MARINE MONEY N.Y. CONFERENCE 2005 – SPEECH GIVEN BY MR STANDARD YARDSTICK ON THE OCCASION OF BENCHMARKCO Inc IPO

Matt McCleery: Ladies & Gentlemen, it is an honour to re-introduce to you one of our great Captains of industry, Mr Standard Yardstick, who navigated Benchmarkco Ltd through the great era of fortunes and misfortunes of the roaring fifties, swinging sixties and their immediate aftermath. The occasion today is the long awaited IPO of Benchmarkco Inc on the New York Stock Exchange. Benchmarkco Inc controls 2% of the world tanker and dry bulk capacity with a combined fleet value of close to $6 billion, making it one of the largest listed companies in its immediate peer group. Standard?

Mr Standard Yardstick: Thank you Matt. It is an honour to meet again and to have the opportunity to co-operate together over the next 25 years. We are relaunching Benchmarkco as a public company. We look to our future with equal confidence as we did in December 1949 when we founded a similar enterprise on a private basis. Most industry observers believe that shipping growth and profitability over the next 25 years may well resemble the period 1950 to 1974, which has long been erased from memory, rather than the unprofitable years of 1975 to 1999 through which most industry participants have lived. This loss of memory has created certain biases in the valuation of public shipping companies that I will be addressing later.

The “new regime of low growth low profitability 1975 – 1999” has come to an end, and we may now be moving into a “back to the future old regime of high growth and high profitability 2005 onwards” ala 1950 – 1974 style. Figures 41 & 42 show the long term fluctuations in operating returns at live replacement cost illustrate the comment just made about the shift in long term cycles.

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