Eneti’s fourth-quarter results fell well short of analyst expectations, but the owner of wind-turbine installation vessels (WTIV) still came across with a payout for shareholders.
New York-listed Eneti posted a $28.3m loss for the final three months of 2021 versus a $466m deficit during the same period last year.
Despite the negative result, the company still announced that its board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.01 per common share.
The latest quarterly results are mainly those of Seajacks International, a WTIV operator in which Eneti took a 58% stake in August for $600m as the former Scorpio Bulkers left the dry bulk sector.
Eneti’s adjusted fourth-quarter loss, which excluded certain costs related to acquiring Seajacks, came in at $26.7m, compared to an adjusted deficit of $174m for the last quarter of 2020.
But $12.3m of Eneti’s fourth-quarter loss was from Scorpio Bulkers’ $100m investment in sister company Scorpio Tankers, which trades on Nasdaq as STNG, in October 2018.
These results produced a $0.94 loss per share for Eneti shareholders in the fourth quarter, missing analysts’ estimates by $0.56 per share but beating the year-ago loss per share of $40.90.
“This morning, Eneti reported fourth-quarter earnings that came well below our expectations largely as a function of higher G&A costs as well as a non-cash mark-to-market loss on the value of STNG shares,” Stifel analyst Ben Nolan wrote in a note.
“Backing out the Scorpio impact (which should be the case in Q1), the results would have been closer, but still, revenue was lower and [general and administrative] costs were higher.
“While quarterly results are less meaningful for the company in the early stages of development, it is hard to imagine numbers much worse than this.”
Eneti recorded $16.5m in revenue for the fourth quarter against $50.1m in revenue a year earlier.
Eneti’s general and administrative (G&A) costs for the three-month period reached $16.8m versus $8.01m a year ago, but total operating expenses came in at $38.4m against $507m in the last quarter of 2020.
The owner registered a $26.1m profit for full-year 2021 versus a $672m loss for the prior year that include $693m in G&A costs.
Full-year revenue was $139m for 2021, compared to $164m for 2020.
