Hunting PLC (HTG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to welcome you into the 2024 Annual General Meeting of Hunting PLC, and I declare the meeting to be open. My name is Jay Glick, and I'm [indiscernible] Chair. As most of you know, the company is celebrating its 150th anniversary of the founding. And I want to take just a few minutes to make a couple of comments on that. If you think about it, that's Queen Victoria was on the throne, about midway through her reign when the company was founded. And this is a kind of calibrate the 150 years. Marks & Spencer's didn't open until 1884. And if you're trying to read about Hunting's founding in the financial times, you wouldn't have been able to [indiscernible] start until 1888. So it's a unique situation for a company to kind of weather the economic trials of 150 years and come out in the position that we're in today. So I want to recognize everyone, who contributed to that over the years and Hunting family here today, but there was clearly a lot of amazing leadership that got the company through some really challenging times. And I think all of us at this table feel fortunate to be a part of all of this. And I certainly [indiscernible]. So with that, let me begin by introducing our company directors. So seated to my far right, is Keith Lough, who is Hunting's Senior Independent Director. Beside Keith is Carol Chesney. Carol is a Non-Executive Director and Chair of our Audit Committee. Next to Carol is Margaret Amos, who comes to us from Rolls-Royce. Margaret is our newest director. Beside Margaret is Stuart Brightman, who is a Non-Executive Director and also Hunting's Chair designate. More on that in my concluding remarks, but suffice to say that Stu will be a dynamic and capable leader and I think the company is probably getting an upgrade on the Chairman's role, but my [indiscernible]. Next to Stu is Jim Johnson, our Chief Executive Officer. Then seated to my far left is Annell Bay, who is Non-Executive Director and chairs our Remuneration Committee. And Annell has been really active this last year, accomplished some incredible things to get the proxy go through on our new RemCo plan. Beside Annell is Paula Harris, who is a Non-Executive Director. Paula also works on the RemCo plan. And next to Paula is Bruce Ferguson, our Finance Director. And finally next to me, my left, is Ben Willy, our Company Secretary. So In advance of the meeting, shareholders were invited to submit questions in writing. Answers to those questions have been published on our company's website and will also be addressed after Jim's presentation. We will continue to take questions from shareholders during the AGM. These can be submitted to the e-mail address. And I'm going to spell this out because there's no way anybody to write it down, but it's because it's not a word, [email protected]. And that's shown on the bottom page of most of the slides in the presentation. The slide on the screen provides an agenda for today's meeting. And in a few moments, we will comment on Hunting's quarter 1 trading update, which was released at 7:00 a.m. this morning. Jim will then provide a presentation on the 2023 annual report and accounts. And then after Jim's presentation, there will be an opportunity to take questions from the floor covering the quarter 1 trading statement in Jim's presentation and any other questions that you have. Following the question-and-answer session, we will then move to the main business of the AGM, which will include the poll. The poll will close 10 minutes after the conclusion of the meeting. Following the conclusion of the meeting, all the directors will be available to meet shareholders. Refreshments will be served at that point. So I will now turn to the review of our quarter 1 trading statement, which was issued this morning at 7 a.m. The group has reported an EBITDA and that's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, [indiscernible] EBITDA of $28.9 million during Q1 2024, which is well ahead of the same period of 2023 and also ahead of our Q4 2023 results. So we were decelerating out in 2023. Most of the group's businesses have reported good progress since the start of the year with the EBITDA results ahead of management's expectations, driven by strong fundamentals in the global oil and gas industry. Our OCTG product lines have reported good growth in the period along with our subsea products. These areas continue to benefit from robust offshore international momentum, particularly in South America and the Middle East, while a perforating system product line has reported more subdued activity in the U.S. in the first few months of the year. International sales growth has continued to be strong, which is offsetting some of the domestic U.S. market softness. Our advanced manufacturing businesses reported good growth in the quarter as energy-related and non-oil and gas sales continue to strengthen. Hunting have seen an increase to working capital during the first quarter, as we continue to work through our sales order book. OCTG tender activity continues to be buoyant particularly in the Middle East, which should lead to further increases to our sales order book, as we progress in quarter 2. Management continues to target unwinding of working capital throughout the remainder of the year, which should lead to a positive total cash and bank position by year-end. Total cash and bank was negative $33 million at 31 March 2024, reflecting the investment in inventory and higher receivables associated with the higher revenue volumes during the quarter. In summary, the Board is comfortable with the current EBITDA guidance of $125 million to $135 million for the year, and we look forward to delivering further progress to our business throughout the balance of the year. And with those comments on the Q1 trade statement, we'll now pass the meeting over to Jim [indiscernible] performance.

Okay. Thanks, Jay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to be here today. It's a very unique time in the company's history. So coming on the heels of celebrating our 150-year entry, I think following up on Jay's comments, it's important to, at this time, recognize the fact how strongly the culture of the company has played into, how our results have been able to improve over the years and take us to where we're at today. So your company, just to let you know, I think it's on the best footing it's been on maybe in the company's history. And one of the things that's been unique about Hunting over the years has always been the ability for the company to change and adapt to new markets and new opportunities. And I think this year will show in our results and what's happening in '24 that, that's going to be a continuing process. So just going through this, again, it was a very good year last year. We were happy with the results and the performance. I wouldn't say that we're content. We're definitely not. There's things that we need to improve on. But it was a definite strong recovery still coming out of the depths of COVID and the downturn we saw there, which in my career was the worst downturn I've ever seen. So a lot of hard work by the team. A lot of good initiatives were able to be kicked off, and we were able to capitalize on that and the one main thing, the main driver, we're talking about change that we always want to get across to our investors and everybody else was the fact that this year really showed how diversified your company was in the marketplace or is in the marketplace. So we weren't just reliant on U.S. shale in North America. And that's going to come out in some of the other details that I talk about here in a little bit. As we mentioned, EBITDA doubled year-over-year, a strong performance there on getting some pricing back in place, getting utilization back in place in the facilities and just seeing an overall broad increase in activity in our industry. A record book of $565 million, the largest I've ever seen in my career with the company, and it's one where we're looking at about 80% of that figure being delivered in 2024. The rest of it going into 2025. And keep in mind when people or investors are doing the numbers, this really doesn't include anything from Titan because of the short cycle way that, that business reacts to the marketplace. So a good backlog there. We continue to see opportunities, as Jay mentioned earlier, especially in the Middle East and international markets to help drive us through better numbers in '24. Non-oil and gas sales, they were up 59% year-over-year. It still is one of our goals to continue to increase that. We laid that out in the 2030 strategy that we want a higher percentage of non-oil and gas revenue, but we want that revenue to be profitable revenue and not just doing it to have a nameplate. It's something that we focus on. And in the past year or so, it's really been an uptick in the aerospace, defense and some medical business that has driven that. The utilization, again, was up. In cash flow, we had a very strong fourth quarter result that brought in a lot of cash for the company to help our end of the year cash figure. More summary here, again, talking about things that I've already touched on, but it gives you some comparison on numbers. I'm not going to read them all. The thing about graphs that I always like when it comes to performance is lower left to upper right. And that's the way the graph is going coming out of '21 and the downturn there, and we are anticipating that graph to continue to trend in the direction of being up in 2024. How did we have our order book play out? I mentioned earlier about the fact that there's not much Titan in there. But you can really see in this the strength of the OCTG business. Those are typically longer-term orders in contrast just from the procurement of pipe, the procurement of materials for places like South America, Subsea, which wasn't much of a story 3 years ago, in part of talking about how the company has changed. And we are now have multiple platforms for the company. You see Subsea a very significant part of that backlog, and we're just very excited about the opportunities that we've had in places like Guyana and Brazil and now even areas like with Enpro in the Gulf of Mexico and some North Sea businesses starting to increase for us. On the non-oil and gas side, you'll see the breakdown there. We have a little bit of the geothermal work, but primarily it's been in the aviation. And commercial space has been another area of growth for us, thanks to people like Blue Origin and Elon Musk business. On the balance sheet, strong balance sheet. The company still is in a very good health financially. We have -- if anyone wants to talk about our ABL and all, Bruce is available afterwards, but we've got the firepower available to do M&A, if needed, good balance sheet, yes, working capital went up, but I did -- looking at all of our peers in the industry, it's really a sign of health in the industry because we had to increase that in order to take advantage of the order intake we've had. So as that unwinds over the years as far as -- with the cash generation, that working capital number will improve as it relates to the total revenue of the company. On cash flow and expenditure. Some of this I've already talked about, one of course, on the far side, we paid out $15 million in dividends. We ended up the year basically neutral in cash. Capital investment was pretty stable. It was slightly above our depreciation level. We see that continuing into 2024. We don't need a lot of roofline expansion in the coming year. So what we have right now is really a case where we're trying to improve productivity. We're trying to make sure we can do things quicker, faster, better this year than what we did last year. And so we're replacing some of our fleet as far as machine tools go and the like. And again, EBITDA number, I've already talked about quite a bit of that. Kind of focusing on our Hunting 2030 strategy. I think many of you were at our September rollout where we had our Capital Markets Day. It was one of the first Capital Markets Days. I don't know when we did one before that. But I think it was a very successful exercise, not only to show the market what we want to do and what our aspirations are, but it was also a great tool internally for the team to come together and focus on just what do we do best and what can we do to grow the business in the future. And so these different points here, I'm just going to touch on briefly, really talk about how we're checking the box on what we said we're going to do for our 2030 strategy. If you look at OCTG, we've done a number of things there with alliances with material suppliers and the like to make sure we're prepared for things like energy transition or for the new challenging oil and gas opportunities in places like Brazil or in the Middle East. We opened up our facility with Jindal in Nashik, India this past year. Bruce and I were there in September for the grand opening. Literally, probably there's no other facility in our company better than that. So between our team in Singapore that worked with the Jindal people on the design, just an excellent facility and layout, the business already has a substantial order book. And it's really going to give us the footing for the development of the oil and gas business in India where they're seeking hydrocarbons to replace coal and to take advantage of all the energy demands they're going to have with a growing population. Titan business on perforating, not the best year. And a lot of that was related to the natural gas decline that we saw pricing there in some of the basins that we are a key operator on, but it's also the fact that we had a 20% decline in rig activity in the U.S. So while it wasn't the best year we've had, I think the performance of the Titan business was very good relative to what we had in our marketplace. One of the upsides there was the fact that our international business grew significantly year-over-year. We continue to focus on new technology, the H-4 Perforating gun, which is a self-oriented gun, which is becoming one of those tools that is allowing greater productivity in the wellbore with our clients, is gaining traction week after week. Subsea, I talked about a little bit earlier. The Guyana business has been great and have an Exxon as a client is a great part of your CV to go to others and that helped play in even to our recent order in the Black Sea region with the Turkish petroleum oil company. And it's almost like now we bought a business that was in hibernation. It's in the full growth mode right now. We expect great things from that to continue going on. The Enpro business has come out strongly this year after seeing some recovery late last year. We expect it to be strong in '24 and beyond. And our core business in Stafford, Texas that makes hydraulic couplings and the like continues to be strong and follows the trend of people like FMC for subsea tree build. Advanced manufacturing. The good thing there in advanced manufacturing, which to remind everybody, is our electronics business in Houston, Dearborn up in Maine that was probably 2 of the businesses more impacted by supply chain issues than anything else. Not -- the activity issues impacted all the company. But for those 2 businesses, it was lack of material. I think everybody read 100 articles by computer chips, and you couldn't get them and the like. So we went through a lot of challenging issues in COVID and coming out of that. Those are pretty much behind us now. So order books have been strengthening there, still focused a lot on diversifying our sales mix with those 2 business units, and we think they are in for a very good 2024. Energy transition. I'll talk a little bit about that more later. But really today, it's kind of in the state of getting ready to prosper from the opportunities down the road. In areas like carbon capture, the market has been very slow to actually put words into deeds and get things done. In the U.S., there's permitting issues. There's pipeline issues. Our -- my personal belief is the geothermal side will have more upside quicker. And actually, the first -- in January, we landed some geothermal business in the Philippines, is a sign that we're out there looking at these opportunities. And again, cost management and rationalization, we did a few things there. We continue to look at our assets on a daily basis to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. One of the things that I'm really glad that we did was we disposed of our E&P assets for some of you. I mean those assets went back to just post World War II on some of them. But what it did was it eliminated a lot of future plug and abandonment costs that we could never predict. And it was -- we would get invoices for $0.5 million or whatever in a month out of the blue, and we weren't the operator for these properties so it's just cleaning up some of that. Again, talking just a momentum under some slides here to go over, I've hit on the high spots for OCTG. This business goes back and -- you look back 150 years of Hunting, you look back on the entry into the oilfield service business. This was the first business of Hunting, was in the oilfield service side, was supporting the OCTG business. So it's the old story of what's old is new again. And right now, it is a huge part of our business is what we're seeing in OCTG, and we think that will continue to grow this year, especially with the tender pipeline we're seeing in places like the Middle East. Again, I've already talked about India, but there's the order book talks to you about the results there. You see EBITDA significantly improved from minus 7% to plus 47% from '21 to '23. That should improve again this year. A lot of that based also on international areas like Guyana for completion accessories as well as our North American connection business. We actually grew market share in a declining market space. And part of that is because of our concept of basically, we're kind of a virtual mill. So we're not tied to any one steel supplier, which gives us a lot of flexibility. Perforating, I talked about earlier, H-3 gun system is now in place and doing well. H-4 is the next generation. We can charge more for it. It's a more pricier product, but it's also a more efficient product and shows our technology to our clients. The recent tie-up with StimStixx, a company out of Canada, that will provide some ESG benefits to our clients because it has less -- there's just less kit at the well site. It's got less toxic materials for things like acidizing and the like. So it's those areas we're looking on, and we think that will help enhance the Titan business. Advanced manufacturing, I mentioned earlier, there are some numbers there and shows that EBITDA, again, the numbers need to get better, but at least it's all going in the right direction. Again, a lot of that is because we've gotten rid of the COVID issues, and we've gotten supply chain issues out of the way and pricing has improved in those businesses as well. On Subsea, 3 businesses now, where before there was one. Again, I'm just showing this briefly to show order books, revenue numbers. The direction of travel is positive right now. We see it continuing to grow. And I think the big change this year significant wise will be the growth in the Enpro business, as we're seeing a lot of opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico as well as abandonment opportunities in the North Sea but overall, a very key part of our business. And I hope with all of these, again, it's showing that we're not just a one-trick pony, as we use the same when we're living in tightened all there was. So now there's multiple product lines and multiple opportunities for us to improve. Other manufacturing, a lot of that's our well intervention, our well testing business. Part of our CapEx this year is we're moving the one well testing facility in the Netherlands to Dubai to be closer to the customers as well as to reduce costs in that segment of what our business is. Energy transition. Numbers were small right now, but I think that's kind of the story with everybody. Everybody is trying to figure out how to make money in energy transition. Is it real? Is it just a tax issue? What's going on? The thing is, we think it is going to be real from talking to our clients. It's just going to be a longer road, as I mentioned, in areas like carbon capture. And we have to do a lot of testing just to be prepared for that. Things like cryogenic testing. You have different issues going on in the tubulars on carbon capture than you would with traditional oil and gas but we're working with some titanium manufacturers, some other material manufacturers and advancing our technology, so we're prepared for the opportunities. ESG, one of the things that we -- I want to thank Ben for his work on that and leading all that up, that we put a lot of time in trying to make sure that we are doing things right from every aspect of ESG. The numbers are out there. I think actually one of the proudest ones I am is our incident rate safety-wise. We probably don't talk about that enough, but Hunting is a very safe place to work at. We put a lot of time and effort into training our people, costs that don't necessarily show up in a P&L statement, but it's more of avoidance and cost, but our safety record has been stellar and our quality record has been stellar. We talked about our CO2 emissions. You'll see that they went up less than what our revenue was year-over-year. And the other important factor is the tenure of our people. I'm very thankful to work with the team that I do. And as your company, you should be thankful as well because it's a great group of people globally that make things happen for us every day. So in closing, strong year last year. Again, we want to see that continue to improve. I've mentioned about the free cash flow. I think I've touched all these points, but we're very bullish about the outlook for '24 and beyond. The company -- your company is in a great place right now. And so with that, that's my presentation. The only thing else I want to do is -- just before I sit down here and you all bombard us with questions is, I want to thank Jay for his service to the company. He's been a great mentor over the years that I've been in this position and going to be missed, and Jay, I just want to thank you on behalf of the team for all that you've done in the time you've been with us.

With that, let's open up for questions from the floor first, then [indiscernible] online questions. Yes, sir.

If I may, Mr. Chairman, a question to Mr. Johnson about Subsea. I've become very focused on the area in the last year investing in a company called [ Ashton Technology ]. Share price has gone up, I think, about 140%. And also [indiscernible] marine services, that's gone up, I think, 390%. Hunting hasn't done as well as that. I assume it's because it's more diverse. But I was surprised to -- not surprised to read in the Investors' Chronicle, I think they had a short interview with you, in which you said that the Subsea business is on fire. And that sort of tally with my thinking at the time, but then I've got the annual report a week or so ago, and you said it was steadily growing which is, is it on fire or is it steady?

Both. So no, the business, from a Hunting's perspective, the Subsea business is the best it's ever been because we've added new parts to it. So 3 years ago, we didn't have the Enpro, we didn't have the RTI. Globally, the Subsea business is expanding rapidly with places like Brazil and Guyana. So one comment I'm making from the industry perspective, one I'm making from Hunting's general what we've done in the past perspective. . But we're very bullish. It's one of our goals if we can find more M&A, one of the areas we want to have bolt-on acquisitions too because it's the areas where technology is probably the most challenged and where we see that you get paid for that technology.

And it's about 10% of the business revenues, is that right?

Yes. Bruce, you got the numbers there?

Yes, 10% revenue.

Yes. I'll just take a comment on Subsea. When I first came to the U.K. at 1978, we were working on the first three Subsea projects to go into the North Sea -- Subsea completion projects. And so the business, the technology from 1978 to today has, in many ways, changed remarkably. But there's some other way in terms of the fundamentals of how you do it, are all exactly the same as what we were doing back then with barrel, bucket than the other fields in the North Sea. So Hunting is in a really good place on Subsea. The technology we've acquired is unique in terms of its capabilities on FPSOs exceed any of our competitor's capabilities. So we are -- the titanium stress joint is a phenomenal product. Any other questions from the floor?

About corporate governance, you say a lot of things about relationships with your shareholders in the annual board but very little about private shareholders like me, like us. I've been with the company for what, 9 months. I wasn't invited to the Capital Markets Day. This is the first contact I've had in person with the company. And I do think it's so important, especially given the state of the London stock market right now. 60% of our [indiscernible] pension fund investing internationally and private versus like myself now, down from [ 1/3 ] to 10%. And then it might be only small, but we do provide some liquidity. And I think there's a potential there to grow, but we need to engage. We're not just talking about Hunting, generally between companies and shareholders.

[Technical Difficulty] concept of share register and the importance of [indiscernible] family practice funds was raised because on both sides of the family offices are increasingly participating in particularly mid-cap companies. So we need to do a better job of reaching out. [Technical Difficulty] a steady source of investment, and we welcome them and it's absolutely essential. Any other questions [Technical Difficulty] Okay. All right. We'll press on [indiscernible] thanks, Jim, for the presentation. Let me -- okay. So I trust the notice for calling the meeting was made available to all the members and I'll take that as read. As stated in the notice of meeting, voting on all resolutions will be on a poll rather than a show of hands. And on a poll, each shareholder has one vote for every share held. Voting on a poll ensures that the votes of all shareholders are counted, including the majority of our institutional shareholders who cannot attend the meeting in person that have submitted a form of proxy. Before describing the procedures that will be adopted taking the poll, I would first like to appoint Equiniti, our registrar, as the poll scrutineer. Equiniti will collate all the votes received during the meeting. Those of you entitled to vote will have been given a poll card at registration. If you do not have a poll card or if you need additional poll cards, please raise your hand now and someone will assist you. Okay. If you've already voted by proxy and you do not wish to change your vote, then you don't have to complete a poll card. Your vote will be taken into account automatically. If you voted by proxy and wish to change your vote, you can now complete the poll card and your new voting instructions will be taken into account. Please complete the poll card by inserting your full name, address and signature. If you're a proxy or a corporate representative, please insert your full name and the full name and the address of the shareholder you're representing. Please ensure that your poll card is signed and handed to our registrar as you exit and leave the room. I now propose formally that each of the resolutions set out in the notice of meeting and also numbered on the poll card are put to the meeting. Resolutions 1 through 16 are ordinary resolutions and require a simple majority of votes cast to be in favor in order to be passed. Resolutions 17 to 20 require 75% of the votes cast to be in favor in order to pass. I now declare the poll to be formally open. The poll will close in 10 minutes after the meeting. If you have any questions about filling in the poll card or if you require any assistance, please speak to the registrar. The registrar will calculate the results at the close of the poll. These will be announced at the stock exchange later today and will also be published on the company's website. So before I conclude the formal business of the meeting, I would like to say a few words. First of all, this is my last meeting so I wanted to thank by saying this is a real honor to be a part of the company for the 9 years that I've been involved. And I have a soft spot in my heart for the company and we'll be watching as we go forward. But I also want to thank a few people, and I'll start with my wife, who's in the back [indiscernible] being here, I wouldn't be here. So thanks for 45 years of support. I also want to thank my fellow directors for all their support and council during my time on the Board. It's been a pleasure to serve with you and we, I think, accomplished some good things that wouldn't have been accomplished without your input. I want to congratulate Stu. I know Stu is going to do a terrific job moving forward and the company is in very, very capable hands. And Jim, I want to thank you and Bruce and the whole management team. You guys have done remarkable things. You're in some really difficult periods of time. I don't think anybody can appreciate kind of the role that Jim has had to play with COVID and oil price crash, oil prices going negative, gas prices went negative last week. So those are really challenging times. And the management team has done a fantastic job of navigating all that. And I want to thank the shareholders [indiscernible] handing over the role in such good form and the council that I've gotten in the interim period. So shareholders play a major role in making this company a success. And I couldn't be happier with the shareholder [indiscernible]. And lastly, I just want to say that I wish the company every success as we move forward into an even more incredible 150 years to come. So -- anyway that concludes the formal business of the Annual Meeting. And on behalf of the Board, I would like to thank everyone for attending, and I now declare the meeting closed. Thanks.