Global Ship Lease reports Q3 normalized EPS $2.62, consensus $2.37

Reports Q3 revenue $192.7M, consensus $180.36M. George Youroukos, our Executive Chairman, stated: “Throughout 2025, the immense complexity and instability of the geopolitical situation and the heightened uncertainty around trade policy have stood in stark contrast to the consistency and strength of the mid-sized and smaller containership charter market. In this environment, our commitment to maximizing optionality in both our fleet and our balance sheet has continued to serve GSL well, both in terms of growing our quarterly earnings and in our ability to secure additional forward charter coverage at attractive rates for the multi-year period ahead. A growing number of external factors and disruptions is progressively fragmenting and reducing the efficiency of the global containership supply chain and, as a consequence, increasing the number of ships required to move a given quantity of cargo. Diffusion of intermediate and final manufacturing out from China and across Southeast Asia; companies in large consumer economies diversifying the sourcing and geographic origins of goods to manage supply chain risk; China developing and diversifying its end-markets; sudden trade policy changes disrupting or diverting trade flows – all of these factors are driving the liners to seek additional, flexible tonnage to meet the practical needs of their existing business. While routing, timing, and deployments are all in flux, the reality is that containerized trade continues to grow. With idle capacity in the global fleet almost non-existent, we continue to negotiate and sign attractively priced charters off forward positions. 2025 is fully covered, 2026 is approaching full coverage, and our open positions in 2027 are reducing fast. Driven by those newly signed charters that have brought our revenue backlog to nearly $2 billion over an average of 2.5 years, we have decided to once again increase our supplemental quarterly dividend. We are raising it by a further $0.40 per common share on an annualized basis, an uplift of 19%, which will push our overall dividend up to $2.50 per common share, annualized. By way of the supplemental dividend, we have now up-sized our overall dividend three times since 2Q 2024, by an aggregate annualized total of $1.00 per common share, an increase of 67%. We remain both vigilant and disciplined in our assessment of fleet renewal opportunities and believe that we are well positioned to act decisively when the right opportunities present themselves.”