Evolution Petroleum Corporation, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Evolution Petroleum Fiscal Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for questions and comments after the presentation. I will now turn the call over to your host, Brady Hudson, Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome to Evolution Petroleum's fiscal full year 2023 earnings call. I'm joined by Kelly Lloyd, President and Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Stash, Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, and Mark Bunch, Chief Operating Officer. We released our fiscal 2023 full year and fourth quarter financial results after the market closed yesterday. Please refer to our earnings press release for additional information concerning these results. You can access our earnings release in the Investors section of our website. Please note that any statements and information provided in today's call speak only as of today's date, September 13, 2023, and any time-sensitive information may not be accurate at a later date. Our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements of management's beliefs and assumptions based on currently available information. These forward-looking statements are subject to the risks, assumptions, and uncertainties as described in our SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from those expected. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement. During today's call, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. Reconciliations of these measures to the closest comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release. Kelly will begin today's call with a few opening comments, followed by our operational results from COO Mark Munch, and then Ryan Stash, CFO, will review our fiscal year financials before turning back over to Kelly for closing comments. After our prepared remarks, the management team will be available to answer any questions. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. If you wish to listen to a webcast replay of today's call, it will be available on the Investors section of our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Kelly.

Thanks, Brandi. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us for today's call. We appreciate everyone's interest in our reporting of our successful fiscal 2023 operational and financial results. However, before we begin to discuss our recent results, I'd first like to make some general comments related to the announcement we put out this morning with PDEVCO concerning our definitive participation agreement to jointly develop the Chavarru oil field in the northwest shelf of southern New Mexico. It's a conventional oil-bearing San Andres play in the Permian Basin located in Chavez County. We're proud to partner with Pedevco, a company that shares our values and goals of providing superior total returns to shareholders. I will let Mark go into the details of the strategic partnership later, but I want to point out the biggest highlight of this arrangement first. The deal adds a new and exciting arrow in our quiver of capital allocation opportunities. In the past, in order to grow our production and reserves, We have relied heavily on the A&D market. While we've been quite successful and plan to continue that strategy, the 80-plus high-quality locations covered by this agreement will allow Evolution to grow or maintain its production and reserves even in times where asset-level transactions are priced at what we consider to be unattractive levels. In turn, we believe this will be highly supportive to our dividend program for years to come. The wells here are 90-plus percent oil and located in the Permian Basin, which is an important market to which we want to be exposed. Now on to our fiscal 2023 results. Our results for the period were solid and continued to demonstrate our assets' ability to generate strong free cash flow. We used our cash flow to once again fund operations, capital spending, and shareholder dividends. In addition, I'm pleased to report that we repaid $21.5 million of debt, again, all from cash flow, and exited the year with a debt-free balance sheet and increased liquidity. We continue generating meaningful free cash flow from the acquisitions completed over the previous years, and we'll use these to continue to fund our strategic objectives. Of course, our ongoing success is a direct reflection of the hard work and accomplishments of our team. I want to thank each and every member of the evolution team for their contributions and continued dedication to driving near and long-term value for our shareholders. During the fiscal year, we paid cash dividends totaling 48 cents per common share. This was 37% higher than for fiscal 2022, which we view as a clear indicator of the growth and strength of our business. Our board recently declared a cash dividend of 12 cents per share for fiscal Q1, 2024 payable on September 29th, marking the payment of our 40th consecutive quarterly dividend. Since the company began paying dividends in December of 2013, we've returned approximately 102.4 million or $3.09 per share of capital to investors. As we have discussed in the past, there are very few small-cap E&P companies that can say they've consistently paid a dividend for that length of time throughout several tumultuous commodity price cycles. We believe this reinforces the strategic view our board takes as we prudently grow the business through the targeted acquisition of solid, long-life, and low-decline assets that will continue to support a sustainable quarterly dividend for the immediate and long-term. In short, maintaining and ultimately growing the payment of a quarterly cash dividend remains front and center for our board and management team. I will now turn the call over to Mark to discuss operations.