Viridien S/Adr

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Viridian Fall Year 2024 Financial Results Webcast and Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a 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 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to the Viridian team. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this presentation of the Iridian's full year 2024 results. I'm Jean-Baptiste Roussy, in charge of corporate finance and investor relations. And I'm here today in Paris with Sophie Zurchia, our CEO, and Jerome Serres, our Group CFO. They will provide you an overview of the results, as well as some comments on our outlook. Following this presentation, we'll be pleased to take your questions. And now, I'll leave you with Sophie.

Thank you, Jean-Baptiste, and welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining this presentation. Market environment remained stable in 2024, characterized by a backdrop of continued discipline investment. Despite some volatility in the macro environment during the second half of the year, with oil prices fluctuating due to geopolitical tensions and moderate oversupply, Our clients maintain stable spending patterns within our sector, driven by increased confidence in long-term and longer cycle offshore investments. We are seeing a gradual pickup in the early phases of exploration efforts, particularly among European IOCs, with a continued focus on efficiency, scalability, low carbon and cost disciplines. Let me start with the highlights of 2024, a year marked by successes where we met or exceeded our key targets. Our revenue remained stable, with notable outperformance on profitability and net cash flow generation. It is worth highlighting our commercial successes at Geoscience and Earthdata, as well as the ongoing restructuring at SMO, which is enhancing profitability and flexibility. Overall, we successfully delivered on the key milestones from the financial roadmap that we presented a year ago. Let me move on to slide six. In this presentation, we will mainly highlight four-year performance as it more accurately represents market trends and the company's overall performance. There are several positive signs for our sector. Clients are increasingly prioritizing quality, they're willing to commit to longer timeframes, indicating increased visibility, and the size of projects is growing. Notably, order intake remained solid throughout the year, particularly during the fourth quarter. Over the year, Geoscience confirmed its strength and ability to drive the group's performance with 20% revenue growth for the second consecutive year. Earth data revenue increased by 14%, driven by strong investments. As anticipated, sending and monitoring experienced a decline in revenue due to a high comparison base with the delivery of MegaCruise in 2023. Overall, our four-year revenue was nearly flat at $1.117 billion, aligning with our revenue guidance at the beginning of the year. A four-year adjusted segment EBITDA increased by 14% year-over-year to $455 million, driven by DDE's growth, partially offset by SMO's decline. Net cash flow improved significantly to $56 million from last year, reflecting our focus on cost control and working cap management. Our performance underscores our focus on cash generation, which is particularly satisfying considering the $75 million in contractual fees related to vessel commitments in 2024 that impacted our cash flow. This contract ended on January 8th, marking a significant turning point for our financial trajectory and the final step towards achieving our asset-like business model ambition. Our financial roadmap remains clear, disciplined capital allocation, robust cash flow generation, and continued balance sheet deleveraging. I'm moving on to slide seven. DDE segment revenue grew by 17% to $787 million, with adjusted EBITDA at 25%, $458 million, with both geoscience and earth data contributing positively. On slide eight with geoscience. Geoscience external revenue reached a record high of $404 million, up 20%, surpassing pre-COVID levels. Order intake increased by 90% year over year, driven by best-in-class imaging technology, which the industry requires to solve increasingly complex subsurface challenges, increased activity in the Middle East, with large volumes of land and OBN data acquired, and the renewal of multiple long-term contracts for dedicated HPC processing centers. A constant focus on efficiency, combined with the use of the latest technologies, has continued to yield further improvements in productivity. This performance demonstrates our unique ability to deliver the highest quality imaging results and design, build and operate the most efficient HPC operations for high workload scientific operations. Going on to slide nine. Our commercial successes are driven by sustained client interest in our technology. Clients consistently tell us that our images are the best in the industry, and they can trust our results to make critical investment decisions. Our elastic four-way form imaging technology, now becoming mainstream across all regions, offers significant differentiation. It provides a step change in image quality, enhancing the resolution of fine geological details and reducing investment risks for our clients. In our new businesses, geoscience is showing positive momentum, especially in carbon sequestrations. We are working on several exciting projects in Norway, the US Gulf, and Asia Pacific, indicating broad regional interest. Additionally, minerals and mining is making progress with new programs awarded in Australia and Oman. Going on to slide 10. This is a really good example of the differentiation that we bring into science. Virgin has been imaging the largest OBN survey in the North Sea. Compared to streamer data, OBN data is much richer, offering better low frequencies and longer offsets between sources and receivers. This, combined with the exponential increase in data, makes the imaging work significantly more complex, which is where our expertise truly shines. Our advanced four-way form imaging algorithms are most effective in extracting the maximum information from the data. And in this case, the subsurface rock velocities inferred from the data exhibit unprecedented resolution and geological relevance with an exceptionally accurate match. The final models and images are critical for our clients, enabling them to explore faster and more accurately. Now moving on to Earth data with slide 11. Earthdata segment revenue grew by 14% to $383 million compared to last year. Pre-funding revenue grew 6% to $205 million with a pre-funding rate of 81% of capex in line with our long-term target. After-sales grew to $178 million, up 25% in the flat market, reflecting client interest in our data quality despite limited bid rounds during the year and our client's disciplined approach. On slide 12, our CAPEX was allocated to the Laconia Survey in the US Gulf, the North Viking Rabid Streamer Survey in Norway, and numerous reprocessing projects globally. We also initiated projects in prospective regions, including Australia, Malaysia, Ivory Coast, and Uruguay. In our new businesses, EarthData completed a mining project in Arizona and delivered several carbon sequestration projects in the North Sea, U.S. Gulf, and Asia. We believe our Laconia project will provide the industry with a step change in imaging quality. Despite being at a very early stage, the first images reveal paleogene structures that were previously unseen in legacy data. Pre-funders have been very impressed by the new information we have been able to provide, which will attract additional clients. Looking at slide 13, you can see on this map the position of our project portfolio in 2024, reflecting our strategy to invest in our core basins of the US Gulf, Brazil and Norway, but also position in the future active basins. I am particularly pleased with our projects in Uruguay, Côte d'Ivoire, and Malaysia that are attracting significant client interest. Moving to sensing and monitoring on slide 14. A four-year SMO segment revenue was $313 million, reflecting a 27% decline from the previous year, which benefited from the delivery of mega-crew systems. The four-year adjusted EBITDA was $35 million, a margin of 11%, slightly down from last year. However, I was particularly pleased with the Q4 performance, which achieved an 18% margin. This indicates that our restructuring plan is on track to deliver the expected cost reduction. On slide 15 now, we can qualify 2024 as a transition year. In the absence of Middle East megacrew projects, we achieved a solid level of revenue, sustained by a large install base, and initiated a restructuring plan aimed at reducing SMO's break-even point while increasing operational flexibility. We have already successfully cut our fixed costs by reducing the industrial footprint in Asia and in the U.S. We believe we will reach our 20 to 30 million cost reduction run rate target by end of 2025, as we complete the implementation of the restructuring plan in France. In 2024, we also had notable operational and commercial successes, including the launch of the next generation of land acquisition systems and vibrator electronics, as well as strong deliveries of land nodes in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. In SMO, our new businesses grew by 17% year over year, now accounting for 17% of SMO revenue, up from 10% in 2023, with infrastructure monitoring being the largest contributor. We are also benefiting from wireless node sales to service companies involved in geothermal activities. Looking ahead, SMO should be well positioned for both growth and improved profitability through the cycle. Let me now hand the floor over to Jerome for comments on our financials.