Serica Energy plc (SQZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Serica Energy plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd like to hand you over to Chris Cox, CEO. Good morning, sir.

Good morning. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Serica's 2026 Half Year Results Presentation. I'm joined as usual by Martin Copeland, CFO; and Andrew Benbow, our Head of Investor Relations. Martin and I will now run through a short presentation, leaving time for Q&A afterwards. I'm pleased to say this has been a very strong period for Serica. We've been working hard across our asset base to increase reliability, and this has driven a material increase in production with Q2 averaging 50,000 barrels a day. In turn, of course, supported by the stronger than forecast commodity prices, we have generated material cash flows, turning a net debt position of $200 million at the start of the year into net cash of $26 million by the middle of the year. We've also made significant strategic moves to support our growth and deliver value to our shareholders. We've got our financing -- refinancing done, giving us a strong liquidity position, allowing us significant flexibility as we enter the next phase of organic investment and portfolio growth. We expect very soon to be able to confirm the contracting of a rig to deliver the start of our high-impact and rapid return organic growth projects in the U.K. North Sea, and continue to seek further opportunities to deliver shareholder value via M&A. In the period, we completed the acquisition of non-operated stakes in Catcher and Golden Eagle from ONE-Dyas and prior to that, operated assets West of Shetland from TotalEnergies. We continue to see that as an area with huge potential for Serica as well as a critical basin in supporting the U.K.'s gas needs well into the next decade. As we press on with further growth in the U.K., we have also made our first step in building a truly diversified and international portfolio with the recommended acquisition of Pharos Energy. Strictly speaking, this represents a reentry into Southeast Asia for those of you with long enough memories to remember Serica's early history. More on that later. But our success is built on our production, which pleasingly averaged just over 45,000 barrels a day in the period. This is a significant step-up from 2025, driven by far higher uptime across the portfolio as well as the addition of production from new assets. The key driver for change was, of course, our Triton Hub. Following a 24-day outage earlier in the year during which essential safety critical maintenance work was carried out, production restarted on the 9th of March. From that date until the end of the period, Triton produced on all but 2 days with uptime of over 95%. The Q2 production of 20,300 barrels a day was a far better signifier of what the asset can deliver. And H1 production was 70% higher than H2 in 2025 and over 800% higher than H1 2025. This doesn't mean that Triton is yet performing to its true capacity. We remain facilities rather than well stock constrained, a genuine rarity in the UKCS today. The focus has been on reliability, and we are pleased with the work Dana has been doing and continues to do, and we continue to work closely with them. The challenge is now to ensure the good work on better reliability continues whilst also optimizing for a further increase in production to deliver the true potential from the hub. We still have production to come from Belinda. But having said that, we do not want to take away from the fact the performance in H1 has been encouraging. Given the tax loss shelter we have at Triton, strong production here is also highly cash generative to the bottom line. Bruce was steady with 86% uptime in the period, but the Bruce Hub can also do more. We have further strengthened the team in H1, including particularly with the arrival of Scott McGinigal as our new Chief Operating Officer. And I look forward to introducing him on a future occasion once he has had a chance to get fully up to speed with the portfolio. Teams across all our assets are working hard to deliver optimized performance, especially as we are now very much into the critical turnaround maintenance season. At Bruce, we are also working to ensure that the facilities are set up to deliver the expected production uplift from the resumption of drilling next year. The addition of production from West of Shetland was notable in H1 with Lancaster producing robustly until production ceased in line with expectations in May due to the FPSO being contracted elsewhere and with the Greater Laggan Area then contributing well in Q2. With both our key hubs now in their annual maintenance periods, production in Q3 will always be considerably lower than the H1 average. But with expectations of a very robust Q4, especially as we bring the Spirit assets into the business from the 1st of October, we remain firmly on track to deliver rates of over 65,000 barrels a day as we hit our stride in Q4. Now I'll hand over to Martin to discuss how this robust H1 performance has translated into cash flow.

Thanks, Chris. It is indeed good to be presenting today a set of results which show that the confidence we have always had in the core robustness of our business is paying off in a period that combines strong operational performance with stronger commodity prices. Revenue in H1 was more than double the prior year period, with the key driver being production up 20,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day on the comparable period last year, as well as the average realized oil price up 33% at $93 a barrel and realized gas prices of 101p a therm, roughly 50% up year-on-year. The impact of higher commodity prices was, however, somewhat offset by our hedging, the necessary insurance price we pay for protecting the downside and as required under our RBL. Despite realized hedging losses of $89 million or just under $11 a barrel of oil equivalent, we still realized a post-hedging oil price of $73 a barrel and 97p per therm for gas. As should be apparent from this, the impact of hedging was considerably more skewed to oil than to gas, which is in part because the higher tax exposure we have in our gas assets act somewhat as a natural hedge. We've included, as usual, our updated hedge position in the appendix of this deck, but what I can say is that we've not added material new hedge positions since early March. Operating and lifting costs in the period were $247 million as reported, but were inflated by the high cost of Lancaster, which included FPSO lease costs for a vessel sized for considerably more than the 6,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day the field was producing before it ceased production in May, which meant its costs were around $89 per barrel. With those costs now removed, the underlying portfolio has a creditable operating and lifting cost of just under $25 per barrel of oil equivalent, more appropriately representing our relatively low breakeven and material cash generative capacity. The corollary of materially increased business activity and higher prices was a larger-than-normal working capital outflow of just over $50 million. But we still generated a very robust post-tax CFFO of $280 million, which equates to nearly $40 per barrel of oil equivalent. This is the KPI against which we peg our refreshed distribution policy. And although we will only apply the 15% to 30% ratio in the context of the full year, it is worth noting the H1 tax position as the metric is, of course, post tax. In the first half of the year, we actually received $9 million from a tax rebate due to a slight overpayment of tax in 2025 and no net payment owing in January. However, the accounting current tax charge for the period was $60 million, and we would expect that cash tax payments will, of course, come in H2 as we make installment tax payments in July and October with, for instance, having paid just over $25 million last month. The phasing of tax payments, together with both dividend payments falling in the second half and the fact that summer maintenance occurs in Q3 and hence, reduces production are the key reasons why our cash generation is naturally biased towards the first half of the year. And as you can see, the cash build in H1 was impressive with just under $300 million added to our cash position in the period. As well as the underlying strength of the business, it's worth noting the receipt of $69 million in total on completion of the deals with TotalEnergies and ONE-Dyas, which represented the post-tax interim cash flows from the historic effective dates of those transactions and which further boosted our cash. These are, of course, not run rate items that we will see in H2. As we've also announced today, now that we have more specific timing for and details of the completion of the Spirit Energy transaction due to occur in the early hours of the 1st of October, we also expect just under GBP 40 million to be paid out on completion for this deal after we factor in completion adjustments for the GBP 57 million agreed purchase price and the offsetting but fully 78% tax affected pre-completion cash flows. We are, however, seeing considerably stronger gas prices than our acquisition case and the Spirit asset cash flows will be considerably more tax efficient in our hands post completion. When we announced the Spirit deal, we stated an expectation that the assets would generate around $100 million in free cash flow by the end of 2028. We now expect the free cash flow to be more than double that figure. Including these cash flows from the 1st of October, we expect to return to material cash generation in a robust fourth quarter of the year. And of course, the best time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. And with this in mind, we are very pleased that we took proactive steps to optimize our liquidity position during the half to set us up very strongly ahead of the exciting growth investment that we're set to make in our U.K. portfolio, while also enabling us to remain active and opportunistic in M&A. Firstly, we took advantage of positive market conditions to make our first step into the Nordic bond market, raising $300 million with a term of 5 years and at a very attractive fixed interest rate. The debt under our bond forms the core debt in our capital structure and is complemented by our refinanced RBL facility, which we signed and completed in July. The new bank facilities are $750 million split into a $500 million revolving loan facility and a separate $250 million tranche for issuing letters of credit. The initial borrowing base under the RBL is $458 million, and the facility is fully undrawn. This bank committed funding, combined with the $326 million of cash we had at the end of June, resulted in pro forma liquidity of not far off $800 million. We'd like to thank our counterparties in the fixed income investors and banks who have helped deliver this solid platform of liquidity, which, together with continued robust cash generation will enable us to invest in our organic growth opportunities, whilst also remaining nimble and opportunistic for M&A opportunities as they arise. And we remain committed to predictable and material shareholder returns. We have today declared our interim dividend at 6p per share, the same level as 2025, with our final dividend for the year being calculated in accordance with our policy of 15% to 30% of post-tax CFFO. The 6p interim would correspond to only about 11% of the H1 post-tax CFO. And if we were to maintain the full year at 16p, that would be comfortably within our payout ratio guardrails at around 18% of the midpoint of our GBP 450 million to GBP 475 million post-tax CFFO full year guidance. We will only determine our overall shareholder distribution based on the full year audited numbers, but we are confident that our financial frame gives us the flexibility to balance healthy distributions to shareholders with investment to maximize value generation through organic growth and acquisitions. And we believe there are great opportunities to create material value for shareholders. And thanks to strong financing partners and the support we enjoy from them, we have the capital available to take advantage of them and deliver. And with that, back to Chris to remind people of some of these opportunities.

Thanks, Martin. As we detailed at our Capital Markets Day, we have an exciting array of opportunities ahead of us in our organic portfolio. Multiple wells at Bruce plus Kyla, Glendronach and others have the potential to deliver material production uplifts totaling a possible incremental 30,000 barrels a day and delivering rates of return over 40%. I'm pleased to say that we are now close to signing a contract for a rig to deliver the start of this drilling program. We are looking to obtain a rig for an initial 400-day duration with options to extend. Drilling is expected to begin in Q3 next year. And it is most likely that we will begin at Bruce with the South Central East and South Central West wells. After 15 years without a well being drilled in the Bruce Field, this is a great opportunity to go after, potentially adding 10,000 barrels a day with production starting within a year of drilling commencement. As a reminder, this drilling would be highly tax efficient and is the logical place to start as the regulatory approval process is simpler than for other opportunities in the portfolio due to the fact that it's infill drilling in an existing producing field. After that, there is the potential for the rig to move to Kyla or head west of Shetland for Glendronach. Both opportunities are also looking attractive. While we are focused on our operated program, it is also worth noting the organic growth on our newly acquired and the yet-to-be acquired assets with drilling set for Catcher and ongoing at Cygnus. And we also continue to seek inorganic growth. The key strategic move made in this regard came post period end with the announced recommended offer for Pharos Energy, a deal consistent with the strategic aims we outlined at the Capital Markets Day. It provides us with a first step in building an international platform with room for further growth at an attractive price. Pharos is a materially cash-generative business, meaning the deal offers a rapid payback accretive across all key metrics. The acquisition cost per 2P barrel compares favorably with recent precedent transactions in the relevant countries. And upon completion, the transaction will boost our reserves and resources by 13% and 15%, respectively, and add materially cash-generative production. The acquisition of Pharos adds a highly complementary business to ours. Similar to Serica, the business has a history of being a cash-generative dividend payer, aiming to offer both growth and returns. We believe that the assets will continue to generate cash while being part of a company better placed to deliver further growth from the asset base and from further business development opportunities around them. This further cash generation and growth potential complements and does not reduce our commitment to the U.K. and is an ideal springboard for further growth in Southeast Asia. It is, of course, far from complete, but we are hopeful that we will see it added to our portfolio next year. And it is not the end of our inorganic growth aims. We have an excellent team and the financial capability to move quickly to take advantage of opportunities. We are certainly not ignoring the U.K., although the recent wave of consolidation means that there is inevitably not quite the same number of opportunities available. Our team is also looking overseas at areas which can deliver Serica's strategy with Southeast Asia standing out as somewhere that we believe growth can be delivered and acquisition opportunities are likely to be available. This is not at the expense of U.K. growth, but working alongside it. We are continuing to build a robust business with an attractive long-term future, delivering material value for our shareholders, and we are working hard to deliver this ambition. And we're on track so far in 2026. Our production expectation post the acquisition of Spirit Energy remains 65,000 barrels a day. That acquisition is now set to complete on the 1st of October. The fact that this additional production will not now start before Q4 has slightly impacted our guidance for the year. But notwithstanding this, our production is still expected to be over 40,000 barrels a day for 2026. And our post-tax cash flow from operations is expected to be in the range of $450 million to $475 million. We are in a strong position and continue to look forward to taking that to the main market later this year. The business has real momentum at present, and we want to get our story to as many potential shareholders as possible. And we expect to build on this momentum. We have numerous catalysts ahead from the signing of the rig contract through the main market move, completion of M&A and further ahead, the drilling program itself. And what this slide doesn't show is the value-accretive M&A that we hope to deliver along the way. We feel that we're in a great position. We are highly cash generative with the ability to grow further, both through high-return organic growth and through rigorous and selective M&A. As we do this, we will continue to deliver material and sustainable dividends. We have a fantastic team scaled up and ready for the growth ahead, and I believe we can deliver for all of our stakeholders. And with that, I will hand over to Andrew to run the Q&A.

Thank you very much. First question is about Bruce. You mentioned that Bruce can do more, in what way?

Yes, we've spoken a bit about this before. So Bruce produces most days. And as I said during the presentation, it's had decent uptime this year. But on any given day, it doesn't produce the maximum potential of all the wells we have. And that's partly due to the complexity of the facilities and some wells that are high pressure back out other wells and things like that. So there's a number of things we can do. There are individual well interventions that we need to do, to do things like scale squeeze where wells get plugged up and every now and again, you just got to go in and flush them out. We can optimize the bullheading operation, which is where we pump high-pressure gas into the well to try and kick wells off when they're quite low pressure. We can optimize the way our compression runs. We're looking at potential gas lift in the future, which is a much more sophisticated way of improving the performance of low-pressure wells than bullheading, but it does require well interventions. And one thing worth noting is if we drill these new wells starting next year and they come on at high rates, they're likely to help some of the low-pressure wells to flow. So there's a lot of optimization to be done. And it's just one of those things about getting after it every day and each day saying, have you done the maximum that you could do on that day from all of your wells? And currently, the answer is no, but we're getting better.

A few questions for Martin, I think now, actually. Does the improved cash flow leave room to consider buybacks, as to me, not me personally, the person asking the question, the shares must look exceptionally cheap to the Board.

Yes. I mean, we -- obviously, we have got good cash flow. And I think as we said at the CMD, we're going to implement a distribution policy based on payout ratio. And I gave the numbers in my talk there that said that if you kept the dividend at 16p, it would be 18%, which obviously is comfortably in the range of 15% to 30%. But we'll only really know that when we get to the end of the year. I think the -- we talk about shareholder distributions. And so our bias is towards dividends, I have to say that, and that's because in most of the conversations we have with shareholders, that is the preference. But we're not ruling out buybacks. They're in our armory as where we got our mandate renewed at the AGM. But I think our bias will probably be more towards potentially paying an additional dividend if we were to do that. But we'll also look at that as against the opportunity set we have in front of us. And Chris painted what that picture is and the returns. I think we've indicated that the average return we anticipate is something like a 40% IRR. So we'll always weigh that up in terms of delivering the best value for shareholders.

I think that also answers the next question, which is why we held the dividend at 6p? That will be reviewed at the end of the year.

We tried to make that clear. It is a new policy, so it's probably just worth reiterating. Our view has always been that we keep -- we aim to keep the interim kind of flat and then look at the ratio only at the year-end. And partly, that's just accounting prudence in the sense that we then have fully audited numbers, and we know exactly how the year has panned out, and we'll be able to apply it at that point.

Another question for you, Martin, is about our tax profit. The GBP 6.1 million after-tax profit at the time of high oil and gas prices looks rather underwhelming. Can you explain how GBP 272 million gross profit becomes a GBP 76 million pretax loss?

Yes, it's the funding gains of accounting relative to cash. And you'll have seen that as I presented the slides, it was really about the cash delivery. And we certainly think that most of our investors are more focused on what we deliver in terms of cash. The real answer to that is there are 2 kind of relatively significant noncash items that have -- that obviously weighed on the pretax profit. And one of them is the mark-to-market value of our hedge book as of the 30th of June, and that is unrealized hedging losses. So it's a point-in-time view as to the potential future value, if you like, or indeed in this instance, cost of our hedge book. But it's a point in time. It just happens to be what the price or the forward curve was on the 30th of June. It doesn't mean that it will pan out to be that in reality that, in fact, we could end up in a position where those hedges are in the money by the time they come around to actually maturing. So it is a -- it's what you're required to do, at least under the method of accounting that we follow. And so that's the impact that it has on the P&L. So that's one of the reasons why we do really focus on cash because that is an artifice. It's not really a fair reality of what the economic outlook is likely to be. And the second one, I'm afraid, is even more arcane in the acquisitions that we've done, as people will probably be aware, we are confident that we'll be creating significant value by the fact that we have a good amount of tax losses, and we've acquired taxpaying production into it, and that is the way to realize value from those losses, and that is beginning to pay off, and you can see that at least the beginning of that through what's coming through in the results from GLA that remember, we've only had in on the books from completion since the 26th of March. But the way the accounting works is even though, obviously, from an M&A perspective, we took that value creation into account, the accounting treatment requires you to recognize the notional value of that tax loss in your calculations, whereas in reality, we discounted it and we took a time value of that, et cetera. And the difference between those 2 things is recognized as goodwill. And we think of it as technical goodwill. And essentially, it's not -- it has to therefore be expensed through the P&L, and that's another GBP 95 million difference. So that -- both of those 2 things hit the profit before tax and that ends up giving us actually a loss before tax, which reverses to a very small admittedly net income or profit after tax but you'll actually see that the -- and that mostly comes from the recognition of deferred tax asset value that creates a positive number in the tax line. So it reverses that loss. Again, that really is just a testament to the delivery of value from the tax losses beginning to show through, and we'd expect to see more of that come the year-end as well.

Yes. I'd just say that there's a reason why we give the table that we do on the front of the presentation. That's because we think it's the -- those are the best metrics on which to judge the strength of the business rather than some of the technical accounting things that you see from the back. We've had quite a few questions on M&A come in. It's just worth reminding people that because of takeover panel rules, we cannot comment on quite a few things in relation to the Pharos Energy transaction. We've had people asking about potential cash flows and things like that. I'm afraid this is not something we can comment on at this time. Similarly, on something we can comment on the slight tangent. We've had quite a few people who have been asking about BP's process. So I'll just ask one question, which is effective. Were you surprised by BP's wish to sell North Sea assets? Do you believe there'll be a ready market to procure them?

We were not surprised. I mean we've said to people that we track everything that's going on in the U.K. And so we look at everything and going in the U.K., and we're obviously fully aware of what's going on. And it's been known, frankly, that BP has been considering this for some time. The fact that they put an announcement on the particular day that they did, I guess, was because they had results coming up, et cetera. And I guess there'll be people looking at it now, but I suspect this is going to take quite some time to see how it all plays out.

Moving on, I still think, sadly, Chris, this is all for Martin. Serica has a significant tax advantage for its accumulated tax losses. When should shareholders expect this to translate into materially higher EPS rather than simply funding further acquisitions?

Well, it is beginning to come through. I mean, as I mentioned, we -- it actually has reversed a loss before tax into a profit before tax. So that is the beginning of it. But remember that, that was really only seeing that effect over a period of -- a relatively short period, certainly for GLA. Some of it's coming through also through the Triton results as well, and we expect that to continue. And we don't typically update the loss balance as it is at the half year, but we've got the numbers in there in the accounts, and they're still very sizable, as you will see. So as we see healthy production and strong robust prices, that benefit is going to come through and is coming through, through the numbers today.

Moving on to the politics. We've had a couple of questions. So which aspects of the current U.K. tax regime are having the greatest impact on Serica's investment decisions? What specific changes would unlock shareholder value? And I'll ask the second part of that question because people have asked it a couple of times. Have we seen any evidence of prime ministerial pragmatism as yet?

So I maybe try the first one and then I'll hand it over to Chris. I mean the specific -- I mean, we actually think our portfolio as a whole is quite nicely set up to be able to manage in all conditions. We've got -- because we have different parts of the business, which have got different attributes. And as Chris mentioned, the drilling that we're planning at Bruce is tax efficient because actually, we have not got losses in the entities that hold Bruce. And so using the benefit of capital allowances there is very attractive. And then in the other part of our business now, I'd say, Triton, where actually apart from Kyla, which may come in the future, there isn't that much CapEx going on. That will benefit from the losses that we have there. So we see the combination of those 2 things as being quite a nice balance. Clearly, we would overall like to see the energy profits levy removed. And that is more because it's just going to be better for the whole industry and better for our supply chain. And I'm sure the sentiment move that, that would entail would be a positive as well. So -- but we've got to go and run the business in the best possible way, and we believe that we are set up for whatever happens. And I'll ask Chris maybe to pick up on the wider point about...