Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon to everyone watching us online, and a very warm welcome to everyone here at the Lysaker office. Very nice to see everyone.

What can we expect, Anders?

We'll hear a little bit about the market strengths, which is driven by China. I think that's an important message, and a little bit about dividends and our results for the quarter, so.

Something to look forward to. We do the usual drill with our CEO, Lasse Kristoffersen, will take the market and the business.

Then CFO Bjørnar Bukholm will take the numbers. Then Lasse will take the prospects before you run a Q&A session.

Some practical information on that part?

If you have questions, you can post questions via the webcast. Just do it as early as you can, or during the presentation, that's fine.

Do allow some time between the questions are posted and they're actually arriving on this end. There will also be a possibility to post questions from the audience, so that's it.

Be ready, and then I think we can just start. With that, Lasse, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you, and good morning, good afternoon.

Very happy to invite you to this presentation. We have, in our view, another solid quarter, and we are in a market that is firming up in shipping, and where we are really proud that we see results of the hard work we do to improve performance also in other segments, in particular in logistics.

We are here with what we believe is a strong report and a strong market outlook. I will talk you through some of the details, starting with the the headlines.

The continued demand in shipping causes basically the whole world fleet to be sold out, and so it is with us. We have at the moment a fully sold-out fleet out of Asia.

I will come back to the to the cargo balance, but that story continues. That has caused a significant hike in both freight rates and charter rates in the quarter.

I will come back to more details. The EBITDA, Bjørnar will give you more details, but a solid EBITDA at $361 million.

It's down quarter-over-quarter, and this is largely due to increased fuel costs that the customers have not compensated us yet. The development in logistics continues.

We deliver a very strong quarter in logistics, the best in in many, many quarters thanks to improved underlying performance. The outlook for the year is maintained.

Although we say it's a very strong outlook in the market, for this year we maintain our outlook of EBITDA in around $1.6 billion. We today announced a dividend of 61 cents per share.

This is 50% of net profit plus $100 million in extraordinary dividends, lifting us up to 82% of net profits in dividend for the quarter, and the first half-year, sorry. Let me then talk you through the key elements of the market.

There are three themes I'd like to to focus on. We cannot avoid talking about the China story as it continues, but we'll try to give you some more background on that.

Second, there is an increasing gap between what China needs and what China gets from our industry. That finally has caused the markets to move quite significantly both on freight, charters, and there is still fuel volatility.

Let me take them one by one. China continues to to grow, and for those who remember well, when we came towards the end of 2025, we're in '26 now, we said that we expected a much stronger growth out of or volumes and exports out of China than consensus was in forecasts.

Actually, at that time, S&P forecasted lower exports in '26 than '25. Fortunately, according to our plan, we were right, and China has, if anything, surprised on the upside.

We were expecting them to export some 10 million cars this year if they got the capacity. We still believe that's the best guess, but right now, in June and increasing in July, they passed 1 million cars in exports per month, meaning that the current run rate indicates more than 12 million cars ex-China.

Remember before COVID, 2019, this was a million or less cars. At the same time, the global car sales has not developed much, and actually it's down quarter-over-quarter, meaning that China is massively massively eating market share, and I'll come back to that.

Unfortunately for the Western OEMs, the story continues. The exports are continuing to slide down, and in particular into Asia and China, the European OEMs are struggling.

The American OEMs has for quite a while lost market share, still falling, but in general this causes an issue in the industry where we are absolutely sold out out of Asia, but we for sure could have had more cargo going back for to Asia from Europe, from the US. There are two main reasons why China is now seeing a massive export.

The number one reason is that they have a fantastic product. They have, in terms of technology, functionality, and quality, some would even say design, but certainly also price, they are extremely competitive.

That's the reason why the whole world ask for Chinese cars. They are growing all over the world except for the US because they are not allowed.

In the quarter, this was even pushed further by the fact that the car sales in China slowed down. Quarter-over-quarter or if you do the 12-month rolling, in any way the sales in China are down.

For the OEMs in China to keep up the volumes, they are pushing even harder on exports. Remember, you cannot push harder on exports if you don't have the competitive product, and that's what's the basis.

I said in the last presentation, it used to be a cheap product; now it is a preferred product. That's very different.

This is the result. Where China was a a cradle for strong profits, in particular for some of the European premium OEMs, their market share had more or less cut in half since since COVID, while China and Chinese OEMs have taken more or less full control of the domestic market.

Today, 70% of the new car sales in China are from China Chinese OEMs. This does not mean only Chinese-produced, because quite a few of the non-Chinese OEMs are also producing in China.

The market share of Chinese-produced in China is higher, but the Chinese OEMs. China is the biggest single market in the world.

There are close to 30, maybe 28 28 27 28 million cars sold annually. Globally, we are close to 90 million.

Comparable in Europe, we sell them around 15 million cars; in the US, we sell around 15 million cars. The Chinese market is as big as US and Europe more or less together.

They're also winning market share outside China, and they have gone up from a very minor market share 5 years ago today be above 10% globally. Then remind remember that they are not basically allowed to compete in the US.

All of this is outside US, meaning that they have a much higher market share in the markets in which they compete. A question has been asked, are they just pushing cars out, or are they being sold?

We have done that analysis, and we have looked into statistics on the exports. We are looking at the the new registration of of cars.

We are looking in our own facilities. Are we piling up Chinese cars?

The answer is no. The Chinese cars are being sold, and there is no sign of increasing inventory of Chinese cars.

This is not just a push to market; it's also cars that are sold in the market. Despite the extreme growth, the the sales are pursuing and and following.

That leads us to the issue in China now. I'm lucky to go to China every now and then.

We have a team there. We have a lot of focus on China.

We are the biggest player out of China. Every single customer I meet tell us that they would prefer ro-ro if they could get access.

Sometimes we get a question, is it a threat with container and others? According to our customers, it's not.

It's just the fact that they don't get enough capacity. That's what we have illustrated here.

We have plotted the exports out of China on that's the top graph, and then the capacity allocated by ro-ros measured on on AIS data to China. As you can see, that gap is increasing.

We now believe that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 million cars exported out of China on other means than ro-ro. Although the vast majority of that, our customers would like to use ro-ro if they could.

If anything, we think that number is closer to 4 than 2. This is future demand for ro-ro.

Although we're sold out now and with no future growth, we are confident that the majority of these volumes will come to ro-ro. That's why we we are saying and and the market sees that the outlook for demand for ro-ro out of China is very, very strong.

What we feared a couple of years ago was that there was a big order book going back to '24-ish. I think we had 40% of the world's sailing fleet on order.

We most of us expected '26, '27 to maybe have more cargo, more vessels than cargo. That has not happened.

Despite a massive growth in the fleet, all of it has been consumed, all of it is sold out, and there are hardly any vessel available for charter over the next few years. That has also caused that the newbuilding activity has come back in our segment.

It paused for a while. In by the end of Q1 or in Q1, we had around 14% of the world fleet on order.

Through the orders in Q2, we are now past 20, 21% of the of the fleet is now on order. We know based on discussions going on with a lot of players in the industry that the actual number is higher.

We expect this newbuilding order book to grow even further. There's a big but, these vessels will arrive in 2030 and onwards.

The yard capacity is basically sold out up until 2029, any new order now comes in 2030 and beyond. The basic assumption is that when we get that far out, unless demand falls falls off, there is quite a big need for a fleet replacement.

If you look at the big numbers, and if you if you scrap vessels that turn 30 years, the world fleet is actually shrinking towards 2030 with a peak somewhere in 2027. What we thought would be the challenge was the supply side.

That has not happened. We don't see that happening anytime soon unless China is politically stopped from market access in other markets than where they are today.

We have seen then just in this quarter a massive pickup in the market for ro-ro and PCTC trade. On the left, you see a spot index made by Hesnes.

These are spot cargoes out of China. We don't do that much spot, but this is the best data we have just to illustrate what has happened.

As you can see, the demand of the China and the willingness to pay out of China has grown 80% just within that quarter. That also have led to a bigger appetite for time charter vessels.

That is in a market where you can hardly find available capacity. Both the freight market and the time charter market has probably gone up 80% during the quarter.

Adding the recent development, I'm sure you could easily claim that that both have doubled so far this year compared to the lowest point in Q1. There is a massive need, a massive interest, and a willingness to pay both for freight and for vessels.

Then I have to remind all that the left side, freight, that's our income; the right side is our cost. The fact that time charter vessel goes up is not a good thing for us, but we don't do much short-term chartering on time charters.

Last but not least, the Middle East conflict is still affecting the markets. Of course, this causes high and volatile fuel prices.

A quarter ago, we were uncertain whether we would get enough fuel. We're not worried about that right now.

There is sufficient, although there is much tighter on the diesel and the refined side than on the than on the fuel oil side. In in sum, we are not concerned to get access to fuel, but the cost is still volatile and relatively high, although down from the peak we saw when the conflict arose.

Then this has also transferred into our demand segment, and we have seen a massive move in many markets into EVs. In Europe, in Australia, even in the US, we see that the demand for EVs has gone up significantly due to the price of the pump for diesel and gasoline.

With that, I'll turn over to the business side. I'll do that relatively quick and leave it to Bjørnar to give you the details.

Highlights, we are coming in just short of $300 million on EBITDA for for shipping. In this day and time, not the best quarter we have seen, but again, very much affected of short-term fuel costs that are not compensated yet.

Very happy to show the logistics numbers, the best quarter in, well well, don't arrest me, but I think 5 years. On top of that, we sold last year a very profitable business in in Australia.

What we have been investing there are are paying off. In government services, we see a a slightly pick up quarter-over-quarter, but still a relatively soft quarter for government, and I'll come back to that.

On shipping, as the capacity is more or less flat, and the market is strong and we're sold out, there's not big movements in the volumes. It's a little bit up quarter-over-quarter, but this is more periodization than anything else.

Underlying, it's more or less flat on volumes, but it's a little bit up, and that means also when the percentage of high and heavy is up, the absolute numbers on high and heavy is also up. This is good for us, as that's a a particularly strong segment for us.

Rates are a little bit down. That is partly because quarter-over-quarter, because we are now phasing in more of the business done last year.

If you see year-over-year, the customer and trade mix is up. What does that mean?

That means that we are doing more relatively out of China, more relatively out of Asia, and less out of the West. The rates are higher out of Asia than out of Europe.

Generally speaking, the rate picture is relatively flat for us quarter-over-quarter. What we did see during the second quarter was that every new business we signed, we did longer deals at higher rates in Q2 compared to same period last year.

For us, still the Middle East is a big challenge. We still consider the Hormuz Strait to be untradeable, and we have not been trading through Bab-el-Mandeb into the Red Sea since, I think, December 2024, three, four, yeah, at least 2 and a half years.

This is a big challenge for us and a big challenge for our customers. They really struggle to get product into the Middle East.

We have and others have now started to trade around Africa into the mid Med, down Suez, and into Aqaba. Recently, that has also been challenged as vessels have been attacked outside Saudi Arabia.

We are trying to find solutions for customers, but they're really struggling. It's hard to get product into the region.

Of course, it's not critical for the region to get new cars, but at some point, you need to also replace cars in the region. I said we're very happy to see how the development has been in in logistics, and with a little dip in Q4 last year, we have been on a consistent improvement track.

This is due to the improvement plan we presented last year. We have actively renegotiated some of our contracts to reflect the current market and costs.

We have aggressively looked for cost in the organization, made it more simple, more efficient. We are also able to deploy technology in an effective way.

We have set a target of reaching 10% cash EBITDA by the end of '27. I'm very happy to say that already in the second quarter this year, we are making a good leap towards it, and we're now around 8% cash EBITDA margin in logistics, and seems to be continue to improving.

Government segment, I said last year we had a particularly strong start to the year. It seems like years ago, but actually just 1 year ago, 1 and a half year ago, we changed president in the US.

At the end of his term, Biden had a lot of presidential-directed cargoes, meaning that he emptied his pocket, sent stuff to Europe and to Ukraine, and we benefited from that first half last year. Did not happen this year, there was some less demand.

The other main effect was actually that the Middle East conflict normally would drag capacity, but this time around it was not, because it was more an airborne conflict than anything else. The the vessels that normally trade for US government into the Middle East are actually now trading in the Atlantic in the second quarter.

That is now changing. They're moving to Pacific.

We see in the third quarter that the supply-demand balance in the Atlantic is more normalized, and we can also see that now on the contracts that we are winning. We believe that that the first and second quarter was okay, but it was also reflecting a unusually strong supply of tonnage into the basin.

Book of business, we announced a big contract extension over the summer. We are working on new contracts as we speak.

On shipping, there's no doubt that what we did in the second quarter was higher and longer than what we did last year. We are now building value into our book of business.

Quickly on sustainability, as safety is the first thing we think of in the morning and and the last thing we think of when we go to bed at night. I'm happy to say that our people on board our vessels are safer than ever.

We have seen some increase in the numbers in logistics. This is probably also due to more accurate data, but for sure, we are looking into how can we get back on track.

The recent trend on the LTIF is positive. No major accidents, that's the most important thing.

We were very happy that we could get Morning Concert out of the Gulf late June. It has been a tough period for them.

Seafarers are used to be at sea for a long time, but nobody likes to be stuck and don't control your own destiny. Luckily, they are out, and we have no vessels in the region.

On emissions, we are delivering improved numbers, but there are still the cargo imbalance and the fact that to meet some customer needs we needed to speed up a little bit. We are trailing slightly behind our targets, but we are still committed to our decarbonization target, net zero 2040, and the pathway to it.

I wanted to share with you the recent development this year. We have for quite a while worked together with our partner Oceanbird on new technology for sails on vessels.

This was installed in June, I believe, on board our vessel. As you can see, 40 m high, 14 m wide.

As we have airbridge, and we have bridges that we need to go under, we need to be able to pull it down. This is quite unique technology.

We're testing it now. We're optimistic that it will add value, but we really need to see it full-scale.

This is first in the world, and we're a proud partner with Oceanbird on this. With that, Bjørnar?

Thank you, Lasse, and good morning, everyone. I must say that coming back after summer and being able to present a report like this with solid numbers for Q2, a strong outlook, and also a strong dividend, that's a great way to start work after summer.

Update on the financial side, first of all, solid Q2, although certainly below what we delivered last quarter, but it's largely explained by the conflict in the Middle East and increased bunker prices. It's as expected, no major surprises on the numbers in this quarter.

Starting on the revenue side, we delivered $1.3 billion in revenues. It's up 4% quarter-on-quarter.

The improvement largely driven by shipping due to more volumes on our vessels, largely due to seasonality with more volumes out of the West. Please note, volumes out of the West typically with lower rates, and that's why we see a net rate reduction in the quarter due to trade mix.

Then we have slightly lower revenues on logistics side and slightly higher revenues, or largely stable revenues, on the government side. If compared to last year, revenues are lower, and the reason for that is shipping with lower rates, as Lasse has already shown you.

Moving over to adjusted EBITDA, $361 million, that is down 7% quarter-on-quarter, with the drop explained by shipping and higher net bunker costs, partially or slightly offset by improved results for logistics and also slightly improved results for the government segment. This quarter, we had adjustments to EBITDA of $12 million that is related to the investments we are doing in digital transformation and also some severance packages.

Both of these related to the cost leadership initiative that we presented in the fourth quarter. Happy to say that for both programs, we are on track.

Net profit, $138 million. This is down around $40 million compared to the previous quarter.

Majority of the drop is explained by EBITDA, but then we also have slightly higher, or $7 million higher, depreciation expense in the quarter. The reason for that is that we took on some long-term charters towards the end of the first quarter, and these now have full effect on our P&L in the second quarter.

Looking at the tax expense and the financial expense, largely in line with the previous quarter. Operating cash flow and the cash flow conversion rather quite weak actually.

The conversion rate is just 72%. The reason for that is higher fuel prices and more fuel on our vessels.

We see this as a temporary effect and expect that to normalize, assuming also that fuel prices over time are reducing. Net debt, $2 billion, slightly down compared to the previous quarter.

You would have normally expected maybe a slightly better development in a quarter where we do not pay dividends. The reason for the relatively modest improvement is then operating cash flow, as I just addressed.

We also had sizeable CapEx in the quarter, and then also our minority shareholder in EUKOR, they actually got their dividend in April this year, and that was around $45 million. Moving over to the financial targets, return on capital employed, 15.6% last 12 months trading.

If you look at the quarterly slide, it's more around 13%. All other financial targets reflecting the balance sheet, as you see, is at a very healthy level.

I'll be coming back to the details when we talk through the balance sheet in a couple of pages. Moving over to shipping services, as you heard from Lasse, adjusted EBITDA, $299 million, down around $30 million compared to the previous quarter.

This is explained as follows. Net freight is actually slightly up.

That is driven by more volumes, but please note a lot of these volumes are now coming ex-West due to stronger seasonality ex the West, not the volumes out of Asia. The volumes out of the West has lower net freight rates than the volumes out of the East.

Carrying more volumes also carries more costs, we also see that other voyage and cargo expenses are up in the quarter due to more activity level supporting the additional volumes that carries lower profitability. Then the main driver is the net bunker costs, up $31 million due to higher fuel and with the lag in recovery under our BAF mechanisms.

Vessel OPEX is up $5 million. We had some more maintenance activity in the quarter.

We also experienced some inflationary pressure on certain consumables, which is linked also to the conflict in the Middle East. Then there were some timing effects with typically quite low deliverables to our vessels in January every year.

As we talked about last time, net bunker costs were expected to increase significantly in Q2 due to the spike in the prices and the lag in the bunker adjustments clauses. Now that we look into the second half of this year and also Q3, we expect this to decline and that we over time will be recovering the additional cost we had to bear in the first half of this year.

Of course, this assumes that we continue to see stabilization or a decline in the bunker prices and that they don't jump up again. Moving over to logistics, strong quarter, adjusted EBITDA, $46 million, up 8% quarter-on-quarter.

As you heard from Lasse, this is the best year in 5 years, or is the best year since before COVID-19. We have a target of delivering a cash EBITDA for this business of 10% that we shared with you all in Q4.

We are now in the area of 7% to 8%, we're really making traction here. I think we need to be honest with ourselves.

It's typically easiest to deliver the first 3% to 4% of improvement than delivering the last couple of percent. We have taken the quick wins, and now the even harder work starts to make that business as profitable as we know it can be.

If you look specifically at the quarter and the improvement compared to last quarter, revenues were actually down $11 million. This is linked to the US auto segment, and as I said, it's two main factors.

One is seasonality. We have quite some Japanese customers in the US, and they have the year-end push in March, which is typically then lifting the volumes.

Then we also had one customer contract, it was quite big from a revenue perspective, that was not renewed, and that started in April this year. Then we had other business that were more positive, and we're also starting to see that we're actually quite successful with also increasing some of the rates on the logistics segment, make individual customer contracts more profitable.

Operating costs significantly down quarter-on-quarter, and in general, we're seeing a very positive development on what we call the cost-to-revenue ratio. This is really much linked to the operational improvement program that we proactively are working with every site to make them more and more profitable.

Moving over to government services, it's a better quarter than the last quarter, but it's not a quarter that we are particularly happy with, and it's very much impacted by what you heard from Lasse, which is the conflict in the Middle East and somewhat more competition short-term, especially during the quarter. Still, it was an improvement of $3 million quarter-on-quarter.

If you look underneath the number, I would argue that it's actually an improvement of $6 million. As some of you may recall, last quarter we got a retroactive MSP payment of close to $3 million linked to Q4 2025, the underlying improvement is actually $6 million.

The driver for the improvement is more US government revenues than what we had in the Q1, there is a positive trend. At the same time, we had quite a big drop in commercial revenues, this is then the cooperation between Wallenius Wilhelmsen on the shipping side and Wallenius Wilhelmsen on the government side.

This is linked to the fact that we had I would say abnormal high dry-docking activity during the quarter for government services, and vessels were not available to actually carry cargo. As you already heard from Lasse, there is certainly cargo out there to carry.

Moving over to liquidity and cash flows, the liquidity position remains very solid. At the end of the quarter, we had $1.2 billion in total liquidity, of which cash around $600 million.

This is down $200 million quarter-on-quarter for the following main reasons. Operating cash flow, as I already talked about, $260 million, pushed down by inventory build-up on our vessels with more expensive fuel, temporarily effect, we expect this to turn.

Investing cash flow was quite substantial at $98 million, mainly related then to vessel, and especially the newbuilding program, but also quite a lot of dry-docking activity. The main element that pushed the cash flow down, that was the financing side, close to $450 million in negative cash flow.

$364 million is linked to our lease payments and bank debt. Within this number, we actually had $200 million in voluntarily repayment of debt.

This also actually links to the material increase in flexibility we have in our debt, we can easier flex up and down to avoid having too much cash on the balance sheet, which is not a good way to run your business. Secondly, we also had regular interest cost payments around $30 million.

Then as already mentioned, we paid $30 million give or take to the minority shareholder in EUKOR as they are getting their dividend in April when we are upstreaming cash to ASA from EUKOR. Moving over to the balance sheet and our continued strong financial position.

Starting on the equity side, big jump on the equity ratio in the quarter, up from 39% to 49%. The main driver for this increase, that is the change in the EUKOR put liability, with the amount reduced from $850 million to $386 million.

Just to remind you all, in April 2026, we reached an agreement with our dear partner HMG, as the 20% shareholder in EUKOR, that the put and the call could not be exercised as long as the ocean carrier contract had an agreement that EUKOR would carry 50% of the volumes. That contract runs until the end of 2029, and then we have agreed that the earliest date in theory that the option could be exercised is then January 1st, 2031, really then reflecting the long-term partnership we have with Hyundai Kia.

Now, the liability is then calculated at the net present value on the I would say estimated or forecasted future exercise price, it is of course quite some uncertainty around this number, but this is our best estimate. For those of you that are interested in understanding more about this, I would urge you to take a look at our quarterly report and the note where we are addressing this topic.

Net interest-bearing debt, as already mentioned, quite stable at $2 billion. We had a reduction in debt, and we had a reduction in cash as we are continuously trying to make our balance sheet more effective, and leverage ratio was stable at 1.2x.

Liquidity reserve, just mentioned, is now at $1.2 billion, and it's around a 50/50 split between cash and undrawn credit facilities. Just as a reminder, our minimum target we are steering against, that is $1 billion, we are getting significantly closer to that target.

I also wanted to use this opportunity to also take a step back and reflect on what we have actually done together with our partnership banks during the last 18 months to really optimize the capital structure and efficiency of Wallenius Wilhelmsen. I'm pointing at really three things when I'm looking back.

We have refinanced $1.2 billion in debt at significantly improved terms. We have extended maturities from '26, '28 into 2030 or maybe even 2031 for some of the capacity, and we have made a lot of this financing significantly more flexible while converting them from a traditional ship loan to a revolving credit facility that you can decide whether it's drawn one day and not drawn the next day.

At the same time, we have reduced the bank debt and the bond debt from $1.8 billion to $1.1 billion. We are really focused on repaying or refinancing, of course, the most expensive debt, including the bond debt we repaid in March 2026.

This has also enabled us to reduce our cash position from $1.4 billion to $0.6 billion as the debt is now much more flexible with the revolving credit facilities, we can flex up and down. We are keeping a strong liquidity buffer without having too much cash on our balance sheet.

I think we have taken a big step, but the work continues to make it even better. Last but not least from me, very happy to announce a new strong dividend from Wallenius Wilhelmsen to our dear shareholders.

Cash dividend of $258 million for the first half-year, equivalent to 61 cents per share. This is then, as already heard from Lasse, it's 50% of the net profit plus an extraordinary element of $100 million.

The dividend is set based on the results, based on the financial position, and based on the strong outlook for the company. Also following paying this dividend, Wallenius Wilhelmsen is, as you have seen, in a very strong financial position to address any opportunities that may arise in the market, and we aim to continue to ensure that Wallenius Wilhelmsen stay financially very solid.

With that, I will hand it over to you, Lasse, for the prospects.

I can make that rather short. The market has strengthened through the second quarter.

We are, of course, benefiting from that on the shipping side. The improvement in logistics we expect is here to stay and continue.

The prospects for the year and the outlook for the year, $1.6 billion in EBITDA, and at the same time an underlying shipping market that is strengthening. We today can share that we see a very strong outlook for Wallenius Wilhelmsen.

No, you have an update, Anders.

Yes, a quick update. It's the save the date on the 24th of September, we're going to have a market update here at our offices at Lysaker where we're going to talk a little bit about what we're seeing in the market and the developments that follow.

We will send out an invite to investors, analysts, and other interested parties. For now, it's a save the date, more to come.

On that, we will start the Q&A. We have a lot of interesting questions here.

Just starting off with you, Lasse.

Yep.

You said strong outlook.

Yeah.

Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

This is mostly linked to the market. We see that the demand out of China is continuing, and it's not just a call it supply push, it's really a strong demand and a big success of Chinese cars around the world.

We don't see any end to that short-term. That drives a lot of demand, even though the fleet is growing fast in shipping, there is more demand.

We see in the contracts that we're doing during the quarter that what we did the second quarter this year is longer and stronger than what we did last year.

Thank you. Bjørnar, you maintained the outlook.

Despite having high fuel costs this quarter, can you put a bit more color to that?

Yes, absolutely. It's actually a very simple reason to that, for in the first half of this year, we have had extraordinary high bunker costs.

The expectations for the second half is that we to a large extent will recoup what we paid extra in this quarter, as we will be compensated to a large extent from our customers. In addition to that, I will also highlight that there is strength on the shipping side, on the commercial side, and we also expect government services to have some more wind in the sales in the second half of there.

All right, thank you. If you have questions on webcast, please post them in the chat.

First, we start opening up for questions from the audience. Is there anyone with questions at the premises?

There's one back there. August?

Thank you. August from Pareto.

You, Lasse, you talked about how the order book has increased and 21% currently, and possibly higher when you are kind of thinking about discussions going on with industry players. Does those industry players include yourself?

We are constantly looking at the opportunities to grow and renew our fleet. We have not made any new commitments.

If so, we would have shared it. Of course, we are continuously looking at extending newbuilding program.

We're very happy with the Shaper Class program that we have put in place, 14 vessels that we think are state of the art and represent strong competitiveness for us, but there will for sure be more to come, but we have not made any commitments yet.

Thank you.

All right, any further questions from the audience? All right, if not, we'll go on to the next one.

Sondre at Nordea is asking, "Could you talk a little bit about the untapped potential in China if we had the capacity?" You did touch upon it,

but The way it plays out for us in reality is that we are not concerned about filling the ships this year or next year. It's actually really tough prioritizations.

We have very deliberate approach to the Chinese markets. We see that the approach from the Chinese players are going from, I would say, more transactional to today much more strategic, where they see they need friends, and they need companies like us.

I've been personally to several meetings where we meet the absolute top management of these OEMs telling us that, "We need your help on shipping, we need your terminals, we need your processing capabilities in the markets you're in, we need your ability to orchestrate end-to-end services." For us, this is a massive opportunity to address growing demand, and at the same time utilize the full capability we have.

I would say in general, what we did last year was typically 1-year contracts in China, and just in 1 year, this is now moving to more normal as we do with others, two, three, and even 5-year type contracts. The nature of the shipping out of China is increasing.

Despite that we give them priority and others, the demand is just growing faster than capacity in ro-ro. We have seen now, our estimate it's probably around 2 million cars going in containers.

If you go to Antwerp or Le Havre, you will see that there are containers coming in with cars even into Europe, and everybody that deals with shipping of cars into Europe know that that is not effective. We even now see that, and it's really hard to know the exact numbers, but significant amount of cars, maybe more than a million cars, are now going in what we call lo-lo, lift-on/lift-off, meaning dry bulk vessels and others.

They just, any capacity that can move cars, they use. We believe that this will come back to our segment eventually when there is capacity, even with no growth out of China, there will be growing demand for ro-ro.

Right. Then there's a question from Sondre at Nordea.

He's asking about our order book or our open capacity for next year. We have more than 40%.

How is the time charter market affecting our rate negotiations?

These follow each other, and I showed that earlier. Of course, this is what works in any market, that if you get the freight rates goes up, the cost of the supply also goes up because people want more vessels.

We are not very much exposed to the time charter market short-term, we are not really tapping into that. We are using some of the medium-term market a bit forward to build capacity, but in general, we are not very much exposed to the time charter market.

The capacity we have now is the capacity we plan for next year.

Okay. Then one for you, Bjørnar.

Don't want to leave you alone here. The run rate that we see on logistics now, the big improvement, is that something that we can expect to be the run rate going forward?

It's hard to be too exact on that question, but I think what we could safely say is that we have certainly lifted logistics to a new level, and we expect to continue to show good numbers for logistics. Exactly what the numbers will be for quarters ahead, we need to wait and see, but we see that the logistics will continue to perform well also in the quarters ahead.

All right. Then on to the Chinese push for cars into Europe.

There's

rumors that European terminals are filling up and delaying vessels. Is this something that we see,

and This has been an up and down situation for years. Congestion, meaning that vessels sit and wait outside, that happens every now and then.

There's not a big, massive change in congestion. If anything, it has been a little bit down lately.

As I said, we have no signs of cars piling up in our terminals or in our storage more than before. We have just looked at what we call drayage, that's the waiting time in our terminals.

Not big changes, if anything, a little bit down since last year, and there are no signs that the Chinese are sitting longer than others. As we said, in any way we try to analyze, we cannot see that the velocity of Chinese cars are lower than any other.

Okay. Then there are some questions about the Red Sea.

Rumors that Maersk is returning to the Red Sea, Chinese players are doing that route. What are our thoughts around the Red Sea?

Very simple. We don't go until it's safe.

We don't consider it safe, and I think the recent activity has shown that it is not safe, and they have been attacking vessels both around Yemen, but also all the way up to the coast of Saudi Arabia. We will be back the second we consider it safe.

It seems to us that the Chinese have a safer transit than others. That's at least what we are told.

We don't consider it safe now, what we need to do then is to go all the way around Africa, down Suez, and distribute product. Even that is now more challenging.

We just had to change an itinerary going in there because it was not safe to go into even the northern Saudi Arabian ports. Unfortunately, we don't see any immediate ease of the risk of trading in both the Southern Red Sea and in the Hormuz.

Okay. Then one for you, Bjørnar.

Working capital has been building. Do you see any unwinding of that into the second quarter, and could you talk a little bit about what's driving the change?

Yes, the reason for the build-up in inventory, that is quite simple. Fuel prices are up, and we have also had significantly more fuel on the vessels to ensure that we don't run out of fuel.

As fuel prices are dropping and we see a significantly lower risk of actually running out of fuel because the fuel is available at the pump, we should see a gradual reduction in the inventory and then over time a normalization. We would say that over time this is a temporary effect.

Okay. Then to Lasse on the average rate of the book of business that we kind of redisclose this quarter.

It's down compared to what we saw in Q4. What are our expectations in terms of that going forward?

It's down because, and you could also see that on the numbers, there was a little bit of a dip in the sentiment last fall when we did some of the renewals. We did them only for 1 year, most of them.

The question was what can we expect? We don't give any forward statements on market, but what I can share is that the contracts that we did in Q2 was at higher rates and longer durations.

As I mentioned, with the Chinese typically going from 1 year towards say 3 years, and what we have done in the second quarter at stronger rates than what we did in '25.

Then on to our outlook statements. We state that it's a little bit dependent upon the duration of the Middle East conflict.

What is our base case in terms of our

I would split that in two, and then you fill me in, Bjørnar. I think in terms of the revenue utilization on the shipping and in general, the Middle East conflict is not affecting us that much.

We're able to find alternative deployment of our vessels, and we still have a logistics operation in Dubai that has very little to do, but still we're there. The effect on us on the Middle East is really on the bunker side, meaning that if you see another spike in bunker costs, that will affect us.

We have not really seen an effect of the increased energy cost on the general economy yet, so that's also of course something that can affect global car sales. There are several effects that could hit us, but it's not really utilization and demand of shipping.

Right. Then there is a question on dividends from Jørgen at DNB.

He's asking, is the liquidity level target base for that, or are there other measures being taken into account in that equation when we do dividends?

When we look at dividends, and then from a balance sheet perspective, we look at multiple factors. Liquidity being one of them, where we have stated that what we consider to be a sound liquidity level, that is $1 billion, which is split between cash to run the business and then revolving credit capacity to have extra buffers if something happens, or for also exciting investment opportunities.

Then we also certainly look at how much debt should we have in the company, and then we're also looking at the equity ratio. It all boils down to that we want to have a strong financial position of the company.

It's really that part, and then looking at the net profit. If the balance sheet is very, very strong, then we open up for a discussion with the board on whether we should pay a little bit extra, which we have done now many quarters or many half-years in a row.

All right. That seems to be running towards the end of the questions, unless we pause a little bit and give it a little time.

There is one question about the 24th of September that we mentioned. It's going to be a market update, it's going to be concentrated on the market rather than the company as such.

Both the global OEM market and then, of course, a deep dive into the shipping market. You're welcome if you'd like to learn more about that.

All right. Should we wrap it up

here? I think that's it.

Any

final words to wrap up, Lasse?

I will just repeat what I said. We are very happy with the quarter.

We're happy with the first half-year, proud to present a solid dividend. There is a strong outlook.

The outlook has improved during the quarter, and we stay quite optimistic on 2026 and the underlying market. Thank you.

Thank you.