Foraco International SA (FAR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the Foraco International Investor Presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. [Operator Instructions] It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Glen Akselrod, with Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Jesse, and thank you, everybody, for joining our webcast today with Foraco International. The purpose of today's presentation is just to give our audience a better understanding of the business through a PowerPoint presentation and then questions for management. The presentation is going to be led by Daniel Simoncini, Chief Executive Officer. You should see the presentation through the webcast, and I would have e-mailed it earlier in PDF. If you don't have a copy and want one, simply e-mail me [email protected], and I'll be happy to send you one. As Jesse mentioned, we will break for Q&A at the end of the formal remarks. When we do break, we encourage questions. And again, we're only taking questions through the web portal. If you're listening over the telephone, please access the web link that we sent earlier today to ask that question wherever you could submit a question any time using the text box within the portal. I'll ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear and then Daniel will answer. I'm not going to reference any names, but simply read the questions asked. As we have a fairly large audience today, if I can't get to your question online, and then that has not yet been addressed during the call and can't be, I'll come back to you by e-mail. I'm not going to read the forward-looking statements, but I do state that they apply and I reference them on Page 2 of this PowerPoint. With that said, once again, thank you for joining us. Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path. And now I'll turn the call over to Daniel to start his part of the discussion and presentation.

Thank you, Glen. Good morning, everybody, and thank you again for attending this presentation. I'm going to -- I'm Daniel Simoncini, Chairman and CEO of Foraco International. Today, my partner, Jean-Pierre Charmensat, was not able to join. So he sent you his apologies, and we can start from now. So number one, Foraco is a drilling company, but is not in the hydrocarbon, not in oil, not in gas and not in thermal coal, okay? We are quasi exclusively in metals and water. The company is listed on the TSX under the ticker name FAR, and there are about 100 million shares outstanding. And the company has booked last year revenue of USD 270 million, and we employ, as we speak, about just short of 3,000 people. We are the #3 in our small space by number of drills. We have a tradition to -- traditionally, we have outperformed the competition in terms of profitability. We operate a fleet of 300 rigs. And we work in the main world mining jurisdictions, starting with Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil, West Africa and CIS. We enjoyed a very solid growth since 2017, which followed a brutal recession between 2013 and 2016. We have one of the strongest customer base in this space, I'll come back later on that. We are gaining significant exposure to EV metals or battery metals, mostly in exploration and production, drilling services. And we are a clear leader in the groundwater well drilling and underground water monitoring businesses. This Slide #6 shows you the relative drilling intensity in terms of dollars volume during the life of a particular mine. Each mine starts with what we call a greenfield phase where it's very early stage, and the people, their owners, do not know exactly what's going on. So they ask us to drill and try to see if there is any reserves. When these reserves are proven, then they kick in the prefeasibility and feasibility study, which are the most -- very intensive phase of the whole mine life. We work for 4 purposes. Number one, of course, the reserves. Number two, the geotechnical characteristic of the rock, because sometimes you have rock which are too soft to build the mine, either an underground mine. Then we drill also for metallurgical purposes to assess on bulk sample. Bulk sample is typically a few hundred to few thousand tons of ore to be processed through pilot test labs, which will tell the miner what we can expect in terms of OpEx and process costs. And finally, of course, each and every mine in the world has water issue, either there is too much and the miner needs to dewater the mine or there is not enough. And of course, he needs to find water table -- groundwater table around because the miners are using a ton of water for the process. After this prefeasibility, feasibility study and financing of the construction, we resume drilling for a very long term what we call -- we call that the life of mine extension and the production drilling. When a mine starts to produce, we never stop drilling, okay? So anything which is on the left side of the mine construction we call it upstream, and anything which is on the right, we call it downstream. Foraco in 2021 was approximately 2/3 of its business exposed to the downstream, which is usually it's less impacted by the yoyo-ing of the commodity prices, whereas the upstream business can be evaporating overnight if the metal price or the mineral price goes up. So just to give you an idea of how the drilling is made and what we do and for which purpose. ESG, I wouldn't be long on that. We are proud that we have reported this year our first ever ESG report. So we know exactly what is our greenhouse gas emission for last year. We know how many tons of water we are using, et cetera, et cetera. We are in a good shape. We have no strikes, no community conflicts whatsoever, no environmental impact, litigation, no corporate governance whistleblower whistling. And therefore, we can say that Foraco is a good place to work and is a good company. What are the fundamentals of our business and what are the sustaining thing? Of course, the main driver of our business is the metrics of commodity prices. And as you know, for the last 3, 4 years, the commodity have had a nice run, kind of getting too much excited for the moment due to the current geopolitical crisis here and there. But we do believe that the commodity in general and the metal prices in particular will be sustained and very high compared to the last, I would say 10 years average, for a very long time. Three reasons for that. Number one, the world -- and again, outside the current Russia invasion, is poised to change is energy pipeline. And therefore, the energy transition is a very, very powerful engine for our business. Number two, iron ore is [indiscernible] here and there. Number three, gold is having a good run as well, independently of the current tensions because basically, during 10 years, the big or gold Major producers have totally neglected to drill and to renew their reserves. And apparently, the reserves have shrunk by more than 2/3 -- by 1/3, which is a kind of issue. And now they are trying to catching up. For those who do not know the space, you will find some difficulty to find a kind of independent database. The only one which we see the standard import global market where they do track the exploration spendings of all the mining -- the publicly listed mining companies in the world. And this correspond to the upstream side of our market. And you can see on the graph, on the left graph, that after a boom in 2012, the business went down and now is recovering nicely. And they -- this is last year graph. I'm just waiting for this year one, which I don't have yet. But you can see that they forecast a 10% to 15% increase year-to-year and then a slow decrease, and I think they're going to change they look this year. And to give you a ballpark figure of this upstream market, you're going to see that in the $10 billion to $15 billion for worldwide market. 50% of these expenditures are spent on the gold subject. A third is spent on copper and followed by zinc, lead, nickel, et cetera, et cetera. This is a prime driver for our business, okay? Unfortunately, most of our business is in the downstream, and to get our guesstimate of our overall accessible market in the world, both upstream and downstream is about double to 2.5x this, okay? So you're talking about a business which is about $20 billion to $30 billion a year. At Foraco, we have a very, very strong and prestigious customer base. We decided with my partner years and years ago, because we being French, nobody is perfect, we didn't have any domestic market and Europe is a kind of mining [indiscernible]. So we decided to export our services in a big mining jurisdiction. And the market in mineral drilling is split between 2 different worlds. You have the world of the Majors, the big names, the Rio Tinto, BHP, Teck, Vale, et cetera. And then you have the world of the juniors. The juniors, by definition, are just explorers. They -- while the first are printing money and getting billions of revenue from the commodity sales. The juniors are not printing money, they are printing shares. And therefore, the attitude is totally different. Usually, if you want to work with juniors, you better be within university bodies and being very, very local. The Majors are more global, and they would accept a foreign company knocking the door and putting the foot in the door and trying to be probed and validated. So this is what we chose and we elected to do. We started in the mining business in 2006. And I can say that 15 years later, we are very proud to have gained the confidence and the trust of most of the bigger names. 85% -- 82%, sorry, of our revenue was generated last year by business with the big guys, whereas 18% was generated with the juniors. I don't think that you have one in the top 10 company in the world in our space having this kind of exposure to Majors. The business -- the mineral drilling business or water drilling business is not a business of process, is not a business of IP, is not a production business. It's a people business. So we have to take care of our people as much as we can, especially in these days where everybody talks about the big resignation, the inflation in wages, et cetera, et cetera, and the generation Y, Z or X who doesn't want to work anymore. So first and foremost, we take care of our personnel safety. And this slide shows you that last year, we've got -- we didn't hurt anybody. We tried to do the same this year, but we went from a pretty high level to a pretty good level. And we can say that today, Foraco is a safe place to work. We have to work every day to retain our people, to keep them motivated, to give them the well-deserved recognition. We don't want to be the company who is disrupting the market and paying big bucks to keep the guys because the only thing you're going to generate is you are building a mercenary attitude, whereas we want to build a family attitude. And the loyalty is built up through, first, of course, good money enough; number two, recognition; number three, long-term incentive; number four, internal promotion. And at Foraco, only the sky is your limits when you are a young technician or a young engineer. So this is important. And just to give you an idea, last year, we hired about 800 people, and that's about 75 per month, and that was a big, big, big challenges, given the fact that also we had the COVID effect. And we managed to do that, and that was a great achievement. So people are our first asset in the company. The second asset, of course, are the rigs. So we have 300 rigs, 2/3 of them are doing diamond drilling. Diamond drilling is non-destructive drilling technique, which means we can deliver on the table to our customer, the geologist, and touch a piece of a rock, which comes from 2,000 meters beneath the surface. And so we can get an absolutely perfect vision and knowledge and chemistry of what's beneath, okay? That's 2/3 of our fleet and 1/3 is rotary, which is a destructive drilling technique, which is very comparable to the oil and gas one. We have another label in the business, which is innovation. This is part of our 3 values. We have been at the forefront of innovation in our business, one of them being the remote control rigs. It's a kind of a mini concept of drones. So basically, we remote control the rigs and we try to have most of our people outside the line of fire, meaning whatever can happen on the rig, failure or an accident, nobody is going to be hurt. The second thing that we have developed over the 5 -- the last 5 years is what we call a deep directional drilling. It's a 3D drilling capacity that we propose to our customers, which allow us to hit any point in the rock from 1,000 meters deep to 3,000 meter deep at any kind of angle X Y Z coordinates. And that saves a ton of money to our customers and give them the best value for money in terms of information and geological data. We do that more and more and more. The flagship is Canada. We have exported that in Brazil. And as we speak, we have launched a massive job for BHP in Southern Australia. The last leadership we have is, as I said, water well drilling. Water well drilling is not exactly a sample -- drilling for a sample, it's more a well, production well. So it's more complex. It's bigger in size. It requires heavier rigs and a lot of technology to produce water from 1,000 meters deep or having large diameter wells like 24-inch, if not the inch. And we have a very good reputation in this segment of the market. We -- as I said earlier, the fact that we don't have any domestic market has pushed up and encouraged us over the years to build up the most resilient business model possible. And this is why we didn't want to be depending on any exposure, particular exposure, meaning we are not a gold driller. So you can see on the right circle that battery metal is about 30% of our business, gold is about 33% to 34% (sic) [ 38% ], water was 14%, and then the steel making ingredients like steel coal and iron ore were 6% of our business. So we have a fairly diverse exposure to different commodities. Both of them as -- all of them have their own, I would say, dynamics, and this is good. In terms of customer, of course, working with our large customer base. Of course, the top 10 clients of Foraco are accounting for 70%, and the top 5 for 50%. There is no surprise by that. And in terms of geographical exposure, North America is our main business place, which means today only Canada. We are contemplating to return to the U.S. Then we have 20% exposure to South America, 19% between Europe and CIS, Asia Pacific at 15% and Africa at 12%. Africa for Foraco is the French speaking Africa, West Africa. Competitive competition. We are -- as I said, we are #3 behind an American company called Boart Longyear and a Canadian company called Major Drilling in terms of size, in terms of rig counts. These are only publicly traded companies that you can pull all kind of data from. And you can see on the right side that we managed to be always above the top 2 in terms of EBITDA margin for the last 5 to 6 years. I think this is because we're now getting the dividends of the resilience of our business model and our excellent, I would say, management because most of our management is totally decentralized and it is managed by a team of super professional VPs, which know they market by heart and have one of the best reputations that you can find -- can dream of. Going forward, basically, we are going to surf the current wave, which is getting bigger every day. The precedent upcycle between 2006 and 2012, we were quite acquisitive. So we purchased companies and market share to establish the name and the footprint. And if we jump over the recession, now, we are just going to grow organically in very well targeted segments, profitable segments, which we master in a jurisdiction and then we are going to import it in another jurisdiction like the deep directional drilling or like the large diameter water well, et cetera, et cetera. The market is excellent. We are going to increase our exposure to battery metals, of course. And this has only one objective, which is to increase and grow our EBITDA as much as we can, generate as much as free cash as we can to deleverage the balance sheet of the company and resume dividends when and if we can. We'll not comment the financial data in the following slides, but you can have a good look of what we did. So we grew our revenue for the 5-year period at 16% per year, and we had our EBITDA margin growing okay, I would say. We were a bit disappointed last year with our 16% EBITDA margin because we got hit with the inflation, and we didn't have time to renegotiate and pass the increased cost to our customers, which we have done now. But it took us a few months to renegotiate and to sit down with them, because most of the economies were saying, I don't know if you remember, that the inflation was kind of a one-off, and it will not be sustainable, blah-blah-blah. And now, they are changing their vision. So they accept to renegotiate the contract. So today, we can see that -- we can say that the contracts have been renegotiated in a good way, and we were able to pass 100% of the inflation impact into our new prices. So I was just about to conclude my long speech. So basically, Foraco is a mineral and water drilling company. We have world class, if not the best world-class customer base. 50% of our business is linked to green energy and water. We are an agile and innovative and resilient company. We have fantastic people. And we have a superior profitability. So what to expect better than that? I don't know. So I'm pleased now to take any question from the audience. Glen, you can manage?

Yes, perfect. Yes, thanks again to our audience, if you have a question, please use the Q&A text box. We've got quite a few questions in the queue already. So we'll just get going. So a number of people have asked this, Daniel, so I'll just summarize it. Could you please touch on the Russia-Ukraine sanctions issue that might be affecting Foraco or the industry. Will cruise equipment in Russia be redeploying to other geographies or -- and any specific disclosure to Foraco?

Okay. Let me explain to you what is Foraco-Russia connection. Foraco is present in Russia through a 50% interest into a mineral exploration drilling company, which is called Eastern Drilling Company or EDC. The other 50% being owned by the founders of EDC, which are entrepreneurs, local entrepreneurs, not oligarchs, of course, and not being subject to any sanctions. EDC is a fully autonomous business entity and is run by Russian employees only without any input of Foraco other than some sporadic technical advice and procurement assistance. EDC works only for private mining companies, Russian or international. Since the beginning of the invasion, and although the -- no sanction whatsoever either from EU, U.S. or Canada or U.K. is touching our sector or our local business, we do stop providing technical and logistic assistance to EDC and we have not traded with our local partners since the invasion. And we do intend to remain put and to not being engaged in any trading with Russia for the moment. That's for the impact of -- the potential impact of the current situation on Foraco itself. Of course, we have strongly encouraged EDC to move assets out of Russia, and they are doing so by increasing the exposure to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the near term. So basically, we are diminishing -- they are diminishing their own activity in Russia, and they are growing in the CIS countries. I hope I have answered this question.

Just a point of clarity, and you may have and I may have missed it, Daniel. But in terms of percentage of your overall business, can you characterize it?

On Q1 this year, we will be less than 10% or a single-digit percentage.

Perfect. Next question. And I know you addressed this towards the end of your formal remarks, but just maybe summarize a little bit of it again. Are there inflationary pass-through built into your contracts? And can you talk about how most of your contracts are structured in terms of currency and length?

Okay. Each and every contract is [ label ] in local currency. So in Canada, we work in Canadian dollar. In Australia, we work in Australian dollar, et cetera, et cetera. Our revenue and our costs are usually in the same currency, so we are not, at local level, subject to ForEx fluctuation. It's only on the consolidated basis because we consolidate in U.S. that our free cash flow and our EBITDA is subject to -- I mean, real cash is subject to ForEx. Price-wise -- I mean, cost wise, as you know, there has been a kind of ramp in inflation and surge of inflation in different countries globally across the board, but at different levels. Our most surging cost has been, in the Western countries, the wages. Typically, the wages represent between 30% and 40% of our revenue -- sorry, of our costs. And of course, these wages have gone up in some places according to the tension that is on the local market. So we have had some wages inflation from, let's say, 8% to 20% depending on the different regions. And of course, we have been able to pass that to our customers. Similarly, we have experienced some surge in consumable or supply cost from 5% to 15%. We also have been able to pass that to our customers. And the only problem we still have, which is a serious one, but I think it's a well shared issue, is the delivery time. Today, when you -- when somebody wants to buy a truck, you can get as much as 14 months when you want to buy. And sometimes it's not even deliverable because there is no chips. So like all the industry, we are fighting with lengthening delivery times, which is the only concern we have because our customers are very, let's say, understanding and they have accepted without too many problems to pay more because we are paying more, okay?

Super. Next question is touching on your revenue mix and more, I guess, relevant to EV Metals. How do you sort of see the revenue mix materially changing? Will it change over the next few years? Maybe just comment a little bit on that.

Number one, we don't give any looking forward because it's prohibited by the TSX. Number two, I wouldn't -- we would be very happy to grow the business, keeping the same mix. You see what I mean, percentage-wise? But of course, the more we gain traction in battery metals, the more the customers like the BHP, the Rio, the Vale do invest -- the Teck, do invest more in copper or nickel, the more the business is going to grow in these kind of segments. So if we see something growing, I think, we will grow in water and we will grow in battery metals going forward.

Okay. Thank you. How do you plan to redeploy free cash flow? Maybe touch on any potential M&A, dividend or share buyback strategy.

Well, number one, we have -- as you can see in our financials, we had a net debt at the end of December of about $84 million, which is too much. So in the coming 2, 3 years, our top priority of allocation of the free cash is going to be our balance sheet deleverage. After that, we are going to -- we are not that acquisitive anymore. We may acquire a small company here or there for a very, let's say, specific strategic interest, but it's not on the top of our list. And so after deleveraging, we are going evenly to invest in hardware and pay our dividends.

Okay. Super. Thank you. When Foraco loses a job or does not get a job that it bids on, what are the primary reasons for this?

It's a good question. In current market, I must say, to be -- and candidly and bluntly that it's very rare we lose a job, because the demand is exceeding the supply. And, therefore, we are declining a ton of jobs today because we are lacking of people, and this is basically our limitation. When the cycle is a bit down, of course, we lose it by price, but we have not lost a job by price since a long time.

Can you comment on the current ownership of the company by management and touch on how management incentives work.

Okay. So Jean-Pierre and myself who are the founder of Foraco International in '97, we never sold a share. So we -- the 2 of us, I think, we have 38% or 38 million shares since inception. We printed more shares, of course, during the course of our acquisitions. Management today is owning about 3%, and this has been made possible through a rather generous free share plan that we were, I think, the first of the second to put in place on the TSX 15 years ago. And basically, we are using free shares as a long-term incentive for our top management and middle management, some of them, and it works beautifully. Is that your question, Glen?

It's not my question, but I'm assuming you answered it. There is a question related to that, that maybe builds on that. Can you comment whether there's been any insider buying or insider selling by management since the middle of last year?

I'm not aware of any insider selling. None of the directors of the Board have sold. And myself and Jean-Pierre, we didn't sell anything. We might have -- sorry, we might have some high executive selling a few thousand shares here and there because they got vested now. But I'm not aware of that.

Okay. I have a follow-up question regarding that comment you made on M&A strategy. Can you just elaborate on the comments regarding potentially acquiring any kind of small company for strategic interest? What areas of, I guess, strategy would that apply to? And can you just expand on that at all?

Well, I'm not going to tell you who and what, because we don't have any, let's say, well-cooked plan. I'm not going to give you my secret sauce ingredients. But I'm going to give you some example. We intend to digitalize more our rigs going forward. And here and there, there are very, very good industrial IT companies, little team. And we might get one to make sure that we get on the front line of the digitalization of our rigs. That's one. Another one can be, of course, a strategic geographical move. So maybe there is something in the States to buy, which fits with our current balance sheet and cash, which would serve us as a leverage to grow furthermore organically then. So we are looking at that. Or if we can find another drilling -- tooling company or start-up, which has invented something very smart, of course, we're going to jump on that. So these are the kind of things we would look at rather than buying a straight mainstream market share, which doesn't make sense for us today in the current market circumstances. Okay?

Yes, perfect. Can you comment on your current utilization level and how you sort of see that moving over the next little bit?

Yes. I think we had a good run last year, and we went over, let's say, the magic 50% -- I think we posted a 53% utilization rate in Q4. And -- sorry, 56% in Q4 for 56% full year. The business is highly leveraged and depending on the utilization rate. So as soon as we reach 45% up, we're making money. As soon as we go over 50%, 52%, we are making good money. And when we are hitting 60% going forward, the company is running very nicely. The historical high has been 72%, if I'm not mistaken, back in 2009 or '10. And I don't think we're going to hit that next year. But I think because 70-ish percent is very close to the maximum efficiency we can get, because we always have rigs on the moves or back in the yard for maintenance, et cetera, et cetera, or between jobs. But we will be happy to gain another 5%, which will do a very, very positive impact in our bottom line and our cash flow. So 2022 is a good year. We had some, let's say, kind of problems -- not we. I mean, the COVID Omicron hit a little bit the planet again in January, February, but the coming quarters are looking very promising. Bear in mind, Glen, that we are a highly seasonal business, okay? Typically, Q1 and Q4 are our weakest quarters, because of seasonality like winter and also holidays, Christmas holidays and long holidays in the South Hemisphere, while Q2 and Q3 are our best quarters by far.

And just building a little bit on that utilization rate and that theme. Can you comment on current rig economics? The current cash economics justify building new rigs and does the industry need to build new rigs?

Okay. In our world, the rigs are very different, okay? The tag price come from $300,000 each to $2.5 million, depending on the size, the capacity, et cetera, et cetera. Today, as I -- like I said, it's very long to get a new rig, like 6 months, 9 months, 14 months, it depends. So basically, we are -- we put some in orders. Usually, we spend about 8% of our business -- of our revenue on a per year basis on CapEx, half of them being brand new rigs. But given the market dynamics, we have decided to overhaul more rigs than buying new ones. And an overhaul is kind of rebuilding a rig and giving it another 10 years, enhancing its capabilities, and we do that for maybe 1/3 of the price. So -- and of course, it makes much more sense financially speaking, but it also makes a lot of more sense commercially speaking because we can hand over this rig and put it in action much earlier than just waiting the supplier is delivering. So we continue to buy rigs, but we put most of our CapEx capacity on overhauls and rebuilding rigs and giving them another 10 years, which please our customers because basically we customize them. Okay?

Yes. Perfect. I guess, sort of in line with this topic then, what are the CapEx needs over the next few years as demand continues to increase?

I wouldn't say that the CapEx is going to be an issue. I think the people is an issue. So if we were to invest somewhere, we are going to invest in human resources. Just to remind you, to run a rig, we need an average of -- depending on the countries, depending on the labor law, et cetera, but we need between 10 and 20 guys. So of course -- and to make a driller, you need between 2 and 3 years. So we are trying all we can to locate high potential people out of the business, out of the drilling, because everybody is busy. And the only ones which are not busy are the worst ones. And we have a training school everywhere, and we invest in that. So I would say the increase of our utilization rates and the increase of our number of rigs out is depending on our capacity to recruit the crews in the coming 2 years. Okay? In parallel with, let's say, investment of 6 or 8 rigs a year as we do today, okay?

Can you comment on how many of your current drill rigs are automated, i.e., controlled remotely by computer?

So automated, we don't have any automated. We are not yet there. In terms of remotely control, I think we're going to hit the 20 mark. We started in about 4 years ago by rolling out a prototype with Rio Tinto in Western Australia. And now we are accelerating because BHP is a fan of that. So as you see, it's less than 10% of the fleet, okay? So what we do on the site is not remotely control, but we put a ton of sensors on other rigs to make them what we call digital, meaning the rig itself can talk to a tablet and can feed our lead drillers and the customer with all the drilling data and the data. And this is another kind of subcategory, and that is where we put our money. To remotely transform -- sorry, to transform a rig into a remote rig, it costs us about USD 0.25 million. Just to give you an idea, okay?

Okay. Do you serve lithium miners?

Yes, we do. We do -- for the moment, we do in Chile and Argentina, including the biggest lithium producer, which is SQM. All the big names are rushing down to Latin America and South America especially. Rio Tinto just bought a massive project over there. The lithium is not under the rocky form. It's more on the brine form and we use what we call solution mining or in-situ leaching technology, which is very similar to drilling water well because basically, you inject water, you dissolve the salt and you pump out the brine and then you get the brine evaporated and get the lithium through salt. So we are very good at that, and we are growing fast in this region. We're just waiting for Australia to wake up on the rocky form of lithium. They have vast reserves and there is currently a rush, but it's more on the, let's say, early stage for the moment.

Can you comment a little bit about your technology, specifically your deep directional drilling technology and whether it's patented?

Okay. It's a special tool that we put at the bottom of traditional drilling. it's a very clever smart tool. It is not patented, it is protected, meaning we manage that. It has been invented by a small startup based out of Bulgaria. We have an exclusive agreement with them and they operate the tool and they take care of it. . Basically, we have relatively, I would say, little access to the tooling side. So we don't know how it is designed, and we have signed an NDA and we honor it. And for the moment, it's going very smoothly, and we started with 1 project. And today, as we speak, I think we may have 6 or 7. And we have exported that to Brazil, and we work with Vale and Argenti Gold with this technology as well. So it's not a Foraco proprietary technology, but it's kind of a commercial joint venture, which has been very well and feel proven for the last 6 years.

Okay. And I guess speaking -- sticking with this theme. Can you talk a little bit about innovation and new technology and adoption in the rig drilling industry in general? I guess how often technology changes and how do customers react to it.

As you know, the mining industry is a very conservative industry, I would say even more than oil and gas. So usually, our customers, they don't want to test something which is too innovative. So I would say that it's a very gradual innovation spirit. It is very rare that a customer do co-finance any R&D. So the R&D is on the contractors, on the vendor's, I would say, shoulders. But I must say that the more the time is going, the more our customers are very -- are developing a very strong appetite for digitalization transmission of, I would say, geological data or drilling parameters in real time. There are a few fields where like transmission, like on the rig data gathering with gamma ray and stuff like that. So we are working with a few customers to move the data collection up into the value chain and the time chain. This is going to be one of the biggest push that we're going to have. Then you have the second one, which is environmental footprint. The customers are trapped between they need to go deeper and bigger and larger and more challenging holes together with the environmental constraints. So a very low -- a very small footprint rig doesn't work well with a very powerful rig, for instance. So we have to be smart. And we are working with them to manage and to use new materials, compact rigs, et cetera, to help them to have a much less, let's say, footprint as far as the environment. And the third one is the water consumption. Of course, more and more now, we are using innovative systems to recycle the water that we use to make our drilling mud. And this is becoming a kind of standard in the industry. So these are more or less environment data transmission and water preservation. I'm not talking about the greenhouse gas because so far, 99% of our rigs are diesel. Okay, we are changing generation of diesel. We go from diesel Tier 1 to Tier 4, even Tier 5 or Euro 5, which is very stringent, very expensive, but you save 20%. And so your emission is going down by 20%. So this is another thing that we -- it's in the industry, and we are poised to change. Electrification of rigs, I don't see that on the short term.

I've got a couple of last questions in the queue unless somebody else pops in a question, and then I'll ask you for some closing remarks. So this actually may be a question more for JP, your CFO. But is there any correlation between meters drilled and revenue per meter?

It's a good question. We generate our revenue. When we generate $100 of revenue, we generate $70 by the meter and $30 by the hour of the day. Usually, our contract compensation metrics are made with these 2 building blocks. Now whether if we get a massive project, we increase our per meter price, no. We gain a ton of money by -- of course, you understand that when on a small job, we have to mobilize, during 3, 4 months, a full safety crew team, a project manager, et cetera, for 1 rig. Of course, it's making the meter price very heavy, because we amortize a supervisor, a safety officer only on 1 rig, which is 2 shifts, okay? But these guys can easily manage 3 or 4 weeks. So the magic number in our business is 4. And when you got 4 rigs -- 3 or 4 rigs, then you have optimized your operational field cost -- fixed cost. And, therefore, you can propose a smaller price, which is counterintuitive and making more money, rather than proposing a full blown, a fully charged price on 1 rig, where at the end of the day, you build the customer on 200 index instead of 180, but in fact you don't make enough money.

Okay, got it. And I doubt that you would have this answer, but I'll ask the question anyway because it's more like for you JP. Would you happen to have a number for the meters drilled and revenue per meter for the last 6 quarters? And if not, where can somebody go find that number?

No, it's not public. It's not public. You have companies who are publishing their revenue per meter -- the total number of meter drilled and the revenue. So you do the math, and you get an average. At Foraco, we have such a diversified spectrum of drilling techniques that doesn't make any sense. You have to split into subcategory between the drilling, the diamond drilling, the rotary drilling, the [indiscernible] drilling, blah, blah, blah, okay?

Okay. I will ask you one last question. I think it's a good closing question, and then we'll ask you for some closing remarks to end the call. Clearly, there's a disconnect in the market as it relates to your valuation, your share price, your liquidity versus, say, in major drilling. What do you think investors in the market misunderstand about Foraco?

I don't think the -- I don't think they are misunderstanding something. But what is clear is that they are missing the point. Major is enjoying 25 years more seniority than us in the business. We are a relatively new name. They -- we're not very well known and so we are lacking of market recognition in terms of financial market recognition. So this is why we do with you guys, and thank you again to events like that today, to raise the awareness of Foraco. But if you look at all the metrics, except for the net debt, you're going to see that we beat these guys. And so for us, it's very good that they are valued at that high multiples. And the only thing that could be a kind of down pressure to our stock price is, of course, liquidity, which has room to grow by far, and we are working on that. But intrinsically, I think we -- as you said, we are lacking of just awareness and visibility.

Perfect. Daniel, that concludes the Q&A. It concludes our call. If you have any closing remarks, now is the time, and then we'll end the call.

Well, thank you, everybody, everyone, to listen to me. I know that I am not a perfect accent, but nobody is perfect. Don't be shy and shoot your question to Glen, which he will happily bounce back that to me or Jean-Pierre. And we can assure you that each and every one question we have an answer. So we wish you a very good day, and we hope to see you either on the Bloomberg Foraco page or next time on the next webinar or conference call. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you, Daniel. Thank you to our audience. This concludes this webinar.