Foraco International SA (FAR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings, and welcome to the Foraco International Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Glen Akselrod, President of Bristol Capital. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Diego, and thank you, everybody, for joining our webcast today with Foraco International. The purpose of today's presentation is to give our audience a better understanding of the business through a presentation and then Q&A with management. The presentation is going to be led by CEO, Tim Bremner, who is also joined on the line by CFO, Fabien Sevestre. You should see the presentation and the webcast. If you'd like to get a copy of this deck simply e-mail me at [email protected], and I'll be happy to send you one. We'll break for questions at the end of the formal presentation. When we do break, we encourage those questions. As a reminder, 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. Remember, you could submit a question at any time using the text box within the portal. I ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear and then Tim or Fabien will answer. I will not 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 it has not yet been addressed during call and candy, I'll send you a reply via 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 and extend the business and its growth path. And now I'll turn the call over to Tim to start his part of the discussion and presentation.

Thanks very much, Glen. I appreciate the introduction. As Glen mentioned, I'm Tim Bremner, the CEO of Foraco International. I'm based in North Bay, Ontario, just north of Toronto. And I'm joined today by our CFO, Fabien Sevestre, who is based in France. I'm going to go through the deck and we're happy to take your questions at the end of the presentation. Incidentally, this is not a Photoshop photo. It actually was a real weather scene that we had in Western Australia, one of our projects. So a quick company overview for you. Foraco is a drilling services provider, a global leader in mineral and water drilling services. We're the third largest drilling services contractor worldwide defined by the number of drills. We're also a leader in groundwater drilling and monitoring. We have a global presence, operating across all of the major mining regions in the world, including Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil, West Africa and the CIS. With over 300 rigs, we have around 3,000 employees and a good solid customer base of Tier 1 mining clients, namely Rio, Vale, Glencore, Teck, BHP amongst others. We're listed on the TSX, and we're actually one of the only French-based companies listed on the TSX with our corporate headquarters in Marseille. We trade under the ticker FAR and about 99.3 million shares outstanding in a current market cap of about 180 million shares. Just some of the key investment highlights, I'm not going to go through all of these, but I would like to point out 3 in particular. Number 5 focuses on the improved financial performance, which is -- has improved consistently over the last 19 quarters with improved results with that trailing 12 months Q3 growth rate of -- revenue of 17% was the -- over the past 12 months and a 37% increase in our EBITDA over the same period. The other point that I'd like to make to you today is the unique product offering that Foraco has compared to the peers in the water-related drilling services make up a significant percentage of our revenue and the strong management team that we have. But there are 8 investor -- investment highlights that you can have a look at. This slide is a particularly important one, which helped explains our strategy. On the vertical axis, we have a scale of relative drilling activity over the various stages of mine life, which is on the horizontal axis. So in the bottom left-hand corner, this is pre mine, this is where greenfields exploration takes place. There would be a number of small projects -- this is the space where a lot of juniors are working. And with discovery, we get into pre-feasibility. And you can see the increase in the drilling activity, which then goes on to the project phase and feasibility study where there's the highest concentration of drilling required to prove up an actual mine. And these are the 2 areas that Foraco was really focused on for a couple of reasons. One is it's where the longer-term contracts come into play and this work happens generally 12 months of the year in most cases. And they can be contracts anywhere from 2 to 3 or even up to 5 years. It's mostly for the majors. And this is where we get an opportunity to have our customers get to know us and we get to know them. And this is where the relationship begins. Why is this important? Because as the mine goes into production, there's the opportunity for you to be the supplier of choice for a sustained period of time throughout the mine life, in some cases, over 30 years. So this is a very strategic part of the market for us to focus on. The other point that I'd like to make is that it's not only exploration or core drilling that is required, but it's all the drilling that is required for a mine, the infrastructure drilling, the definition drilling, the condemnation drilling, looking for the places where it's -- there's no ore and safe to do other development and also the water-related drilling for a particular mine. So it's something that is very much part of our strategy. And like I said, it's the opportunity for us to develop the relationship with our customer. Foraco is one of the few companies that is trying to get ahead of the curve in terms of ESG reporting. We followed the sustainable accounting standard for metals and mining. We have been reporting this now for several years and tracking the improvements in Scope 1 and Scope 2. There is more on our website about this. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but just to say that Foraco is one of the few doing ESG reporting. So let's talk a little bit about the market and what drives our business. It's no secret that metal prices are the prime driver of the business that we are in. With increased metal prices, there are increased budgets for exploration drilling. And I'm just going to skip ahead quickly to the next slide. You can see here that drilling activity generally follows the metal price cycle direct overlap. And you can see that in 2012, when the exploration spend globally, and these are figures produced by S&P that the exploration spend was right in line. The drilling activity was right in line with the exploration spend. And this activity fell off and now it has increased to 2022 levels, which are recovering quite nicely. So the amount of activity that we're seeing today is actually becoming a little bit more decoupled from this traditional metal price index and drilling activity. Why? Because there is an increased demand for EV metals, primarily copper, nickel and others. And a lot of our customers are continuing to press on with drilling activity in spite of some decrease in the metals price index, which is off from the beginning of the year. These customers, including Vale, Glencore, Rio Tinto, have all said that they're quite bullish on copper and nickel, and we've seen that their projects and exploration initiatives have continued in spite of some softening in the metal price market. It's the first time I've seen this in my career. Contrasting that is the junior activity, which the junior space has had some challenges getting financed as the equity markets are challenging, and that's particularly in the gold. So again, this is a main reason why we're focusing on the Tier 1 customers like Vale, Rio Tinto Teck and BHP, where they are focused on copper and nickel and decoupled from the traditional metals price curve. Continuing on that theme, the amount -- how big is the actual market? So the exploration spend reported is the nonferrous exploration spend. And it does not include all drilling activity that we see around the world. You remember the slide that I talked about earlier with the mining life cycle. There's a number of -- there's a certain amount of drilling activity that S&P does not capture, which is the infrastructure drilling, definition drilling, which is different from exploration. So in our estimation, we feel that the actual drilling market globally is approaching 2x what is reported in the exploration figures. And that also includes water. So a little bit about Foraco today. Everyone knows that the industry has gone through some difficult times. The bottom of the market for us was around 2015, 2016, where the demand for drilling services was at an all-time low. And we have had a slow but steady and increasingly better performance over the last few years as the market has improved. So we have expanded our footprint. We've regained pricing power and this has also more than offset inflation. We focused on high-tech and client critical services. And we've been very successful in signing new and extending existing long-term contracts for our Tier 1 customers. We've renewed a lot of those and continue to renew them since 2022 and again, some this year and enjoy a good order book. We have developed a strong HR policy to attract and retain and develop young professionals in our industry. That is the biggest challenge for us in terms of fielding more rigs as being able to accrue them. And we've deployed deep directional services originally mastered in Canada. We are now doing that in Australia for BHP and also in Brazil, where we're drilling holes precisely to the target for our customers, and we're doing all of that work internally rather than the customer steering the holes for us. And we have successfully refinanced the company, again, to improve our financial flexibility and extend our debt maturities. You may have read about this in our most recent press release, where we've returned to normal commercial banking relationships with Desjardin in Canada and Caisse d'Epargne in Europe. And on the right, you can see the improvement in our financial performance with the trailing 12 months revenue of USD 368 million and an EBITDA margin of now improved up to 23%. And again, as I said before, this represents 19 consecutive quarters of improved performance. So what is Foraco strategy? I've alluded to some of this, but it begins with a strong customer base. The Tier 1 customers are the most demanding in terms of not only performance but value for money. They've all got -- they're a very high level of health and safety requirements. They like to do things properly. And then the -- underneath that -- directly underneath that is diverse exposures. And what I mean by that is not only commodities and geographical regions, but it's also in types of services offerings that we have in the company. So for example, we are not a pure-play surface exploration drilling contractor. We offer water drilling services. We offer surface and underground coring drilling services, reverse circulation, drill and blast. Basically, we strive to meet all of the drilling needs that our mining clients have. So if it's drilling that needs to be done, we have the services in-house to do that. And that is balanced and underpinned by a top management team and a very lean and efficient organization. If you look at our SG&A figures, we are one of the leanest. I've mentioned this before, we're worked for the Tier 1 customer bases. That represents about 85% of our business. And juniors represent only about 15% of our business, and this is intentional. If we look at the mix of where the work is done, 59% of our work is done on a mine site. So this could be a project prefeasibility or feasibility going back to that slide that I mentioned. So 60% almost of our business is focused in that area. Water represents 13% of our business. Grassroots or greenfields, only 9% and this would be the junior and late stage and feasibility represents 19%. So the heavy concentration in mine site work reflects the work that we're doing for the majors. The other diversification that we have is across the commodities and also the geographies. So if we look at the commodities first, battery metals being copper and nickel represents 42% of our revenue, only 28% in gold, perhaps a little underweighted there. Water at 13%, steelmaking coal 3%, iron ore at 10% and others, which could be lithium, diamonds and other metals, only 4%. Our top 5 customers make up almost 50% of our business, with none of them representing any more than 15%. And the next -- the Tier 2 or the small producers make up about 15% and the others are about 36%. Geographical distribution, North America and South America are balanced in terms of revenue percentage at 32% each. Asia Pacific is next at 16% and growing. The CIS and Europe represent 14% and Africa is decreasing for us now down at 6%. Africa has been a challenge. We work predominantly in West Africa with the former French Colonies and have been retreating our operations to Ivory Coast and Senegal primarily as a result of the unstable political situations in those regions. So our ingredients for success, an experienced international workforce retained by a fair progressive and effective HR policy is critically important. We are nothing without our people, and they're the most important aspect of our business. And with them, we're looking for long-term sustainable contracts. So the long-term sustainable contracts goes hand-in-hand with being able to retain our people, our crews in the field. It's much easier to retain someone if they know that they've got a predictable work schedule over the next 3 to 5 years, where they're on a rotation. Work-life balance is critical to our employees. It's becoming more and more important. And if we're able to offer that work-life balance and longer-term employment, it makes it much easier for us to train. I think we get a return on the investment and the training and it makes it much easier for us to retain those employees. We also have to keep them safe, and we have a leading health and safety program. We've had no fatalities and no serious injuries, and we spend a tremendous amount of time and energy on that. We also invest in skills and knowledge training. This is not only a practical drilling knowledge, but also in innovation, remote control rigs. I'll speak more about that later. And we also have long-term financial incentives for our executive team, which is critically important. We've made a number of acquisitions over the year. I've been with the company for 17 years and some of the same management that has been with us when I started Foraco in Canada 17 years ago are still with us today. And that speaks very, very well on volumes for the longer-term financial incentives that we have. And all that leads to engaged and empowered employees. Looking quickly at the drill fleet. As I mentioned, we're just over 302 drills. In that fleet, 62 of them are rotary and RC. And these are the most expensive and highly capital-intensive rigs that we have in our fleet. They also generate the most revenue and they have the highest utilization rate. In terms of exploration core rigs, these are the diamond drills. We have 190, 18 combination rigs and a combination rig is a drill that can do more than one type of drilling service. So it could be a core rig that can also do first circulation, which is the most common. And then we have 32 underground drills, which include our underground core drills and include our underground drill and blast. Over the last few years, the last 6 years, we have added 50 new rigs to the fleet. These 50 rigs have replaced older rigs that have been called or retired out of the fleet or are no longer current in terms of health and safety requirements. And that's why the rig count has stayed stable at 302. We're very careful not to include rigs that are not serviceable. All of this investment in new equipment was done on the back of long-term contracts. And we invest about 8% of our revenue into CapEx currently. We estimate that the current market value of our entire fleet at about $150 million. The replacement value of the equipment can be anywhere from USD 0.5 million for an underground drill rig up to $2.5 million for the heavy rotary rigs. And I'll remind you that's just for the drill rig and does not include all of the ancillary equipment and drill rods and tooling that go with it. As far as rig life, drill rigs are a bit like steam ships. They've got a long useful life that can come in for rebuild or reset and turned out again with updated technology in terms of Tier 4 engines, new electronics, PLCs, remote control units and whatnot. And when they're sent back out into the field, they are, in essence, a brand-new rig. And the -- it usually averages around 10 years before a rig will come in for a full rebuild. So I touched on this earlier, but this is an important point. We are the leaders in deep directional core drilling. Ore bodies are getting more and more difficult to find, and they're also going a lot deeper. They're going deeper for 2 reasons. One is the best place to find and is where there's an existing deposit, but also the advent of electric mining equipment has enabled our customers to increase the threshold for mining to up to 2,500 meters deep for base metals in some areas from the previous threshold of about 2,000. The battery-powered mining equipment significantly reduces ventilation costs, reduces heat and has allowed our customers to extend the existing deposits that they have to those depths. And in order to find them and define them, we -- they require deep directional drilling. And what you're looking at are 2 sections of drill holes that are intersecting an ore body, and you can see with these ultra deep holes that it doesn't make sense to start them again from the surface. So they -- so what our customers want us to do is take multiple intersections or cuts of these -- of the ore body and basically define them all from 1 drill hole with branches. And these branches are directionally drilled to specific targets as defined by our customers. But we steer the hole and take to those coordinates for them. We have proprietary directional drilling tooling and our own in-house directional drilling teams that track the hole and deliver the hole right to our customers' objective. Why is this an advantage? Because this means that our customers don't have to have these technicians on staff, of which a lot of them will let go when the business declined. And to have this additional value-added service provided by a drilling contractor as a great advantage to them. I spoke quickly about innovation. About some of our bigger tooling is very heavy. It won't hurt you. It will kill you. So the best -- the safest place to be is away from that equipment. And our team in Australia are the leaders in innovation. They've been awarded the Department of Mining Innovation, Regulation and Safety award in Western Australia for this innovation as Foraco was the company that pioneered remote-controlled rotary drill rigs in Australia. And it's also allowed our people to work in a much safer and more comfortable environment. So we're operating the rigs from an air-conditioned cab instead of standing out in the dusty heat. And this innovation is continuing, and we're going to be rolling out the next generation of water wells and specialty mining rigs early in 2024 into new jurisdictions, including Latin America, and hopefully in Canada and the U.S. as well. So I'd like to speak a little bit about water. Water for mining is primarily understanding where the water is and what the implications of mining activity are on the water table. In Chile, the authorities have mandated that any mining operation must do groundwater monitoring as a part of their mining operation. So we're contracted to install monitoring wells and understand how the mining activity is affecting the water table in these areas. Similarly, water sometimes has to be removed to allow mining activity to continue, and this requires dewatering wells. Once that water comes out, we're not allowed to just dump it on to the ground and it must be injected back into the aquifer through another location. So water management is becoming an increasingly important part of our business. We do provide water wells for human consumption. This is primarily in West Africa, where we do large commercial water wells for villages. We don't do residential kind of like the water well at your cottage, that's not part of our business. These wells that I'm talking about are much bigger, much larger diameter, much higher volumes than that type of work. But increasingly, it's a very important part of our business. Incidentally, these same techniques used in water well drilled for mining operations, have application in lithium mining where lithium is mined by solution mining, an injection and an extraction well, where we inject a brine into the formation and dissolve the lithium and pump it out through a large dewatering well in the middle of a bring of injection wells. So our strategy going forward, there are really 4 ingredients for our success. Sustainable long-term contracts are critically important. It's much easier for us to plan our business when we have a good solid order book going forward. A leading health and safety structure aligned with productivity and long-term financial incentives for our executives. That is going to retain our people. The next ingredient for success is a versatile drill fleet that is also diversified. As I mentioned, we've added 50 new rigs over the last 6 years and kept that rig fleet up to date with a current market value of about $150 million. We continue to innovate. We're doing a lot of different types of drilling with our fleet, not only the deep directional. Most recently in the water well market, our customers have asked us to do angled dewater wells, especially in open pit environments, which has helped us -- which has helped them get better utilization out of the water wells. And the remote control innovation is also a very important part of our business. So innovation, our people and long-term stable contracts and diversification of services are really the main ingredients for our success. We're positioned for growth. We're going to take advantage of the long-term contracts that we have and continue to focus on the Tier 1 customers. Yes, they are more demanding. But they are the ones that can provide the vision for us going forward. We're going to increase our exposure to battery metals, copper and nickel and lithium. And we're going to reinforce our leadership in groundwater management. The path forward is to strengthen our balance sheet. We're going to take advantage of the significant cash flows from operations that we are seeing today and continue to pay down debt. We're at a leverage ratio of 0.9 at the moment, and we feel that it's important to pay that debt down further. That will lead into a review of our capital allocation, which is on the agenda for 2024. And we're going to be prepared for the probable metal shortage as consequences that are coming. In other words, the forecasted deficiency in copper primarily and be able to respond to our customers' requirements for increased drilling activity. So just a quick overview of the current shareholder structure. Management is very invested in the company. Daniel and Jean-Pierre, who were co-CEOs are the largest shareholders. They have moved into semi-retirement. They're still very active in the business today. Management, including myself and Fabien, hold another 5% of the float, and the 61% is in the public float. You can -- this may be a bit difficult to see on the screen, but what I would like to focus on here, you can see the improved performance year-on-year to where we are now. But the most important figure for me on this slide is in the final column, which is our Q3 trailing 12 months figures of USD 368.4 million in revenue, a growth of 17.1%. You can see the improvement in the gross margin. All of our figures, by the way, are IFRS. So the gross margin includes the cost of depreciation and equipment, resulting in an EBITDA of 23.1%. And the EBITDA improvement over the trailing 12 months, you can see here has been quite significant. In terms of -- this is just the 6 years of quarterly revenue, and that reflects the 19 quarters of improved performance that I referred to. And just quickly, a snapshot of rig utilization from what we felt was the bottom of the market in 2016, where the utilization rate was under 50% and we are now just under 60% utilization rate at the moment. So how does our business work? Our revenue generation comes from the long-term contracts. We are -- we invoice monthly, and we generate revenue by charging a fee for the meters that we actually drill and a combination of hourly rate. So it's basically paid for performance work on a meterage basis and hourly rate work for additional work that our customer may ask us to do or when we encounter geological conditions that are significantly different than what we expect, and we shift from the meterage rates to a time and materials basis. So that gives us the risk protection that is so important in our business. All of our work is tendered. Our customers go through a rigorous tendering procedure. We like to make certain that we give them the best value. Foraco's strategy is not to be the lowest tender, but to be the best. And our company is also a pure player in the area of drilling services other than the deep directional where we add that value of taking the whole to the target. We do not perform any downstream diagnostics analysis or geotechnical results. Our business is very much the business of providing our customers with the information that they need to be able to do that downstream analysis. All of our contracts are signed in local entities, whether they're in Canada or in West Africa, and most of them are denominated in local currencies. We report in U.S. dollars, the dominant currency in our business at the moment is Canadian dollars. So I think that's the final slide in the formal presentation. So we're happy to turn it back to the moderator and take any questions that you may have.

Perfect. Thank you, Tim. [Operator Instructions] We do have quite a few questions in the queue, Tim. So I'll just get going. So first question is, given the high cash you're generating, we're paying down debt or reissuing a dividend be considered priority, especially considering your recent debt refinancing use.

So as I mentioned, the priorities for the use of cash is to continue to pay down debt. We think that's the responsible thing to do. The debt is -- but that's quite manageable. But we feel it's the most responsible thing to pay that debt down further. Then the next use of capital will be to reevaluate our capital expenditure, which recently has been at a very disciplined 8% as we improve the balance sheet. There will be opportunities to increase that on a project-by-project, region-by-region basis. We have a strategy to focus on the U.S. where we are not present. So that will require some capital. And we would also like to increase our weighting in gold, and we are strategically focused on gaining a new significant Tier 1 gold customer. So in order to do that, we'll require investment in new equipment to be able to expand commodity base, customer base and geographical base. And then the third, use of capital allocation, subject to Board approval, would be revisiting the dividend payment. Foraco has paid a dividend in the past as recently as 2012, recently -- quite a long time ago. But as the conditions allow and Board approves, there is a possibility that we will be visiting a dividend payment in 2024 or 2025.

What is your outlook for junior financing activity? Do you expect a better year in 2024? Can pricing really take off without the juniors being able to get financing?

We're not betting on an improved market for our junior customers, the ones that we are working for, tell us how challenging it is. There have been some articles in the press lately, reminding us how challenging the market is for the junior miners. So no, we are not banking on them rebounding at all. We're going to continue our focus on the Tier 1 majors and the longer-term contracts. We do have friends in the business that run junior mining companies that want to work with us. And of course, we will respond to them in a responsible manner.

Okay. Next question. S&P Global projects exploration spend to be down 20% this year. What have been the primary drivers of this decline? And do you expect a stronger exploration environment in 2024?

Well, I think the decline is, as I pointed out in that 1 slide, I mean, exploration spend is directly linked to the metals price. And the S&P data is based on speaking under S&P's control reports the nonferrous exploration spend and excludes some of the work that we are doing on a project-by-project base. It would exclude underground definition and grade control drilling, I believe. It would not include any of the work we're doing in iron or coal or water. So the size of the drilling market exploration is directly linked to the S&P data, but the rest of it is not. And as we work for the customers who are in feasibility or prefeasibility stage, they're committed. These are project dollars. This is not money that is raised on the market. And they're committed to these projects over the long term and will continue to do so. They're taking a longer-term view. So we see the demand for drilling services in Foraco's world to be relatively stable despite the forecast that S&P is putting out.

I guess as a follow-up to that previous question, and you may have answered part of this in your last answer. What enabled Foraco to deliver strong 2023 growth despite this 20% decline in the global exploration budgets?

It's largely by focusing on the right customers -- the right Tier 1 customers in the right jurisdictions. That includes Canada and Australia. And by doing a good job, it's that simple. We are -- I mean some of these customers have scaled back on some projects, and they've kept the best drilling contractor of the bunch working, and that is us. Rio Tinto recently scaled back some of their operations in Australia, not because of market conditions per se, but they were not able to permit some of the sites as quickly as they'd hoped, and they needed to scale back on their drilling plans, and they retained us because of the superior performance and the value that they received. And that's the equation that we use. When we do a good job and we get to know our customer and they get to know us, it's very much a relationship business, and we work with them. Prices change up and down. Our customers have been very understanding of the labor shortage that we've experienced. They have accommodated us with significant price increases over 2023 as we've seen inflation increase. That has contributed to the increase in revenue as well. And there's also been an increase in the mix of rigs with a bias towards some of our heavier rotary rigs, which generate a lot more revenue per rig than, say, some of the underground drill in past rigs. So when we put that -- the bigger heavy fleet to work and keep it working, that really helps sustain the top line.

Next question. This may be more for Fabien. It looks like the new debt agreement has a balloon payment in 2027. Can you provide more detail about the structure of the recent refinancing of the debt?

So in terms of the new debt, so we have the 1 debt -- 1 loan with Desjardin in Canada and 1 with Caisse d'Epargne in France. The terms with Desjardin, it's 3.5 years terms with a balloon payment at the end, but risk involved over the next 6.5 years in order to have the capacity, agility to early reimburse this debt. The obligation -- the repayment obligation is only 10% per year in -- with the Canadian refinancing. So it gives us a lot of headroom towards the better cash and to look up after our capital allocation. In France, we have a balloon or the [indiscernible] at the fifth year. And this one more time, it's risk over the next 2 years in order to give us [Technical Difficulty] with the commercial bank with this maturity.

Next question, do you have any comments about the potential policy changes in Argentina? Have you made any changes about how you operate there?

Sorry, could you repeat the question? You cut out for a second.

Yes. Do you have any comments about the potential policy changes in Argentina? And have you made any changes about how you operate there?

So we've always had a very balanced and conservative approach to Argentina. And yes, it's very much on our radar. We've been very fortunate to be able to meet the demands in Argentina by transferring rigs from Chile into the country, renting them to our Argentinian affiliate, as required. We've also been able to take advantage of local rigs that exist in the country from other drilling companies and have been able to rent them. And in some cases, we're operating our customers' rigs where the customer had no alternative but to acquire the rigs themselves and then find someone to operate it. This as opposed to direct investment in rigs and importing them into Argentina, which we have not done. So our approach to Argentina is very careful and cautious. And that is precisely for the reasons that you pointed out with the political risk. So the risk profile for Argentina has not increased over the past few years, even though the financial performance in the region has improved significantly.

And I guess sticking to this theme, given the exposure to many different countries, do you have other geopolitical concerns?

So at the moment, we do not. The areas that were of concern including Russia, where it's widely known that Foraco has a controlling 50% interest with our partner in Russia. The exit agreement has been put in place and agreed upon and executed between the parties and is now awaiting approval of the Russian authorities for us to conclude that transaction. We have taken into consideration the impact on our business already, which will be negligible for this year. So in all respects, that has been concluded. With respect to West Africa, where there's been crews most recently in Niger, where we operate and before that Burkina Faso and Mali, those operations have all been suspended. All ex-patriots have been taken out of the country and all drilling assets have been relocated to Ivory Coast and Senegal. So we have concentrated all of our activities now in those regions with plans to sell any assets or facilities and properties that we may have in the remaining jurisdictions. So other than that, we are not operating in any areas that one could deem to be geopolitically sensitive and all of the work in those areas has now been stopped and the people and assets removed.

Okay. Given the expected battery metal deficiencies over the next decade, a need for future mine development, does your industry need to invest further in new or upgraded rigs? And do you expect to expand the fleet over the next 5 years?

So yes, we will be expanding the fleet over the next 5 years. We have definite plans to move into additional jurisdictions. We're not in the U.S., for example, and that is very much in our plan. And that will require investment in new equipment for that market, which generally tends to be truck mounted and also will require an investment in some more rotary rigs. The rotary fleet is particularly well utilized, so we can't transfer that into a new jurisdiction. We talked about Argentina. The main thing there is a cautious approach. And the other market that is really EV-focused is Chile, where we are carefully investing in new equipment on new projects based on securing long-term contracts that will substantiate the investments that we need. So yes, we will be expanding our fleet. And yes, it will be because of the increased demand for EV metals and in particular, copper.

How is the double or triple shifting on some rigs calculated in your reporting rig utilization?

Sorry, the double in which?

Triple shifting on some rigs calculated in your reporting rig utilization?

So when we consider a rig utilized when it is on a project and generating revenue. So for example, if we had a rig that has single shifted 5 days a week, which is the case in some places. That is a rig that is fully utilized. Why? Because it can't go and work anywhere else. We are definitely looking at maximizing the uptime for a rig. So we have very few on single shift. We have very few not operating 7 days a week. So most of that 59% or 60% rig utilization is a rig that is fully utilized, 24 hours a day. And then you -- that's why the rig utilization has remained relatively flat and the revenue has increased. So a prime example of that is, again, Rio Tinto in Australia, where they have not been able to permit some of the areas where they want to do work. They wanted to keep the rigs. They wanted to keep the crews so they have a single shift to them. Now that the permitting is in place, they can accelerate the drilling requirements and are increasingly putting rigs on double shift, and that's been increasing the revenue.

Okay. I guess a couple of questions here that I'll combine into one. First, can you talk a little about your competitive environment? Maybe highlight some key competitors? And then as a second question to that, do you think there will be consolidation among different public mineral drillers? And are there any significant synergies between you?

So first, the part about the competitive landscape. Our industry is a bit unique and that it is made up of a very few larger drilling companies such as Boart Longyear, Major and ourselves are the top 3 and all operate in pretty much the same jurisdictions globally. And from my perspective, all have a very similar profile in terms of being a value player and offering high-quality services at reasonable rates. I wouldn't say any of those or any of us are low-cost leaders. We understand what the cost drivers are in the business. We understand the need to make a return for our shareholders and a return on investment. So it's a responsible approach to the business. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a lot of small owner operators that work in local mining jurisdictions. So if we think about Canada, this could be Timmins, it could be [indiscernible] parts of Northern Saskatchewan, where they will go and work for primarily the juniors on a spot market basis, seasonal projects, either a winter drilling program or a summer drilling program. And these are companies that don't work very far away from home, employ locals, have a lower operating cost base, generally don't do anything more than routine surface core drilling, very straightforward work. And they are definitely the lower-cost providers in our industry. And they are the first ones to decrease the rates when the markets turn. So they are somewhat of a challenge in that our customers have referenced rates provided by our competitors, our owner operators that are significantly lower. But again, they don't have the same requirements for health and safety and responsible work, which comes at a cost. I mean doing things the way a Vale or Rio Tinto or Glencore want to do it, adds cost. And these -- some of our smaller competitors aren't used to operating that way. As far as consolidation in the industry, in the -- and the last upturn from 2009 to 2012, there was a lot of consolidation led primarily by Boart Longyear, Foraco made some acquisitions as well. But that was really for strategic expansion into key markets that we weren't in. At the moment, I don't see any industry consolidation happening other than a few major -- have made a couple of acquisitions, one in particular to reenter the Australian market, a market that they were in and they had exited and are now back. So that was a strategic one for them. But I don't see any acquisitions in markets like Canada, making a lot of sense for our company because we don't do an acquisition for -- to gain market share, for example, to buy a competitor in a jurisdiction that we're currently not in, doesn't really make any sense for us. If there's a customer that wants us to work in an area that we are not in currently, we will work with that customer, secure the long-term contract. I'd invest in the rigs and move the equipment and the people into that part of the country where they want us to work. And that's how we'll grow the business. So we're not in the business of geographical expansion by acquisition. And that being said, I don't see an awful lot of synergies if we were to do an acquisition in an existing country. That being said, where -- would it make sense? It would make sense for us to enter into a completely new market like the U.S., where we do have a legal entity, and we have worked in the U.S. before. But it would make sense for us to make an acquisition there in terms of adding management strength and local industry knowledge and the relationships with that local management would have with the local mining industry in the U.S. So that is an area where an acquisition would make sense for us.

Just time check, we're at 11.57. We've still got a number of good questions in the queue. So if you're -- it's okay with you, Tim, we'll probably be going 5 to 10 minutes post the hour. And for anybody that needs to drop off on the hour, don't forget this call is being recorded, and you can catch a replay of it later on today or tomorrow. So the next question for you, Tim, is how do contracts differ between Tier 1 companies and juniors? And then, I guess, as a follow-on from a different participant, are your contracts structured differently when mines ended the production phase, I would expect rigs would -- I would expect rigs would have far more downtime during this longer-term phase?

So there's -- we structure our services the same for all of our customers. Our contracts that we have generally for the junior companies, we will use the Foraco template, which is -- protects us against geological risk and outlines commercial terms that are for fair for both of our customers and for Foraco. In terms of the larger Tier 1 clients, we're generally using their commercial terms and their legal contracts, but they're pretty much the same in terms of the way that our services are offered on a per meter basis with protection from geological risk. There is an obligation for us to perform and adhere to a schedule. That is not there with the juniors. So there's very much an obligation for us to get the work done on time safely for the major customers and that in some cases means adding rigs to a project in order to maintain the schedule, and we've got the ability to do that. And again, that is an important factor for the major companies when making a decision on who they're going to get to do their drilling. They don't want somebody with a limited capacity that if their demands increase then they need to accelerate the project that we can't respond. It's critically important that we deliver the project on time and be able to respond to any increases that they demand on the delivery time of the project.

Okay. It's great that you're focused on Tier 1 players, but with the capital markets generally weak, have you found it more difficult to collect from grassroots or Tier 2 producers who are beholden to the capital markets?

Sorry, you cut out there, again, the line is bad. Could you repeat it again? Sorry.

I guess if you have any -- given that you're doing all the work with Tier 1, and that's a majority of your customer base, are you having any issues with collections from Tier 2 or lower customers given the, I guess, uncertainty around capital markets?

No, we are not. And that is very much a function of responsible management on our part. It's critically important that we get to know our customer when we know who we are working for. And we're very careful. We have not had any bad debt and a nonpayment of any invoices for a number of years. We do carry a bad debt provision, but we have not had to utilize it. And we stay in constant communication with our Tier 1 and Tier 2 customers and understand exactly where they are. And yes, things do change. But with a good working relationship and understanding exactly where we both are in the business, we've been able to manage that very responsibly. So it's not an issue for us.

Next question. Do you see growth continuing in 2024, even without a recovery in junior exploration activity? Foraco has more visibility on growth relative to peers as that -- as a result of long-term contracts? What is your current visibility on 2024?

Well, we don't give a lot of guidance. We don't give any guidance actually. But what I can say is, we don't see any change in the market conditions that Foraco is working in today. We see 2024 is very much continuous of the work that we have been doing in 2023. Again, that's because we're working on long-term contracts. Some of them were in year 3, some of them were in year 2. Some of them were in year 1. But the customer profile has not changed. The customers' outlook has not changed. And any increase in growth that we are going to see in our business will be as a direct result of initiatives that Foraco launches like a Tier 1 gold customer, another one or geographical expansion. So -- and those are very much part of our strategy. But again, even though there's a challenging equity market for some part of the industry, we do not see that impacting us in 2024.

Next question. Why do you want leverage lower than 1x? Your trailing 12-month EBITDA is growing, so the leverage will drop organically, seems like a change to the capital allocation policies warranted today. What is the hesitation?

We -- I think honestly, it's more -- we would like to be -- let me restart the answer to that question because there's a lot of things going through my mind. This is a cyclical business, and we came through a particularly difficult time in the last downturn, and we don't want to go through that again. We want to make certain that there is a significant change in the business that we're prepared for it and that we can see it through in the long haul. Therefore, we would like to see less debt. I think it would be irresponsible to think that we can continue to grow the business at the same level that we have in the last few years. There's so much uncertainty geopolitically in the markets. The only thing that I can say is a constant is the demand for EV metals appears to be very, very solid. And we're hopeful that, that will mean a long-term sustained period of exploration growth in our business. And in that case, yes, 0.9, it would be something that we could carry. But we've seen the market change before. And we just want to be able to be that much more conservative and be able to prepare for the unexpected. Fabien, I don't know if you want to chime in with anything else on that?

No, no. I'm fine.

Okay. We've got just a couple of more questions in the queue for you, Tim. So first question is, have you been impacted by permitting issues in customers temporary suspending projects in Canada? That some of your competitors have mentioned and why have projects been suspended?

So the only areas that we've had difficulty -- not even difficulty, some unforeseen changes to the schedule is a better way to put it. I mean, it would be in Australia, where our customers there have not been able to permit some of the work sites as quickly as they had or on schedule like they had expected. These are getting permitted, but at a slower pace. So that is the only area where we have been impacted. We have not been impacted by permitting in any other jurisdiction around the world other than Australia. We have not been impacted by any other disruption other than wildfires a little bit in Western Canada and a very small suspension of some operations in Ontario as a result of wildfires. But permitting and regulatory requirement changes have not been an issue for us, no.

And I've got a couple more questions in the queue, and it's really related to your public market in the stock. So I'll try to combine everything in sort of into 1 question. So first off, do you have a strategy to pursue any kind of a U.S. uplifting?

At this time, no, we do not.

Okay. Next question. What do you believe is the primary driver behind your multiple discounts to peers? And I'll just follow it on with another question that you can answer in one, despite the significant increases in revenue and EBITDA, your stock price is down 20% over a 2-year period, in line with that of many of your competitors. What is necessary for the stock prices of mineral drillers to reflect their strong underlying fundamental performance?

I think number 1 for us is more marketing. What has changed since 2012 when the space was of a lot more interest was that there were more publicly listed drillers with improved performance. The minerals driller sector performance now is somewhat mixed if we compare ourselves. We compare well with major. But beyond that, the space is mixed. And I think that's had some impact on it. And we're being viewed through that collective lens rather than individually. The second thing is the challenging market for the micro caps, which is where Foraco is, I mean that sector of the market is -- has been particularly challenging. And then the third is just the overall overhang and perception of some of the junior miners and the challenges there, I think, is spilling over into our sector and the lack of interest in it. So it's been a challenge. I'm frankly surprised at major drilling share price. I mean it's a great company and I own some major drilling. And I frankly don't understand why that stock hasn't performed better and the same for ourselves.

Okay. Thank you. That ends the Q&A session. Tim, if you want to give any closing remarks, and then we'll end the call.

Thank you, Glen. Well, I just wanted to say I sincerely appreciate your interest in our company and our story. I'm also happy to speak to any one of you individually that can be arranged through Glen's company. And appreciate your interest and the time and thank you very much, Fabien, for joining us from France, and thank you very much to Bristol and Glen for arranging this for us.

Perfect. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Fabien, and thank you to our audience. This concludes this presentation.

Thank you. All parties may now disconnect.