Euroseas at Noble Capital Markets: Strategic Fleet Expansion

On Thursday, 09 October 2025, Euroseas Ltd (NASDAQ:ESEA) presented at the Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference. The discussion, led by CFO Tasos, highlighted the company’s strategic focus on modernizing its fleet with an eye on environmental impact while navigating industry challenges. Despite a positive financial outlook, Euroseas faces potential hurdles from tariffs and regulatory changes.

Key Takeaways

• Euroseas is focusing on expanding and modernizing its fleet, with four new vessels under construction.
• The company reported strong financial performance, with $114 million in net revenue for the first half of 2025.
• Euroseas maintains a 5% annualized dividend yield and expects earnings per share to exceed $15 in 2025.
• The company is fully chartered for the remainder of 2025, with 70% of days already booked for 2026.
• Challenges include tariffs and environmental regulations impacting the shipping industry.

Financial Results

• Net revenue for the first half of 2025 was $114 million, with an EBITDA of $76 million.
• Euroseas achieved average charter rates of $28,500 per day and expects $31,000 per day for 2026.
• The company pays a quarterly dividend of $0.70, representing a 5% annualized yield.
• Euroseas’ NAV per share is estimated at $80, while shares traded around $56, a 30% discount.
• The company holds $225 million in debt, with eight unencumbered vessels.

Operational Updates

• Euroseas operates 22 vessels, including 15 feeder and 7 intermediate-sized container ships.
• Four 4,300 TEU vessels are under construction, with delivery expected in 2027 and 2028.
• A retrofit program is underway, achieving 25% fuel savings on retrofitted ships.
• The company has sold one vessel, resulting in a $10 million capital gain.

Future Outlook

• Euroseas plans to continue modernizing its fleet with environmentally friendly vessels.
• The company intends to capitalize on investment opportunities through strong cash flow.
• A share purchase program is in place to be executed if the share price is low.
• Euroseas expects earnings to remain strong, with continued focus on securing long-term contracts.

Q&A Highlights

• The CFO addressed concerns about market rates and newbuild costs, maintaining confidence in profitability.
• Euroseas plans to focus on the feeder segment, which has a lower order book than the overall market.
• The company highlighted its unique focus on feeders, offering a 5% dividend yield and stock price upside.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a more detailed discussion of Euroseas’ strategic plans and financial performance.

Full transcript - Noble Capital Markets Emerging Growth Virtual Investor Conference:

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Treasurer of Euroseas Ltd. Euroseas trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker ESEA. Tasos, the floor is yours.

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: Mark, thank you for the introduction. Thank you also for inviting us to participate in this conference. Both thanks to you and to Noble. Before I start, let me flash for five seconds the forward-looking statement disclaimer that we have because we’ll be making some forward-looking statements in the rest of my presentation. With that behind us, let me jump right into presenting you Euroseas Ltd., a company that is an owner and operator of container ship vessels that is focusing on the feeder side of the business. We own 22 vessels. We call them seven feeder container ships. I’ll explain the sizes in a subsequent slide. We have 15 feeder container ships and seven intermediate-sized container ships with a total capacity a little bit more than 67,000 20-foot equivalent units, or TEU.

We also have four vessels under construction, four units of 4,300 TEU each, two to be delivered in the fourth quarter of 2027 and two scheduled to be delivered in the first half of 2028. With those vessels, and after the sale of one of our vessels that we agreed to sell and we deliver it to its buyers later in this month, we will end up having 25 vessels. Euroseas represents the current reincarnation, the current evolution of a shipping family out of the Chios Island of Greece that traces its roots all the way back to the 19th century, in 1970 or so. Currently, the fourth generation of the company, of the families running the company, and the fifth one is coming. Myself, I’m the CFO of the company. I have joined the company 20 years ago.

I have 30-plus years of experience in the shipping industry, like the experience of our CEO, Aristides Pittas, and the other officers and directors of the company. All of our board of directors, the remaining board of directors, members of the board of directors, hold leading positions in their respective fields and provide for us a sounding board and the guidance that we need to navigate the typically, you know, volatile waters of maritime shipping. We manage our fleet through an affiliate, Eurobulk Ltd., which was established about 30 years ago. It is well-respected within the shipping industry and provides us a vertically integrated platform, having strong relationships with charterers, suppliers, bankers, and all other industry participants. On this slide, you can see in a tabular format our current fleet and our new building program. One of our vessels, the first one, Marcos V, we have agreed to sell.

We have announced the sale about four months, five months ago. A pretty lucrative sale will result in making about $10 million capital gain on the sale of the vessel. The rest of our fleet consists of, as I said, seven what we call intermediate vessels that are vessels around 4,250 TEU and a feeder fleet including 2,800 and 1,700 and 1,800 TEU units. About nine of our vessels have been part of our just completed new building program. These four vessels at the bottom of this table, these are the second phase of our new building program that we embarked on earlier this year. Our strategy overall has been to modernize our fleet and expand it, reducing at the same time the environmental impact of it. As I mentioned, we started a new building program ordering nine vessels, and we took delivery of all of them.

In parallel with the new building program, we have a retrofit program where we take middle-aged ships, typically our 4,200 TEU vessels, and we retrofit them, doing things like that, changing the bow, putting a lighter propeller, putting as simple things as LED lighting, etc., achieving overall savings, fuel savings of the order of 25%, and making the vessels a lot more attractive commercially. You can see here in a stacked diagram how our fleet falls. This vessel, the largest one, has agreed to be sold. We are focusing on having vessels in the most commercially desired sizes, the 1,800s, as we call them, the 2,800s, and the 4,200s. You can see here that nine vessels are our most recently completed new building program, and four are our current new building program that we have in place.

I want to emphasize that we’re focusing on the feeder sector because later on I will make a significant point, I believe, about our investment thesis. Container ship sizes range from below 1,000 TEU all the way to 24,000 TEU. The biggest vessels are used in the long-haul trades, carrying containers between main hubs in Asia, Europe, and North America, while our vessels, the smaller vessels, that’s why they’re called feeder, they feed the containers to the hubs, and they distribute them from the delivery hub to their final destination. That much about our fleet profile and broader positioning. Let’s look a little bit about the industry. I have here for you two charts showing the evolution of rates, time charter rates, the daily rates, and prices. You can see on the left slide, the container ship markets have gone through an interesting 20 years.

They got benefited with what we call the China boom. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization back in 2001, shipping boomed. Subsequently, we suffered from the financial crisis. There was a long decade of pretty miserable rates, which was really the result of outside capital pouring into shipping, ordering over and above what a typical shipping cycle would entail. All this changed dramatically with COVID. In the beginning, we thought it would be a very difficult period, but soon we realized, and the world realized, that the restrictions placed by the pandemic created huge inefficiencies in the world’s transportation system, the supply chain that we call. That led to shipping rates going literally through the roof. As you can see here, we had new highs recorded by the shipping rates.

We exploited that increase in rates, booking longer-term contracts for our vessels, and establishing certain visibility of our revenues, which allowed us in turn to embark on the nine-vessel newbuilds program that I mentioned earlier. When the COVID effects subsided, rates dropped to significantly lower levels, but still higher than the pre-COVID levels. Another unfortunate for the world event took place, obviously fortunate for shipping. The Red Sea got essentially clogged, and companies avoided going through the Suez Canal because of Houthi attacks on shipping. That created the most recent boom that is still continuous. If we can, we’ll talk later about the effects of this. We experienced this type of rate development that allowed us, and I will be a little more specific later on, to book a great part of our fleet on long-term and lucrative contracts.

Really looking forward, the world faces a few, and shipping faces a few challenges. I think the most important is the tariffs that could change the way trade is done by changing the location of suppliers and how trade is executed. We will have to see the effects of that. Another big factor is the resolution of the Red Sea situation. If ships go again back through the Suez Canal, shipping distances will become shorter, and fewer ships will be required. The industry has to face that challenge as well. Of course, the environmental regulations that come into place here will affect how many ships will find it profitable to continue trading. All in all, it’s a quite uncertain situation. On top of that, as I will show you in a subsequent slide, we have a supply challenge.

I jumped directly to this slide to show you on the bottom chart here that the supply of container ships, that is the number of container ships under construction as a % of the raw fleet, is quite high. Just before COVID, it was at its lowest level for many years. That was a contributing factor to rates going through the roof. Subsequently, on the strength of the long-term contracts that owners were able to secure, orders were placed, and order books increased, dropped, and increased again. The industry has the challenge of absorbing that order book on top of potential changes on the demand side. Let me go back to the previous slide, which talks a little bit about demand. Typically, and you can see here a visual, pretty good correlation of demand for containerized trade with the world GDP growth.

Generally, if the world economy is doing well, container shipping is doing well. There were periods like in 2024 when the Red Sea situation emerged that although trade increased, demand for ships increased manifold because of the distance that ships had to travel. Of course, if this situation reverses, or when the situation reverses, shipping would have to deal, containerized shipping would have to deal with a reduced demand because of the short distances the vessels need to travel. Let me go back here and show you a slide, some data that for us is the cornerstone of our thesis and our involvement and our choice of the feeder sector. This breaks down the order book as a % of the fleet by size segment and also shows somewhat a portion of the age profile of the respective segment.

For the segments that we operate, and we really are in these segments here, not only do we have a very low order book compared to the overall order book, but also we have a very high % of vessels, of fleet over 20 years of age. These vessels here are prime candidates for removal because of their natural aging and also because of the environmental regulations that very likely will bite harder the elder vessels of our fleet. You see our fleet is really concentrated there. If anything, we expect the supply situation for the feeder segments to be totally different from the overall container ship, and we expect to see supply support for our sizes.

Indeed, liner companies have been pretty active in trying to secure vessels like ours for longer-term contracts because I think they see that picture as well, and they need to have the feeders to complement their long-haul services. Irrespective of how much the supply-demand situation is on the big ships, as long as containers arrive on the major hubs, let’s say Rotterdam, New York, whatever, smaller ships would be needed to distribute the containers locally. We hope and we believe that the smaller sizes will maintain their own economics, separate economics, separate supply and demand equilibrium for the older vessels and will feel less pressure rate-wise. Clearly, every trade tries to exploit economies of scale, and larger ships try to eat the lunch of smaller ones. We expect to face a trickle-down effect.

In our case, I believe there are several sizes in between ours and the large ones that could give us some sort of protection against larger ships trickling down to our sizes. Let me now go back and give you the next three or four minutes some financial highlights of Euroseas Ltd. First, about our fleet employment. Over the next, in the remaining of 2025, all our fleet, obviously, all our vessels are employed. We have 100% employment. This vessel, at the end of its charter, is going to be delivered to its buyer. In 2026, we have an average of 70% of our available days already chartered at a rate that exceeds $30,000 a day.

To operate our vessels, and I’ll have a little more detailed chart later on, the operating expenses, and if you include the G&A expenses and periodic maintenance, do not go above $7,500, $8,000 a day. You can see that on an operating basis, this situation creates a cash flow surplus in excess of $20,000, in excess of $22,000 per day per ship, generating for us significant earnings and cash flow. Our results for the last several years have been quite good. In the first half of this year, we had $114 million of net revenue, that is net of commissions. We had an EBITDA of $76 million, and we had average charter rates of $28,500 per day, which in 2026, based on the contracted rates for the contracted portion of the fleet, is in excess of $31,000 per day. We maintain a dividend.

We started paying a dividend three years ago. Recently, we increased it to $0.70 per quarter. That translates to about 5% annualized yield. This shows graphically our earnings over the last three and a half years and provides some hints about our earning capacity over the next of our 2026. I think in 2025, we would have north of $15 per share for the year. In 2026, we should be in similar or even better levels. It will depend partly at what rates the remaining capacity will be chartered. The same picture, by and large, will continue in 2027, although then it will depend a little more on what the market rates would be as far as our renewals are concerned. We have very good earnings visibility. We expect to see earnings continuing at or higher levels than the recent years.

This is our cash flow break-even level on an average basis. Overall, we expect we have about $12,300 per vessel per day, including repaying debt. About $8,000 is the operating cash flow break-even level. After that, we have positive EBITDA. As I mentioned to you earlier, in 2026, our average contracted is $31,000 or more. We have the interest payments, etc. We maintain significant margins to keep recording earnings over the next 12 months and beyond. Some highlights from our balance sheet. This talks about our debt. Current debt is about $225 million. We have very low leverage. We have eight vessels that are unencumbered, no debt on eight vessels. The market value of our fleet is way above the levels of debt. Of course, we’re going to incur some more debt to finance, to partly finance the upcoming new building program.

I will close the presentation by showing you some simplified balance highlights. On the asset side, we have about more than $100 million of cash. We have paid some advances for our newbuilds. The book value of our vessels, on the liability side, are debt. We have, on a book basis, about all of this. If you use the market value of our ships, we estimate our NAV, as we say, per share to be about $80. Our last closing price, I think yesterday, was around $56, representing a 30% discount to our net asset value, still providing some upside there. It was recently as high as $66 per share. We do provide a 5% dividend. If you look at Euroseas Ltd. as an investment opportunity, we have insulated ourselves to a great degree by market developments, by having significant contractual cash flow.

We intend to renew our fleet and go to fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly vessels. We are using our earnings to enable the renewal program, but also to reward our shareholders. We pay almost 5% dividend at the current share price. We have a share purchase program, which we execute opportunistically if we feel the share price is low. We have still some upside on the stock because we trade at a discount to our net asset value. With that, Mark, I will turn the floor back to you to manage any questions that there might be from the audience.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Thank you, Tasos. With roughly 100% of 2025 and 70% of 2026 booked, how are you approaching locking up the remaining 30% of charters for 2026?

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: I think really most of the next ships that open for us is sometime in the spring. We’re in a continuous dialogue with our charters. Obviously, we have built strong relationships with them about chartering our ships, and we have continuous cooperation. Many of the retrofits that we have done were in cooperation and with the agreement of the charters because they are the main benefactors of the fuel reduction that was achieved. As we get closer to the renewal date, we intend to renew and/or replace the existing charters. I think the market was pretty strong in September, and we’re in continuous talk. We’re not in an imminent need to recharter, but we are in continuous discussion, both for the existing fleet that comes open, but also potentially to charter early the newbuilds.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Okay. We have three questions from our viewers, so we’ll get through each of these. What is the outlook for market rates when feeder renewals begin in early 2026? Is a market rate of $25,000 per day for new feeders, meaning the Peppi Star, Gregos, Terataki, reasonable?

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: I think it’s hard to say. The freight rates, the rates that liner companies charge per container, recently have dropped. That doesn’t necessarily mean that these drops would be reflected on the charter rates that the liner companies pay to secure capacity because they do need the capacity, especially the feeders. Obviously, if the overall mood in the market is less optimistic, there might be some effects. I think when we run our internal scenarios about the recharters, we’re very conservative, and even with that, we expect our profitability to remain very comparable in 2026 and 2027 to this year. It’s hard to say where the market will be. There are many, many balls up in the air between the tariffs, the timing of the Suez Canal normalization, the environmental effects of the regulation, the effects of the environmental regulations on ships. It’s hard to say.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Okay. The next question is, please break down the costs for the intermediate newbuilds. How much was spent in the first half of 2025? How much will be spent in the second half, 2026, and 2027?

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: I think the newbuilds were in the order of $60 million, roughly, per unit, and about 10%, 15% has been paid upon contract signature. We have no payments in 2026, if I recall well, or maybe late in 2026, maybe another 10% on two of the units, and the rest would be in 2027 and beyond. We are well capitalized and very liquid on Euroseas. We generate more than $20 million of excess cash flow every quarter. There is no issue in our mind that we can finance the newbuilding program, not only the equity part. If we wanted, we could potentially finance the entire newbuilding program without debt. We intend to put 60% to 65% debt on the vessel, so the equity needs would be much less than the cost of the program. We have still a lot of capacity to capitalize on investment opportunities.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: The question is, if you’re worried about the order book, why are you ordering newbuilds? That might be conflating the large versus the feeder and intermediates.

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: Yeah, I think, I mean, I love this table here that I showed you that shows the very distinct situation between the feeders and the older vessels. I think they go hand in hand. The long hauls need, at both ends, feeders to do the distribution, and there are some smaller trades as well. I think for the time being and for the existing new building program that we have, there would be, I believe, to be seen, sufficient demand for these types of vessels, especially since there is a good number of them that are to go out of the fleet within the same period.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Tasos, I think we’re nearing the end of our time. I think the final question would be, why should investors consider gaining exposure to the container ship market and why invest in Euroseas?

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: The container ship market in general is a different question. It is true that many companies, many of our peers, have also secured long-term contracts. To a great degree, there is visibility of earnings across all the companies. We are, I think, the only one, at least in the U.S. capital markets, that’s focusing only on feeders. This situation that I keep highlighting here is a good reason. We provide 5% dividend yield, and we have upside on the stock price. All in all, taken together, I think it provides a decent and worth-looking investment opportunity.

Mark, Treasurer, Euroseas Ltd.: Tasos, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tasos, CFO, Euroseas Ltd.: Thank you very much for the invitation, and thanks everybody for attending my short presentation.

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