Tgs Asa S/Adr

Good morning and welcome to the presentation of TGS presentation of Q1 2026 results. My name is Bart Sandberg, Vice President Investor Relations and Business Intelligence in TGS. Today's presentation will be given by CEO Christian Johansen and CFO Svendberg Larsen. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements showing on the screen and available in today's presentation and earnings release. After management's concluding remarks, we will open up for questions from the audience on the webcast. So with that, I give the word to you, Christian.

Thanks, Bård. Before we kick off with the highlights of Q1, please allow me to provide a quick backdrop to recent market developments impacting our business going forward. Just a few months ago, the market expected 2026 to be defined by oversupply and continued capital discipline. Today, the picture has changed dramatically. The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supply, effectively trapping significant volumes of oil, tightening the market and driving higher prices. More importantly, it has fundamentally shifted how our clients think about exploration. Energy security is once again a top priority. Strategic reserves are being drawn down and reserve replacement has moved back to the forefront after years of underinvestment. Activity is beginning to pick up, particularly outside the Middle East, as operators look to secure new, diversified sources of supply. That said, this will not happen overnight. Industry budgets for 2026 were set in late 2025, and it will take some time for this shift in sentiment to fully translate into increased spending. However, the direction is clear. What was expected to be a gradual recovery is now shaping into a more urgent and potentially stronger cycle for exploration. And we have good reasons to be increasingly optimistic about the outlook for 2027 and beyond. In this environment, TGS's data and insights are more relevant than ever, helping our clients move faster with greater confidence as they respond to a rapidly changing energy landscape. So if I move on to the highlights for Q1 of 2026, we had revenues of $321 million driven by high multi-client activity on the investment side. And as a result of that, we had a utilization of 91% in the quarter. Our Q1 EBITDA was about $200 million. That corresponds to a 62% margin, which is up from last year and pretty much in line with Q4 of 2025. Our Q1 EBIT was $64 million, and that corresponds to a 20% margin. We had a net cash flow of $29 million, and we have successfully continued to reduce the net debt now to a new level of $424 million. Our order inflow was strong in Q1. We had order inflow of $392 million, and that means that our total order backlog is now $779 million, which is the strongest order backlog TGS has had since 2019. And last but not least, we're maintaining a quarterly dividend of US dollar 0.155 per share. Moving on to the business update for the quarter, the first slide is showing our data acquisition activity for Q1. And you can clearly see from this map that we have the majority of activity in multi-clients. So the light blue here showing the multi-client activity for our streamer vessels in the South Atlantic area shows that we had five vessels operating in Q1. We had three in Brazil, one in the Northern Equatorial margin, two in the Pelotas play, and then you see two vessels on the other side of the margin, one in Nigeria and one in Angola, and I will come back to that. Then we had only one contract for our vessel operations, and that was in Indonesia, as you see in the lower right-hand corner of the map. Moving on to starting with multi-clients. So we had external revenues of $240 million for multi-clients. And we had investments of $178 million and a sales to investment for the last 12 months of $1.7 million. $1.7 million is down from the $2.2 million that we had about a year ago. And this is partly driven, as we have announced previously, with a delay in pre-funding of one of the active projects in the South Atlantic area. To summarize the activity for the quarter, we had the APEX-1 ocean bottom node project in the Gulf of America. This is a dense node grid, and thanks to new technology developments developed between acquisition and imaging of TGS, we can actually acquire that data without reliance on underlying streamer data, which is a huge advantage and opens up a new opportunity for us in terms of using OBN for exploration elsewhere in the world. We had a multi-client campaign in West Africa consisting of two projects. We commenced a big project in Nigeria. It's called LIDAR. It's a multi-client 3D survey. And then we also had a project in Angola, which is the ultra-profundo multi-client 2D survey that we did in the quarter. We have, as mentioned previously, high multi-client activity in Brazil's exploration basins. Three Ramform Titan-class vessels. Again, as I said, one in the equatorial margin and two in the Pelotas basin. And we also see a pickup in terms of frontier activity. And you see that the evidence of that with two agreements with governments in the quarter. And we see a pickup in interest from governments in terms of signing new MOUs and exclusivity agreements with TGS. So we have one signed in Republic of Equatorial Guinea. And then we have an LOI with a subsidiary of the Libya National Oil Corporation that was also signed this quarter. And again, these are two of the most prospective frontier areas, further showing evidence that frontier is gradually coming back on the agenda for our clients. On the marine data acquisition, we had external revenues of $58 million, internal production of $137 million. And if you compare that to Q1 of last year, you see that the activity level overall is about the same, but you see a complete shift in terms of how we allocate the vessels. So far more vessel activity on internal projects, so multi-clients, and then you see less contracts. And this is very much in line with the strategy that we lined up and we talked about after Q4. So we said 2026, you will see more multi-client activity. You will see in a relatively weak vessel market, we allocate more of our vessels to multi-clients. And this plays out in terms of Q1 exactly as we planned, where utilization is as high as 91%, so sharply up from the average of last year, because we have the flexibility and the ability to move our vessels between contracts and multi-client as where we see the highest revenue potential and profitability potential. And you see that from the EBITDA margin as well. We have 19% EBITDA margin in the quarter. But keep in mind that $137 million of internal production has a zero margin, which means that all the margin is coming from the external revenues of $58 million. So a strong quarter in terms of profitability as well. In terms of the activity summary, we were awarded an extension to a multi-year OBN contract in the Gulf of America. This is an agreement that we've had for the past three years. Now we've extended that further with one of our key clients who's very active in the Gulf of America, particularly in terms of OBN usage. This is a frame agreement, and again, it goes over the next three years. In addition to that, we reintroduced and I'm very pleased to see Ramform Vanguard back in business again and out of stacking. So we have a solid backlog now for the Ramform Vanguard in Europe for the summer season. And we will run a long campaign now funded by multiple parties for offshore wind and site surveying using Vanguard. We also saw contract streamer activity in both West Africa and Indonesia in the quarter, and then we recently signed an OBN contract in the Gulf of America. Moving on to imaging and technology, sort of a similar picture there with a little bit of a shift from external to internal. You see the majority of our production is internal, so $17 million in internal production versus 10 in Q1 of last year. And then $15 million in external revenue. So you see we're able to even grow our external revenues in a quarter where we use most of our capacity on internal production as a result of higher acquisition activity on our vessels for multi-client. Also strong margin there, 19% margin. And again, internal production, we don't charge any margin. So strong margin on external projects. In terms of activities, we announced a multi-year strategic agreement with AWS, so Amazon Web Services. I'm extremely excited about this because not only does it provide us the compute that we need and flexibility and scalability in terms of compute, but probably more important and more interesting is the fact that we're working now very closely in a partnership with AWS on GenAI and what you can do with AI on seismic data. We've already developed very promising models called seismic foundation models where you're able to get increasingly more efficient in terms of interpretation of data. So you can do things in days now that you spend weeks or even months in the past. And I'm super excited that together with AWS, we can continue to break new barriers in terms of AI for seismic and seismic data. So again, as we say here, the collaboration is designed to create a foundational shift in geoscience. And again, very excited to follow the outlook of that going forward. New imaging center in KL this quarter, and this builds on a very similar model to what we do in Brazil. Strong utilization at all imaging centers. You see the total of internal production and external revenues is significantly up from last year. And we expect to see that continued activity growth throughout 2026. So I hand it over to go through our financials and then I will be back talking about the outlook for the rest of the year and the future. Thank you very much.

Thank you for that, Christian. I'll start by going through the revenues for Q1. You see here the revenues by nature listed on this page. On the left-hand side, we show a waterfall of our multi-client revenues in the quarter. Of course, the multi-client business unit It's behind most of the multi-client revenues, 207 in this quarter. And then we also have a component of $5 million coming from the other category, and that is mostly related to offshore wind measurement and metocean measurement campaigns. In total, multi-client revenues amounted to $213 million. On the contract revenue side, you see that multi-client business unit contributes by $33 million in the quarter, and that is related to revenues from JV partners on ongoing multi-client projects. The MDA, the marine data acquisition business, amounted to $58 million in the quarter. We had $15 million of external revenue from our imaging business, and the other category accounted for $3 million, resulting in total net contract revenues of $108 million for the quarter. If you look at the results by business unit, you see the multi-client business unit on the top left-hand side with with split by the multi-client revenue and the JV revenue. In total, $240 million. You have multi-client investments of 176. As you can see, a sharp uptick in multi-client investments, as Christian talked about. On the MDA side, data acquisition side, you see that we have $58 million of investments external revenue, but you also see the internal production on top. And as Christian said, we charge a zero EBIT margin on the internal production. So as you can see, the activity level is pretty high in the quarter and sharply up from Q4 when you also include the internal production. Imaging revenue is a bit down on the external revenue part, $15 million, whereas the internal part related to our own multi-client projects also is up here related to the higher multi-client activity. So as you can see, the overall activity level is more or less flat and we feel quite confident that we will grow the total amount of activity in our imaging business this year. versus last year. So if you look at the consolidated numbers, $321 million of revenues that have been well covered by now, so I won't go into more detail there. You see our operating expenses, $122 million net operating expenses in the quarter. This excludes one of, or an extraordinary item, non-cash of $8 million. And then we had $262 million of gross operating expenses in the quarter. As you can see, that is a bit higher than what we have seen in some of the preceding quarters. And this, of course, is partially related to the to the higher activity level and the high investment activity and partially related to geographical uplifts when you work in regions where you have more geographical related costs that are also reflected in the revenue line. you see that the gross cost will go up. And also, you should also see gross cost to some extent in a longer-term perspective because there are also some periodization effects between the different quarters. Then looking at depreciation and amortization, we had $36 million of net depreciation in the quarter after capitalizing some of it to multi-client projects. We had straight line amortization or multi-client library of $56 million. reasonably stable from the preceding quarters. And we had accelerated amortization of $43 million in the quarter. All in all, this gave us an EBIT of $64 million, excluding this $1 million one-off cost. This corresponds to an EBIT margin of $20 million, which is actually significantly up from the EBIT margin that we saw one year ago. Looking at the P&L, total revenues $321 million. We had an EBITDA, including this $8 million extraordinary cost of $191 million and $56 million of EBIT, including this cost. Adding on financial income and financial expenses and impacts from currency movements, we ended up with a result before tax in our produced P&L of $44 million in this quarter, which is slightly down compared to the $47 million that we had in the corresponding quarter of last year. Looking at cash flow, cash flow was quite strong in the quarter, supported by by working capital movements, which is normal, of course, in a Q1. So there are, as you know, some seasonal impacts or seasonal effects in our cash flow and working capital movement. We had cash flow from operations of $249 million. We had cash flow from investment activities of $168 million in the quarter. Then we paid down approximately or a little bit more than $30 million of debt in the quarter. And in addition, of course, we have some costs relating to IFRS leases. Interest paid were $29 million in the quarter. We pay interest on the bond loan bi-annually. So Q1, Q3, Q1, Q3, and so on. So we pay that in Q1. And we had normal dividend payments of just about $30 million in the quarter. So all in all, this gave us a net cash position at the end of the quarter of $184 million. As I said, after paying down a bit more than $30 million of debt and after paying $30 million of dividends as well. As I said, we tend to have some seasonal patterns in our working capital development. So Q1 is typically quite strong from a working capital viewpoint and Q2 tend to be weak. So you should expect to see weaker cash flow in Q2 as a result of the seasonal fluctuations. The balance sheet, and note that this is on an IFRS basis, I won't go into details on any of these items other than once again noting that the balance sheet remains very strong and net interest-bearing debt is now down to $424 million as per the end of Q1. And then we This gave us the confidence to continue to sanction a dividend of 15.5 US cents per share. The exit date is set to 8th of May, and the payment date will be on the 27th of May. By that, I'll leave the word back to you, Christian.

Thank you, Svens. I'll talk about the outlook now. And I think the first slide sort of speaks to itself and it repeats my introduction message. Exploration is back. And if you look on the left hand side of this slide, you see five different recent reports. It's McKinsey, Woodmack. Goldman Sachs, Financial Times, and last but not least, IEA, concluding that the exploration activity that you've seen ever since COVID is not sustainable and it has to come up. And not only does it have to come up, it has to come up sharply compared to where it's been for the past five years. And there are five bullet points that I want to go through in more detail in this presentation. Number one starts with peak oil being extended by more than 20 years. This is the conclusion of the IEA report that came out in November last year. So think about it for a second. If your doctor told you that you had another 20 years to live, you would probably change your priorities. And that's exactly what the oil companies are doing right now. They've been told that peak oil is not going to be 2030 or 2032. It's probably going to be sometime after 2050. And the models of IEA only goes to 2050, so they can conclude that it's going to peak in 2050. But what they're saying is that it's definitely not going to peak until after 2050. And that means that all companies have to go back on the drawing board. They need to relook at their plans and they need to start investing in projects now that are going to get in production in 2035 or later, which again is very good news for frontier activity going forward. Again, this doesn't change overnight. And I think for Q1, obviously, it doesn't happen overnight. And it's not like you're going to see increased spending immediately. But we are increasingly optimistic for the future in terms of exploration. And we get that signal from our clients as well. The second point here is that reserve life continues to decline. I will show a slide showing the development of reserve outlook, and it continues to go sharply down every year. And the reason for that is obviously that the RRR, so the reserve replacement ratio, is below one. And if it's below one and you keep on producing as much as you do, then you know that it's just a matter of time until your reserves are going to be unsustainable low. Number three is, as a result of that, the renewed focus on energy security and geopolitical risk. And this actually started late last fall. We started talking about the energy security and geopolitical risk. And then it was further accelerated, of course, by the war in the Middle East. And now it's on everybody's agenda right now in terms of energy. What do we do when 10 to 20 million barrels are under high risk going forward? And obviously inventories are drawn very, very quickly as we speak. And as a result of that, investor sentiment is changing. So it used to be that investors expected all the capital allocation to go back to share buybacks and dividends. And we actually see now that investors actually prefer companies to continue to reinvest in the business because they see that today's production is not sustainable in five or ten years if you keep on underinvesting in your own business. Last but not least, exploration successes, which we have seen in 2026, are supported by TGS data, which is always a great sign that TGS has data in the right places. So going into further details. So the first one I have covered before and I talked about that. But again, this refers to IEA's World Energy Outlook from November 2025, where they make a U-turn compared to what they did about a year before. So in terms of oil and expected demand for oil, you can see the dark blue line. It continues to grow. It continues to grow every year between now and 2050. And that's a significant change from what IEA predicted about 12 months ago. Natural gas is the same thing. That's a lighter blue, and you see it continues to grow. And if you look at the change in demand expected in 2050 from what IEA said one year earlier, oil and natural gas is up 25%. And you see that the one that is down is renewables, which is down 25%. So we're getting more pessimistic about the growth of renewables, and we're getting more optimistic about the growth prospects for oil and gas. And it doesn't mean that renewables is not growing. You see it's growing faster than anything else, but it's just not growing as fast as we expected about a year ago. So again, a very positive slide in terms of the outlook for especially frontier exploration, where you will see all companies are returning back to frontier. The second point is on declining reserve life and what we call an unsustainable RRR. You see the RRRs on the right-hand side, and then you see that they've been consistently below 100%. And as a result, you see a sharp decline in the reserve life of the major IOCs on the left-hand side. So again, this is obviously not sustainable. It would be sustainable if you had peak oil in 2030, but it's not sustainable if you get another 20 years life expectancy of oil and gas, which is what we have seen quite recently. Moving on to renewed focus on energy security and geopolitical risk. Of course, this has taken a major change over the past few years, kicking off with a war on the 28th of February. And it seems like it's just going to continue like that. So the global oil supply actually plummeted by 10.1 million barrels to 97 million in March. This is the largest oil supply disruption in history. And obviously, we're going to see the impact of that in the months to come. In March, oil prices posted the largest ever monthly gain in wake of the most severe oil supply shock that the world has ever seen. And that, again, means that the investor sentiment is changing. So the graph on the left-hand side is showing companies that reinvest in the business, illustrated with a dark blue line, versus companies who underinvest in their business with a lighter blue line. And basically, the definition of that is based on the CapEx to cash flow ratio. So whenever your CapEx... to cash flow ratio is over a certain point or over the median, you will belong to the dark blue line. And if you're below the median, it would be the lighter blue. And what you see is a significant change here starting in late October of 2025. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's about the same time as IEA released their report on another 20 years of extension to peak oil. But what you see now is that companies who are reinvesting in their business are trading at about 20 percentage points higher share prices than the companies who don't reinvest and allocate all their capital to share buybacks and dividends. And this is a big change compared to what you've seen over the past few years where investors were demanding that you pay out all your excess capital to shareholders rather than reinvesting in your business. If you look at what some of the CEOs are quoted here on the lower right-hand corner, you see Mike Wirth, who's the CEO of Chevron, who's saying shale oil production in the U.S. has probably plateaued over the past 6 to 12 months. This is a statement from the Sarah Week in Houston quite recently. BP, so Meg O'Neill, who came in as a new CEO of BP, one of the first public statements she made is that they've set themselves a target of 100% reserve replacement by 2027. And that's a big change to where BP has been in the past. And it obviously requires more exploration spending and obviously more data in terms of finding those new barrels. Last but not least, from Galp, Maria said that, I know that exploration is all that the industry is talking about these days. Quite a change from a few years ago. And again, she can't be more right in terms of making that statement. We've seen a significant change in terms of our clients really getting back to the drawing board in terms of setting plans for exploration for the future. Number five, and this is probably my favorite slide of the deck, it's showing exploration success, which is supported by TGS data. So you see some of the commercial discoveries that have been made in 2026, ranging from Norway all the way to Brazil. And you see three discoveries in the South Atlantic area. You see a couple of discoveries in Gulf of America, etc., The point of this slide is that pretty much every discovery that is made in the world today, we go in and we check, do we have data? And pretty much 10 out of 10, we have data underneath the discoveries that have been made, which is always great. Every morning I wake up, I read the news and I see there's been a discovery. And the first thing I check is our TGS database and see whether we have data there. And again, this year has been fantastic in terms of strong exploration success, but also supported by TGS data, which is also a great proof and evidence that we have. Not only do we have a lot of data, but we also have data at the right places. So to summarize that, we're extremely well positioned for an exploration upcycle. We've been a major consolidator during the five-year industry down cycle. And there has been times when I've been thinking, you know, are we too brave? Because it's certainly taken longer time for this recovery to happen than we thought at the time. Nobody expected this to be a five-year industry down cycle or even six years. We thought it was going to be a relatively quick rebound, but it's great to see now that industry partners, clients, and you name it, they're all talking about exploration these days. And TGS is obviously in a unique position, having almost 60% of all the multi-client data in the world. having about 50% of the global fleet for seismic acquisition, having the largest OBN counts for deep water, etc., etc. We have, through these acquisitions, gained a unique geophysical technology suite. If you look at all the technologies that we have today, whether it's a geostreamer, whether it's a ram-formed vessels, whether it's a Gemini low-frequency source, imaging technologies, and you name it. These are all technologies that TGS has gotten access to through acquisitions of four companies during the last five years. And it's great to see, you know, some TGS used to be asset light. We didn't even have access to the geo streamer. We didn't have access to the Gemini low frequency source that was marketed by Ion at the time. Now we have all these technologies in-house. And that is probably the key reason that an increasing number of clients prefer to work with TGS, whether it's in streamer business, whether it's OBN or, of course, multi-client. Talking about multi-client, we have multi-client data covering all major basins. I touched on the fact that we have about 60% of all the data that has been acquired since 2018. And it's obviously a great position to be in. As you saw from our Q1 numbers, we continue to invest in the business. We continue to be brave, bold, and we think that this will benefit TGS and our shareholders in the future. Last but not least, we have an efficient cost base and a strong balance sheet, and you shouldn't take that for granted in our industry. So looking forward, order backlog and inflow. We had an order inflow of close to $400 million in Q1. Q1 is usually a rather weak quarter in terms of order inflow, but you see that Q1 stands out this year as a very strong quarter. And that means that our total backlog is close to $800 million now. And if you look at historical data on that, you have to go all the way back to 2019 to see a backlog that is as strong as TGS is reporting for Q1 2026. Right hand side touches on the expected timing of the backlog, and you can read that yourself. I'm not going to cover that in much detail. Next slide is showing booked positions for both streamer work and OBN for the next two quarters. As you see for Q2 of 2026 on the streamer side, we're pretty much sold out. We have a strong backlog and pretty much all our vessels are now working 100%, which means that utilization will probably be in line with what we saw in Q1, which is record strong, by the way. Then you see in Q3, there is still some work to be sold, but it's mainly multi-client. You see that there is a pickup in activity on the contract side, which is a good sign. We think that the contract, we believe that the contract market will strengthen during the summer and into the latter half of, or second half of 2026. And again, there are still multiple multi-client projects that will fill up the capacity, such as Q3 will probably be at a satisfactory level in terms of utilization as well. On the OBN work, it's slightly different. You see a relatively low crew count in Q2 of 26. This market has been a bit challenging over the past year and a half. We see some signs of improvement. And if you look at Q3, it doesn't look good. I mean, it's pretty much the same contract allocation as we had in Q2. But keep in mind that the long-term agreement that we signed for Gulf of America with one of our key partners covering OBN work for the next three years, That is already sold. So now it's more about timing. When do we decide to go on and acquire the first project? So it will most likely increase the size of the dark blue bar quite substantially. So I'm not too worried about the OBM allocation for Q3 and then Q4. It's still early days. But again, it's always good to have some of these long term contracts with clients because you only sell them once. And then it's more about timing and it's more about discussions with the clients in terms of when do you start the project rather than being part of a tender where you need to spend weeks and months to plan for a project. If we move on to the guidance, as Sven said, no changes in the guidance for 2026. We still expect our multi-client investments to be somewhere between $500 and $575 million. You've seen that we've gotten off to a very good start in that regard. And I think first half may be slightly higher than the second half because there is a capacity constraint now in terms of vessels. And we're using all our vessels except for one on multi-client in Q1. That's probably not going to be the case for the full year. There's probably going to be a slight shift from multi-client back to contract in line with a better market. On the CapEx, we expect the same level as in 2025. We get sometimes the question whether we can cut the CapEx further. Yes, we can, but I don't think it would be smart. I think we keep on investing in new technologies. We're really proud of some of the technologies that we have acquired over the past five years, and we want to continue to develop these technologies. So I think the level that you've seen in 2025 is quite sustainable also for at least 2026. Gross operating costs, Sven touched on that. And then in terms of utilization, we're expecting a significant increase in streamer vessel utilization for 2026. And you've already seen the signs of that in Q1. You've seen what is already booked for Q2. So I feel pretty good about that statement. And then we said that OBN activity is expected to be in line with 2025. And I think that still stands as it looks right now. Our long-term net debt target range is between $250 and $350 million. You saw that we're getting close to $400 million in net debt now. And obviously, our plan is as soon as we get down to the guided range, we want to look at capital allocation, see if we should either increase dividends, buy back shares, or at least do a full assessment of what our shareholders prefer. So in summary, high multi-client activity in the quarter measured as multi-client investments, of course, and as a result, very strong vessel utilization. I think I talked about it last quarter, but in 2025, we had a lot of waste. We had white spaces between different contracts, which cost us a lot of money. We've started out 2026 in a much better way where we've been really efficient in terms of booking vessels, making sure that the next project is ready such that you can move a vessel from A to B very quickly. And we've already seen the results of that in terms of increased utilization, but also lower costs and lower waste, which is great to see. EBITDA and EBIT margins, 62% and 20% respectively. Very strong order inflow, which means that we have the highest backlog since 2019. And again, as I've said multiple times, exploration is back. There is renewed focus on energy security. And most importantly, the investor sentiment has changed. We're not changing our guidance, our 2026 guidance stance. And then last but not least, we maintain our quarterly dividend of 0.155 per share. Thank you very much. And I will now open up for questions. And I will ask Sven to come and join me on the stage. Thank you very much.

Yes, we have a series of questions from the people on the webcast. So starting off with John Lyson in ABG. Have you seen any tangible signs of improvements in oil companies eager to buy seismic data? In example, the number of client meetings, leads, tenders, vessels, requests, etc. And then which of your segments do you expect to see improvements first? Should we expect any improvements in your 2026 P&L or is it more at 2027 event?

Yeah, I think in terms of client meetings and client interest, I mean, everyone's talking about exploration these days. And as I said, it doesn't change overnight. It's not like a war that kicks off in late February is going to impact spending on seismic in March. But I think there are clear signs that companies are now going back to their strategy plans. They're meeting with their boards. They're discussing what do we do as a consequence of this. And I think one of the challenges that you've seen over the past few years is that all companies spend all their cash. They spend it on dividend buybacks and capex, and there is no more cash unless they're willing to compromise on shareholder allocation. That is going to change now because now they have more cash. So obviously what happens with a higher oil price is that you will have higher revenues and better cash flow. And we think and we have reason to believe that some of that will benefit seismic and exploration going forward. So I guess the answer is yes, there is more optimism. I've had recent meetings with heads of explorations of some of our biggest clients and they they're definitely confirming that they are back to the drawing board in terms of making plans for the future. And again, as John knows, budgets were set when the oil price was 62 and with an expectation that it would drop down to the 50s. And now we're in a different world and all companies and especially the supermajors don't move very fast. But we think that for 27 and onwards, you will see a change. Whether it's going to happen in 26, based on the stronger cash flow, it's still too early to say.

Then we have a somewhat related question from an investor. You mentioned expectations for more contract work in second half of the year. Are you seeing firm tenders supporting this already? And when could we expect to see more contracts being awarded?

Yeah, there's been a pickup in tender activity, both in OBN and Streamr. And as we said in Q4, we don't want to go and compete for, let's say, Streamr contracts where the margins are unsustainably low. So we actually shifted a lot of our activity to multi-client, which you saw the results of in Q1 with more multi-client investments and higher utilization outcomes. I think we see some signs of a pickup in terms of tender activity, and we are competing for some of that. We're not going to sacrifice on our margins. We're going to be very disciplined in that regard. But we see that there is certainly a volume of contracts out there that justifies that we can switch some of that activity back to contract if the pricing is good enough.

uh kevin roger in kepler chevro this is one for you as a better you also mentioned it in the presentation but you can probably repeat it in terms of working capital can you please comment on the working capital movement over the past quarters and what to expect for the coming quarters

Yeah, we're typically seeing strong, as I said, strong working capital developments in Q1. That's a seasonal pattern and we almost always see a weaker development in Q2 and we don't expect it to be very much different this year. So, as I said, there is a pretty significant seasonal pattern where Q1 is strong, Q2 is weak, Q3 is... is also normally a little bit weak, but much better than Q2 normally. And then Q4 is typically better than Q3 again. But Q1 is normally the best one. And it varies a little bit from year to year, the relative strength in working capital movements between the quarters. But over time, that's a reasonable pattern to assume. Yeah.

Kevin Rodger has also a question regarding if we could indicate the amount of the delayed pre-funding that we did not secure in Q1.

Yeah, we don't want to give a number on that. But of course, I mean, you can do the math yourself. It's a big survey. It's a high technology capacity vessel. And we've been acquiring data there for quite some time. And again, on that question, we've been quite transparent on that. We have no reason to believe that we're not going to get that funding from our client. That client is funding multiple projects for TGS in that area. They never let us down. And we would never have started that project and definitely not continue to acquire data if we didn't know that this is more related to bureaucracy and slow internal processes rather than a willingness to buy data over their own blocks. So we're not concerned about that. And then the timing, you know, whether it's, we feel very, very strong that it's going to happen during the acquisition of data, which is good.

Lukas Dahl in Arctic Securities wonders, so if the recovery plays out the way you project, can you give an indication of what kind of multi-client investments and activity that would imply?

I think we've probably been a bit ahead of schedule in terms of we upped our investments quite significantly in 2025 because we have expected that the market would rebound and then it may happen quicker and more significant than we put into our own plans because of the war and the increased focus on energy security and investor sentiment that is changing. So I guess we've already started. Whether we're going to continue to increase multi-client investments, it all depends on client interest, client funding, etc. And keep in mind, we have somewhat limited vessel capacity too. I mean, in Q1, we pretty much used all our vessels but one to get to the multi-client investments that we reported. So there's not a whole lot of flexibility in continuing to increase unless we're going to use third-party vessels. On the OBN side, it's a bit different. There's still capacity there. We can still grow the revenues quite substantially on the OBN side with the current crew count and the current crew availability.

And I have a question from Stefan Evian in D&B Carnegie. How does a higher oil price environment impact fuel costs on your streaming vessels? Would that be upside to your gross OPEX guidance if we stay at current oil price levels? And to what extent can you push these costs over to the clients?

Yeah, obviously we will have to pay a bit more for fuel than we assumed some months ago, given the situation that do impact the gross cost. You've seen a little bit of that in Q1. It's not too bad. On our contract work, we typically are well protected in our contracts where there are closest that are pushing that additional cost over to us. over to the customers. So that's valid for a few exceptions, but almost all contracts will have that. But it will of course affect gross cost and then a corresponding component in revenues.

Very good. I don't see any further questions from the people on the webcast. Unless there's any last minute questions coming up. I think that concludes the presentation. So I'll leave the concluding remarks to you, Christian.

Yeah, thank you very much. And I think it's obviously after five or almost six years where exploration and seismic has been completely out of favour. It's great to see all the news flow, all the reports, all the discussions now with clients that are taking a very different tone to what it did quite recently. It's great. We're prepared for this. This is really what we've been working on for the past few years in terms of our strategic agenda. It's taken longer than we expected and it will still not change overnight, but we definitely see the early signs of a very strong cycle going forward and Being probably one of the companies in the world with the highest exposure to exploration is a good position to be in. I really want to thank you for your attention today and hope that you come back in Q2, which is going to be reported in the middle of summer in July. So thank you very much for that and have a great day. Thanks.