Sitio Royalties Corp.

Good morning. My name is Samantha, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the CISIO Royalties Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. Our lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Ross Wong, Senior Director of Corporate Finance and Investors Relations.

Ross, you may begin your conference.

Thanks, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to CITIO Realty's second quarter 2022 earnings call. If you don't already have a copy of our recent press release and updated investor presentation, please visit our website at www.citio.com. where you will find them in our investor relations section. With me today to discuss second quarter 2022 financial and operating results is Chris Conocenti, our chief executive officer, and Kerry Osica, our chief financial officer, and other members of our executive leadership team. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that our discussion today may contain four looking statements. These statements may include or are not limited to estimates of future volumes, operating expenses, and other financial metrics. They may also include statements concerning anticipated cash flow, liquidity, business strategy, and other plans and objectives for the company. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, we can provide no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Please see our Form 10-Q, which was filed with the SEC on August 8, 2022, the company's proxy statement on Schedule 14A, filed with the SEC on May 5th, 2022. Our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2021, as well as other SEC filings for listening factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Please also note that on this call, we may use the terms EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, discretionary cash flow, and cash GNA. These are financial measures that are not presented in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. While CTO believes such non-GAAP measures are useful for investors, they are not measures of financial performance under GAAP and should not be considered in isolation or as an alternative to any measure of such performance derived in accordance with GAAP. These non-GAAP measures have limitations with analytical tools, and you should not consider them in isolation or as substitutes for analysis of results that are reported under GAAP. These non-GAAP measures may not be comparable to similarly titled measures used by other companies in our industry or across different industries. These are non-GAAP financial measures, and we have provided reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our most recent earnings release.

And with that, I'll turn the call over to Chris. Thanks, Ross. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining CTO's inaugural quarterly earnings call. Overall, second quarter 2022 financial and operational results exceeded our internal expectations, and we made significant progress on execution of our large-scale minerals consolidation strategy with the completion of the reverse merger with Falcon Minerals on June 7th, the signing and closing of the Foundation Minerals acquisition in late June, and the announcement of the Momentum Minerals acquisition, which closed in late July. In aggregate, all transactions resulted in the acquisition of more than 68,000 net royalty acres and increased our total NRAs by approximately 65% to more than 173,000. Completing the foundation and momentum acquisitions further weighted our asset portfolio towards the Permian Basin, which comprises approximately 80% of our NRAs. In June, we also changed the name of our company from Desert Peak Minerals to City of Royalty and listed our Class A common stock on the New York Stock Exchange, which trades under the stock ticker STR. Since there were several large transactions that occurred during the quarter, I want to explain our second quarter 2022 financial reporting methodology so there is a clear understanding of the metrics we'll be referring to later on the call. Our reported second quarter 2022 financials include a full quarter contribution from legacy Desert Seas Minerals assets in the Permian Basin and contributions from the acquired assets based on transaction closing dates, which includes 24 days from legacy Falcon Minerals assets and seven days from legacy Foundation Minerals assets. In our reported financials, there was no contribution from the assets acquired from Momentum Minerals since that transaction closed subsequent to the second quarter. In January 2022, when the reverse merger with Falcon Minerals was publicly announced, we issued first half 2022 financial and operational guidance for the combined company. Therefore, For comparability to the first half 2022 guidance, I will sometimes refer to pro forma combined second quarter 2022. This refers to metrics as if legacy Desert Peak Minerals and legacy Falcon Minerals assets have been combined for the entire quarter. Now, let's briefly review our pro forma combined first half 2022 results relative to the combined company guidance that was provided in January 2022. In summary, we met or exceeded all production-related guidance metrics, including average daily production on a BOE basis, average daily oil production in barrels, percent oil production, and percent production from the Permian Basin. Second quarter 2022 pro forma combined production was 15,149 BOEs per day, which exceeded expectations and was primarily driven by the timing and performance of wells turned in line on our Permian assets. This continued strong production output in the second quarter resulted in first half 2022 pro forma combined production of 15,317 VOEs per day, which is 9.4% above the midpoint of our first half 2022 guidance range and 5.6% above the high end of that range. Pro forma combined first half 2022 oil production of 50.4% was on the lower end of our 50 to 53% guidance range. However, Looking at percent oil production alone is a bit misleading because Proclama combined first half 2022 oil volumes of 7,720 barrels per day exceeded the high end of the implied guidance range for barrels of oil production, which was 7,685 barrels per day. Furthermore, approximately 75% of Proclama combined first half 2022 production volumes came from the Permian assets, which exceeded guidance by nearly 2%. Second quarter cash G&A of $3.7 million, which excludes share-based compensation and one-time transaction costs, was slightly below the midpoints of our full-year 2022 quarterly run rate of $3.9 million that was disclosed in our most recent guidance issued on June 27th. Now, turning to second quarter actual recorded results. Production volumes were 12,402 DOEs per day. Adjusted EBITDA was $76.7 million. And discretionary cash flow was $75.5 million, all record highs for CTO, which were driven primarily by a 20% increase in quarter-over-quarter realized pricing inclusive of hedging impact to $76.28 per BOE, and the integration of assets from Falcon and Foundation during the quarter. Consistent with our publicly disclosed capital allocation framework, the Board utilized a 65% payout ratio to determine the dividend per share declared for the second quarter. However, instead of applying the payout ratio to reported second quarter discretionary cash flow, which would have resulted in a 58 cents per share dividend, the board approved a second quarter dividend of 71 cents per share based on $91.4 million of pro forma discretionary cash flow, which is inclusive of Falcon Minerals cash flow for the entire quarter and excludes transaction fees related to the reverse merger. We believe that the dividend of 71 cents per share for the second quarter returns the intended amount of capital to shareholders and does not penalize investors for the closing timing of the Falcon Minerals merger. We are particularly pleased that the dividend came in only a penny lower for the combined enterprise as compared to Falcon's first quarter split adjusted dividend, while we moved from Falcon's historical 100% payout framework to our 65% dividend payout methodology. For the second half of 2022, we are reiterating our average daily production range of 18,000 to 19,000 BOEs per day and slightly lowering the ranges for gathering transportation for BOE and cash taxes after reviewing completed second quarter results. On assets currently owned and as of the end of the second quarter, there were 26.8 net line-of-sight wells versus only 58 net wells that have been turned in line since the beginning of 2019, implying strong visible growth. which gives us confidence in this production range. As I touched on briefly earlier, we had a very active quarter on the mergers and acquisitions front and continued to execute on our large-scale, permanent weighted consolidation strategy, including the momentum acquisition, which closed in July. We have completed five transactions of at least 10,000 NRAs since June of 2021. Since the beginning of 2019, we've grown our NRA position by more than 365%. which is over four and a half times that of our nearest public peer. Additionally, I'd like to remind you that the foundation acquisition was effective April 1st, and the momentum acquisition was effective March 1st. Through the end of July, we had received approximately $15 million in the form of post-effective date, but pre-closing cash receipts from these assets. Given the effective dates and the time required to collect cash on royalties owed to us, We expect to receive more post-effective date but pre-closing date cash receipts over the coming months, which will be utilized to accelerate debt repayment. In addition to having no lease operating expenses and 100% of our capital expenditures being discretionary, one of the key differences between our business model versus a traditional EMP operator is how scalable our cost structure is. Our cash margin for BOE improves with each acquisition since we don't operate assets and don't need to grow headcount linearly as we increase our mineral and royalty cash flow. For context, in 2020, our cash G&A per BOE was $4.45, and we had 24 employees and less than 50,000 NRAs. This metric falls to $2.31 per BOE at the midpoint of our second half guidance. This represents a decrease of $2.14 per BOE, or 48% since 2020, and we are now approaching $2 per BOE. That concludes my prepared remarks.

I'd like to open up the call for questions.

At this time, I'd like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.

Your first question comes from the line of Jenny Wall with Barclays.

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking our questions. Our first question may be just on leverage and A and D. Post the foundation and momentum deals, leverage is about one and a half times, and your target is to improve that to one time. You put hedges in place for protection. We forecast really strong free cash flow or cash flow Can you talk about how your current leverage impacts CIDEO on the A&D front, specifically in terms of timing, size, and structure of future deals?

Hello? Can you hear us? We can hear you now, yes.

Great. Great. Good morning, Janine. So, yeah, our focus on acquisitions is still on large-scale consolidation. I would say that near-term, our focus is going to be more weighted towards deleveraging and getting back below one-time leverage. So, I think you should expect us to look at transactions or prioritize transactions that have a stock component that would allow us to continue deleveraging, bringing assets and cash flow into the enterprise, but not adding to that leverage.

Okay, great. And then maybe adjusting the elephant in the room on your appetite for the larger scale accretive acquisitions. Given the minerals business model versus, say, the upstream operator model, how are you currently thinking about CIDEO's scale in terms of your ability to compete versus peers in both deals and how you compete for investor dollars? Do you see a meaningful advantage in CIDEO getting larger, or do you currently think that competitive as is. Thank you.

Yeah, so I think the scale that we have today allows us to compete for larger transactions, but the question is, do we have the scale and relevancy for public investors as they look at their investment alternatives across the energy landscape? And so I think that's one area where we can continue to improve, and that's really the purpose of our large-scale consolidation strategy is building something that's truly investable and competitive across all acquisitions. So, you know, that's why we focus on the large-scale acquisitions. That's why we look for ways to grow the enterprise and add more capital to the business.

Great. Thank you.

Control line of Derek Whitfield with Citifilm.

Good morning to all. Congrats on a strong first quarter. Thanks, Derek. With my first question, I wanted to focus on your growth trajectory during the second half. Based on your Q2 results, line of sight inventory, and noted transaction closures, how do you see the trajectory of volumes during Q3 and Q4?

Yeah, so we don't have specific individual quarterly guidance, but what I can tell you is you're going to see a ramp just because the momentum transaction closed in late July. So you won't see a full quarter contribution from momentum until the fourth quarter. You'll see a bit of a ramp just from that. And then when you look at our line-of-sight inventory, where we have roughly 27 net normalized line-of-sight wells, that gives us visibility into organic growth on the asset today.

So we do see the organic growth continue through the back half of the year. And more broadly, just on cycle times, how are you guys thinking about duct conversions in an environment where operators are continuing to add rigs, but we're not seeing a commensurate increase in frac spreads?

Well, we have seen, just like everybody else has, the decrease in the duct inventory. But when we look at pace of development, so for us, the metric that we follow most closely is wells per DSU per year. and that's the number of wells that are turned online on our asset. To us, that's the most important metric. It's not rigged because you can have different net interest in any given well, but when we look at net wells turned in line per year per unit, that metric is continuing to trend up and is becoming competitive with 2019 levels.

Perfect. Thanks for your time. Thank you.

And as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star then the number one on your telephone keypad.

Again, that's star followed by the number one. And there are no other questions in queue at this time.

And this concludes the Q&A portion for today's call. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.