Viridien S/Adr

good day and thank you for standing by welcome to the cgg q1 2024 financial results conference call at this time all participants are in the listen only mode after the speaker's presentation there'll be a question and answer session to ask a question during the session you will need to press star one and one on your telephone you will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised to withdraw your question please press star one and one again Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to CGG. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sean. Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this presentation of CDG's first quarter of 24 results. The call today is hosted from Paris, where Mrs. Sophie Zurchia, Chief Executive Officer, and from Los Angeles, where Mr. Sean Serba, our crew CFO, will provide an overview of the quarter results, as well as provide comments on our outlook. Let me remind you that some of the information contains forward-looking statements, and therefore that may change at any time. Following the overview of the quarter, we will be pleased to take your questions, and now I will turn the call over to Sophie.

Thank you, Christophe. Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for participating in this Q1 2024 conference call. I would like to start by first recognizing Christophe's numerous contributions to CGG. After 28 years in the company and holding various key finance, business, and commercial leadership positions, he will be retiring in a few weeks. All the best into your future endeavors, Christophe, and thank you for the great work. We're now moving on to slide two. We're off to a good start in 2024. Overall activity was strong in Q1 across all our three business lines and across all geographic locations. Exploration activities continue to progressively pick up globally with interest from all clients' profiles in all geographies, including in an increasing number of frontier areas. To respond to projected supply demand balance, our clients are also continuing to accelerate their field development programs where ocean bottom node technology which requires advanced imaging, is establishing itself as the reference in mature basins across the globe. The Gulf of Mexico and Norway remain very active, sustained by demand for incremental barrels, which is driving increased high-end imaging and OBN activity. The Middle East and North Africa are active, while Asia-Pacific is picking up nicely with increasing IOC presence. Looking at CGG in Q1, I am very pleased to report our best first quarter since 2018. Overall, the quarter was strong with excellent performance and $13 million in net cash flow generation, despite $20 million paid for our vessel contractual commitments, which highlights the benefits of our decision to become an asset-light company. Q1 revenue reached $273 million, up 30% year-on-year. Geoscience was up 11% year-on-year at $88 million. Global activity remained strong, supported by demand for high-end large projects and NOCs increasing activity. Earth data was up 50% year-on-year at $97 million, driven mainly by broader geographical demand. Sensing and monitoring was up 35% year-on-year at $89 million, with high deliveries of land equipment this quarter. Segment EBITDA was up 58% year-on-year at $106 million, including $16 million of penalty fees from vessel commitments, a 39% margin. Now on slide three. There were two positive post-closing events in April that I would like to highlight. First, the S&P global ratings upgraded our long-term debt, recognizing our commitment to deleverage our balance sheet. And second, the settlement of our long-lasting dispute in India for a net amount of around $13 million. These are positive events for our financial roadmap. Going on to slide four. DDE segment revenue was solid this quarter at $185 million, up 28% year-on-year, with growth in both geoscience and earth data. Profitability improved year-on-year to 56% EBITDA margin, while still being impacted by penalty fees from vessel commitments. Let's go on to the business line now. On slide five, geoscience external revenue was $88 million in Q1, up 11% year-on-year. Geoscience had very solid activity led by high-end work in all regions. The market continues to strengthen, driven mainly by increased activity in infrastructure-led exploration and field development. Backlog at $227 million is up 23% since the end of last year, thanks to catch-up in order intake. Slide six. Following 18% external revenue growth in 2023, geoscience grew 11% into one year-on-year. Increasing demand for our high-end technologies along with the increasing size of projects drove the solid start of the year for geoscience. Use of our unique elastic for waveform inversion is expanding geographically, increasingly providing value in all basins globally across all geologic settings, including those that are less complex. In definition and fidelity, we can also apply the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques with our expert modifications to extract insights that accelerate the speed and accuracy of structural and stratigraphic interpretation. The picture on this slide is a very nice example of the added value of AI to detect sand injectites, and they're in green on the picture, in the Norwegian North Sea. which are expected to be oil-bearing. Combining the best geoscience technology with the best data science technology is a powerful combination and fits CDG's strengths very well. Looking at our low-carbon businesses in CCUS, we see increasing demand in reservoir screening along with monitoring design, and in minerals and mining, we used our high-end imaging technology to successfully map an oil body of interest deep below the surface in Australia to identify new extraction opportunities. Slide 7. We continue to advance the value of seismic for reservoir management. Reservoir engineers are interested in understanding small reservoir changes in time, which has historically been a challenge. Full waveform inversion is increasingly being applied successfully in this space. And this example is offshore Brazil. and it shows our advanced 4D full waveform inversion technology clearly distinguish the producing and water injection layers in the 4D response, helping reservoir engineers adjust their reservoir models and optimize production. Now going on to Earth data, slide 8. In general, we see our clients starting to expand the breadth of their focus areas. especially IOCs, international oil companies, who are regaining interest and becoming more active in frontier areas. Q1 Earthdata cash capex was $50 million, up 79% year-on-year, driven by a large portfolio of well-funded ongoing projects. Pre-funding revenue was very strong at $58 million, driving our pre-funding rate to 116%. After-sales were $39 million this quarter, up 32% year-on-year, mainly driven by active projects and interest in South America, North Sea, and Africa. Slide 9. With this strong level of pre-funding, our portfolio of ongoing multi-client projects is growing larger and geographically broader in scope. This quarter, we completed our second Gulf of Mexico node project ahead of schedule, despite initial weather delays. In Asia, we completed our 2D survey in Malaysia and started a new survey in Australia. We continue the expansion of our CCUS subsurface data packages in the Gulf of Mexico and in the UK, mainly for screening applications, and the recent CCUS Lease Round in Norway fits very well our data library. Now I'm sensing and monitoring slide 10. Ascenting and monitoring segment revenue at $89 million was stronger year-over-year this quarter, up 35%. The growth was mainly supported by land equipment sales at $39 million, while marine equipment sales remained stable year-on-year at $34 million, driven by demand for OBN equipment. Sales from our new businesses were stable at $11 million. And at this level of revenue, the EBITDA margin of the sensing and monitoring business line was 11%. Now with highlights on slide 11. During the quarter, SMO sold its first 528 land acquisition system together with a new V564 vibrator electronic system. The 528 land acquisition system includes several new features designed to improve recording capacity reliability, productivity, and data fidelity for these challenging survey requirements. We had significant deliveries of our GPR 300 node this quarter in Europe, as clients appreciate the quality of our unique sensor, which enables better imaging. In our new businesses, we deployed a commercial railway monitoring solution during the first quarter And it is worth noting that we see a progressively increasing portion of our equipment, standard equipment, going to a new group of clients for application outside the oil and gas industry. Let me now give the floor to Jérôme for more comments on our financials.