rates, I think that you were just getting asked about, Graham? Or I know that doesn't affect you in terms of the market rate. I'm just wondering in terms of what backdrop we could be looking at here. .

(inaudible) chime on here again. So look, shipyards essentially a [sausage] machine. But one of the things that you may or may not recognize Seaspan is when we ultimately do the contract with the yard. We've done a very mature specification and outline design with the yards. So we don't have a lot of changes.

What happens in the yard is, everything being equal, it would actually be tough to accelerate our production. But what we see during these times of somewhat volatility, a few others doing speculative orders, as they are subject to many changes, and that actually presents opportunities for us to jump ahead. So generally speaking, that's how that would lay out also you look at where we're building in yards that typically we've done a lot with them before. And therefore, our ability to work with them to accelerate the line and to find opportunities for essentially earlier slots to move our slots ahead is advantages to us. I don't know if that gives you some color, Ken.

No, it does. And then, Graham, you want to throw any thoughts on being in terms of what that means for the market. I know, again, your fixed contracts, I'm just wondering if that means do we see the supply moving a little faster or if it really is just Atlas jumping out a line?

I think so far is Atlas. That's what we are aware of. As what Peter explained because the experience, the work that -- the quality of the work that you experience or anticipation and also the partnership with the shipyard allows us to be able to work this a sausage machine, very effective and efficiently and that is why we have this confidence.

In terms of the implication to the market, if we're looking at the total newbuild, this is roughly about 6.5 million TEU. And the delivery of this newbuild is roughly about 1 million TEU in 2021, 1 million TEU in 2022, 2.4 million TEU in 2023 and 2.6 million TEU in 2024. So with this newbuild coming into the market, for sure, that we'll be able to alleviate some of these demand and supply of balance. So as a consequence, we will see -- we would anticipate the rate, it will be in terms of the charter rate that should be more likely to return to a more normalized rate versus the current rate is historically high.

And as you correctly pointed out, very importantly for Seaspan, actually, our -- all of our newbuild are fixed into the long-term charter and which is why I think our business model is different. Also, if you're looking at our existing fleet, as I said earlier, we have zero roll off in terms of existing charters expire for 2022. We only have 8 recharter in 2023 and 16 in 2024. So this is exactly what we anticipate the demand supply going forward in the market. And that is why we have been able to forward fixing 86 of our vessels from our existing fleet of 130 vessels. And that's what the [exact] is we anticipate the development of the market, and we are well-positioned in avoiding such a peak of delivery. And I think from a market perspective, we'll be able to see how the rate is going to evolve and gradually normalizes.

Great. Peter, that was a great insight and thing. I appreciate the follow-up. So just maybe 2 more for me, 1 for Graham. There was a gain from currency swap. Maybe talk about the hedging activities and how we should think about interest expense for the rest of the year. And then I'll just throw in my second one, which is just the long-term utilization. What's your target on the [powergen]? Should -- I guess, is it just once you get Argentina reset then it's at 100%? Or is there kind of a target utilization we should think about for that business over a period of time? .

Maybe if I start at sort of the interest rate exposure piece. Ken, the first step was we continually monitor our fixed positions that we have in terms of our charter agreements, which obviously get a fixed income coming in, and we've got a mix of fixed and variable debt. We try to maintain that within a certain range, generally around 50% to 70% of the fixed revenue range depending on sort of market conditions.

So early in January, I think everyone started to sort of get a bit of a feel about inflation and the fact that the market and the Fed would probably be taking some action on rates. So we managed to get in fairly early on that. And you would have probably seen in the earnings release that this around $46 million worth of unrealized mark-to-market on our hedge positions at the moment. We'll continue to manage that as is. I mean we're not going to -- I don't want to get too aggressive either. The Board is very focused on making sure that we balance our exposures here and we don't get over-hedged.

But in terms of the outcomes, in terms of the guidance we gave back at Investor Day on our financials, that still holds true. And given it was only a short period ago, I think that's good, but it does hold true. So our guidance is still very much in line with what we presented there including on rates and they're all holding. We don't really have currency exposure we have through Argentina and that's indemnified under a structure with the Fairfax so the currency issues there don't impact on us. And of course, they're winding up as we exit Argentina going forward.

And it's being mentioned earlier, the portfolio in APR, and we touched on Investor Day, is really going through a big transition this year with 15 turbines or 14 turbines coming out of Argentina. And that's a big demob and then remobilization of those. So you may recall back at Investor Day, we provided a steady detailed chart, which sort of demonstrated the deployment schedule for 2022. Once again, that's holding firm, and there might be some opportunities to accelerate some of that. But clearly, we're running at around 67% utilization, I think forecast, currently. We would expect that to get higher but it's still, as we've touched on a few times, Ken, it's a very lumpy business and where you've got short-term contracts still in the portfolio.

The modern demod just means that you've got material downtime, but that's what we're striving to change in the contract structure. Just one other point I just want to make before next caller. People should have noticed in the earnings release that at the beginning of this year, we adopted a new accounting policy, which applies to our convertible notes. And under this accounting policy, it means that we now account for these is they were all converted in terms of our issued shares. So it's an additional 15.5 million shares that you'll see in the share buildup for the EPS calculation and the FFO calculation. That equates to approximately $0.02 per share lower as a result of that additional dilution. It's a conservative approach, but I just want to make it clear to people when you're benchmarking it against our previous EPS and also your consensus models, you need to take that into consideration.

(Operator Instructions) I'm showing no further question at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to the company.

Well, thank you all for joining our call, particularly for those of you who asked the good questions. For any further questions, please feel free to reach out to our IR team and also Graham and myself. We look forward to our Q2 call. And in the meantime, please stay safe and healthy, and you have a great day. Thank you all very much.

Thank you, everyone.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day. You may all disconnect.