Meren Energy Inc.

Hello, everyone. My name is Sharon and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Africa Oil Corp Q2 24 Results Management presentation. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there'll be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one and one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one and one again Please note that any time participants on the webcast can submit questions using the Q&A box on the webcast interface. Please note that this event is being recorded. The recording will be available for playback on the company's website. I would now like to pass the meeting to Mr. Shaheen Amani, Africa Oils Investor Relations Manager. Please go ahead, Mr. Amani.

Thank you, operator. On behalf of management, I thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2024 results presentation. On the call today, we have President and CEO Roger Tucker, our CFO Pascal Nicodem, and our Chief Commercial Officer Oliver Cui. There will be a presentation for around 20 minutes before we go into the Q&A session. But first, I would like to remind everyone that remarks made during this session are subject to forward-looking statements which involve significant risk factors and assumptions and these have been fully described in the company's continuous disclosure reports. The information discussed is made as of today's date and time, and Africa Oil assumes no obligation to update or revise this information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. The company's complete financial statements and related MDMA are available on our website and on CDAR. I will now pass you over to Pascal for the highlight of the second quarter. Pascal, over to you. Go ahead, please.

Thank you, Shane. Can you please move to the next slide? I will present the financial statements for the second quarter of 2024 and the first half 2024. First, I would like to start this presentation by showing how we've used our resources and how we've maintained the strength of our balance sheet in the first half of this year. So we started the year with $232 million of cash on the balance sheet. We are ending the second quarter with $185 million. And the main use of this cash for the first half of the year has been the return to the shareholders to a magnitude of about $51 million, both in dividend and share buyback. I will come back onto that. Minimal exploration expenditures, mainly on EG, about $6 million. And the negative $11 million that you can see on this chart, the fourth bar named as operating activities, is mainly GNAs, actually. And you will see in this $11 million that a significant portion of this $11 million, about $5 million, is GNAs. one-off cost in relation to the signing of the amalgamation agreement with BTG. We've received another dividend from Prime, the first of the year, $25 million net to Africa in April, which is the only source of cash that we received this first half. which explains our end of quarter balance, cash balance of $185 million. So if we aggregate this cash balance with prime net debt of at the moment of $222 million, it means that we have a combined net debt of $36 million. which once we have completed the deal with Prime is what you will see actually on the balance sheet as we are going to consolidate 100% of Prime going forward after the completion of the transaction with BTG. Next slide, please. Thanks, Shane. So yeah, in terms of buyback and dividends, I think it has been the main use of our cash in the first half. We want to continue to manage the company and the balance sheet and continue to return some of these positive resources to our shareholders. In the first half, we basically bought back some shares for an amount of $39 million plus $11 million of first half dividend paid in March. And so in total, since we have started the dividend return program in March 2022, we've returned a total of $143 million to our shareholders. And the board has also decided to reconduct the existing semi-annual dividend. So we are going to pay another 2.5 cents, US cents per share to our shareholders end of September. Next slide, please, Shane. Thank you. So yeah, a few financial highlights for the quarter and the previous quarters. So Prime's performance has remained very solid with a bid-back for the quarter of $92 million and a free cash flow of $77 million. So very stable, very stable performance. Looking on the left side of this slide, you will see the Africa net income. which have been impacted by civil exceptional items. And this quarter, again, we had a few exceptional items. The first one has been we've picked up our share of loss of Africa energy following the withdrawal of Total and CNR from the Block 11 B12 in South Africa. We've basically accounted for our share of that loss, that impairment into our net income. So that accounts for an additional loss of about $7 million. And also, it's worth mentioning that our share of net profit from Prime this quarter has been slightly down at $17 million, which has been impacted by a negative over-lift balance of about $12 million net to us, which explains why our net income for the quarter just breaks even. Next slide, please. Thank you. So coming back to our oil sales, I've explained in the past what we market our oil now, and I think this quarter still has been the evidence that we manage now to sell our oil in Nigeria consistently above dated brands. In Q2 has been the case again. where we sold, on average, our barrels at $89 per barrel, while Dited Brand has been $85. So we sold three cargoes. Prime has sold three cargoes, so one and a half cargoes net to us. And going forward, two cargoes have actually hit their trigger price in September and October, with an average price of $79 per barrel, which also evidences that The marketing strategy that we have now is efficient, and when the oil price goes down, we manage to secure a flow for all cargo. So that's also very good news. Next slide, please. Thank you, Shane. So yeah, just a few words on our production performance this quarter. So you will have noticed that our production is slightly down. And the average has been down at 16,700 working interest and 19,300 for the first half on average on an entitlement basis. So this is mainly due to a planned one-month shutdown which has now restarted and actually restarted above expectations. This drop that you have seen in Q2 is a . We are now talking to . Therefore, We've maintained our existing production guidance, and we are confident that we will be able to improve in the nine-month and four-year period for 2024. I will now hand over to Roger.