On October 12 DHT Holdings told the market it had fixed roughly half of its fourth-quarter spot days at an average of $509,100 per day, and that third-quarter fleet earnings had landed at $141,300 per day across 2,055 revenue days . For most shipowners that would be a trading statement. For DHT it is a dividend guide published seven weeks before the quarter closes, because the company's capital-allocation policy is to pay out 100% of ordinary net income, and the $1.22 declared in August was the sixty-sixth consecutive quarterly payment .
What DHT owns is unusually simple and entirely unhedged. The fleet consists of crude oil tankers in the VLCC segment — very large crude carriers, roughly two million barrels apiece — and nothing else . Twenty-three are in the water today, after the July sale of the 2007-built DHT Bauhinia for $51.0 million of net proceeds and the delivery of the newbuilding DHT Impala the same week ; a twenty-fourth, DHT Oryx, is contracted at Hanwha Ocean for August 2028 . Revenue arrives in exactly two forms, voyage charter hire earned in the spot market and fixed time-charter hire, alongside a rounding-error fee line of $0.4 million in the first half for managing third-party ships . Underneath sits a cost base that barely moves: vessel operating expenses of $18.6 million, depreciation of $27.8 million and G&A of $5.6 million in the second quarter .
All of this is happening because the Strait of Hormuz is contested. Iran's war with the United States and Israel has pushed crude out of the Gulf onto a shuttle system that burns enormous quantities of ship-days, and October was the worst month on record for attacks on commercial shipping in and around the strait, with the International Maritime Organization listing more than thirty damaged VLCCs — eleven of them in October alone, or about 3.5% of a global supertanker fleet of more than nine hundred . That is the engine under DHT's earnings, and the reason the argument about this stock is really an argument about 2028.
The booking update is the dividend, and the conversion rate is nearly one
DHT's estimated profit-and-loss break-even for the second half of 2026 is $29,700 per day, and...