New Fortress Energy Inc.

Good day and welcome to the NFE fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Matt Reinhardt, Managing Director for Introductory Remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining today's conference call where we will discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results. This call is being recorded and will be available by replay on the Investors section of our website under the subheading Events and Presentations. At the same location, you will find a presentation that we will walk through on today's call. Please review this as it includes important information on forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. With that, I'll turn it over to our Chairman and CEO, Wes Edens.

All right, great, Matt, and thanks, everyone, for dialing in. Let's just jump into it here and start with the presentation that we sent out. So starting on page number three, quarterly financial results and annual financial results. So very, very good quarter concluding a very, very good year. $313 million in EBITDA for the quarter. That's roughly a 50% increase over the guidance that we had previously provided, so it was a big beat for that. Very positive outlook for 2025 and beyond. We were confirming our guidance for a billion dollars for this year in total, so by the numbers, a very, very good report. The profile of the business that we run is tremendous. We're an integrated gas to power company. We have five countries, seven terminals, manage or own nearly 10 gigawatts of power, so a very, very significant portfolio. It's a capital-intensive business to build, which is the bad news. But once it's created, as it largely is now, it has massive competitive barriers to entry. So sustainable competitive advantage are the terms that we use. And basically where we are right now is that we think by just focusing on our current markets, we feel that we have an opportunity in the next two years to grow EBITDA by 50% or more. So huge numbers, I know, but that's how big these markets are and how big the opportunities are if we execute on them. Growth with very little in the way of CapEx. and reduce then the amount of our debt outstanding and the cost of it dramatically. Those are the goals that we have. There's tremendous work by our people this last year and over the first couple months of this year. Tremendous work, actually. And I want to give a big thank you to all of them. We're very excited for what we have accomplished thus far this year, and we think that there's great things ahead. So with that, let's turn to page number four. A little bit more detail on the financial update. So basically here's the 314 and the 950. What is crystal clear is that the FLNG asset coming online was the star of the show for us, the star of the quarter, and contributing significantly to earnings now and also in the future. The volumes that are created there allowed us to optimize the portfolio and make significant returns, and the positions continue to do so in the quarters ahead. So two areas of focus for us is long-term growth in the core markets, number one, and number two are asset sales and deleveraging. So a little bit of the detail in terms of the business. Page number five, capital markets update. In the last six months or so, we have done a ton of different capital markets activities to strengthen the balance sheet, increase liquidity, and set ourselves up well for future growth. In October, we raised $409 in new equity, including $50 million of my own equity. In November, we extended the $900 million revolver to October of 2027. We issued the $2.7 billion bond that basically consolidated debt and extended its maturity out to 2029. And then in March, as recently as today, it's been a very busy period at the start of the year, we closed the $425 million term loan B upsize, and we refinanced our corporate facility in Brazil, which was $200 million, increased that to $350 million. Total of $4.775 billion in corporate transactions. And it's put us up in a terrific place in terms of our balance sheet and liquidity to now execute what our plans are. The goal is very simple. We want to deleverage, we want to simplify the capital structure, and we want to reduce debt costs, all of which are well in hand. So let's turn now to page number six. Gas supply update, as I said, FONG entering service was a big catalyst for us. And as a result, we have excess supply versus our current basic demand. The significant incremental demand that we see in our core markets will definitely come over the next couple of years, but this surplus then leads to the next question. Do we wait and sell excess cargoes over time until demand comes online, or do we hedge and sell today to capture excess spread? If you look at the chart on the right-hand side, the blue line represents the price of TTF as it goes forward. So you can see that it goes down fairly substantially over the next couple of years and then flattens out, as people expect, more and more gas to come onto the market. The yellow box represents the amount of gas or profitability that we have above our base returns. So the base returns at the bottom, that's if we sell to our customers down line with the returns that we generate. The yellow is the amount above that. And so the question is, do we hedge or sell some of this, or do we just let it all ride? I think in particular with the geopolitical time that we live in, In particular, the prospects for some kind of a resolution in the Ukraine-Russian war. We think that that alone would have a profound impact on the market. And if we did nothing and simply waited for the events to transpire, the yellow box could get bigger or it could get actually quite a bit smaller. And so the answer, what we did in our judgment, was to de-risk. sell a portion of it, keep significant upside if the market stays elevated or goes higher, but if the market falls, we're insulated, puts cash on balance sheet, conservative approach by us that we felt struck the right balance. It's good for our earnings. It's good for our cash flow. It was the right decision to make. We still retain a lot of optionality. So a very, very good result with our FLNG volumes. Page number seven, I'm just going to breeze on these because we're going to talk about them in some detail. Chris is going to talk about our fast LNG assets. I'll spend some time talking about Puerto Rico. We have our senior management, Leandro Cunha and Jeremy Dawson, on the phone to talk about Brazil. Lots of tremendous commercial activity. The greatest opportunities for us exist in our biggest markets. So there's a lot that we have to talk about that we're looking forward to. Chris?