Transportadora de Gas del Sur SA TGS

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of TGS Q4 2023 results. My name is Christian Johansen. I'm the CEO of TGS. And with me today, we have Sven Berg Larsen, our chief financial officer. So I'll take you through the forward-looking statements first that you can read after the presentation. And then we go to the first slide, which highlights the summary of Q4. And obviously, as we usually do, we have recorded this on the sixth business day of the quarter. But I'm still going to go through the numbers. So we had total POC revenue, so percentage of completion revenues of $206 million in Q4 that compares to $227 million in the Q4 of 2022, but with a very different mix of sales. So first of all, we had late sales of $59 million that compares to $137 million in Q4 of 2022. And then we had early sales of $59 million, which compares to $31 million in the last quarter of 2022. And then finally, we had a strong quarter in terms of proprietary revenue, mainly related to our acquisition activities from the former mag size, where we had $88 million compared to $60 million in Q4 of 2022. We had a stronger than expected EBITDA. We had $137 million. That compares to 151 million in Q4 of last year. We had solid contract inflow, $275 million of new contracts signed in the quarter. And given that we signed more contracts than we had revenues, we increased our backlog and our backlog as of the 31st of December now is including acquisition is about $545 million, which is about 21% higher than it was in the same quarter of last year. Last but not least, the PGS transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024 and the integration planning is well underway with teams from both companies trying to do the necessary analysis to be ready to kick off on day one after the close. So just summarizing the full year of 2023 and the POC highlights. So we had continued strong early sales momentum. So early sales were up 128% year on year. We had good performance by acquisition, 26% growth in acquisition. We had a backlog growth, as I said, of 21%. So we're well positioned for growth also in 2024 based on a strong backlog. We see our DES business of digital energy solutions, which mainly consists of our activities within new energies growing rapidly with a 62% year-on-year growth. We have an EBIT margin of 18%, partly driven by operational performance and strong cost control. And then last but not least, a robust cash flow of $154 million for the full year. Again, we had significant growth in full year revenues of 2023, but a significant change in the revenue mix. And this is something we have spent quite some time on since the sixth business day in terms of surprising the market negatively in terms of our late sales. But I think it's really important that you all see this in a bigger context and you look at the overall sales, because as you know, every sale is cash. It's not like late sales gives more cash than proprietary sales or early sales. It's just the timing of it that is different. So our proprietary sales are up 25% for 2023. And again, this is driven by very good performance in our acquisition business unit. We can already conclude that the timing of the acquisition of MagSize and obviously the execution and the integration of that acquisition has been really good. And I'm very pleased with all the new colleagues who have joined from MagSize who now become true TGS employees and integrated well into the overall company. You see our early sales are up 128%. It's partly driven by higher investments. We invested more in 2023. As you see from our guidance, it's going to come down slightly in 2024. And this is very much in line with our plans. This was our plan for 23, and it's been part of our long-term plan that the first year of an expected upcycle, we invest more, and then we take the foot off the gas pedal in year two, three, and four. to improve the sales to investment and improve the free cash flow. And that's really our plan for the next couple of years. So again, early sales up 128%, and then that's partly compensated negatively by late sales down 36%. And again, as most of you probably know, we had a very strong 2022 in terms of late sales. This was driven by quite significant transfer fees. And we pretty much had zero transfer fees in 2023. And then we expect 2024 to be probably more similar to 22 than it is to 23. Because as you know, there's been a significant consolidation activity among our clients in 2023, waiting to be closed or waiting to be integrated then in 2024. So summarize pro forma revenues up 14%, which certainly signals that seismic spending continues to be strong seismic spending continues to grow with overall spending. It's just a different mix than what we saw in 2022. And that mix could easily be back again to more normal in 2024. So I'll touch on the operational highlights. So start with the OBN contract secured in the quarter. Again, you saw our backlog was record strong at the end of the year. It was 21% higher than it was at the end of 2022. So sets it up really well in terms of our activity level for 24. We were awarded two 4D surveys in the Gulf of Mexico in Q4, and we're going to acquire these surveys simultaneously utilizing the same vessels and possibly by deploying the full spreads and then acquire with source vessels that basically acquire data from both surveys. We expect this to be complete in Q2 of 2024. And again, it highlights our strong position in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for OBN and particularly 4D. Number two is that we had a new contract signed for a repeat customer in the North Sea. We were awarded a contract that is probably going to be between three, probably closer to four months of an OBN contract this summer. We're going to shoot this in Q2 and Q3 of 2024. And then last but not least, it's great to see that we get renewals of these multi year reservoir monitoring contracts that we have in Europe. So again, this is an extension to a monitoring and source contract. It's in the North Sea, and it's with a client that has been working with us for quite some time. So really good. And it's a quality stamp in terms of both HSE and also operational performance. Then we have engagement phase five that we announced in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. So, so far that we've done seven surveys, if you include this, it's all in partnership with Western GECO or SLB. And we have two amendment surveys that we did together. And this is the fifth phase of the engagement surveys. And as you see from the map, we're about to cover the entire Gulf of Mexico in terms of new data, better data, higher technologies. And this is obviously driven by great customer interest. So this data set covers about 157 OCS blocks. It's about 3,650 square kilometers. So it's a relatively big OBN survey. We are going to apply the new elastic full waveform inversion technology and imaging and started the project in Q1. And again, fast track data is going to be available from H2 of 2024. This reminds me about an important point in terms of the strict focus on late sales. And if you look at this survey, it started in Q1 of 2024. We're going to have fast track data available early next year, so about 14 months after we start acquisition. Then the final data is probably going to be available towards the end of 2021. and 24 and into early 2025, that's when we start to call it late sales. Everything we sell from now on until, you know, second half of 2000 and 2025 possibly is going to be what we call late participants to early sales. So it's still going to be recorded as early sales. And that's why it is extremely important that you guys look at the mix and you look at the total sales rather than trying to carve out late sales and basically base your market or market assumption based on that number only. This survey is not going to be called late sales again until probably second half of 2025. Okay, if we move on, we had a 2D in offshore Malaysia. This is a collaboration with PGS and SLB. It's also the seventh phase in a multi-year program. It's a 5,000 kilometers of new 2D seismic acquisition, 2,600 kilometers of legacy processing, and then 2,800 square kilometers of what we call 2D tube processing, which is basically a way to stitch a lot of older 2D data in terms of getting 3D results through processing. Acquisition of this is completing in or completes in Q1. Fast track data available for the Malaysian bid rounds late in the year and again supported by good industry funding. And then this map shows a lot of the activities that we had in Q4. And you see typically Q4 is kind of a low point in terms of activity. But you see we were quite busy around the world, whether it was multi-client projects, whether it's OBN operations or operations related to our new energy solutions business. So another active quarter in that regard, despite the fact that Q4 is typically a low point in terms of acquisition activity. So a quick update on the PGS transaction. So transaction was approved with close to 100% majority by the extraordinary general meetings of both companies. I think everybody we talked to understand the rationale of this transaction. I think we're very excited about getting together and really starting to kick off the integration work. And we think we can build a great company together, a fully integrated company that has activities pretty much all over the world and very strong positions in the leading basics. we're going through on the regulatory reviews in norway and the uk as you saw yesterday the norwegian competition authority has as expected resolved to continue its assessment of a transaction in the phase two review and i'm going to show you the timeline on that on the next slide As I also mentioned, the post merger integration planning is well underway with people from both companies. And then we estimate closing in the second quarter of 2024. So nothing has changed in that regard and in terms of our expectations of a closing date. And if you look at that in more details, and I'm not going to take you through everything here, but you see the Norwegian competition authorities have just finished the phase one, which took 25 working days. They're now entering into phase two, which is another 45 working days. And if you compare that with the UK authorities process, you see that it fits really well with their phase one. And hopefully we end after phase one in UK and after phase two in Norway. And that should put us in a good position to close sometime in late May or possibly early June. But again, everything is going according to plans. They have a job to do and they obviously need to be educated too about the marketplace and how the different players see the marketplace going forward as well. So with that, I'll hand it over to Sven who's going to go through the financials and then I'm going to come back and talk about the outlook for 2024. Thank you very much and welcome, Sven.

Thank you for that, Christian. Good morning, everyone. As always, I will start with going through our POC revenues by the different types of revenue streams that we have. Starting with early sales on the top left-hand quarter, we had $59 million of early sales in the quarter. It's a bit down compared to what we've seen in the previous quarters. But that's down to the seasonality of our investment profile and very much as expected. And as you can see, it's a pretty significant increase and almost a doubling from what we had in the same quarter of last year. And it's a reflection of the improvement in the customer's willingness to support new multi-client projects. Then moving on to late sales, we came in at $59 million in the quarter. And as you can see, that's a pretty significant reduction from what we had last year. I'm not going to go into the details of the reasons for that because Christian is going to cover that later in the presentations. But of course, that was a disappointing number, not only to the stock market, but also to us internally. Then, looking at proprietary sales, came in at $88 million, which is a 47% year-over-year increase. And also here, we see that it's down on a quarter-to-quarter basis, again related to the seasonality of our OBN business. This gave total revenues of $206 million, which is a little bit down compared to the $227 million that we recorded in the same quarter of 2022. Then looking at the revenues by business unit. Multi client and imaging on the top left hand side had $113 million in this quarter, which is a 27% reduction compared to the same quarter of last year. And that is, as I already discussed, related to the drop in late sales. So despite a growth, sharp growth in early sales, the drop in late sales outweigh this and we have a reduction of 27% year over year. Then looking at the digital energy solutions, as you can see, we had a massive increase in revenue stream from our digital energy solutions business. This has partially to do with an XHR data acquisition project we did for a CCS project in Gulf of Mexico in the quarter, but also the more recurring revenue streams continues to increase. So even excluding this XHR project, so these XHR revenues tend to be quite lumpy. And we haven't lined up any new contracts in the next few quarters, although we are looking at some leads. But even adjusting for this, we saw a close to 40% increase in the more recurring revenue streams. uh year over year in the des business so we're very happy with the development in the on the revenue side with respect to digital energy solutions Then looking at the acquisition business unit on the bottom left-hand chart, the gross revenues ended up at $77 million, which is a 26% increase compared to the same quarter of last year. And if you remove elimination of internal work, we had 75 million dollars which is an increase of 39% compared to the same quarter of last year. Again there is a component of seasonality here as you can see with a difference from Q3 and Q2 to Q4. and also the uh project mix that we were doing in q4 had uh we we typically did or we did some projects with less scope than we typically do uh which means that the margin uh in in percentage terms is higher but uh the the revenue is uh a bit lower but the net contribution in dollar terms should be the same and that partially explains the the uh the strong percentage margin that you saw in the acquisition business in this quarter. And then looking at our costs in the quarter, starting with the cost of goods sold, which is related to our proprietary revenues. Here you see that we recorded $25 million in this quarter. And if you compare that to our proprietary revenue, we'll see that we had a very strong gross margin in the quarter. But be aware that there is a one-off included in this number. So we have reclassified $7.8 million of cost of goods sold to depreciation. We have basically agreed or changed the valuation of some of the lease obligations, which has led to this reclassification. So, there is a one-off that has reduced the cost of goods sold by $7.8 million in the quarter. But even adjusting for that, you see that we have a very strong gross margin in the quarter, and this has partly, obviously, to do with strong operational performance, partially to do with what I alluded to about the lower scope of some of the projects that we are doing compared to what we normally do, and partially as we enter into some lease arrangements or longer-term leases for source vessels and node handling vessels in the quarter. which is, and these are vessels that we had on shorter term contracts earlier, which basically removes a little bit of cost from cost of goods sold to depreciation or depreciation of right of use assets. So, there are several reasons for the low cost of goods sold, but even adjusting for this, we had very strong operations in the quarter. Then looking at personnel cost coming in more or less in line with expectations at 32 million, which is the same more or less level as we have seen over the past few quarters. And we also expected to remain at this level going forward. Other operating costs came in at 12 million dollars. So we show strong cost discipline as you can see we expect this number to remain at a quarterly run rate of 13 to 15 million dollars going forward although it may be a bit lumpy from from time to time This gave us a strong EBITDA in the quarter of $137 million. So despite the sharp reduction in late sales, our POC EBITDA did not fall that much compared to the Q4 of 2022. Then amortization, straight line amortization increased a little bit in the quarter, and that has to do with the fact that some projects were completed in the quarter. You can see that our accelerated amortization were low, $8 million in the quarter, and that we had a small impairment of $1 million. The $8 million of accelerated amortization means that we had a really strong profit on our early sales revenue, not only for the quarter, but for the year as a whole, we saw that early sales actually contributed. If you just subtract the accelerated amortization from the early sales, you'll see that it had a contribution of $200 million. in 2023 as a whole. So it's a very profitable part of our business. Then depreciation was high in the quarter. This includes the $7.8 million of reclassification that I talked about from cost of goods sold to depreciation. And it also reflects these new leases that we entered into in Q4. This gave us a POC operating result of $47 million, which is to be compared with $75 million in the same quarter of last year. Multi-client investments were $71 million in the quarter. We had 84% early sales rate in the quarter, which brought the full year early sales rate up to 77-78%. This chart here shows the bridge between POC revenues and IFRS revenues, which brings us to the IFRS profit and loss account, $199 million of revenues. You'll see that early sales here is significantly lower than POC early sales. But that has only to do with timing, obviously. Cost of goods sold, $25 million. Personnel cost, $32 million. And other operational cost, $12 million, as we have already discussed. Gave us an IFRS EBITDA of $121 million. We had straight line amortization, which is the same in POC and IFRS. $43 million accelerated amortization of $27 million, which is higher than what we had in our POC accounts. The impairment is the same, $1.4 million, and depreciation is the same. This brought the operating result on IFRS basis down to $10 or $11 million for this quarter. Adding on net financials, we ended up with a pre-tax profit of $15.6 million, and then you'll see that we have a high tax cost in the quarter. We actually have an effective tax rate above 100%. And this has mainly to do with some impacts from some tax assets that we have not been able to recognize in the core. So unlike, for instance, in Norway, where you can utilize tax assets between group companies, you have certain jurisdictions where you cannot do that. And if we accumulate a loss, in one entity you cannot basically take the tax deduction in another entity but it doesn't mean that the uh the the tax asset is lost if we can allocate some profit to those entities in the future you'll see a reversal of this so it's it's partially of a technical and preliminary nature So this actually gave a net income or net that was negative of $9 million, which gave a negative EPS of $7 cents in the quarter. Looking at the balance sheet, others then noting that the balance sheet remains strong with $197 million of net cash sitting on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter. You should also note the fairly unusual development for a Q4 in working capital. So you actually see a negative or a reduction of net working capital. And that obviously has to do with the low late sales that we saw in Q4. Then the cash flow statement. Cash flow from operations, $148 million in this quarter. And this has been reduced by the 7.8 million... Sorry, increased by the $7.8 million of reclassification of cost of goods sold that I talked about earlier. We had net cash flow from investing activities of $107 million. And then we had... cash flow to financing activities of minus $48 million. And again, this is reduced by the same $7.8 million under repayment of lease liabilities. So that reclassification also affects the mix that you see in the cash flow statement, but obviously the net cash flow is is the same at the minus $7.6 million in the quarter, which gave us $197 million in cash at the end of the quarter. Then dividend, the board has resolved to keep the dividend unchanged at 14 cents per share, which corresponds to 1.47 NOK per share in this quarter. The exit date is a week from now, 22nd of February, and the payment date will be on the 7th of March. We have chosen to not change the allocation strategy for now. We will wait until we have closed the PGS transaction and then the board will revert with a new allocation strategy after that. But you should expect us to focus more on buybacks in the allocation strategy going forward. But we'll revert with that later in the year. About that, I'll hand the word back to you, Christian.

Thank you, Sven. And let's touch on the outlook for 2024. And then we're gonna open up for Q&A after that. So let's start with the overall market. What you see on the right hand side of this slide is E&P guidance or capex guidance for the largest E&P companies. And you see the list of companies below the bar chart. Overall, we saw a growth in 2023 of 12%, so quite healthy growth. It's going to grow quite healthy in 2024 as well, but it's going to be at lower multiples, about 7% versus 12% in 23. But keep in mind that this is overall E&P capex and we're very small. This industry is about 2% or slightly less than 2% of overall E&P. So this may vary a lot from year to year in terms of data purchases and subsurface data as a percentage of E&P capex. What we see from talking to some of these customers is that they have data needs. There's no question about that. Everyone is going to continue to do exploration for the future is probably a bit short of data. They still have relatively large subsurface departments and they need data in the future as well. So I think overall it probably corresponds quite well to what we're seeing in the market. There's definitely going to be growth in 2024 and And some clients are playing catch up games, meaning that that growth could be quite significant. Others are being very disciplined and they would guide at a relatively flattish development in terms of 24 versus 23. But I think overall, if I were to summarize this, we think that growth is going to be quite healthy for companies. for 2024 we saw a little bit of inflationary pressure that particularly towards the end of the year a lot of the super majors have no money left at the end of the year because they overspent on other segments and they had to kind of borrow from the from from from seismic and data purchases towards the end of the year um we think that this year they will probably budget where where or set the budget where it should be in terms of cost inflation um we we don't see cost inflation continue to go up it's probably flattening out a little bit there's probably more visibility on that going into 24 than it was into 23 when they were caught by some surprises on that So overall a relatively optimistic signals from customers, which means that we feel pretty good about 2024 and we'll come back and talk more about that when we get to the guidance slide. we see strong growth and we're pretty certain about that because there are relatively long sales cycles is in the obn market so this is showing the global mid and deep water obn market from 2020 to 2024 and you see a very strong growth from 20 through 23 and then in 24 we've we're basically providing you with three different scenarios. It's a low case, which is very similar to what has already been committed for the year. And then we have a mid case and then we have a high case. And the reason why there is such a gap between the low case and the high case is that, you know, this is very dependent on some bigger contracts. You know, India, for example, Gulf of Mexico also plays a big role. And if things get pushed out, then obviously we're going to get closer to the mid case or or possibly even closer to the low case but if it goes according to plans we are going to have another very strong year for the global obn market in 2024. And we see that from the acquisition activity plan. As I said previously, we've signed up a lot of contracts in Q4. We're still continuing to cover some of these white spots. You see OBN Crew 3 has worked until the end of probably sometime in end of April, early May. And obviously there is a bit of a white spot going into Q3 and Q4. But overall, this is a schedule that we are very pleased about and it reflects a strong market for OBN. So we're we feel certain that we're going to have another good year for our OBM business and our proprietary revenues in that regard. So talking about multi-client, so late sales clearly affected by lack of year-end spending, but also low inventories. If we start on the left-hand side, you see Q4 of 2023, we only had 23% of our sales or our late sales coming from our biggest customers. And these would typically be the super majors. that same customer group accounted for 69 of our q4 sales in 2022. it's a significant difference and this caused us to miss our own forecasts as well as your expectations for the quarter you know as late as the 11th of december we were pretty much tracking the same line as we did in 2022 What happened in 22 is that we saw the normal significant uptick in spending towards the end of the year. We didn't see it this year and the reason why we didn't see it is partly explained by this bar chart. In a normal Q4 we would typically have 50% of spending covered by these clients that I refer to. It's a very unusual quarter in that regard and obviously we have talked to all these clients after the quarter trying to understand what happened and again it really goes back to what Sven mentioned and what I also mentioned at the beginning of the presentation. A lot of them overspent in other areas and more discretionary type of spending that they usually have a lot of in late December that didn't come into play in 2023. And then the second part of this slide, if you look on the right hand side, it's showing late sales versus vintage library over the last 12 months. And what you see here is that there is a negative trend in 2023. but a very positive trend in 21 and 22. You also see that the library is smaller. It's smaller because we invested less obviously during the COVID period, but pretty much lasting all the way until 2022. So we have a smaller library and we see a year on year drop in late sales as a percentage of that library. That is mainly due to the transfer fees. So I was talking about significant transfer fees in 2022, no transfer fees in 2023 but relatively good visibility on transfer fees in 2024. What I'm basically saying then is that the size of the library is not going to change a lot but what you're going to see is hopefully a trend that turns quite significantly upwards in 2024 and if you look at the comparables that we have because now we're comparing to 23 a year without transfer fee obviously it makes us far more optimistic in terms of beating the year-on-year figures. But probably even more important is that this is compensated by higher early sales. And as I mentioned, early sales is not only pre-funding that we get prior to starting a survey, but it's also the sale that we make probably over the next 12 to 24 months after a survey started. And you have to take this into account because if you look at the two different graphs, if you go back to the previous one and see the negative trend in terms of late sales, caused by lack of transfer fees, then you see the corresponding increase on the multi-client revenues. On the left-hand side, you see the dark blue, which is the pre-funding, is coming up quite significantly. So it's compensating for that, and it's just a shift of sales. It's not sales disappearing. It's a shift from late sales to early sales. And in many ways, in isolation, that's a positive thing because we collect the cash earlier. So in terms of IRR, this is actually a good thing. Of course, we want to see late sales also increasing. And I think I've said between the lines today that we expect that to happen in 2024. If you look at the pre-funding rate on the right hand side, there is a similar trend on the pre-funding rate as there is a negative trend on the late sales, meaning that overall we're in very good shape. It's just a mix. So I think this is extremely important to understand. And I've seen, obviously, an increase and an exceptional focus on late sales, which I, to a certain degree, accept and respect. But at the same time, you need to see the full picture. And you need to keep in mind that starting 2021, we reported this differently to the past. So again, I'm not going to dwell more or mention that more today, but I think this is really important for both investors who are invested or prospective investors in TGS and obviously for the analysts who are guiding these investors in the future. So that leads me to the contract backlog and inflow. So you see the contract inflow of 275 in the quarter and you compare that to Q4 of 22 when we had a pretty similar number of 283. But if you look at the last two bars, so look at the 355 for Q3 and the 275 for Q4, and then you compare that to the same numbers of of last year, you see that we're building significant backlog towards the end of the year. And this is a backlog that is going to drive our investments and obviously our proprietary activity in 2020 and 24. So again, we have a backlog of about $545 million. It's up 21% compared to last year. And this is really what we're going to be doing in 24 and gives us a lot of visibility in terms of the early sales and obviously the acquisition revenues in 2024. You see the pie chart on the right-hand side. That's a timing of the expected recognition of our acquisition part of the backlog. So that's referring to the 322 that you see on the left-hand side. So it helps you a little bit with the timing of backlog and help you to do your estimates on that. So financial guidance for 2024. So basically three bullet points. I think I'm going to start with the last one. So our early sales rate is expected to be above 85%. So what you can read from that is that we feel very certain that early sales is going to be good. This is partly driven by the fact that we have a lot of backlog already committed. So we know that a lot of the investments we already have strong funding on that. And it also reflects a relatively healthy outlook in terms of the early sales of projects that are in operation today. Number two are multi-client investments. We expect our investments to be about $300 to $350 million. We've talked about that before, and this is and has been part of our plan, is that we invest counter-cyclically, which means that ideally we invest more when the market is down. And I think this time around, we were probably a bit late to escalate or accelerate our investments because in 2021, I think we were all very uncertain about where is this market going to be. In hindsight, we should probably have invested even more in 21 and 22. But late 22, we saw that this market is going to pick up and it's going to be healthy. And we started to invest quite extensively in 2023. So our investments in 23 were $400 million. But as we've always done with TGS, in the second, third and fourth year, we take the foot off the gas pedal and then we start to harvest in terms of increasing our sales to investments, improving our cash flow and the overall return on capital. There's a lot of questions after 2023. Are you able to reach your target of 2x in terms of sales to investment? Is there a structural change in the market? Are the good times behind us? No, it's not. We are planning and our ambition is that we're going to be at that 2 mark in 2024. We may be wrong. Of course, we've proven through Q4 of 2023 that this is a low visibility game. But there's nothing in our projects that indicate that we should set the bar lower for the future. And if we set the bar close to two, again, through the cycles, it's going to vary a lot depending on our investment profile. But it's a normal course of action and the normal course of business for TGS. Year one, we invest heavily and it's going to hurt our sales to investment and cash flow. Year two and three, we take the foot off the gas pedal and we're going to improve our sales to investment. So in summary, total POC revenue, so 206 compared to 27 in Q4 last year. Our EBITDA, as we mentioned today, came in stronger than we expected at 137, pretty close to that 151 that we had in Q4 last year. We have seen strong development in proprietary sales and early sales, and again, negatively offset by weak late sales. Solid contract inflow, solid backlog, 21% higher than last year. We see continued growth in exploration spending and we hear that from our clients as well. And again, we feel we are very well positioned to benefit from this with leading positions in all segments and these leading positions being even stronger after the transaction with PGS. So that's what we have today. We obviously have a lot of questions, both from people not being in the room today, but hopefully also from you guys who are present in the room. So we'll start with John. Please go ahead.