8/29/2023

speaker
Operator

Okay, good morning everyone. Welcome to BW Offshore's second quarter 2023 update. We're presenting today from our office in Skøyen. I will run you as usual through the general update and outlook and I have here Stol Andreassen, our CFO, who will run you through the financials. Moving to the highlights, but please note our disclaimer. Barossa is still on a very good track towards first gas in the first half of 2025. Progress is now 73% complete. We also continue with our divestments of our non-core fleet, and we completed Espoir and Senniburgen for proceeds of 35 million in the quarter. And we also continue with 11 million of quarterly dividend, which is a mix between cash and payments in BW Energy shares. Other highlights Stoller will elaborate on, but quickly the EBITDA came in at 61 million. We have an operating cash flow of 84 million, which includes Barossa prepayments. And then we completed the refinancing of the revolving credit facility, as well as a $200 million facility based on the catcher. Stolle will come back to that. I move on to the operational update and then in the first place the ROSA FPSO. As you can see in the pictures, we're progressing very well with the project. Construction is nearing completion. You see the hull on the left side. nearing completion in Korea. We're planning a sail away from the SK yard in Korea early October and she will then sail to Singapore and in Singapore we will integrate the topside modules and the turret mooring system. And that really marks the next phase of the project where we start integration and commissioning, as you can see in line with the time bars on the bottom of the slide. I'm very pleased that we have been doing this with an excellent safety performance. By now, more than 80 million man hours completed without any lost time injury. very pleased with that and we don't achieve that with a very good alignment and support from our main subcontractors in particular SK and DYNAMIC in Singapore but also our NOV in Batam Yard. We are executing the project in difficult circumstances. We reported that also earlier. We are living in a world with cost inflation, and that keeps putting pressure on the project and has impacted us during engineering and procurement and construction. But on a forward-looking base, we can see that this will also be the case in the next phase, installation and commissioning. Therefore, we expect, taking all that into account, that by the time we have reached first gas in 2025, we will have consumed the EPCI project buffers. However, that will not impact the long-term project lease and operate economics as we are still, as I explained, very much on track for first gas as planned. Then on the fleet and general HSE performance, again, I'm pleased with the HSE performance. We're trending down in a very convincing way with no LTIs nor in the project nor in the fleet, which is excellent and also put us below the IHCP benchmarking. But we remain focused on the high potential incidents. Those are the incidents where nothing happens, but where something could have happened. And we see those as opportunities to learn. We investigate those and they're part of our continuous improvement program. On the fleet uptime, similar as previous quarters, these are numbers that are weighed by the revenue of the units. So very much the uptime of the most important units define what these numbers are. And as you can see, we have a steady trend there of high uptime. Talking about the core units, this is the portfolio of the core units, the three units in operation, but also then the Barossa FPSO, which we're having under construction, as explained. Together, that gives a backlog close to $7 billion, and $5.7 billion of that is firm. ADOLO benefits from the production increase that is being achieved by BW Energy by bringing the Hibiscus Rus field online. I'll come back to that. But today it produces from two additional wells on the Hibiscus Rus field. Actually, no, that was in the quarter. It's by now three and we're heading to four. Catcher, high commercial uptime, more than 100% as you are used to. And also Pioneer in the US benefits from stable production. You see that the firm terms of the contracts of Pioneer and Catcher will expire by the end of 2024. And with both clients, we are discussing options to continue beyond the fixed term. And as you can see, as we have good production, that is of course very helpful in those kind of discussions. So we have a good view on the future of these two units. Then on the non-core fleet, we are on track with our divesting program. We will conclude this before 2023. We made good progress in this quarter by concluding transactions for Sandy Burger and Espar in Ivory Coast and Sandy Burger in Nigeria. Also in Nigeria, Abo, we're progressing well and nearing completion of that transaction as well in the coming months. Petroleum Nautipa in Gabon, we're still planning recycling in Q4, but this decommissioning project has incurred some delays. We're depending on our client and had certain disputes and we're waiting for vessels that they needed to hire. So this has dragged out a bit and has also impacted us financially somewhat. Stole will come back to that. And then last FPSO Polvo that's already a unit that's already sold to BW Energy but we have agreed to deferred payment scheme in line with their Maromba field development plans and the payments will now come in by Q4 2023 and then Q2 2024 and of course BW Energy compensates for interest related to these deferments. With that, over to Stolem.

speaker
Stol Andreassen

Good morning everyone. I'll run through the financials today. As Marco said earlier, our EBITDA came in at 61 million for the quarter and the result was somewhat impacted by the activities ongoing on Petroleum Notipa and the divestment on Sennibørge. And the combined impact on Q2 is estimated around $15 million. If you look at Seneburge in isolation, so in addition to incurring kind of ongoing costs for the operation of that unit until we sold it, we have also made one-off provision for future reduction of the organization in Nigeria as we are now ramping down and as people will leave their organization. For Petroleum Notable, as Marco mentioned, decommissioning is ongoing, which means that activity level is actually quite high, and we also have costs related to, you have supply vessels, helicopters, and we need bunkers for power of the unit. So an estimated quarterly cost of $10 million on that unit in Q2. And as Marco was saying, we expect that we will leave the field by Q4. And we see the activity level continue on P&A until then, meaning that we estimate an impact of 10 million per quarter for the next two quarters related to petroleum hotspots. But then, of course, following that, we also estimate that EBITDA will come up with the same when this is closed out. And Marco, again, he referred to it, but of course, we will have some discussions with the client on the cost impact of this, which we'll need to come back to later. On the income statement, it's fairly straightforward. A couple of one-off items. We had to make an impairment related to Senneberge. The unit was only sold formally in Q3, but as the sale was firming up in Q2, we reclassified it as held for sale, and we booked an impairment of 5.1 million as the unit was sold for 15 million, which was below book value. On the other hand, we closed out the sale on Athena and Espoir above book, meaning that we could book a gain of 8.7 million in Q2. If you move to net interest expenses, you will see that they are reducing quarter on quarter, somewhat linked to lower debt, but actually more related to the fact that we've been able to place our deposits more effectively this quarter. Interest rates are coming up and we're now earning what I would say, well, a meaningful amount of interest on cash on hand, which is reducing our net interest expenses. Small mark to mark positive effect on the financial instruments. And if I move down to share of profit from equity accounted investments, you will see contribution from our ownership in BW Energy was 0.6 million this quarter. So just above zero. Again, when it comes to this, we're much more interested in the future there. We are seeing that production is ramping up in Gabon. And we're expecting imminent closing on Golfinio, which we think will add to their bottom line and indirectly also add to the contribution we are getting from the ownership we have. Moving to cash flow, operating cash flow was 84 million in the quarter. So when you then exclude payments from Santos, it means we had 30 million flat from the fleet. I have to say this was below our expectation. If you look at EBITDA, there's quite a gap between our EBITDA of 61 million and the net free cash flow from the fleet. And this was due to certain payments from clients kind of tipping into quarter three before they were paid. So that has impacted the kind of this quarter's cash flow negatively, but should impact next quarter positively as these payments have now been done. High activity on Barossa with over 200 million invested in the quarter and the remaining amounts here is related to Adolo and still some work ongoing there on that unit related to upgrade activities for BW Energy. We received 31 million for units that were sold in the quarter. And when it comes to Barossa, we invested 13 million into the JV for kind of continuous funding on the ongoing project. And the JV as a whole paid in 149 million to our construction company to fund it for future cappings coming in Q3 and so forth. We continue to reduce on our debt. We had scheduled installments on catcher. We reduced on the RCF as much as we can when we have surplus liquidity. And we continue to buy back convertible bonds, approximately 31 million in Q2, which we continue to be able to buy on an opportunistic basis at a considerable discount to par. And we think that still is a meaningful way of allocating capital as long as we are sitting on as much surplus capital as we are at the moment. When it comes to payment of interest, you will see it's almost zero in the quarter. And that is due to the fact that we... And I'll come back to it, but as we now have refinanced our... our corporate facility and catcher. We have also calibrated the hedges we have in place to fix the interest rates on these facilities. We were over hedged in the past in anticipation of a future refinancing. We have now calibrated these hedges so that they align more with the new maturity profile. And since the hedges were in the money, done at reasonably low levels, we got a settlement from the banks when we terminated certain swaps of 6.5 million in Q2. And I'm not going to comment on the other effects here, which are kind of ongoing recurring effects that you see every quarter. Moving to Barossa funding in isolation, we continue to draw on the senior debt facility. We did draw 100 million in Q2 and the facility is now almost 60% drawn so far, so plenty of capacity on the facility. We injected 25 million when you combine BW Offshore and JV Partners as a whole in new equity in the project. Maybe more interesting for the outlook of this is that on BW Offshore side, there's about 40 million to go. to fund there to get to the 240 targeted or estimated equity that needs to be injected into the project. So about 40 million to go for the next one and a half to two years. And then prepayments from Santos has been coming in as planned. They pay when we invoice and that's how it should be. And that means we have received about 1.5 billion of the total 2.4 billion of funding available to complete this project. Balance sheet, not really that much to say. You see net debt continues to reduce somewhat. Again, I want to highlight that I expected that it would be slightly lower because if our clients are paid on time, we should have another few millions which have been offsetting this. So we're a little bit behind where we hope to be this quarter, but still we are at a fairly comfortable net debt level. And when you look at the equity ratio, it's almost flat quarter on quarter at 31.9%. So all in all, ratios look good and fairly comfortable situation when it comes to the balance sheet as it is. In May, we announced that we will go to market with the refinancing of our senior secured debt facilities. So we went to the market to raise 295 million under a new corporate facility and 200 million under a new loan facility for Catcher. I'm happy to say that we have now signed also Catcher before this Q2, so magically it all came together. came in place just before the Q2 presentation. And I have to give some credit to the team for working through the summer to get it this far. I think when I look at this, our reflection is more the fact that we see that the fact that we've been able to taking 10 international banks into a new corporate facility and seven international banks in a new cash facility on what we consider reasonably good market terms shows that we are able to attract capital in a market which is, I wouldn't say, maybe not that pro oil and gas, but the bank still likes to see solid counterparties. And I think we offer them what they need to see to give us a competitive pricing. So when you look at the right hand side here on the slides, you can now see that the two facilities that originally matured in summer 24 has now been refinanced and we have a much more spaced out debt maturity structure. And the next on our plan is to address the bond portfolio. Again, this is where we, I would say, we consult a bit internally what's the next steps. We have a good liquidity in general, but we're also looking at what kind of new projects are in the pipeline. So depending a little bit on where we land, where we go, we might go all the way from repaying all the bonds to going back to the market to refinance part of the bond portfolio. Again, I want to emphasize that we don't think higher bonds in general should be a large part of the capital or debt capital structure for a company like ours. But we can see that it can be an add-on. So certain size of bonds in the market can be sensible. That means that obviously we will not refinance 300 million currently outstanding in the new bonds, but maybe one third, which is similar to what I've said before. So to sum it up, I think we're happy to see that we're getting towards the end of the divestment program for the fleet. We have sold assets for about 250 million so far, quite a sizable amount. And we have a few units to go as Marco mentioned, but I think we're pleased to see that we'll be able to execute quite firmly on these activities. get into a company that can now focus on a few core units, very meaningful units, which generates cash flow for the future. And we can adjust the company for that and then focus on new opportunities going forward. I think I've said what I need to say about liquidity, but as you can see, just for the sake of it, 400 million in available liquidity by Q4. And all in all, when it comes to our, I would say, our capital allocation going forward, I would say we are in a position where we have flexibility when it comes to allocation of capital for new organic growth, for debt reduction and for paying dividends also going forward. And which we are with the dividend of in total 11.3 million being paid on the on the back of Q2 done in in terms of a cash dividend of 6.5 million and 5 million worth of BW Energy shares being paid in kind. Also, also this time that moves us back to Marko for further on the investments.

speaker
Operator

Yeah. Thank you, Stole. First of all, I'd like to share our views on the market. I think the FPSO market is probably better than it may ever have been looking forward. Many projects announced that you can also see on this chart by geography. And also you see that this year there have been about 10 FBSO awards taking place and so you would expect that that would continue and I guess that could be the case. There are, however, different dynamics. While there is a large demand for FPSOs, there is also a constraint on the FPSO contract capacity. There's constraints on the yard capacity. And there's also financial constraints. And so the question will still be, you know, how many of these contracts that are announced and are in the pipeline will actually materialize and how many of these will be leased and operate. Another trend is that the type of projects that we see, they increase in complexity, they show higher cost and it requires actually lease prepayments to keep these projects financeable. or as an alternative could also trend and we think we see that trend into more EPCI projects combined with O&M and that's fine with us too I mean with those contracting models I still think FPSO contractors have a plus above the more standard EPC proposals that you get from from shipyards. So, in these models, still the added value from FPSO contractors will be recognized. Of course, we need to make sure collectively as an industry that we also get priced properly then for that added value and for the risk we take. And I think it's fair to say that that hasn't always been the case in the history of our industry. So, if there's a time that that finally should happen, it's really now. And in any case, we will be, despite the strong market, we will be very selective towards new projects. But of course, with this oil price, it is a positive environment for new projects. It is a positive environment for redeployment and for contact extension. So I do see this as a positive time for the FBSO industry going forward. But as I said, we will be very selective towards which projects we will pursue. We will be quite strict on the criteria like a firm period in which we achieve our returns, which should be above 15%. with no residual value. Projects need to be infrastructure type of projects with meaningful lease prepayments, as I explained. Otherwise, these size of projects are actually not financeable. Counterparties, either solid NOCs or investment grade counterparties, and also the projects need to allow to work together with our partners both on the equity side, co-investing, but also in project execution. With that, then another market, the floating wind market, also a very promising market. The market keeps growing and our subsidiary and investment vehicle BWDOL continues to build out its position. Of course, also here key is funding and therefore we are very pleased that ADEME Investment has signed an agreement with BWDOL to co-fund the developments and with a commitment of 40 million euro. And that will take place through a project development company of which BWDO will keep about 75% and ADEMA will own 25%. And that means that the valuation of the project portfolio equals to around 74 million euro. The remaining value of the company which really sits in the business development pipeline is access, technology and IP remains 100% with BWEDO. Also in South Korea, promising market and new partnership has been established with a very large and reputable local player to jointly co-develop, but also pursue co-EPCI opportunities for gigawatt scale floating wind projects. The current portfolio of almost one gigawatt of floating wind in the Buchan offshore wind project, which is part of the Scotland license, is progressing well and now the geophysical studies and the environmental campaigns have been completed and we're moving into the next phase of permitting. And then finally, the three times 10 megawatt EOMET floaters are progressing and they are in the construction phase and the assembly is ongoing in Porte-la-Nouvelle in France. This is a project that is 100% executed in France. And then an update on BW Energy, which reported last week, but this company sees a step change in production and as 25% owner of BW Energy, this is also very positive for us. During the quarter, two wells of the Hibiscus ruse development were added. A third well followed in July and now we're close to completion of the fourth well. By the time the six wells have been in production, then an additional 30,000 barrels per day are added to the production of BW Energy, but also to the production of our FPSO BW Adolo. And we benefit from that through a production tariff. A further production increase was achieved through the startup of a gas lift compressor on Adolo. And that increases the tortue production, the tortue field production with 3,000 barrels per day. Currently, the production of Dissafu now is around 27,500 barrels per day. So both as 25% owner of BW Energy, but also as the FPSO contractor leasing BW Adolo to BW Energy, this is a very positive development. Then more good news in Brazil. It's now progressing towards closing of the Colvinho transaction. That field and the FSO has started up producing around 9,000 barrels in line with expectations. And that transaction is expected to close in the near future as well. And then also Namibia, together with all the other good news in Namibia, BW Energy decided to embark on a new seismic campaign. And now the data have been gathered. And so far, that looks that the quality of this data is very good. Initial reviews are going on. So that could result in more good news in the future for KUDU. That brings me to the end. So summing up, we remain strongly focused as our primary target to deliver the Barossa project safe and timely. And we're on track with that. The fleet investment program will soon be concluded and that marks a key strategic goal. And then we are pursuing and looking at new FPSO projects, but we will remain very selective of which projects and with which returns we will take. There is a strong market out there and we should make sure we benefit from that. We continue to support BW Deol in pursuing their floating wind opportunities and helping them to prepare for EPCI phases, which will start in the coming years. And then we'll support BW Energy in the production ramp-up through our operations of BW Adolo. And then we continue with our substantial shareholder return program through dividend in cash and BW Energy shares. So that concludes this presentation. I'm happy to take questions and I think we'll move to Erik to facilitate this. Or you have them? Sorry. Okay. Sorry.

speaker
Stol Andreassen

And you'll take it. You have the online ones? Good. I can read it now. So the first question is from Christoffer Møllerlöken from Sparbank One Markets, saying, it seems like Euronext is not permitting BW Group to pass 40% in BW Energy without submitting a bid for the remaining shares in the BW Energy. How would you evaluate to distribute the remaining shares in BW Energy once BW Group is coming close to pass the 40% threshold in BW Energy? I can take it. I think for one, our intent when it comes to distributing BW Energy shares as dividend stays. Our intent is to continue to distribute. We have approached OSC on the basis of a waiver, which they don't accept. So we now have a dialogue on different angles. I don't want to go into details of this, but where we think there is a solution which will allow us to continue to pay dividends also in the future. If for any reason we do not get to a solution on this one, we will get back to this on Q3 if we need to rethink this on the basis of their view. The next one is from Alexander Asta from DMV. Can you clarify if EPCI buffer being consumed implies that both contingency and EPCI margin are consumed by the higher cost based on both contingency and EPCI margin?

speaker
Operator

On a forward-looking basis indeed that's what we mean. So when we project everything we see and know by experience what can happen till by the time we reach first gas in 2025 then the project buffers will be consumed which means the EPCI margins and contingencies will be consumed by then.

speaker
Stol Andreassen

Yep, that's the questions we have online. If anyone from the audience have any questions, we can take those.

speaker
Operator

Nope. Okay, good. And thank you very much. And I wish everyone a good day. Thank you.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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