Matador Resources Company

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first quarter 2025 Matador Resources Company Earnings Conference Call. My name is Tanya, and I'll be serving as your operator for today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will facilitate a question and answer session at the end of the company's remarks. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes, and the replay will be available on the company's website for one year as discussed in the company's earnings press release issued yesterday. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Matt Schmidt, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations for Matador. Mr. Schmidt, you may proceed.

Thank you, LaTanya. And good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Matador's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. Some of the presenters today will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures regularly used by Matador Resources in measuring the company's financial performance. Reconciliations of such non-GAAP financial measures with the comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP are contained at the end of the company's earnings press release. As a reminder, certain statements included in this morning's presentation may be forward-looking and reflect the company's current expectations or forecasts of future events based on the information that is now available. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are contained in the company's earnings release and its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and any subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. In addition to our earnings press release issued yesterday, I would like to remind everyone that you can find a slide presentation in connection with the first quarter of 2025 earnings release under the Investor Relations tab on our corporate website. And finally, as a reminder, I would like to invite all all of you to join us for our first ever Town Hall conference call on Monday, April 28th at 3.30 p.m. Central Time. Please send any questions that you have in advance by email to investors at matadorresources.com no later than 3 p.m. Central Time on Friday, April 25th. The live conference call will be available under the Investor Relations tab on our corporate website. And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Joe Foran, our founder, chairman, and CEO. Joe?

Thank you, Mac. As we've often done in the past, I like to begin by emphasizing some of the themes that we expressed in our earnings release. The first one is that we've been here before in challenging times, and we've come out of it each time stronger than we went in. So we have confidence in the plans that we've submitted to you today. We feel we have the right tools in the toolbox. They give us the flexibility and the optionality to make the plans work and advance Matador's interest and value, regardless of the atmosphere or how much it changes throughout the year. Second is to call to the attention that not only will we try to make the prudent decisions, but can really point to the operational excellence of our field people and our operating staff is that we've had growth in the revenues to a point that we were able to repay $190 million of our debt. We have record gas processing. The Marlin plant is coming online, and between the Marlin plant and Black River, we'll have processing capacity of 720 million, which is quite a bit better than the original Black River plant that was only 60 million. And that provides us a large amount of flow assurance, which is critical these times to get all of it you can to market. And finally, the point three is that we want One, it emphasized how we have an alignment of interest with our shareholders. That's one of the reasons that we have the board authorized a repurchase of shares to be sure people knew of that alignment. But second is to point out what we did in the first quarter, what we being the management leadership team, that we had – over 31 transactions. Virtually everybody on the management team bought shares, and then we had over 100 other employees buying stock where other companies were not as aggressive. But our guys, like our leadership team, recognize a good deal when they see it, So we felt it was important to offer the opportunity to have a repurchase of shares. At this price, we think it's a good buying opportunity and a good entry point. And so we welcome your questions. And finally, there's been some concern about production. Is it going up or is it going down? We slowed down a little bit on our production, but it wasn't because the wells were performing well. They've done better than they expected, but what you had was you had some shut-ins due to maintenance, and in light of that, the maintenance and force majeure events, in light of that, we were off by one or two percent, which You know, we could have easily made that up, but it was better to move slowly but surely to be sure to provide growth for this year, reduce expenses, and to wait for the processing to come online so we receive the full economic benefit of our production. And we'll have growth at the end of the year, remind everybody, that if we're 1% down now, by the end of the year, we'll be up 17%.