Matador Resources Company (MTDR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

We'll go ahead and get started. Our next presentation, Matador Resources. I'm Dave Mossberg with Three Part Advisors. Very happy to have them back today. They came, I think, for the first time last year to the Chicago conference, came all the way from Dallas, which is where we're headquartered. We've known the company for a lot of years, really a good example of the type of company that we like, fantastic asset allocators over the years. And it's a really unique story. And I think there's aspects of it that maybe not everybody would understand or appreciate. And I don't think it's reflected in the stock price. But I'll let them tell the story, and I'll turn it over to Mac.

Thanks, Dave. I wanted to first thank Three Part Advisors for having us back again this year. This is our second year at this conference. I think it's really good. It's a different conference that we attend and see a lot of new faces. So certainly appreciate everybody coming out for our presentation today. As Dave said, I'm Mac Schmitz, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. I'm joined with a few other members of the team, which I'll call up, and we'll speak to a few slides before we jump into Q&A. One is Chris Calvert, EVP and CFO. To his right is Michael Frenzel, EVP and Treasurer; and then [ Hanna Rhodes ] is to my right, Vice President of Land. And so I thought I'd dive into a few slides. And then again, we'll try and quickly get to Q&A and hopefully keep this a little back and forth. So kind of a couple of slides on just, sort of, the history of Matador, just to give those that are sort of new to the story sort of a high-level look, and then we'll drill down into the operations and try and get into a little more of the specifics. But we'd like to show this slide. It kind of shows that we are still a founder-run oil and gas company, which is fairly -- you don't see that much today. But Joe Foran, our founder, is still at the helm today. He started Matador I with $270,000 with initial capital. He ended up selling that 20 years after he started in 2003 for $388 million. And the story goes that he started that -- or sold that on a Friday and started this current Matador on a Monday. And so this Matador started with $6 million in initial capital, $5 million from Joe and $1 million from his partner. And today, as you can see, we're obviously a public company, but the asset value is approaching in over $10 billion today. And so when thinking about Matador and where we're positioned, this gives a high-level snapshot, just generally speaking, of where we operate. I think most would consider us a pure-play Delaware Basin operator, which is out in Northeast New Mexico and West Texas. We do still have some legacy assets, as you can see on the right hand of the slide, over in the Haynesville and Cotton Valley. That is what we call our gas bank. It's 100% held by production. We don't currently have any ongoing operations there. It's also a fairly large non-op position for us. But it is an option value for us depending on what natural gas prices do. Again, don't -- it doesn't cost much money for us to hold on to it. And so what -- where we do spend our time and where essentially, as you can see in the lower left-hand corner, where virtually all of our production and all of our reserve value is in Northeast New Mexico and West Texas. I wanted to turn it over to [ Hanna Rhodes ] to further explain why we're in the Delaware Basin and why we think it's the best basin in the United States.

All right. I get to talk about the fun stuff. So the Delaware, why the Delaware, obviously, I think we'll talk a little bit today about why not every net acre is the same. A lot of peers will talk about their position and where they're located. But I think this is a really great visual to show the stacked pay that the Delaware has and we're continuing to add to it. And so we recently announced our Woodford position, the Woodford, as you can see, the very bottom portion of that layer. And so the Woodford is a really exciting part for us, and I think we've even added a few before, 2nd Bone Spring Carb as well was not on this. We've continued to kind of be a pioneer in proving up geological formations in targeted zones within our operated position and then elsewhere. This is kind of a good overview, history of where our acreage evolution has started and where it is today. In blue on the today, far right, you'll see a couple of different acquisitions that we've also announced this year, this quarter that we're very excited about. But really, it all starts with our ground game. And I know a lot of folks out there have talked a little bit about a ground game, but I think our ground game here is a little bit more organic. We are constantly in the backgrounds, our landmen are constantly doing deals, leasing efforts, making relationships in the basin and traveling a lot. And so they're on the road, getting good deals done and a lot of these deals are accretive and can be really meaningful and impactful at the end of the year. Just last year, we announced just from the ground game efforts, 17,000 net acres in the basin that they had acquired. And that's also through trades and swaps, and a lot of different creative structures and just really proud of that effort that they've put there. We're also very, very particular about these acquisitions. We put the balance sheet first, but if they're highly accretive in quality and the rock and position and where it's at, if it's contiguous for us, we obviously love to be able to extend laterals and be able to turn that story into more of a capital efficiency story. And so that's exactly what we did first starting with the BLM lease sale back in May. This was one of the larger lease sales that we had seen coming up. And so we had been aware of this and had been evaluating the tracts that were going to come up for sale. The ones that we had ended up choosing and winning were highly accretive to our current position, being able to extend laterals while also being able to get a higher net revenue interest with those. I think typically, average is around 75% in the basin. Those were at 87.5% or 12.5% interest. And so we're really excited about those. And those all come without PDP, full opportunity set with formations. We had targeted 9 different zones with some of those leases and so -- or all of those leases. So we're very excited about adding them to our portfolio. Next, too, we had a Paloma, announced Paloma acquisition, and those are the same quality. They're high -- they have high targeted formations within those leases, a higher net revenue interest on average across all of those properties. And then also we're contiguous to our footprint. And then Ridge Runner, we had announced with the position of our Woodford. So just really proud of this evolution here, and I think this is just a story to tell that we've started Joe started in the basin taking leases and then it's really kind of trickled in with our land group, and it's continuing in the background while also being able to be in the mix of other acquisitions in the basin that come up. This is a little bit on the inventory side. Inventory is a really big topic for the energy sector. And I think that you get a lot of that coming from peers that are having -- or struggling with maintaining inventory or creating a good inventory base. Luckily for us, and I'm happy to be able to talk about it today, but we're very happy and very proud of our inventory base that we have put together. Again, a lot of it through ground game acquisitions, and we continue to replenish net locations drilled the year prior with those, but also too, with the high-quality acquisitions that we've targeted and transacted on. And so this kind of just shows the ability for our team to add this longevity and in a world where we talk a lot about scarcity and opportunity within the basin, which I always tend to laugh at because 17,000 net acres is not small, and so we're continuing on a really good path of that this year. But our inventory base is really put together through the Land Group, but also through geological efforts. We are putting a lot of efforts in finding new zones like I talked about earlier. And so I would be regretted to mention the geological team going back through our current operated position and also adding in benches there, too. And then I'll pass it over to Chris Calvert to talk about our production.

Thank you, Hanna. I think the one thing that we do like to talk about, we've got this slide going back to 2021, really kind of post-COVID. The industry kind of did a reset at that point. We had been spending and not generating a lot of free cash flow. Coming out of COVID, we really focused on prioritizing cash flow. This slide doesn't speak to free cash flow generation. But coming out of COVID, we became a free cash flow generator. In 2026, in our last quarter release, we projected that we would generate around $900 million in free cash flow for the year. We are able to do that while still growing production. And I think that's a key factor. We look at ourselves as one of the superior operators in the Permian Basin, and we do feel that we have the opportunity to not only grow from Hanna's perspective at the land position, but also we can grow our reserves, we can grow our production and still deliver free cash flow generation. This slide here shows the historical production growth, 21% CAGR from oil production and then also a similar compound annual growth rate for BOE production. And so it's something that we're proud of. We can deliver this production growth in a capitally efficient way that still allows us to generate free cash. Not on this slide, but I'll speak to it real quick. Uses of free cash have historically been we have a fixed dividend that we have grown 7x in 5 years. So that is kind of priority #1. We've been very thoughtful when we implemented this dividend and with every raise where we never want to have to pull it back. We never did special dividends. We never did variable dividends. However, we have been very conscious and thoughtful about raising that dividend when we can. And that is kind of our priority of free cash. Debt repayment kind of second priority. We do have a stock buyback program that we have participated in. Probably since inception in April of '25, we've repurchased about 1.8 million shares at an average price probably somewhere in the low 40s. We've been opportunistic with that buyback plan, but it is a tool that we do have in our tool chest where when we feel that the stock is maybe somewhat undervalued, we can step in from a corporate perspective and buy some shares. Obviously, the ability to generate free cash is dependent on your production growth, production, obviously, commodity price, but then the capital investment at the well level. And so because we're a pure play, I've been with Matador almost 12 years, a very similar story to all of my colleagues here. I started as a completion engineer with Matador 12 years ago. So capital efficiency is something that I have lived really since day 1 with Matador. What this slide shows is the amount of money it takes us to drill and complete a well going back to 2024. And so a metric that we use, the industry typically uses is how much we spend drilling and completion cost per lateral foot to invest at the well level to develop our resource. And so going back to 2024, we see a 12% reduction in our investment cost. And I think when we look at the basin and when we look at our metrics, capital efficiency in the energy industry has become a very hot topic because we want to partner with people who are going to deliver the most capitally efficient programs. And so when we look at this from an outside investor, even just our internal metrics when we're meeting with our staff, focus on growth, but we want to do it in a capitally efficient way that allows us to continue to deliver free cash at the end of the year. Getting granular on this slide, how do we do this? We drill and complete wells faster, about 10% to 15% faster year-over-year. And so that's when you're paying your rig contractor a flat day rate, if you can shave 5 days off of a drill time, obviously, you're going to save money. If you're paying rental rates on a day rate, the faster you can complete a well, the more you can save money. So it's something that we, kind of, guide ourselves and benchmark ourselves to where we look at this as kind of a key driver in free cash flow generation. Another thing that is unique to us, specifically a company of our size, is we have an embedded integrated midstream business that is we are a 51% owner of a joint venture that we have control over what we call San Mateo Midstream. And so for us, this was a company that was built out of necessity. Going back to 2016, 2017 time frame, when we really started building our Delaware position and building our production base in the Delaware, we were faced with an issue to say who is going to process your gas. And so when we looked at the options available, really just kind of substandard service, substandard pricing. And so we said, look, we think we can do a better job. And so we built our first plant, gas processing plant in West Texas. Spent about $40 million. The day we turned it on, we sold it for around $130 million, $140 million and then took some of those proceeds to start building our next plant in Southeast New Mexico. The initial plant was 60 million cubic feet of processing per day. Since then, we have grown the system to 720 million cubic feet of processing per day. And with this Cardinal acquisition that Mac, kind of spoke to, we are now the largest privately held gas processor gatherer and processor in the Northern Delaware Basin. Not only do we have gas gathering and processing, we have water gathering and disposal. And so if you keep up with the energy industry, if you keep up with the Permian Basin, who handles your water is a huge, huge component to our business because as you produce oil and gas wells, typically, you do have a waste product of water that comes up. And what do you do with that? How do you handle it? If you rely on a third-party operator, you are going to be subject to their maintenance programs, their deliverability, their contracts. And so that was another business that we said, hey, I think we can integrate this and we can do a better job than some of the third parties out there. So we have a water business, an oil gathering business, gas gathering and processing business that has grown over time that we show here on this slide today. When we look at specifically -- this is the activity levels surrounding our midstream infrastructure. And I can say before I dive into this slide, why do we feel this is undervalued and not taken into consideration with our stock price. If you look at the entirety of San Mateo systems and then Matador, we actually wholly own some other midstream assets. If you combine those 2 and just look at an EBITDA run rate from those 2 entities, they will, 2026 generate approaching $400 million in EBITDA for the year calendar '26. If you look at multiples of typical midstream companies, put whatever marker you want to, 8 to 12x multiple on that, the San Mateo business has a lot of value for us. We like it. It is a fixed fee business. It is not necessarily as correlated to commodity price. And so it's something that we feel is a very valued part of our business. When we look at this map, this shows the San Mateo infrastructure, kind of the pipeline, spiderweb, if you will, different plant complexes. Now we have 3 different plant complexes. And specific to this, we wanted to show the activity levels. And so within an 8- to 10-mile radius of our infrastructure, we have 100 rigs running, almost 100 rigs running in the Delaware Basin. And so this infrastructure is not only crucial to Matador's E&P business from a flow assurance perspective, but many third-party customers as well, blue-chip names that you would all know that are companies much larger than Matador. And so I think this business was built out of necessity. It was kind of a genesis idea that we had that our executive team had that is now built into a business that is obviously a multibillion-dollar business if it was a stand-alone. But that is one of the key focuses of management is how do we get the San Mateo value unlocked for Matador shareholders. And so we spent a lot of time on the road this team of talking about what potential alternatives do we have from a San Mateo perspective. And so that could be -- we could put bonds at the entity, we could potentially IPO it. We -- a lot of different things. But the key thing is that San Mateo generates in and of itself, a substantial amount of cash that is distributed up to the partner, up to Matador and Five Point Infrastructure. So this map shows not only the highlights of the assets themselves, but just the activity level because we feel it's probably not a secret that oil growth in the United States is likely going to come from the Permian Basin. And so we feel that we are not only in the best basin from an E&P perspective, but also from a midstream perspective to where we can provide service to Matador and our third-party customers in a way that is accretive to the Matador shareholders because we have line of sight to construction projects. We have line of sight to a drill schedule from the San Mateo perspective. So it's something we spend a lot of time educating the sell-side analysts on, our investors on. And so it's something that is very important to us. And like I say, it is a differentiator. Many of our peers do not have an integrated midstream business and the potential growth for that midstream business. Moving forward, and I can kick it back to Mac. We'll show some last slides here on stock ownership and free cash.

Thanks, Chris. I thought I'd just finish on a few quick slides. This is a slide that we're really proud of. So one of the unique things about Matador is that Joe Foran, our Founder and CEO, is the single largest individual shareholder of Matador. But not only is he bought in, but the entire management team and frankly, the staff, which I can hit upon. But this is a slide, and you can go look it up through Form 4s. But what you'll find is that in the very bottom, you'll see that Matador has had 86 purchases by management and 0 sales. And so you won't find that a Form 4 filer has actually filed to sell Matador. But then when you look across the landscape of our peers, at least those that are closest to us, you'll see that they largely are on Form 4s for selling their stock and not buying it. So we think this is a differentiator for us, not only the insider ownership, but also just the idea that we're out there putting our money where our mouth is and try to align ourselves with you all. Another piece of this is because, obviously, you have 450 employees, but only a handful file Form 4s. We have an employee stock purchase program. I'm no expert with how those work, but we have over 95% of the staff participating in that program. Our program provider said that anything over probably 40% or 50% is sort of unheard of, but 95% is where we sit. And so we have the entire staff bought into the stock, and this is something that we're really proud of. And I know it does catch a lot of eyeballs, but we are aligned with our shareholder base. A couple of quick slides. I know there's a lot of generalists at this conference, but we thought we'd take just a quick look at, just sort, of Matador and then also the various sectors that are out there. I mean, these are things that, I'm sure, a lot of people look at, but we're really interested in, sort of, free cash flow yield and how we screen publicly across the spectrum. You can see how energy stocks tend to screen fairly well on the free cash flow side, but that seems very topical today at this conference and frankly, on the road here recently. But we're really proud of the free cash flow profile of the company. I know Chris spoke about that moments ago. Also dividend yield, Chris talked about we have a modest dividend that we've slowly been growing over the last 5 years. We think that it sits right in line with where other energy stocks are. And so to the extent that dividend yield is important to you or yield itself, we feel like we're right aligned with where other energy companies should be. And the Board and Joe certainly take a look at that at each Board meeting, and it's probably something that we'll look to do once a year. But again, we've been -- we've raised it now 7 times in 5 years. And so certainly, it's something that's important to us, and we want to keep pace with the current yield. And finally, this kind of just comes down to just sort of valuation. And we feel like there's a lot of value left in the stock and where it could go. Obviously, energy as a sector has been under some pressure here recently, but I think that to the extent that the Iranian conflict can start to come to rest or at least get comfortable with where oil price will be, maybe it's in the 70s or 80s, there's certainly going to be -- at least our hope is it be some sort of re-rating higher when it comes to the sector itself. We think that the wind will be at our back when it comes to Matador and how it will be positioned in that market. So we feel from a valuation perspective, we're in a good spot. I'll leave this here. We touched upon a lot of these items. We tend to obviously talk through the things we think are most important and why Matador should be considered, particularly when you're looking at energy, just generally speaking. I mean, obviously, first is we think we're in the best basin. We have very high-quality inventory and a lot of runway. Chris touched upon the better wells for less money and also the flow assurance from the midstream that Chris also talked about. We can get into it through Q&A if people are interested more on the natural gas side, but we think we have a lot of really good catalysts waiting for us with the Hugh Brinson pipeline coming on. Hanna spoke to the ground game. We think we are one of the premier organizations when it comes to adding acreage at attractive prices. We've been doing that over 40 years. I already spoke to the shareholder alignment and the fact that Joe is the single largest individual shareholder, but also the staff has really bought in and we buy the stock with our own money versus just sell it. And then finally, to the extent that dividends are important, we have a fixed dividend that is important to us, as Chris alluded to, and we do feel like it's growing as time goes on. And so with that, we'll take questions from the room. I'll try and repeat the question, and I think the entire team will join in on answering those.

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Sure. Yes, I can start, and Chris, you can jump in. I mean, this year, we came into the year as a relative grower. It's sort of hard to rewind time and think what the market looked like, at least in energy back in January. But we came out and said we're going to be a relative grower to the market, low single digits on the oil side. And I think that's where we're positioned is we want to continue to be a relative grower to our peers. I think that we've had this conversation now today, just this morning in some meetings and also yesterday running around town. But I do think that particularly energy companies who are messaging that they're just going to kind of keep things flat, they might be hiding the fact that they don't have good projects. We feel like we have a lot of really good projects to get after. And so to that extent, I do think that those projects will yield, again, modest growth, I think, is important. If you look over our history, we've had some significant growth. I don't know that law of big numbers is true. Like it's going to be kind of hard to grow 20%, 30%, 40% every year. But if we can kind of keep that relative growth to our peers, I think we get rewarded for that. Chris, I don't know if you'd add?

Yes. And just to rephrase, so the question was kind of outlooks on production growth with the Strait of Hormuz backdrop and Iranian conflict. Yes. So like Mac said, we've always kind of seen ourselves as a relative grower. From a growth perspective, there's a few hurdles that I personally think of. You want to make sure you have good inventory duration and durability, which we have. You want to make sure you have marketing capabilities to where we produce a lot of gas in the Permian Basin, about 0.5 Bcf a day, a little over that. At the beginning of this year, we typically have sold anywhere between 50% to 70% of our gas at the Waha hub. At the beginning of this year, Waha pricing was extremely challenged, extremely negative, really. And so to be able to grow, I would want to make sure you have that worry kind of fixed. And so with this Hugh Brinson pipeline, we will now be able to sell the entirety of our gas away from Waha. We'll sell some at Houston Ship Channel pricing and the rest at Henry Hub. And so you think through the growth hurdles, it's like, okay, inventory check, the best liquid marketplace for your hydrocarbons check and then the ability to grow from a rig vendor technology perspective, which we have. So we feel that even when the Strait of Hormuz is settled and pricing falls somewhere, like Mac said, maybe it's in the 70s, maybe it's in the 60s, we still see ourselves as a grower to where we can still generate free cash. And so I think the one thing that we've always been mindful of, we don't want to grow just for growth's sake. That is from a production standpoint, that's from a land standpoint. We want to make sure we're thoughtful about it, kind of profitable growth at a measured pace has somewhat been our mantra. And so even if you rewind to pre-conflict, and so let's go back to February of this year, oil was hovering somewhere in the mid-50s, low 60s at any given time. Like Mac said, we had put together a plan that was -- we were a relative grower. We're going to grow modestly 3%. But we were still going to generate even at those price levels, we expected to still generate about $500 million in free cash. And so regardless, when the Iranian conflict did start, prices jumped. We really didn't change our plan. We don't chase price up. We react to it when it goes down if we have to. But when that conflict started, we didn't go and say, hey, we're going to add a bunch of rigs and now we're going to boost our production to try to chase this price. We were a little bit more thoughtful with it. We wanted to kind of chase barrels around the margins to where there -- is there more ancillary work that we can do to kind of maximize our production instead of just saying, hey, let's go add 3 rigs to our portfolio and let's drill 50 more wells or whatever it was, we're more thoughtful about it. And so knowing that we didn't really change our plan going up too much, the expectation of when the conflict somewhat resolves and we're in a little bit more stable commodity price market, there's not really going to be a drastic change because we didn't really ramp up, if that makes sense. And so while -- I don't say that I'm agnostic to oil prices, but from a plan, right now, we somewhat have been. We've been a little bit more thoughtful around how we see the world because we're more interested in long-term value creation, not quarter-over-quarter growth, not quarter-over-quarter cash generation. We want -- we look at things more from a yearly perspective. And we're happy with the plan that we've put forward. And if the Iranian conflict is resolved tomorrow and the Strait opens up and the infrastructure damage is not as bad as people might think it is, say, Chinese demand picks back up, we feel that we're still in a really good spot to generate free cash and to still grow our production volumes. Great question.