Genel Energy plc (GENL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to the Genel Energy plc Trading and Operations Update Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Andrew Benbow, Head of Communications. Good morning.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Thanks to those who've already submitted questions. We hope we will answer most of them in the presentation, but if not, we'll cover off as many as we can in the Q&A afterwards. As always, Luke Clements, our CFO, is leading this trading update. Our CEO, John Weir and other relevant members of the executive team will be joining us for the full year update presentation, which is when you dive to the 26th of March. And in that meeting, we'll get a deeper dive into strategy and assets. With that said, over to Luke.

Thank you, Andrew. Good morning. I'm Luke Clements, the CFO of Genel Energy. In this presentation, I'm going to focus on giving some color around the sub-header on this slide. Firstly, I'll explain the reshaped business and its resilience. And secondly, I'll explain the potential of the business and how Genel can deliver very significant near-term value benefit to shareholders in the year ahead. As you can see, this first slide focuses and rightly given circumstances on resilience. There is no doubt that we continue to face very challenging conditions with still no access to exports to the Iraq-Turkiye pipeline and no payments for past exports since March. We have no clarity when exports may improve, and so it's important for us to demonstrate that we are resilient to continued pipeline closure. Against that uncertain backdrop, I am pleased with where we've got to in time for the start of 2024 and grateful for the hard work and commitment that's gone into getting us here. Our resilience is comprised principally of 2 layers: first, balanced cash flows; second, a strong balance sheet. Starting with the balanced cash flows and firstly income, the ramp-up in domestic sales that we forecast for Q4 has been delivered very effectively by DNO. Tawke is now delivering meaningful funding to the business and generated $13 million of net cash flow for Genel in Q4. On spending, we are now very different to what we were just 1 year ago, we're a much smaller but very much fit-for-purpose workforce. Our work has reduced the size of the organization by over 2/3 and going forward, we have a much lower run rate spend and consequently, significantly improve resilience to defend value for our shareholders. The combination of Tawke domestic sales at Q4 levels and our continued spend reductions now means that we expect our sources and uses to be balanced from March onwards when we expect to pay down balance sheet payables and the arbitration case would have been hurt. Our second layer of resilience is the strong balance sheet. We opened the year with net cash of $119 million. And having exceeded our original targets and organizational reduction, we're now expecting to maintain net cash above $100 million throughout the year ahead. On the next few slides, I'm going to walk through our activity and spend in Q4 and how that work done last year will benefit 2024 in both domestic and export sales scenarios. A reminder of the balance sheet and the opportunity it brings then I will provide a brief update on the pipeline. A brief reminder on our arbitration claim with a hearing now less than 1 month away. And finally, I'll run through our focus for 2024 with a reminder of the 4 specific catalysts ahead of us that can deliver very material shareholder value and have the potential to end the year with the transform business valuation and outlook. Next slide, please. The waterfall on the right shows our sources and uses of cash in Q4, illustrating that the cash outflow last quarter is not indicative of what happens in 2024. You can see that I split the components into 3 buckets of activity. The first bucket is activity that relates to the go-forward business post Q1 2024. The second bucket is Q4 activity that doesn't repeat in 2024. And the third bucket is the investment decisions taken by the company. Starting with sources for the go-forward business, Tawke domestic sales increased from just under 26,000 barrels a day in Q3 to just over 65,000 barrels a day in Q4, with December well above that level. You can see in the chart that Tawke generated $30 million of cash flow for Genel in the quarter, which did benefit from recovery of costs incurred through the summer when no sales were being made. The operator DNO has done an exceptional job to achieve consistency of sales volumes in November and December, which is very challenging and remains hard to predict. There is significant variability in demand from buyers in Kurdistan, which impacts all IOCs and the process requires constant attention and oversight. As an example of the volume challenge, where we thought that in Q4 we were going to develop local sales for Taq Taq that interest has now gone away. So the Taq Taq is not selling domestically, and we now do not expect Taq Taq to be selling domestically in '24. So far, the Tawke PSC is doing as well as ending license in the country, and we'll be pleased that this Q4 sales volumes can be maintained through the year. Back to the waterfall, you will see that to the Tawke income stack is organizational spend. Organization spend represents all non-Tawke spend in the remaining business. So for example, it includes Taq Taq, corporate spend and new business activity. Our cost cutting across the business where we have reduced the organization beyond our original plan means that our spend was $12 million in Q4, and this will reduce further in 2024. You can see that this spend is covered by the Tawke income in Q4. Next on the charts is a nonrepeating items. We've spent $3 million closing out Sarta work where some remediation work was required. This work was done ahead of time and below budget, and it's credit to the quality and professionalism of the people we have in the organization. Some of them were working knowing that they'll be released once the work is done. With Sarta work now complete, there is no reason why we should not be able to sign documents and formalize our exit with the government. Finally, the investment bucket. We spent $4 million on Somaliland civils. Again, this work was completed on time and ahead of budget, which was a very good result. This is frontier exploration without local experience to service providers. The team has demonstrated real skill to deliver this work ahead of schedule and safely with over 125,000 man-hours worked without an incident. We've been incurring legal costs and arbitration throughout the year, and we spent $3 million in Q4, and I will talk a bit more about arbitration later. We paid 6 months of bond interest in the quarter at a cost of $11 million for debt of $248 million, and we owned 3 months of interest on our cash resulting in a net interest cost of $6 million. And finally, we bought back $16 million of our bonds at an average price below 95%. So in summary, a cash-generating go-forward operating business, some efficient closeout of planned and required work and some cost-effective investment of capital by all 4 items, we see a pathway to returns that can be significantly greater than the spend. Next slide, please. So then taking that frame and looking ahead to 2024, the chart on the right shows first in light green, that we expect our monthly run rate spend to look like after Q1 at around $3 million per month once the arbitration is done and Sarta activity has closed out. We are significantly leaner vehicle than we were 6 months ago, and we're getting leaner. Again, our organizational spend number includes everything apart from Tawke. So it includes the benefit of cost reductions at Taq Taq, Somaliland and at the corporate level, and we continue to seek to optimize these further. The middle stat shows that we expect that spend to be covered by Tawke cash generation from local sales and Q4 levels. So after Q1, we expect our sources and uses to be balanced. On the far right, we put the third step to illustrate how impactful the reduction of exports would be. I mentioned a number of specific potentially significantly value accretive events. And therefore, this is the first one, resumption of exports and export payments. As you can see from the chart, renewed access to export pricing and volumes provides a very significant uplift in monthly cash generation, more than doubling what we are currently receiving on a monthly basis from the Tawke license. Importantly, that bar on the right excludes cash generation from our overdue receivables. This is the second of those significant value-accretive events receivables value realization. We are owed over $100 million from sales made between September 2022 and March 2023. That is a big number, more than a year of Tawke cash generation at full export pricing. It would double our net cash and is over 1/3 of our market cap. We have always recovered amount so to us, and we have received repeated commitments that we paid all that we are owed, and even in paid over 2 to 3 years, it would add $3 million to $4 million per month to our cash generation. But so far, we have seen no payment plan. And given the size and importance of this balance, we will take whatever action is required to defend the significant value for our shareholders. So in short, we've recut the business so that our costs can be covered by revenue from domestic sales of recent domestic sales volumes and in a scenario where exports resume the expected outcome case we've become very cash generative, even more so with recovery of receivables on top. And now I want to turn to the balance sheet. We have net cash of $190 million, which together with the protection given from our outlook sources and uses being balanced means that our balance sheet is very robust going forward. We opened the year with cash of $363 million. $248 million of this is funded by our bond debt. The net cost of the bond is now under 4%. So an annual cost of just under $10 million. This is low cost for the optionality that it bring to the business generally and more specifically, provide funding for us to continue to pursue our strategy of adding new assets to our portfolio. Our search for new production and cash flows is ongoing, and it continues to be a priority for our use of cash. We continue to screen and pursue a range of opportunities, and we'll continue to be selective and cautious. Successful addition of the right new assets and diversification of income, even with a relatively small scale, would have significant impact on the outlook for our business, increasing profitability and diversifying our cash generation. Improving resilience and introducing new paths to increasing shareholder value. Diversify our income is the third catalyst for value delivery. Next slide, please. It goes without saying that the opening of the pipeline and access to higher volumes and double the current price is very important to us. It turns us from a cash-neutral business to a highly cash-generative business and doubled the value of the significant oil reserves that we have in the ground. We continue to believe the pipe will open, and we have had numerous positive comments from important senior politicians in Iraq that believe the same. And importantly, we know are spending time on the issue. However, the timing of this happening and the restart of exports remains uncertain. There were recent meetings in Baghdad, the first time the IOCs, federal government of Iraq and the KRG, they all met. So this feels like a step forward. There was some discussion of seeking an amendment to budget law in order to support payments for Kurdistan production. But at this stage, it is not clear to what extent commercial terms or funding of payments have been discussed or how close to any resolution these discussions may be. There is a further meetings with the KRG, scheduled for today. Next slide, please. I would now like to provide the limited color that I can on another issue that is very important to us, which is our arbitration damages plan against the KRG in respect to the Bina Bawi and Miran licenses with the London International arbitration hearing now less than 1 month away. As a reminder, our claims that the KRG's terminations in Bina Bawi and Miran licenses was repudiatory. And because of that, we have suffered significant losses. By way of reference, we have spent over $1.4 billion of cash acquiring and investing in these assets, both as operator and nonoperator up to their termination by the KRG in December 2021. To be clear, there is no monetary claim against Genel, the KRG's claim is that it was entitled to terminate the Bina Bawi and Miran licenses. The international arbitration hearing is set to begin in London on 19th of February for 2 weeks. The arbitration is covered by strict confidentiality rules, which precludes us from discussing the issues in any detail. This means we will not be able to update on progress even once the hearing is finished. And hence, we will not be taking any questions on the subject, and we will not be in a position to comment further until the award is received. Arbitration is the fourth potentially value-accretive event. Finally, the last slide pulls together the key themes of this presentation through the lens of our focus for the year ahead. We start the year with a strong balance sheet by maximizing local sales revenues and focus on costs, we expect to protect that strong balance sheet, and we expect to retain net cash of $100 million through the year. Our focus there is delivering the transformational value proposition through the 4 specific catalysts that I highlighted through the presentation. First, we continue to work with peers on assessing export pricing through the pipeline of regular payments, which would overnight have us generating over $50 million of cash annually. Second, we will continue to work for a recovery of over $100 million of receivables and significant incremental cash generation. Third, we will continue to work diligently to add the right new assets to our portfolio at the right price. And fourth, we will continue to be dedicated and determined and work with our lawyers on the arbitration hearing in February. We are now resilient to the downside with a reshaped lean and capable organization to maximize the delivery of value to shareholders from these upside events. I will now hand back to Andrew who will take us through your questions.

Thank you very much, Luke. Thank you to people who've submitted questions so far. First question I've got a couple on M&A. So let's take first. Given the current cash position, and the status of exports. Are you still financially able to buy assets? And are you happy to use debt to do so?

So with net cash of about $120 million, we've cash of over $350 million. We are still looking to do M&A, and we will do M&A if it's there before the pipeline opens. It's obvious that if the pipe is open and paying regularly, we have more cash available, and you can use more cash if the pipe is shutting, you are not getting paid for exports. There is less capital available. But we will -- we very much look at each opportunity on an individual basis, different assets have different cash flow profiles, different debt capacity, qualities. Different resilience to downside oil price or downside production, they're all different. There isn't one answer. There isn't one amount of cash that I can tell you is the right amount of capital that's available for M&A but we press on M&A is important to us. We want to do it. We believe we'll do it. We've worked hard for it for 15 months building up what I kind of call a watch list of over 20 assets that we like, that we are either trying to move into position or we have -- they will move themselves into position. So we continue to be focus on M&A and we continue to seek to do M&A.

And as a follow-up question, are you finding a lot of M&A opportunities still coming your way? And is MENA still your focus?

MENA still first price, but when you look at the opportunities coming out of MENA, which sounds quite be could actually when you're trying to get the right asset in the right location, it's not quite as big as it sounds. We may have to go further afield, we're happy to get further afield for the right asset and right location.

And having cut costs, you mentioned the significant reduction in the workforce. Do you think that, that's meant -- there's a bit of a skills deficit should you carry out M&A?

So a lot of the cut was to do with our operational arm where obviously, Sarta's doing less. We've also made cuts across the entire business. We have been very careful to ensure we retain the significant capability that we worked very hard to bring into this business over a number of years and we've retained the right capability to fit the work that we're trying to do. You can see them from the numbers, we are a lot smaller, but we're a lot more focused. I think what we've done, particularly in the last 15 months is refocused the business on very much core objectives. Those are a few of them. We've been pretty clear on them, and we've got the right team to deliver on.

Moving on to bonds as a question. Given debt maturity is due next year, does it not make sense to buy back more debt we're paying a higher interest than your current receiving on cash?

Yes. So I mean we're paying about 4% to carry that $250 million of debt, which is $250 million of cash, which is $250 million of optionality. So 4% cost of money is pretty light. If you look at where our bonds trading at the moment, it's been 13%, 14%, 15%. I think that's a pretty low cost to pay for the optionality it brings. And as I said on your first question, the key priority for us is to do M&A, diversify the business and replenish our production outlook, which got estimated really by losing the gas assets and the disappointment it started.

I'll take a couple of quick questions because there's a couple we've had on disclosure. One is regarding arbitration will we disclose when the award is made. The answer to that is yes. It will be a price-sensitive event, we'll disclose once the award is made. And again, I can see there's a lot of questions coming on arbitration, but to reiterate what Luke said, it's a confidential process. And unfortunately, I completely understand you're wanting to know more about it, but I had to tie in what we can say about it publicly. There's another question about the meeting that Luke alluded to between the KRG meeting with IOCs in Africa today, asking if we will discuss the results of this meeting announcement to the market. We're going to be quite consistent in relation to the politics, where we will announce things to the market when there is clarity. And when there's clarity and when it's price-sensitive, and when it is something that investors need to know, there is news for an almost constant basis on this. It's therefore, it is a bit of a judgment call about what we do in that. What I will say is that today's meeting is more of an update, I would say, from the KRG to people rather than negotiation. But if people want to know chapter and verse on where things are with the politics, you are very, very welcome to either email myself or give me a call. I'm very happy to talk through where things are. But in terms of formal announcements, it can be misleading to say at one time what is happening on any given day because the situation is in flux. There is a general positive direction of travel, and I'm very happy to discuss that with anyone who wants to give me a call. The next question we've had is on Somaliland, where so many people would like to ask for an update. Please can you update on what work has been done since November when you said you now have a good 6 months? And when do you think test drilling may commence?

So yes. Since November yes, that civils work, went well, it's the first time we've done the groundwork in country, new contractors, obviously, because it -- because there hasn't been -- it's a not an oil and gas country, yet there aren't lots of local contractors. They are very experienced with oil and gas and you have to find who can and do the work with the contractors available. Now what we've found is actually, we've been quite pleased with the performance we've got. And the support we have for local communities has been really good. So that 6 months that I talked about it, that would -- that continue to be good. We finished the work, and we're now looking again at when we might do more work on that license.

And somebody has asked about Taq Taq. And we've mentioned, Luke, the challenges in local sales. Can you expand on that and the plans for the license?

So Taq Taq is -- for a few years, Taq Taq has contributed a little bit to us from a cash point of view, but not much. It's production has been fairly steady, but again, not contributing meaningfully. So we haven't been very careful about how we think about Taq Taq and it doesn't just become something that drains money out, it's not selling domestically. We don't have lines at the site, assumption of exports and importantly, payments. So we are -- we're minimizing spend on Taq Taq and we need to see that there's a route to that becoming profitable for the business before we restart investment in that again. So we'll keep it under review, but it's pretty marginal for now.

Moving towards the final couple of questions now, I think. How would you expect to get the receivable back? Would you expect that to be a similar mechanism to previously?

Good question. Yes. So in the past, there have been payments linked to field revenue or barrels or oil price or a combination of those. We don't know. There has been some discussion of a part payment or bullet payment on it, but just discussions. So we don't know. Clearly, it's very important to us. I've said in my presentation, it was important to us, and we'll do whatever we need to do to make sure we get it back. It's been nearly a year since our last payment for exports. That's a long time to wait for money or a plan. And we're pretty motivated to try and get that money back.

And we'll take the final question about local sales. I think it's worth just clarifying the payment mechanism on this, someone has asked the question is whether our monthly cash flow is based on existing agreements with the KRG. [ What it's worth ], just giving a bit of clarity on sales payments that we seeing?

So local sales are made to local buyers. So we have contracts with local buyers for local buyers to come and pay cash upfront and then draw down on the barrels. We touched on a bit in the presentation, but the demand is not kind of consistent and it takes a lot of work from the operators and they have done a really, really good job to achieve what they've done in Q4 last year. But again, it's not a KRG contract, KRG take their barrels and they take them where they want to take them, and we take our barrels and we sell them to these local buyers.

Thank you very much, Luke. And with that, I'd just like to reiterate to people that if they feel their question wasn't answered, and I apologize if it was not, then please either e-mail me on [email protected] or give me a call. My phone number is on the website. With that, I'd just like to now pass over to Luke to make some closing remarks. But thank you again for everyone who joined us.

Thanks, Andrew. I guess I'd just reiterate, challenging conditions continue. There is uncertainty out there. I'm really pleased with how we've recut the business to be resilient and balanced on cash flows now after the end of this first quarter. It puts us in a really good position because not only from the existing business, also from M&A, we've got our cash flows balance. We can do a bit more in M&A, which is great. And we've got these 4 catalysts, which were on the screen there which all could significantly impact our business valuation, our cash generation outlook and of course, importantly, the share price. So I think we want to keep a closer eye on that and see how we go. We will speak again in March, and we will update you when anything has happened between now and then as we go along. Thank you very much.

That's great. Luke, Andrew for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the team to understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and that's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, Genel Energy plc, I would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. Thank you, and good morning to you all.