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Tsakos Energy Navigation Ltd (NYSE:TNP)Q4 2018 Earnings Conference CallMarch 29, 2019, 10:00 a.m. ET
Contents: Prepared Remarks Questions and Answers Call Participants Prepared Remarks:Operator
Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Tsakos Energy Navigation Conference Call on the Fourth Quarter and Year-end Financial Results. We have with us Mr. Takis Arapoglou, Chairman of the Board; Mr. Nikolas Tsakos, President and CEO; Mr. Paul Durham, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. George Saroglou, Chief Operating Officer of the company.
At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions) I must advise, the conference is being recorded today.
And now I pass the floor to Mr. Nicolas Bornozis, President of Capital Link, Investor Relations Advisor at Tsakos Energy Navigation. Please go ahead, sir.
Nicolas Bornozis -- Investor Relations
Thank you very much, and good morning to all of our participants. This is Nicolas Bornozis of Capital Link, Investor Relations Advisor to Tsakos Energy Navigation. This morning, the company publicly released its financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2018. In case you do not have a copy of today's earnings release, please call us at (212) 661-7566 or email us at ten@capitallink.com, and we will email a copy to you right away.
Please note that parallel to today's conference call, there is also a live audio and slide webcast, which can be accessed on the company's website on the front page at www.tenn.gr. The conference call will follow the presentation slides, so please we urge you to access the presentation of the webcast.
Please note that the slides of the webcast will be available as an archive on the company's website after the conference call. Also, please note that the slides of the webcast presentation are user controlled, and that means that by clicking on the proper button, you can move to the next or to the previous slide on your own.
At this time, I would like to read the Safe Harbor statement. This conference call and slide presentation of the webcast contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, which may affect TEN's business prospects and results of operations. Such risks are more fully disclosed in TEN's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
And before turning the floor over to the company, I would like to mention two things. First of all, on Monday, April 1st, 2019, next week, the company's management will be participating at the Capital Link International Shipping Conference in New York. Then on Wednesday, April 3, 2019, the company is hosting an Investor and Analyst Day of its own in New York. Those of you interested to join the Investor and Analyst Day, please contact us at Capital Link and we will be happy to have you. You can call us at (212) 661-7566.
And now, I will turn over the call to Mr. Takis Arapoglou, the Chairman of the Board of Tsakos Energy Navigation. Mr. Arapoglou, please go ahead, sir.
Takis Arapoglou -- Chairman of the Board
Thank you, Nicholas. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Coming out of the longest bad market ever with positive operating performance, being able to pay obligations and a steady dividend is quite an achievement, confirming our operating model and our supreme industrial platform. It's important to note, that we have managed to repay debt equivalent to $2 per share and to maintain a cash position of $2.5 per share equivalent. And now with the stronger markets in the fourth quarter continuing at admittedly lower pace in 2019, we're benefiting from profit sharing arrangements and look forward to a stronger year positioning for growth and for renewing our fleet and further growing our platform.
Once again, I'd like to congratulate on behalf of the Board Nikolas Tsakos and his colleagues, his team and wish him an equally successful 2019. That's it for me for now. Over to you Nikolas Tsakos. Thank you.
Nikolas P. Tsakos -- Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Chairman. And with you and the board's support, hopefully, 2019 would be a much better year than 2018. 2018, to put it with a few words, was a rough year, as you said, with a happy ending at the later part. The first three quarters, we experienced one of the worst spot tanker markets in recent memory. However, the last part of the year then spilling over in the first quarter has been much more rewarding. Since the beginning of the year and we're very close to the end of the quarter, the market has very -- have normalized, but they have normalized at healthy and accretive levels. The VLCCs have averaged in the -- since the beginning of the year in the mid-30s, the Suezmaxes in the 20s together with the Aframaxes. The LR2s have done even better than that. Our clean investments have done significantly better than that. And even the product carriers are enjoying a period of revival with the levels in the mid-20s for the larger vessels, the 50,000 plus categories and upper teens for the 37,000 tonners. So all the levels that we are enjoying in the spot market are accretive levels. And we are looking forward, given we do not exactly believe, hopefully, it's true, the forecast that Mr. Saroglou will take you from various brokers that show a very strong revival of the market after -- in the second half mainly due to the 2020 legislation taking ships out of competition for a significant period of time. I think the most important thing that we have seen after a very tough year in 2018 was the company has been able again to continue its positive cash flow -- a positive operating cash flow, maintaining our dividend, continuously repaying significant -- reducing our debt significantly.
As the Chairman said, we have reduced $2 per share worth of debt, and we are steadily maintaining always a strong liquidity of at least $2.50 per share. For those of you, just to put it, we are -- we have about 90 million shares outstanding as a company. But I was -- as I was saying, the most important part is the psychology has changed. And a big number of our customers are looking to take up to three years or even longer of accretive cover on existing tonnage. We are seeing the same to the LNG market. We have been fortunate to charter our ships out at accretive rates for the next couple of years. So we are looking, I will talk later about this, to grow this business significantly.
And in our strategic relationships, after taking delivery last year of 15 vessels, growing the fleet by 30%, all of them with long-term charters, we are now building four ships, all of them against very long employment. So we believe, as we always said, to build responsibly and not to bring tonnage in the market with no employment. The company right now has 14 vessels on the fuel spot and 19 vessels on profit sharing arrangement, which allows us to take advantage of the movements in the market, however, maintaining a very good protection to our bottom line.
And then with this, I will ask Mr. Saroglou to give us the -- his report on the 2018 operating performance of the company and the beginning of the year. Here's George.
George V. Saroglou -- Chief Operating Officer
Thank you very much, Nikolas, and good morning to all of you. In our last earnings call back in November, we talked about the brighter prospects of the tanker market that was starting to emerge after three challenging quarters in 2018. Today, we report the operating and financial results of the fourth quarter of 2018, which are positive again. We are happy to reiterate our beliefs that the prospects for the tanker market continue to be favorable.
Main drivers behind the market strength since the start of the fourth quarter are; strong global oil demand growing year-over-year in excess of 1.3 million, 1.4 million barrels per day; higher OPEC and Russian production during the seasonally strong fourth quarter of 2018; strong crude oil exports from the United States with added tonne miles and global fleet utilization; limited vessels supply at the global tanker fleets at very little growth in 2018, thanks to the higher scrapping levels since 2012. This environment, we saw and continue to see strong appetite by oil majors to partner with our company in accretive, long-term business projects and also extend charters as improved and profitable for the bottom line rates on existing vessels of the fleet as the company's recent announceme
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