Gulfport Energy Corporation

Greetings and welcome to the Gulfport Energy Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Jessica Antle, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Melissa, and good morning. Welcome to Gulfport Energy's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. Speakers on today's call include John Reinhart, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Hodges, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. In addition, Matthew Rucker, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, will be available for the Q&A portion of today's call. I would like to remind everybody that during this conference call, the participants may make certain forward-looking statements. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those that are indicated in these forward-looking statements due to a variety of factors. Information concerning these factors can be found in the company's filings with the SEC. In addition, we may reference non-GAAP measures. Please refer to our most recent earnings release and our investor presentation for important disclosures regarding such measures, including reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP financial measures. An updated Gulfport presentation was posted yesterday evening to our website in conjunction with the earnings announcement. Please review at your leisure. At this time, I would like to turn in the call over to John Reinhart, President and CEO.

Thank you, Jessica, and thank you for joining our call today. I'll begin my comments with a discussion of the 2026 development program we announced yesterday with our earnings release, followed by an overview of the 2025 results. Building on our consistent operational execution, successful discretionary acreage acquisition programs, and strong financial performance, our 2026 outlook is centered on prioritizing our most attractive opportunities and allocating capital to maximize value. This year's development program is focused on sustaining the company's exposure to a constructive natural gas environment, and as such, we plan to center the majority of our development efforts in the dry gas and wet gas windows of the Utica. These development areas represent our highest return wells at today's commodity prices, and we forecast more than 75% of our 2026 turn in line program to be weighted to these two areas. As a reminder, the Utica Wet Gas, which ranks as the most economic development area in the company's portfolio, has been a key focus of our inventory ads over the past few years, and this planned development activity reinforces our success of adding high quality high return inventory that supports near-term development we remain consistent in our capital allocation framework and continue to believe the most attractive uses of our available free cash flow are discretionary acreage acquisitions highlighted by today's announcement of the expected successful results of our existing program and the continued repurchase of our undervalued equity we expect to maintain an active repurchase program through 2026, and our strong financial position provides maximum flexibility as we intend to utilize both our adjusted free cash flow generation and available capacity on our revolving credit facility to opportunistically repurchase our equity while maintaining an attractive leverage ratio of approximately one times or below. This includes our announced plan to deploy more than 140 million towards repurchases in the first quarter of 2026, reflecting our confidence in the value of our business and the upside we see in our equity today. Total capital spend for the year is projected to be in the range of $400 million to $430 million, which includes $35 to $40 million of maintenance, land, and seismic investment. Embedded in this program is approximately $15 million targeting base production improvements across both basins, which includes highly accretive workovers aimed at enhancing long-term well performance and reducing natural production declines. In addition, we plan to invest an incremental $10 million in the Marcellus North development area when compared to our 2025 four-year spend. directed at drilling two wells in Jefferson County, Ohio during the second half of 2026 and then to be carried as ducts into 2027. This activity is aimed at confirming phase window and production mix, which will support future development planning and midstream evaluation across our substantial inventory positions in both Jefferson and Belmont counties. With respect to our maintenance land and seismic investments, This spend includes approximately $5 million directed towards acquiring proprietary 3D seismic in 2026 that will facilitate improved well planning in our targeted Monroe County discretionary buy area. The company currently forecasts approximately 60% of our drilling and completion capital will be deployed in the first half of 2026 with the activity trending slightly lower in the third and fourth quarters. We will continue to execute on our current discretionary acreage acquisition program, primarily in Belmont and Monroe counties. Driven by our recent success, we now expect to achieve the high end of the previously provided range, investing approximately $100 million in total, of which $62.9 million was deployed at year-end 2025. We plan to conclude this program during the first quarter of 2026, and upon successful completion, we expect to add over two years of core drilling inventory at our current development pace. These acquisitions are being made at approximately $2 million per net location, well below recent valuation metrics implied in larger inorganic transactions in the immediate area, and reinforces the significant value uplift we are capturing through these attractive organic leasing efforts. Since 2022, our targeted discretionary acreage acquisitions successful execution of U development on our Utica position, and delineation and development efforts into Marcellus have collectively unlocked substantial value across our core assets. The discretionary acreage acquisition and U development initiatives by the end of the first quarter of 26 will have added over five and a half years of high-quality net locations, in addition to the four years of delineated net Marcellus locations. In total, the company will have expanded our gross inventory by more than 40% and will continue to monitor opportunities to further expand our resource depth. Turning to production, we forecast our development program will deliver 1.03 to 1.055 billion cubic feet equivalent per day in 2026, relatively flat over our full year 2025 average. This outlook incorporates several temporary factors. including known production downtime associated with simultaneous operations of an offsetting operator, as well as planned third-party midstream maintenance in the first quarter of 2026. In addition, winter storm fern created weather-related downtime that modestly impacted full-year volumes and is incorporated in our full-year production guidance. Importantly, these impacts are short-lived, and as we move through 2026, we expect production levels to strengthen as new wells come online and these production impacts abate, which positions the company attractively for an improving commodity environment. Reflecting this momentum, we forecast fourth quarter 2026 production will increase approximately 5% compared to the fourth quarter of 2025. In our investor deck on slide 11, we include a more detailed outlook on our expected 2026 capital and production cadence. Shifting to the company's 2025 performance, Gulfport delivered another year of strong operational and financial performance, strategically expanding our high-quality resource base and remained consistent in our commitment to returning capital to shareholders. After adjusting for free cash flow utilized for discretionary acreage acquisitions, the company returned more than 100% of our adjusted free cash flow to shareholders through common stock purchases during the year. all while maintaining a solid financial position with leverage below one times a year end. Full year 2025 capital expenditures, excluding discretionary acreage acquisitions, totaled approximately 463 million, including 354 million of base-operated DNC capital expenditures and 35 million of maintenance land spending, with production for the full year averaging 1.04 billion cubic feet equivalent per day. In the fourth quarter, we completed the drilling and completion of our first U development wells in the Utica. These wells were successfully drilled, fracked, and recently brought online during the first quarter. Early results are encouraging with the performance tracking in line with expectations and consistent with recent traditionally developed dry gas offsets. In closing, 2025 represented a solid year of execution for Gulfport. with operational performance supporting attractive adjusted free cash flow generation, inventory expansion, and consistent capital return through equity repurchases. As we move into 2026, our story remains the same. Prioritize our highest return opportunities, deepen our high quality resource base, and grow sustainable free cash flow that can be used to continue delivering meaningful returns to our shareholders. Now we'll turn the call over to Michael to discuss our financial results.