GasLog Doubles 2Q Profit, Expects Business Growth

Monaco-based owner, operator and manager of LNG carriers GasLog ended the second quarter of 2017 with more than a doubled profit of USD 6.9 million, compared to USD 3.3 million posted in the same period a year earlier. 

The company’s revenues also rose to USD 129.9 million in 2Q 2017 from USD 114.5 million in the three-month period last year.

“GasLog had a stronger quarter with record revenues as a result of high uptime across our chartered fleet and improving earnings on our spot vessels,” Paul Wogan, Chief Executive Officer, explained.

During the quarter, GasLog completed the dropdown of two vessels, GasLog Greece and GasLog Geneva, to GasLog Partners.

“These two transactions show our continued ability to recycle liquidity from the Partnership to GasLog, which we can then use to repay debt and grow our business,” Wogan commented.

“Towards the end of the quarter, we repurchased the outstanding 2018 Norwegian bond meaning that GasLog now has no material debt maturities until 2019. With the increased dropdown activity, improving spot rates, a growing fleet and largely amortising debt, we expect the company’s leverage to continue to fallthrough 2017 and beyond,” he continued.

Wogan also said that the company progresses with its FSRU strategy as it is involved in a number of projects. He revealed that the Front-End Engineering and Design (FEED) study for the Alexandroupolis FSRU project in Greece is expected to be completed in the third quarter.

“In the short-term market, spot rates continue to be low. However, we are seeing a return to a more seasonal market pattern as well as round-trip economics on many spot charters, both of which suggest a tightening shipping market,” according to Wogan.

“With five vessels currently trading in the spot market through The Cool Pool Limited (the “Cool Pool”), we continue to have significant upside to an improvement in this market. We expect that increased LNG supply and demand, coupled with historically low new vessel orders, should lead to an upturn in the LNG shipping market, from which GasLog is very well positioned to benefit,” Wogan concluded.

Currently, GasLog’s owned fleet comprises 27 LNG carriers – 22 ships on the water and five on order, slated for delivery in 2018 and 2019.