Dno Asa Ord

Good morning, and welcome to DNO's first quarter 2026 earnings call. My name is Jostein Lerbos, and I am the communications manager here at DNO. Present with me here today in Oslo are, as usual, Executive Chairman William Mosavar-Money, Managing Director Chris Spencer, and CFO Birgitte Lindelbo-Johansson. In addition, we have a surprise guest, Morten Greeney, who is Senior Vice President, responsible for assets and project development in the North Sea Business Unit. And then we'll wrap up the presentation with the North Sea Deep Dive. After the presentation, we will open up for questions in the Q&A session, and press questions will be dealt with afterwards. With that, I give the word to Bijan.

Please. Good morning, and welcome to our first quarter of the and operational updates, again, with a focus on the North Sea. This is a beautiful spring, sunny day in Oslo, clear blue skies. You won't have a chance to see it because we're an indoor room. My colleagues typically put me in an indoor room away from a window, away from the seagulls, but fly over Oslo Fjord. Those of you in Norway, some of you in Norway may understand the reference. But trust me, it's a beautiful day, and our results are similarly sunny and blue skies for the first quarter, and this has continued into the first part of the second quarter. Much of this has to do with higher oil and gas prices, principally in the month of March, but the impact has been significant on our results and those of many other international or national oil and gas companies. The strong performance of our North Sea operations, which we will review more extensively, Morton will, and others will touch on it. Our strong North Sea performance has been able to capture high prices. We are, as you know, not producing currently in our courtesan sector, but the acquisition of small energy last year, and our much larger presence in the North Sea now has proven the important de-risking that acquisition and diversification has brought to the company, and now we are a far more resilient company in terms of capturing in Kurdistan, but also in the North Sea, principally on the Norwegian continental shelf. The higher oil prices, of course, and higher gas prices are a result of the geopolitical turmoil and the war in the Middle East based on You may be seeing a light at the end of that tunnel and the peace and stability brought back to the Persian Gulf region and Iran in particular and the other countries that have been impacted by this crisis. The higher oil and gas prices resulted from it. that they have not been because of any action by our industry. Our industry has benefited, but, of course, we all recognize that tragedy and devastation and suffering of people that are affected by these tripolar crises are not something we welcome. financial results for us and other companies, and these are only reflected in our first quarter results. They will be importantly reflected in our second quarter results, but they give us the financial means with which to continue to grow our business. There are many opportunities in the DNO portfolio, and the additional resources will allow us to capture those. So that also points to a stronger stronger weeks and months and years ahead. With that, I'll turn to our manager director, Chris Spencer, to give a more color to the problems during the three-quarter facts and figures about the first quarter. Please, Chris.

Thank you, Peter, and good morning from me. As introduced by William, we've had a good quarter. with the strong performance again in the North Sea, lifting our profits on the back of those higher prices that we've seen, particularly in March. So the operating profit level results increased by a full 60% quarter on quarter, and happily we have black ink on the bottom line, which pretty good, so our CFO will take you into a bit more details shortly. The production, of course, as you see on the chart on the right-hand side of the graph, we, again, have very strong levels of production in the North Sea. A new record by just 400 barrels a day, or barrels equivalent to that, I should say. But we'd still love to talk about that because, first of all, it re-emphasizes the importance of the soil acquisition we made last year, which quadrupled our North Sea production. And of course, at a time like this, the strategic importance of that acquisition is self-evident to everyone who follows our company. Also, that is a higher level of production than we expected to have when we made the acquisition, which is a great, one of the many areas where that acquisition so far has been very successful for the company. And as we say on this slide, we're not resting on our laurels. We are challenging, we put forward, we've been very open about our target to get to 100,000 from what we have within our portfolio in the North Sea by 2030. And I'm very pleased that my colleague is joining us this morning to give you a bit more insight into some of the key projects that will underpin that ambition. Another element that we've been very active on and I hope you will continue to see is the new business development. Not giant deals like the trial one, but very much building on that through smaller and frequent transactions as we refocus that large North Sea portfolio into core areas. and seek to accelerate production through business development as well as project development. And the top deal we did with Equinor in Q1 is a fantastic example of that. I'm very pleased to say that we found a win-win deal. Equinor are very happy with the deal, we understand, and VNO is very happy from our side. and it's accelerating the production from some of our discoveries in an unusual way, because we're swapped out of those discoveries into Proveri Atlantis, which we expect to come on sooner than the discoveries we left. A smaller deal, but another nice bolt-on is the Vega transaction, which we announced today. It was just inked yesterday, so thanks to Inpex, And of course, our team, a small deal, but once again showing the way we are building a strengthening position in our core areas. Last on the slide, but very much not least, the dividend was maintained by our board of directors in their meeting yesterday. Not a difficult decision on the back of these results, and that's maintaining a strong Next slide. So I'm just going to quickly touch on Kyrgyzstan because we have a new number of slides on the North Sea which Gordon will present shortly. In Kyrgyzstan we started the quarter optimistically and strongly. We had recommenced drilling just before the end of last year and had really great results from the first two wells we drilled until of course we got to the middle of February and the world changed for us as it did for everyone. Of course we had to shut down as a precautionary measure. We are ramping up what we call passive protection, in other words concrete walls. So in case we do get targeted, we do. whatever we can to protect, of course, our people, but also our critical facilities and particularly those that have long leave times to repair. Following the declaration of ceasefire, we have started tentatively to get back to work, bring back people to site and so forth. We resumed work over existing wells and we started drilling. And that means that when we are ready to start, we are optimistic that we'll be able to bring back tablet and petiole beer at higher rates than we left off at. So obviously we're not quite sure now where the production levels from Kyrgyzstan will be. So the final point saying at the moment, of course, 26 production will be lower than we thought when we addressed you a quarter ago. Similarly, investments are going to be lower, but when we do restart, we're expecting strong levels of production. With that, I will pass over to Birgitta to take you through the financials.