Dry Bulk Market Will Be Rewarding in Years to Come Says Petros Panagiotidis, CEO of Castor Maritime Inc.
Castor Maritime Inc, an international shipping company specializing in the ownership of dry-bulk vessels, announced its financial results for the six months ended March 31, 2019.
For the six months ended March 31, 2019, voyage revenues increased to $2.04 million from $1.70 million, in the same period of 2018, a 20% increase. EBITDA for the period was $0.67 million, a 50% increase as compared to $0.44 million in the same period of 2018. The daily TCE of our sole fleet vessel for the six months ended March 31, 2019 stood at $10,843, slightly higher than the $10,761 earned during the same period ended March 31, 2018. Average daily OPEX of the vessel for the period came at $4,956, a 5.6% decrease from the respective period of 2018. Cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2019 amounted to $2.64 million.
Petros Panagiotidis, the Company’s Chairman and CEO, stated, “We are very pleased with our performance for the six months ended March 31, 2019, the first period we report results as a NASDAQ listed entity. We believe that the dry bulk market will be rewarding in the years to come despite the normal shorter-term volatility exhibited. In this context, we are focused on taking advantage of market opportunities in order to maximize our profitability and opportunistically enlarge our fleet.”
Set forth below are selected operational and financial statistical data of our Fleet for each of the six month periods ended March 31, 2019 and 2018 that the Company believes are useful in better analysing trends in its results of operations:
(1) Represents the number of vessels that constituted our Fleet for the relevant period, as measured by the sum of the number of days each vessel was a part of our Fleet during the period divided by the number of calendar days in the period.
(2) Non-GAAP Financial Information
Daily Time Charter Equivalent (TCE) Rate. TCE rate, is a measure of the average daily revenue performance of a vessel. For time charters, the TCE rate is calculated by dividing total voyage revenues, less any voyage expenses and commissions to related party, by the number of Available Days during that period. Under a time charter, the charterer pays substantially all the vessel voyage related expenses. However, we may incur voyage related expenses when positioning or repositioning vessels before or after the period of a time charter, during periods of commercial waiting time or while off-hire during dry-docking or due to other unforeseen circumstances. The TCE rate is not a measure of financial performance under U.S. GAAP (non-GAAP measure), and should not be considered as an alternative to voyage revenues, the most directly comparable GAAP measure, or any other measure of financial performance presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. However, TCE rate is standard shipping industry performance measure used primarily to compare period-to-period changes in a company’s performance and assists our management in making decisions regarding the deployment and use of our vessels and in evaluating their financial performance.
Source: Castor Maritime Inc.