Ha sido una sorpresa enorme. Cuando estuve leyendo el earnings call, me quedó muy claro que este año no habría dividendo especial.
Jon Chappell
Okay, final one for me. Maybe we thought going into this winter couldn't be as strong as the last two and maybe not as peaky as last year's winter, but as strong as maybe last year's average and the winter before. Last year you pleasantly surprised with a pretty robust special dividend. So, given where you kind of sit today with the financing, the rates that you think you'll achieve on the 4Q, but also given the fact that the stock prices almost 50% lower or 30% to 40% lower than where it was in November of the prior two years, how do you think about capital return for this fourth quarter period if you do attain these very healthy rates, is special dividend on the table, or do you think maybe you'd be more aggressive with the buyback given the valuation today?
Alastair Maxwell
Hey, John; Alastair. I think that -- before talking specifically about one or the other, I think that we continue to have that as priorities in terms of capital allocation, but we're making sure that the newbuild program is funded, and I think where we sit today with we're very confident about that, especially given the stage that we're at with the financing, as I talked about in my remarks. So I think having that as our first priority, we do continue to monitor the market and the cash flows that are coming from our ships that are trading in the spot market. We look forward to where we stand in the fourth quarter of this year. Clearly the market is seeing a significant pick-up, although we're not getting as much benefit if you like for the reasons that we talked about, and Paul was explaining earlier on.
So, I think that as we think about the scope for enhanced shareholder returns, it's something that we consider on a continual basis, and we're always looking to see if we can find ways to do it, but we are watching in particular the performance of the spot market. We're also looking at other elements of our strategy, including, for example, capital raisings by GasLog partners, dropdowns, those kinds of things also play into how we think about shareholder returns. And you'll recall that last year, we had three things all at the same time, we had a dropdown, we had the IDR adjustment modification, and we had a very strong market. And those are the three factors that together put us in a position where we were able to pay that special dividend.
So I think, again, Paul said earlier something that we monitor continually, we're always looking for ways that we can enhance shareholder returns, and it's too early to tell at this stage if we do find scope to do that, where we will do it through share repurchases or through special dividends, I think we need to see where we were at the time.
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