TGS ASA (TGS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

August 29, 2024

Oslo Bors NO Energy Energy Equipment and Services investor_day 123 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Bård Stenberg

executive
#1

Good afternoon, and welcome to TGS Capital Markets Day. My name is Bård Stenberg, I'm responsible for Investor Relations in TGS. Before we start, I would like to give some practical information. For those of you present here in Oslo, I would like to inform you about the emergent emergency exit, which is the same way as you entered the building. There's not any drills planned. So if the alarm is sounded, please evacuate immediately. I'd also like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements showing on the screen, and available in today's presentation. So please study that carefully. Today's presentation team comprises of our Chairman of the Board, Chris Finlayson; Kristian Johansen, CEO; Sven Børre Larsen, CFO; Kristin Omreng, EVP, People & Culture; and Carel Hooijkaas, EVP, New Energy Solutions. Today's agenda is showing on the screen. And Chris, he will start with an introduction. Then Kristian will give you the state of the market and our position. And then we will follow on with the TGS strategic priorities. And then Carel Hooijkaas will continue with the priorities for resilience, and Kristin Omreng will address the knowledge aspect. She will also continue on with an integration update. And then Sven Børre Larsen will do the financial strategy. At the end, Kristian will do a summary, and then we will open up for questions. So the people on the webcast can type in questions while we present. And we will address those along with the questions from the people in Oslo after management's concluding remarks. So with that, I give the floor to you, Chris, for your introduction.

Christopher Finlayson

executive
#2

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to add my welcome to this Capital Markets Day. And in particular, I'd like to thank you all for coming today in the midst of what is a busy season of conferences and the like. As you're aware, we successfully completed our game-changing check takeover of PGS on the 1st of July. This has established TGS as the undisputed industry leader in terms of its range of services, it's technologies available, and its geographical spread. As we saw Kristian talking on the video there. Today, we want to share our strategies for translating this into shareholder value, realizing the many strengths of the new TGS, and achieving our ambition of being the world's leading energy data company. Today's presentation will be led by Kristian, supported, as we've seen by members of his management team. However, I would like to open with some context and some observations about our direction, our aspirations as a Board on behalf of our shareholders. Now I would identify two critical success factors, which have driven TGS' progress over the last decade. One has been our success in acquisition-led growth frankly, something at which most fail. This means success in identifying the right targets, moving at the right time, paying the right price and having the financial capability to execute rapidly, then success at integrating the newly acquired companies, realizing promised synergies rapidly, retaining top talent and maintaining TGS' inclusive but performance-driven culture, which I view as a pretty unique blend of Norwegian and American values. I'll give you 2 examples. Firstly, our acquisition of ION, fully paid for within 12 months from multi-client sales alone, and additionally giving us enhanced technologies in acquisition and processing capabilities. Secondly, our acquisition of Magseis took us from having no position in ocean bottom node technology, which is, of course, the fastest-growing seismic segment to being the industry leader with strong technical and operational capabilities and a very healthy order book. Now of course, we look to an exciting future, getting the best out of the PGS takeover. Today, you'll hear presentations from leaders with TGS, PGS and Magseis heritages, all now driving the strategy of the merged company. This successful acquisition strategy has only been possible, thanks to the robust financial position that the company has maintained over the years, almost unique amongst oil service companies. This financial resilience means TGS has paid dividends continuously for 14 years through the economic cycles that the industry has encountered. It's allowed us to move countercyclically and acquire at the right time for the right value. And it is very much the view of the Board that financial robustness remains a critical success factor for the future. We are 100% committed to prioritizing reducing debt levels, leading to lower borrowing costs and more financial flexibility. Indeed, the improved financial position of the merged company will, of itself, lead to reductions in the cost of debt servicing and give the opportunity to utilize significant inherited tax losses. As soon as possible, our ambition is to enhance shareholder returns through a combination of improved dividends and share buybacks, and Sven Børre will be taking you through our financial plans. Once we've achieved our aspirations in terms of financial robustness and shareholder returns, we will seek to grow both in our traditional business and in the new energy space. We don't want a token in new energy business. We certainly don't want greenwashing, we want to grow new and profitable business areas, which can really add to the bottom line even of our half -- of our $2.5 billion or more company. You'll be hearing more from Carel of our impressive progress and future plans in this area. We'll complete our integration and realize additional synergies rapidly, effectively and at minimum cost. As I've said, I see this as a core skill of TGS, and Kristin will be telling you more about our progress. As an example, all our office integrations will be completed within 6 months of closing, allowing us to operate as a single team with duplicate locations eliminated, and surplus property ready to be realized -- released rather. Detailed preparation and effective processes will mean that staff rationalization and the savings that go with it will be completed on a similar timeframe by the end of this year, allowing the organization to focus solely on the future. Clearly, one thing that has changed, with first the Magseis acquisition and now the PGS acquisition, is our move from being an asset-light company to one with significant owned assets. As you can imagine, this is something that we have debated extensively as a Board. We have come to a clear view that the changes in the marketplace have made this not just acceptable but absolutely essential. Consolidation, both in our customer base and amongst our suppliers means that to maintain our success, we need to be present across the value chain, including guaranteed access to streamer acquisition vessels at competitive rates. As a result of the PGS merger, we've acquired top quality assets for a great price. These will be an additional source of revenue and profit in a highly consolidated market. We will ensure that the necessary expertise to run these assets in a safe and efficient way will be maintained. We will also apply TGS' historic financial discipline to these new areas of the business. Kristian has chosen a great leadership team to support him and to realize the value growth I am confident TGS can achieve. Our determination is to be financially robust and investable through the cycle to enhance shareholder returns and still have the capacity to pursue further growth opportunities. On a personal note, I have invested in this company because I believe it has an exciting and profitable growth story ahead of it. With that, I'll hand over to Kristian and his team to take you through their plans.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#3

Thank you, Chris, and thank you for a good introduction and nice words. Welcome, everybody, for this session. I'm super excited to be here and present to all of you. I actually got here late last night from Houston, and I don't say that because it should be a disclaimer to the fact that I have a major jet lag and may fall asleep. But the reason why I say it is that I came from a big industry conference, which is called IMAGE, is the biggest seismic conference in the world. It happens once every year in Houston. And the reason why I want to look back on that is that for the first time ever, and I've been with this company for 14 years, I feel like we can sit there and meet with our clients and address every single need they have in terms of their exploration ambitions. That has not always been the case, [ that I've had ] 5 meetings with 5 of our biggest clients. And I feel every time the needs are different. So one company wants to pursue a long-term agreement on the OBN side, another company would like to address some streamer challenges that they may have in Africa. Third company wants to do a look into a library subscription, for example, fourth company has some interest in the new energy space, and they've heard that TGS have offerings in that space as well. And the fifth company may be interested in either imaging software that we have now started to license or having TGS to image or reimage their major databases. So again, in every single meeting, I felt like we had products and services that we could be proud to supply to these clients at the best possible quality and service. I'm going to go through the status of the market and TGS position in that market, and I'm going to start with a slide that you guys are all very familiar to, and it shows on the right-hand side, it shows the oil and gas supply until 2023. Then it shows the estimated production from current producing fields, as you see the decline rate is very high and it's very high for the next decade or so. And then it shows 3 different estimates for demand. It shows OPEC, which continues to grow in the same trend line as you've seen for the past few decades. You see Exxon, and this is not updated with Exxon's long-term energy outlook or new long-term energy outlook that was posted on Monday, which is even more optimistic actually. And then it shows the IEA steps scenario, which is the most conservative in terms of where is demand going for oil and gas in the future. In every single alternative, you see that there is a huge gap to be closed over the next decades. And it's interesting to look back on Exxon, and I have huge respect for Exxon, both as a client, but also as a one that has been really good at predicting the market for decades. And if you look at the long-term energy outlook of Exxon that they released on Monday, what they're saying is that the demand for oil in 2050 is going to be 2% higher than today. It's not going to be 20% lower. It's not going to be no need for oil. It's actually going to be 2% higher in 2050. That's a long time. I think most of us are probably not going to be here in 2050. But our kids are probably going to be here, and it means that TGS is also going to be here. For gas, the outlook is going to be 21% higher in 2050 than what it is today. And in terms of the overall energy mix, we all know that oil and gas represents about 56% of the energy mix today. Exxon says that's going to drop to 54%. But again, the cake is bigger. So we will see continued growth in the market that 3 years ago, in 2021, IEA came out with a report and said there is no more exploration needed. Probably the toughest day of my life. But fortunately, they were wrong. And fortunately, things are looking far better today. And I think that goes back to the ONS conference last week. I wasn't fair, but I read a lot of newspaper articles. I talked to a lot of people who have been there. And I think the whole atmosphere has changed significantly. I think people are getting more fact-based. People understand that this is going to continue to be a major part of the energy mix going forward. And the focus is then how can we make sure that we add additional energy sources to limit the growth of oil and gas and limit emissions of oil and gas, and how can we come up with economically feasible ways to reduce emissions from oil and gas. In that regard, it was great to read the Aker BP report in terms of how Norway can play a role, not by cutting production but actually increasing production on behalf of other countries who have significantly higher emissions than what we have in Norway. It's also interesting, if you go back on the left-hand side and you look at the trend line, and you look at the trend line of -- we're talking about a 50-year history here. And the fact is that COVID was just a little dip. We're back to growth again. We're back to a level that is higher than pre-COVID. And if you draw a straight line, whether you do it on oil or you do it on gas, you see that we're back at the same trend as we used to be. And what Exxon is saying is that, that trend is going to continue. What does that mean? Well, if you look on the right-hand side, you look at the reserve life of major IOCs, and you see pretty much the opposite trend. For oil, it's actually getting quite dramatic. It's dropping from 13 years to 9 years on average in the matter of 10 years. So it's actually reduced by 4 years over a 10-year period, meaning that we only replace about 40% of what we find. That is something our clients will have to take into consideration. They will have to take this seriously. And it's really interesting, obviously, we have a breakup of who are these companies and what's the average lifetime. And we actually see some correlation between the interest they have in exploring and the average reserve life. There is no secret who's at the bottom of this list, and that company is being very vocal now about doing more exploration and how important exploration is. And of course, if you're down to 6.5 or 7 years, you have a major issue. The good thing is that Wall Street has also started to realize that. If you go back 5 years, every time Hess announced a newer discovery in Guyana, their share price dropped 5%. And it dropped 5% because more oil means that more CapEx is needed to develop and get that all into production. When Galp announced the discovery in Namibia quite recently, their share price went up 23%. So Wall Street has also changed in terms of how they look at exploration, and I think our clients need to look at that and they're going to be under severe pressure to increase exploration. What they've done so far is that they've done a lot of M&A. So in 2023, there were about $200 billion worth of M&A transactions in E&P. That's probably going to continue, but it doesn't solve the big issue. It just solve your own issue. So that's important points to take from this first slide. Also going to talk about the energy macro trends. What do we see today and what do we going to see over the next few years and partly to explain the quite aggressive consolidation and diversification strategy that TGS has carried out over the past few years. So if you start with the left hand with the oil and gas industry, increased recovery rate, near-field exploration and reduced cycle time. That's really been the focus. And this didn't happen overnight. This has been the case over the past 5 years or so. And obviously, as a result of that, we see more demand for 4D which was addressed with the acquisition of Magseis. We see more near-field exploration. So 10 years ago, 70% of our business was frontier, 30% of the business was mature. Now it's flipped, the cake is getting smaller, too, but it's flipped and we still see significant opportunities in near-field exploration and frontier will eventually have to come back if you believe what I presented on the previous slide. Significant M&A activity. I've already covered that. And then we see a gradual increase in exploration spending, not enough, and again, if I go back to the previous slide, it should and will have to be significantly higher. But for now, at least, we see trends in a positive direction, and that's what we hear from our clients as well. If you look at the seismic industry, again, most activity in mature basins switched from 30-70 to 70-30 over a 10-year period. Continued multi-client investment opportunities, absolutely. And in this market, I think if you go back 10 years, you could basically go out anywhere, which was called frontier and had a petroleum system and you would see demand for your data. Today, our clients are much more selective, but there are still pockets of growth, and it's still extremely important for a company like TGS, to at any point, make sure that we are represented in the pockets of growth. The best starting point to find those pockets of growth is to have the existing data. And we have data all over the world. In fact, we've invested $4 billion in seismic data over the past 8 years, that represents about 62% to 65% of the overall global market. That's what we have in terms of data. That's a huge advantage when you're going to find the next basin. Number 3 is that we see a significant consolidation of the seismic vessel supply market. For those of you who have been in this industry for some time, you remember back in 2013, there were about 65 vessels. The 65 vessels were owned by 7 or 8 different companies. Today, there's 15 to 17 vessels owned by 2 companies. So Shearwater and TGS control this market in many ways. That's just happened to be the case because a lot of the different players who've been participating in the vessel market are not there for obvious financial reasons. If we look at the new energy industry, and Carel is going to talk more about that today, but energy evolution, or I like to call it energy addition, drives new data needs. There is no question about that. And if you look at the maturity of these industries in terms of data knowledge and data needs compared to oil and gas, and we were still at a very, very early case. And our intention is to be part of that growth story. We've actually grown our revenues in the new energy space from $7 million to $70 million since 2021, and that's going to continue to grow at double-digit percentages, which means that this is going to be a sizable business for TGS going forward. These companies are also focused on providing secure, affordable, and sustainability energy, and that's obviously doesn't go for new energies only, it goes just as much for oil and gas in the future. But again, the bottom line there and what we are going to make sure that you leave with today is that there are significant growth opportunities in these markets because data is just as important for an offshore wind, a solar, a deep-sea mineral or a CCS company likely as for oil and gas. I'm going to take you through on the next slide, the journey that we've been through since 2020. And I'm going to start with how TGS looked back in 2020. And I think most of you were here. Most of you were following TGS at the time. I was definitely here, so I know the story quite well. But in 2020, we were the #1 multi-client company in the world, that we were pretty much tied with 3 oil companies who had strong offerings in the multi-client space. And then in imaging, we pretty much spent all our imaging resources on imaging and reimaging our multi-client products. So we didn't really have a lot of proprietary revenues in that regard. So we were not really seen as an external imaging provider back in 2020. 95% of what we did was internal work. And then for new energies, yes, we had -- we were kind of dipping our toes into the CCS market just by selling data or licensing data that we already had acquired for oil and gas purposes. But again, a company that was not very well diversified, very successful because we were riding the cycles of frontier. We were riding the cycles of being asset-light in a market that have multiple opportunities in terms of sourcing assets whenever you needed it to a very favorable economics. So what happened since then? Well, number one, we were hit by COVID in March 2020. I think going back to that IEA report, it obviously made us a little bit nervous about putting all eggs in one basket and that basket was oil and gas. And we did a deep dive into the renewable markets. And it didn't take us long to realize that this market is also based on subsurface data, whether you do offshore wind and do those major offshore installations for offshore wind or you do CCS or you do deep-sea minerals or you do geothermal. What you need is deep or subsurface data and subsurface knowledge. And that's what we have. So what we did is that we made an acquisition of a company called 4C Offshore. 4C Offshore is an offshore wind market intelligence company. And the question at the time was, why do you buy a market intelligence company when subsurface data is your core competence? Well, because our core competence was subsurface, but nobody knew about TGS and nobody knew that our core competence was subsurface data. So what is then better than going out and buying a market intelligence company who's got 2,000 subscribers and you get your name out there. And that's been a very successful strategy, which means that a company that was basically used to have 25 clients in oil and gas, all by a sudden, had access to thousands of clients in the offshore wind space. So that's been a good strategy. It's a great company, it improved. As you see, we added a cake to the pie called New Energy Solutions and it's been a company that has grown rapidly in line with our business case when we acquired them at the time and with good margins. And that's going to be the future as well for 4C. Then we realized that we did not have any offerings for solar. So if you wanted to be fully diversified through the new energy space, you also needed to have an offering in solar. Prediktor gave us a foot step into the solar market. They're doing asset management solutions for solar, but not only for solar, because their biggest client at the time was CalTech, but they also have Equinor, they have Aker BP. They have a lot of traditional energy companies on the client list. And what they do for them is asset management on big installations offshore. So huge potential in terms of growing that to other clients or existing clients of TGS, and of course, the second growth engine here is going to be the solar market. That is the fastest-growing new energy market today. So Prediktor is based in Fredrikstad, has about 35 to 40 employees, very highly educated science people. And again, we have already contracts with a lot of our traditional oil and gas clients in addition to solar-based companies. And the software is installed at, I think, 3 out of the 5 largest solar parks in the world. In 2022, we also acquired ION. ION was probably more opportunistic acquisition. ION was a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, it went into some financial difficulties. I think I don't disclose too much by saying this is the best acquisition we've ever done. Chris said it in his intro, we got that money back in 12 months. I think the actual answer is 9 months, but I got to be careful. We don't want to make the sellers feel bad, but it was a really good acquisition. I think what is important with ION, yes, it gave us a multi-client business that we returned our money very quickly on. But it actually did more than that. Number one, it improved our imaging reputation and our overall offering in imaging. And in fact, last week, we signed a relatively large contract -- software contract with one of the super-majors who's now going to use the former ION software for all of their own internal imaging needs. The contract is so much more than just a software license that contract also allows the 2 parties so TGS and the super-major to work together on developing the next algorithms and really do R&D together as a joint team. So again, that's probably the highlight of the ION acquisition on top of the fact that it was financially a very good return in a short period of time. Multi-client business of ION was about 20% of TGS in terms of the size of the overall library. So it has a huge potential going forward. And we got this for basically pennies on the dollars. And after ION, we did MagseisFairfield, and you see that MagseisFairfield is a transitional acquisition for TGS. It adds a completely new pie to our service offering. What we saw at the time is that this trend of going from frontier and closer to infrastructure, including the reservoir, of course, was happening very fast. And we saw that the OBN market for the future is going to be the fastest-growing segment of seismic, and we need to have some kind of access or control over that market. The acquisition of Magseis was perfect in terms of timing. I think it was a win-win for both parties, and Magseis got access to a stronger balance sheet, got access to a couple of super-majors that TGS was already very close to, and it's been a great success. No question about that. And you see, obviously, Magseis added a big pie on the OBN side, where we have about 40% market share in the deepwater market. In addition to that, we also added technologies that are being used by Carel and his team in new energies today. So a great strategic move so far and with 2 years into this, it's developed probably better than we expected at the time. And then the big game changer, of course, or another big game changer is PGS, and you clearly see from this slide that PGS adds another dimension to our business. It adds streamer capacity. And a lot of you would say that do you really need streamer capacity. Utilization has been pretty low. Well, the fact is that there are 2 players in that market. The fact is that pricing is really good. The fact is that being on the outside of that market and paying for those services would be rather expensive for TGS. And I'll give you a great example for that -- of that in a few minutes. So PGS obviously covers this 3D streamer side, covers the multi-client side. I mean it's a great performing data library that has returns above 2x over a long period of time. It's got a strong imaging base and, of course, new energies on top of that, which fits very well into the overall picture. So the summary of that is basically a company that is fully integrated, and who can certainly say that we are best in class or very close to the best in every single segment of the industry we're playing. So that's the reason for my opening statement where I sit there and meet with 5 of our biggest clients, and we feel like we can help them with any need that they have rather than having them go into the room next door. Another way to look at that would be to split up the different businesses we have, multi-client, of course, clear market leader. As I said, we've invested $4 billion over the past 8 years. 62%, 65% of the total global investments in multi-client carried out by this company and obviously, the companies that used to be under different ownership, but is now controlled by TGS. On the streamer acquisition, again, no secret, we've been using PGS a lot. We've talked to a lot of our clients. Obviously, some of these clients, we've been using PGS for acquisition in partnership and then we're facing the clients, and we get best first-hand information about the quality of the GeoStreamer and it's really, really good. No question about that. When you talk to 10 of our largest customers and ask them who do you prefer to do business with, we score really well. And that was part of the due diligence that we already did for many, many years before we acquired PGS. On the OBN side, again, the acquisition of Magseis leads us to a strong position in that market. I've covered the imaging side as well. But I think the combination we have now where we get much more scale, particularly relative to some of our suppliers of cloud compute gives great synergies for that regard. And the New Energy side, I'm not going to steal the tender from Carel, so he's going to get his 10 or 15 minutes to talk about that. And then you may ask yourself, okay, but how does that work in reality? Yes, there's a lot of nice words about how good it is to be fully integrated and you cover every single part of the value chain, but how does that work in [ brackets ]. And the way it works can be very well illustrated by a contract that we announced last week. It's called PAMA 3D. It's in Brazil, and this is the first time we get the opportunity to leverage the fully integrated model. First of all, the project is huge. We're talking about close to 20,000 square kilometers, and we have a total permitted area of 55,000 square kilometers, meaning that TGS could be playing in this basin for many years. And we could use one vessel if we want, we can use 2. We can even use 3 vessels if we have to and if the market allows us to do that. We manage the project from A to Z, meaning that we do everything. We got the permit. We're shooting the multi-client, of course, we're developing the survey design. We're acquiring the data with a PGS vessel. We're doing imaging in-house. We're doing data management, and we finally sell the data. And I want to give you a comparison because 1.5 years ago, we did a similar survey, it was about half the size. And at that time, we didn't have a fully integrated model. So we ended up with a multi-client. We had to partner 50-50. On the 3D acquisition, we had to use a third-party vendor who probably made their 20%, 25% profit on the project. We had to use a third party on imaging as well. Data management, we did as a consortium and sales we did together. Now we're doing everything from A to Z. And if you look at all the inefficiencies in the value chain here where people are going to have their share of the cake or their share of the profit and you compare to what we have on this survey, this survey is going to be a great success for the company, and it's a blueprint about how -- what we're going to do in the future. All the value kept in-house. Wanted to talk about the executive team, of course, I really apologize that not everyone is here and for obvious reasons because the imaging -- or the IMAGE conference in Houston is very important to us. This is an avenue where we get to meet all our biggest clients. And most of our executives are there, and they should be there. And I think you would also be better off that they are there than they are here. So in that regard, I'm just going to go quickly through it. Legal Counsel continues to be Tana Pool. She was with TGS, and has been with TGS for more than 10 years. So as Whitney Eaton, who is our Head of Sustainability and Communication; Kristin Omreng, who's going to speak today is in charge of People & Culture. She came from PGS. And then our CFO, Sven Børre Larsen, obviously, with about 10 years from TGS is also part of the new team. Then we get Carel Hooijkaas, who's the former CEO of Magseis and came in through the acquisition of Magseis in 2022. He is now looking after our New Energy Solutions, and he's going to present that today. Multi-client is David Hajovsky from TGS, but he's actually -- he has a background with PGS before that, he was with PGS from 2010 to 2015. Imaging and Technology is the only external hire, Wadii El Karkouri came from AWS. He's been with AWS for the past 3 years before that, he headed up global imaging for WesternGeco or SLB; Nathan Oliver, you all probably know, he was -- he had a similar position with PGS for many years. And then in operations, we have Rob Adams from PGS. So as Chris said in his intro, a great combination of people from 3 different companies, TGS, PGS and Magseis. Again, I wish they were all here, but hopefully, they do even better where they are right now. I'm crossing fingers for that. So with that, I'm going to talk about some of the strategic priorities going forward. We have characterized or categorized our priorities in 3 different buckets. One is related to value. I'm going to cover that myself. One is on resilience, which is very important for a company like TGS. Carel is going to go through that. And then knowledge is going to be Kristin. And if you look at the 3 different buckets, what we're going to talk about is on value, how do you enhance that leading position. What do we do with all these very strong market positions in different segments, how do we stitch that together and become a truly unique company in the seismic space. Partnerships, we're going to talk about that. And of course, our goal of being a preferred imaging provider. On diversification, Carel is going to touch on HSE and sustainability and of course, our balance sheet strength, and obviously, on our diversification and the fact that we're continuing to diversify a company that used to be very, very targeted at one small segment of the seismic industry. And then most people forget the fact that TGS is a knowledge company. We -- one of those great examples where the CEO who probably don't rank in the top 25 of IQ of the overall organization. But the fact is that we have very, very educated employees with 6% PhDs and a typical blue-collar company for -- which is very different from most other oil service companies in that regard. Kristin is going to talk more about that. So talking about value. So number one, the industry's largest multi-client library. This one does a good job in terms of not only showing the size and what PGS did to the size of the overall library, but also showing the pricing of that library in terms of enterprise value over the book value of the library. So you see that pretty close to an all-time low as we speak, and the library size is pretty close to an all-time high. So obviously, it's going to be our job for the future to make sure that we close that gap going forward. And you can also see at the bottom of the left-hand side, you see the current EV-to-MC library with 1.8x. So we trade at 1x our current book value. and that compares to an average from '11 to '24, so 2011 to 2024 or 2.8. If you adjust that for the COVID years, which most people would probably say makes sense, we're talking about 3.3. If you look at that from '16 to '24, the numbers are 2.2 and 2.9. So you can conclude that whatever you like from this slide. But again, we're just pointing to the facts, and the fact is that we have grown the library significantly with additional PGS library. And I think it's fair to say that, that library has a performance that is just as good as the vintage TGS library. Second bucket of value is the industry's most capable seismic 3D vessel fleet. Again, very favorable market dynamics. I talked about the fact that the supply side is extremely consolidated with basically 2 players. The second important point here is that there is no new building activity. Let's face it. There are probably no banks who are willing to supply parties with funds to build new seismic vessels. If you look at the each of these seismic vessels that we have acquired, they're are about 10 years on average. These vessels have a lifetime of probably somewhere between 30 to 35 years. Some people would argue they can probably last for 40 years. So this is it in terms of what's going to be built for the future and what's going to be available for the industry in the future. And keep in mind, a lot of these vessels can be used for offshore wind, they can be used for CCS. In fact, I saw one of the competitors of TGS talking about a need for 5 seismic vessels for the CCS industry by 2027. That's a lot. If that turns out to be the truth, we may run short of vessels. Very attractive entry points. So we got 7 high-spec 3D vessels acquired at an average price of less than $100 million per vessel if you look at the PPA. And if you look at how that compares to new-build costs of about $270 million, the age-adjusted new-build cost of $200 million. And what we call the replacement cost of the broker value of $200 million, it's clear that we got these vessels very, very cheap. Number three is that the OBN business is a great stand-alone business in itself. And if you look at the EBITDA of that business, slightly better in 2024 than it was in 2023. Revenues pretty much flat, and again, this is after a very strong 2023 with significant growth. And when we turned around the business that was negative by a few tens of millions of dollars to a very positive EBIT. As you see, we acquired MagseisFairfield at an EV of $238 million in 2023. The EBITDA contribution that year was $132 million. That gives you an EV/EBITDA of 1.8x. And then the 2023 EBIT was $55 million, which again means that we acquired Magseis at an EV/EBIT of 4.3x. So again, an acquisition that was very accretive for TGS shareholders and that was made just at the right time. And then last but not least, the fast-growing new energy exposure. I think, again, Carel is going to talk more about this. But if you look at the growth in this industry, it's been phenomenal by every single year, yes, it was only 22% in -- or it will be 22% in 2024, but the fact is that we're growing this business with very strong margins. So you look at the EBITDA margin that we expect more than 20% for 2024. It's up from 15% in 2023. When you grow a business that fast, typically it has a negative impact on short-term margins, we have been able to show profitable growth and Carel is going to talk more about that. Finally, on the strategy going forward. And one of the things I discussed on my previous slide is partnerships and the fact that we're a one-stop shop for seismic and energy data. We can pretty much do anything for anyone who's interested in either exploration or new energy. So I'm just going to cover some of the key basins and some of the opportunities we see before I pass it over to Carel. So let's start with the U.S. Gulf of Mexico on my left upper corner. So very strong technology intensity in the Gulf of Mexico. Gulf of Mexico in very many ways, has been a playground for seismic in terms of testing new technologies and applying new technologies, and that continues to be the case. I think we're at the sixth generation of seismic technology now in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. And keep in mind, we've been there since the early-80s but the Gulf never stops surprising in terms of being -- or absorbing new technologies and demanding new technologies. And then you can test those technologies in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and then you apply that similar technology elsewhere in the world. So that's been the case for more than 40 years now, and that's going to be the case going forward as well. Obviously, needless to say, a very strong TGS data position. We have data pretty much across the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and new technology breakthroughs partly on the OBN side means that we are now able to shoot the entire Western [indiscernible] where TGS had no presence historically and we're just about to carry out big programs there, which already started back in 2023. Norway. I think those of you who read the Norwegian newspapers last week or those of you who attended ONS, I can't stop but becoming more bullish on Norway for sure. If I listen to Aker BP, Equinor and [ Vår ] and their plants there's a lot of activity happening in Norway as we speak. There's a push for new technology in mature areas, very similar to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. There are still areas with lots of needs for streamer data. In fact, the different basins of Norway have a very different kind of profile in that regard. You have the Barren Sea that is very frontier, you have the Norwegian sea that is semi-frontier and then you get the North Sea, that is more mature. But I think the combination of that is a beauty for a company who can basically cover any type of technology. Middle East is interesting in terms of -- we all know that, that's where the last drop or barrel of oil is going to be produced sometime in many, many years after we pass away. But I think Middle East is important in terms of there is great data needs, relatively low-quality of enormous amounts of data today. TGS has a weaker position in that market because there's a lot of onshore and less offshore. But of course, our aim is that we're going to break into that market. We're going to do that partially through imaging technologies and then there will be need for our services and technologies also in onshore or transition zone areas. Southeast Asia is probably the one that ranks relatively low in terms of current activity per [ grams ] ranks extremely high in terms of future activity. There is an enormous need for data. Governments are committed to build better self-sufficiency of energy, take a country like India, where 85% of their energy need is imported. And what we see in India now is a huge pressure to find their own petroleum base. Both Mature and Emerging basin, a lot has already been done. Malaysia is probably more mature than India and Indonesia, but a lot of our activity going forward is going to be in this basin. And we have a strong data position already. West Africa is one of those examples we've been talking about. West Africa for many, many years keeps sliding to the right continues to be the case. And I mean -- but there is no question about the fact that Africa is key in terms of sorting the challenges that I've touched on my first line of the day. There's going to be enormous amount of exploration activity. Again, the fact that it keeps sliding to the right, it's more related to government bureaucracies and permits and that kind of stuff. But again, this is going to happen, and we see some of the exploration success that have been announced over the past 6 or 12 months. Obviously, it's going to drive more need for data in West Africa. So TGS and PGS very strong combined data positions. And then Brazil, probably the country where I would rank the highest in terms of what is hot at the moment and what is going to continue to be hot for the next 3 to 5 years. We have a phenomenal position in Brazil. Again, the permit I referred to today of 55,000 square kilometers, it's fantastic. And it's actually due to a long-term, very patient people who started permitting this in 2018. It was actually Spectrum. We started to permit that. And TGS took over Spectrum, and we continue to develop that permit until quite recently when we got this approved and now we're shooting data as we speak, with great prefunding and a big, big project that is going to last for hopefully years. So that's all I had for my part, and I'm going to come back and do a brief summary at the end, but I'm going to hand it over to Carel who is going to talk about resilience. So the floor is yours.

Carel Hooijkaas

executive
#4

Thank you, Kristian, and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Carol Hooijkaas, EVP for New Energy Solutions. And when we talk about resilience, we talk about 3 things: We talk about HSE and sustainability. We talk about highly scalable and cost-effective fleet that we now have, and we talk about new energy solutions. And I will touch on each of these during my presentation. So when it comes to new standards in HSE and sustainability, clearly, that's an important starting point for us. And we can very much build on the leading HSE performance from both PGS and Magseis Fairfield. We've traditionally set the standard, and we continue to do that going forward, where we want the industry and our customers to focus on incidents with the highest consequences and focus our attention there. We've started these discussions with our clients and suppliers. And the initial feedback is extremely positive to move in this direction. It will ultimately provide the next step change in HSE performance. And it's these kinds of proactive HSE initiatives that our customers welcome from TGS. From a sustainability perspective, I wanted to start by circling back to the presentation we gave to you at the last Capital Markets day where we've made a very clear pitch that energy creates prosperity and lifts people out of poverty. This is a great responsibility for us and we take pride in that, and we take energy from that to make that happen. And we have an important role to play in that. We also have an important role to play when it comes to helping our customers achieve their aspirations with regards to reducing carbon emissions. Ultimately, we help them to produce lower carbon barrels. And we do that through very efficient exploration, 4D acquisition and a reduced cycle time. I will come back to carbon in a minute. But in a world that Christian described, where oil and gas continues for longer, having a CCS solution is crucial and will ultimately be part of a license to operate for our customers. Now those were all external points with regards to sustainability. We're also very focused on what we can do as a company. And as you see here on the graph, is the tremendous reduction in emissions per seismic unit data acquired over the last years from 2011 to '23 and we will continue to deploy technologies and initiatives to continue down this trend. Let me now talk about the highly scalable and cost-effective fleet. And Kristian made the point already through the PGS transaction. We now have a very young Ramform fleet of around 10 years, very high-capacity vessels, which, on average, to approximately 16 streamers. But we need to see this in the bigger context of the new TGS because we have many other vessels that we use in our acquisition business. So the 7 Ramforms represent around 40% of the total fleet that we use. We have additional 3D towed streamer capacity that we can charter in and all of our OBN capacity is either on long or short-term charters. So again, this provides great scalability where you have assets that you own, assets that you have on the long-term charter, assets that we hire on short-term basis. So again, huge scalability and a cost-effective fleet for TGS. Let me now move to new energy solutions. And I wanted to start by showing you the macro outlook. Starting on the left, and Kristian already referenced these graphs. This is from ExxonMobil. And what they show is that oil and gas will be with us for longer, well, well into the future. But to an earlier point I made, to make that a palatable solution from an overall environmental perspective, we need to have a proper CCS solution. And we will very much play in this market. And ultimately, it will become a license to operate for our customers. Moving to the picture on the right. This is from BP. And as you know, they have different scenarios that they present in their outlook. And there you see the current trajectory and the net zero scenario, whichever scenario plays out, there is tremendous growth. In the current trajectory, renewables will double. And in the net zero scenario, it will triple. So it is a huge market opportunity for TGS. And I now want to talk to you about, okay, so what's our offering in this market? And why are we so excited about this? Well, let's use what our customers do to develop or to enter this market. They first need to have a global view of where to potentially focus and this is where we have our multiclient and well data that can help them identify areas where they should focus on. We also have on-demand market intelligence, referencing Kristian's comment about 4C Offshore, the acquisition we did a couple of years ago. So again, both provide a great vehicle for customers to do screening and to identify, where they potentially want to go. Once they've identified an area of interest, we can then offer new data acquisition, and we have a selection of options here. For example, in the wind market, the Head of licensing rounds, we've deployed multiple floating LiDARs that measure data, win data over a long, long period of time. And with that data, our customers can make data-driven investment decisions on whether to take a license or not. If they decide to go ahead and have the license, we can then provide the acquisition for new data for them using as described here in the picture of a Ramform, but we can use many of our vessels in this regard to image the subsurface so that our customers can determine where to put the foundations for the turbines for wind farms. As you may know, some of our or all of our customers also need what we've referred to as auxiliary measurements, additional measurements, gravity, magnetometer data and so on to make their decisions. With the vessels that we now own, we have those measurements already installed on our vessels and can acquire all of that data at the same time. And at last but not least, particularly when it comes to CCS, we've used OBN combined with towed streamer to create the imaging that we need for that market segment. But the story isn't finished here. We need to turn this data into knowledge. And what we do in all of our acquisitions is that we provide imaging solutions and answer products to our customers. So again, we want to provide solution to our customers so that they can make proper decisions based on the data that we provided to them. What you see at the bottom right is what we do in solar, where as you know, solar parks are becoming absolutely enormous. There's a lot of data there. How do you manage these solar parks? So through our data gateway solutions and asset management solutions, we are now supporting 50 solar parks with this solution to manage these over time. I don't think there is a company out there in the new energy space that has such a depth and breadth in this offering. And it's really exciting to see how we've built that up over just four years. And we just got started. So what you see here is the growth we've seen so far. And as Kristian mentioned, there are very clear ambitions to grow this into the future. And we'll do this into 4 areas, specifically. We will focus very much on knowledge. So we're moving from providing data in a database to how do we provide knowledge so that customers can make data-driven asset management decisions. This is obviously underpinned by a very clear understanding and pioneering technology, the best people that we have and ultimately, again, the answer products that we give to our customers so that we truly become their trusted partner in everything that they do. In wind, I mentioned that we already deployed floating LiDARs in many areas. But clearly, there is significant scope to expand on what we do there. So we will certainly do that. And we will capitalize on the [indiscernible] capabilities that we now have through the PGS transaction to create significant efficiencies in this market. From a carbon perspective, it's very critical that we get into a space where we can offer monitoring solutions over the long term. These reservoirs are going to be with us for decades, and it will be -- or it is a great business to be in that monitoring business. So we will spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that we have the right offering in this space so that we can generate this long-term business for TGS. We need to recognize that this is very much an evolving business, a very diverse customer base from oil and gas customers to private equity companies. So we need to be extremely flexible in how we deal with that. And then the last one is around solar. Again, we're supporting 50 solar parks right now. There are many, many more in the world and many more to come. So we have fantastic growth opportunities when it comes to providing data gateway and asset management solutions. So I hope I conveyed our enthusiasm about what we do in new energies and what our plans are. And then with that, I'll hand the presentation over to Kristin, who will talk about Knowledge.

Kristin Omreng

executive
#5

Thank you. Knowledge. Knowledge is at the core of everything we do. And people and technology are critical to our knowledge creation every day. First of all, I would like to talk about our people. We have been recognized as one of the best places to work in global energy by a number of indexes and organizations during the past years. And our ambition is to be the best place to work in global energy. We have a highly skilled workforce with excellent skills and capabilities. Kristian already mentioned that 6% of our office-based workforce have PhD degrees, 30% of our office-based workforce have master's degrees and 70% of our office-based workforce have higher education. In other words, the numbers speak for themselves. We have a highly educated and skilled workforce. But there are many important ingredients to making sure that you are truly the best place to work in energy. Not only is it important that our employees have the skills and capabilities they need to perform and deliver really well every day, but it's also extremely important that we have the learning and development culture and the platform and the systems to make sure everyone is developing their skills and capabilities every day at work in order to continue performing in line with our business needs. That our employees feel safe and well at work, to make sure that they're doing well and can bring their best self to work every day is also very important. Global reach when it comes to our employees, close to our customers in all corners of the world and close to talent pools across the world allow us to embrace diversity among our workforce and unlock the best potential among all our people. Cross-functional collaboration and making sure that our employees have access to excellent processes and tools, these are all important ingredients that accelerating value creation through our people technology. But in the end, it actually boils down to our culture. It's the vibe that you get when you walk into the TGS office every day. And it's also the feeling that you get when you walk on to one of our vessels, which has truly excellent HSE culture, a culture that comes with the legacy companies, PGS and Magseis, something we can be very proud of. It's about how it feels to be a part of the TGS team and how things are done, how people treat each other every day and also what work is valued in our office place. My experience so far is that the culture of the legacy companies are actually quite similar. We are all very results driven. We're passionate, we are hard working, we're truly dedicated, loyal, and we really care. We created an environment that attracts retains, develops and excites exceptional talent in our industry. And we focus on building a culture that is inclusive, that fosters well-being and that supports the development and performance of all individuals. Our culture brings together the best of our legacy companies. It's a sustaining culture that's adaptable and resilient. For us, the core is about engaging and empowering employees across the world. It's about securing role clarity, which fosters performance. It's about value-adding processes and tools and a strong connection to the organization's purpose and strategy. Why are we here? Our people-centric approach strengthens employee wellbeing and performance. We, as a company, set bold aspirations and prioritize the development of our people to build the needed skills and capabilities to deliver on our business today and in the future. We really recognize the importance of people, culture and technology and how critical it is that these elements truly play well together. We are a company that is well positioned to accelerate knowledge and insights through our people and technology. Technology is part of the core of knowledge. We are well positioned to embrace and accelerate technology as a fully integrated energy data company. Our strategy and priority is to align technology development along the same value chain to lead technology development from acquisitions to imaging to reservoir characterization. We aim to provide best-in-class solutions to our clients through close collaboration. We make use of digital technologies and AI and ML to improve the speed and quality for our end users and for our customers to extract more value, reduce cost and reduce cycle time. We have a strong foundation, building on our digital maturity among our workforce. This is a key component of securing that our people and our technologies play well together. Through our digitally savvy workforce with joint domain and digital knowledge, we have best-in-class technology driven by end user value. Our focus is what brings value to our customers every day. Our aspiration is to provide Tier 1 imaging technologies by leveraging our hybrid cloud capabilities jointly with our technology platform. Our hybrid cloud capabilities enable seamless end-to-end digital workflows supporting our Tier 1 imaging technology. Now keep in mind, we are one of the largest users of high-performance compute capacity in the cloud, in the world. So it's quite an astounding capacity. Through leveraging AI, we are able to capture insights and incremental value from the largest multiclient data library in the world. We have a strong track record of integrating AI technologies into our processes and tools. And with the skills and capabilities in our organization, we are accelerating data value creation through our people and technology interactions. The R&D investments made by the combined legacy companies that today make up TGS amount to more than $0.5 billion throughout the last 10 years. And now we build on all of these investments to further accelerate value creation for our customers and we'll continue making the needed investments that make sense. There is enormous potential, and we are ready to embrace and accelerate. A few slides updating on our integration process. We've made significant progress when it comes to our merger integration activities. And I've been through a number of processes like these several times throughout my career in the global energy space. And I've learned a lot about what's important to focus on. Throughout the process, we must do what we can to take care of our people so that they can perform well also during times of change. But I must say I am very pleased with how efficient the process has been kicked off and also the speed that we've been able to implement the process so far. Our merger integration efforts are centered around our predefined merger integration goals. And we have some very clearly designed merger integration milestones and synergy targets. First of all, one common culture, bringing together the best competence and best combination of talent and culture from both companies. Second of all, the best energy data company, we're building a fully integrated company with the best combination of solutions and technology from both. And lastly, creating shareholder value. We have clear ownership and accountability to deliver on the synergy targets and the value creation that we set out to achieve through this merger integration process. On this slide, you see a number of milestones and there was someone who commented that it looks a little bit like a calm windy forest road, but it is a little bit more like a highway right now. It's been a speedy process so far. And as I said, I'm proud of the achievements so far and the speed at which we moved. First of all, on day 1 was at July 1. And on day 1, we had our new executive team in place. And by mid-August, we had the next 2 layers of leadership in place across our global organization. And since mid-August, our global organization, a new organization has been up and running. We have already engaged our employees across the world in updating our new vision and mission statements, aligning our teams around the world around our new updated common purpose. Our teams will be co-located under the same roof across our five biggest locations around the world within six months of the merger, within six months of July 1. And actually, a number of them will already be under the same roof within 3 to 4 months. We've already secured the 2, first milestones related to our refinancing efforts. And the next one is planned for 2025. With regards to technology and IT integrations, we were able to secure significant integrations already prior to day 1 on July 1. When all our employees were on the same Microsoft platform with the same e-mail system, the same teams channel, same SharePoint and even the same cybersecurity solution. When it comes to HVC, we are now consolidating our respective contracts, cloud contracts, which enable us to make use of each other's capacity commitments which forms an important synergy also. On data management, we are combining our solutions, allowing us to take advantage of significant scale benefits. And as mentioned earlier today, with regards to our imaging platform solution, we are working towards integrating our people and teams around one common solution, which secures that we bring together the best elements of both legacy companies. On the right-hand side, you see our milestone connected to one common ERP system. And the team has completed a very thorough analysis to understand which modules will prioritize, but the end game is one end-to-end solution across the company. As you can see, we've made important progress towards our integration goals and milestones. And looking ahead, we will, of course, continue our focus and priority on securing this merger integration and that we are bringing together the best of the 2 legacy companies. We are well on track to deliver the merger cost and synergy run rate targets. We originally guided the market that we expect synergies between $90 million and $110 million. However, based on our ongoing work to validate our progress, we're pleased to inform that we expect to exceed the top range and deliver between $110 million and $130 million. As you can see from the timing of the synergies, we see approximately $45 million by end of Q3 and approximately $60 million by the end of Q4 and the remainder in 2025. Our synergies are divided into a few different buckets. Personnel costs are related to removing overlapping roles and capacities when combining the 2 organizations. Other OpEx are related to travel, IT costs, trade shows, compute costs, data management. We also have important buckets related to refinancing synergies and vessel utilization. Our integration costs are listed on the right-hand side. And they are estimated to amount to between $20 million and $25 million. The majority of these costs are related to redundancy costs, but they're also related to co-location, IT and technology integrations. So those are the key highlights, and we are well on track, as I mentioned. Over to you, Sven.

Sven Larsen

executive
#6

Thank you for that. Not only is the integration process on track, but we're actually ahead of schedule here at the Capital Markets Day as well by a few minutes. So that's really good to see. And I'm really happy also to see as CFO that the integration process is going so well because that means that there will be money on the bottom line from the synergies realized as planned or maybe even a little bit ahead of plan. So that's really good to see. So I will start off by talking a bit about our capital allocation priorities going forward. We have divided it into 3 parts: the investments, the balance sheet policy and our shareholder distribution ambitions. So first, about our disciplined approach to organic investments. So there, we want to maintain the approach that the historical TGS philosophy of being extremely disciplined and being extremely value focused in everything we do in terms of investments. As for the multi-client investments, they will be managed to yield a sales to investment over time. That's in line with the historical average of around 2. So it means that it will still fluctuate a bit with the cycles and may go up and down depending on the opportunity set that we are facing at each and every point in time, maybe lower than 2 in certain years, higher than 2 in certain years, but the ambition is to keep it around 2. And based on the experience we have had by doing several M&A, several acquisitions in this space. We've seen that this is also a great opportunity to high-grade our portfolio, which means that there maybe -- even be some synergies on the multi-client investment side, which allows us to harvest and even higher sales to investment than we otherwise would do. In terms of the streamer fleet, we have no ambitions of growing that fleet. We are happy with the vessel capacity that we have for the time being. But we have a clear ambition of maintaining a top standard fleet that is the most capable in the industry. And on the OBN side, our ambition is to grow in line with or more than the market, but we're going to do it in an extremely disciplined fashion. And as of now, getting margin further up from where they are now has priority above increasing the volumes at this stage. So in terms of our beyond multi-client investments, we expect the run rate to be between $120 million and $150 million on an annual basis for the next few years. And then potentially lower than that once we have completed our streamer renewal program that we are going through. This year, however, it will be higher than that indicated range because we are indeed doing some growth investments in new nodes and some technology investments. But a lot of that is some costs that were done already in the first half of the year. In terms of the balance sheet policy, we obviously want to maintain our strong balance sheet. It's extremely important to keep a strong balance sheet in our industry, mainly for two reasons. First of all, we know that it's a strongly cyclical industry. And during those down cycles, you want to have a strong balance sheet to cope with the market conditions. Secondly, our strong balance sheet allow you to do countercyclical investments that, in the past, has proven to be the winning strategy in terms of value creation over time. So for that reason, it's super important to maintain some dry -- dry powder in terms of being able to do those organic and inorganic countercyclical investments when the market conditions are less favorable because that's mostly when you can do the most value-creative investments. So as you can see on the chart on the right-hand side, we have already one of the strongest balance sheets in the energy services industry. And we obviously have the ambition of keeping it that way. So our aim is to keep the net interest-bearing debt level between $250 million and $350 million on an ongoing basis. This is to be compared with a pro forma net debt level as of end Q2 of $416 million. So we have a little bit of deleveraging to do to get into that range. And then to our shareholder distribution policy. We have a clear ambition of growing the distribution to shareholders over time. The first bullet there reads pay a stable dividend on a quarterly basis. That doesn't mean that we will not grow the dividend. What it means is that we will continue the policy of deciding the dividend for that coming year, in first quarter every year, and then we will keep it stable in the 3 remaining quarters. And then the year after, we will decide a new dividend and then we will keep it stable for the 3 next quarters. And the ambition is, of course, to gradually grow that over time. In addition to this, we want to buy back shares or distribute additional dividend to manage the net debt level in accordance with our indicated range of $250 million to $350 million. And we are convinced, given the cash flow profile of the company that this will allow for growing shareholder distribution going forward. As CFO, what really makes me excited about the transactions we've been through over the past few years, and now lastly, obviously, the PGS transaction is the cash flow potential that we see in this new company. So this chart here is an illustration of the cash flow potential that we see given market conditions that are fairly similar to the ones we are facing right now. So on the 2 bars on the left-hand side, we show average revenue in the different categories that you achieved we 2022 and 2023. And we show the average multi-client investments for the same 2 years simply because we feel that those years on average are fairly representative for where we stand today. And then we subtract the current cost base before synergies. We subtract the maintenance CapEx, and we also subtract the net interest that we have before any refinancing, and then we add back the synergies, and we end up with a cash flow potential between our 2 equity holders of between $300 million and $400 million. But this is given the market conditions we are facing currently. On the 2 bars on the right-hand side, we illustrate the upside if we were to experience the 2019 market conditions again. 2019 is probably in the recent few years, probably the best year we have seen. But as you know, it -- we've had peak year as well about 2019 in the more long-term past. So clearly, there is both quite good cash flow potential in the company assets with the current market conditions, but with significant upside from improving market conditions. Then I want to touch upon how we're going to report to the market going forward because as we've been through earlier in the presentation, the structure of the company has changed quite significantly over the past couple of years, which basically gives us the opportunity to start reporting in a somewhat different manner than what you've been used to when we were a pure multiclient company. So, first of all, we will continue focusing on produced financials or percentage of completion POC financials as we used in TGS language. We are going to use the term produce because that's actually a very good description of how those -- how that revenue is generated in our segment reporting. And we have split up in 3 -- sorry, 4 business segments. We have multiclient, we have contracts, we have new energy solutions, and we have imaging. And all those businesses will be reported as profit centers. It means that we will present the numbers on a gross basis, including profit on any internal transactions. And the reason why we're doing this is basically twofold. First of all, We, of course, want to visualize the values represented by all -- by these 4 businesses, as Kristian already went through earlier. And secondly, we want to make sure that there is no value leakage across the value chain that we take the margin in every single service that we provide throughout the value chain and that we don't lose out of any opportunities in that respect. Shared services includes overhead expenses or general and administrative expenses and also what we do on the technology side, and that will report as a cost center. And then we will also then deduct obviously, the intercompany eliminations and arrive at the group numbers. In terms of revenues, we will reduce the number of categories to 2, multi-client revenues will be reported on one line. That means that we will stop reporting all the little details on multiclient revenues, early sales and prefunding and late sales and whatnot. And then we will report contract sales across these different business units. And then depreciation, amortization and investments will be presented on a group level, and we have listed some of the key performance indicators that we intend to report on, on the bottom there, contract backlog streamer, fleet utilization and also the number of OBN crews that we have in operations and there may be more also as we prepare for the first report as one company towards the end of October. Then, about the backlog that we currently have. On the dark blue bar on the left-hand side there, you see the backlog that we reported as TGS without PGS on the 30th of June this year. And then we have added on the PGS backlog at the same point in time, obviously, eliminated any intercompany backlog from that number. And then the blue bar to the right represents the gross order inflow that we have seen quarter-to-date. And as you can see, this stacks up to more than $1 billion currently. In terms of financial communication, we just wanted to make it clear what criteria we used to -- we will apply to stand out stock exchange notices and such. So, for multi-client programs and contract -- other contracts, we will report or send out stock exchange notices for everything above with a value of more than $5 million. In addition to that, we will report the strategically important contracts and all new energy solutions related projects that we commence. And then we will still preannounce our activity level during the quarter on the sixth trading day of the quarter, but this will not include the revenue figures. You will have to wait until the full quarterly report to get the revenue numbers, but you will get all the key performance indicators at that point in time. And then, of course, we will have the ordinary media releases and marketing releases and all of that, which will not be necessarily reported to the stock exchange, but I'm sure you will pick up that as well. And then, we have updated our guidance. It has basically not changed. So, the multi-client investments guidance is if you add the old TGS guidance of $300 million to $350 million for 2024 and the approximately $185 million guidance from PGS and then you align the accounting principles and remove approximately $40 million of that, you end up with a range of $450 million to $500 million for the year as a whole. So it's essentially the same as we guided before, when you take those eliminations into account. Of this, $189 million was incurred already in H2. It means that we will see significantly higher investments now in H1, sorry, and we will see significantly higher investments in H2 of this year. In terms of the synergy, let me make it clear. This is a run rate, the annualized run rate that we are looking at here. We expect to realize approximately $60 million of annualized run rate by year-end, whereof approximately $55 million is OpEx. And for the total synergies that we expect to realize by end 2025, we expect $110 million to $130 million, where as $70 million to $75 million is OpEx. And by that, I hand the word back to Kristian, who will summarize and conclude.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#7

Thank you, Sven. I can tell you, we're still ahead of schedule. So that's great, and we're at the summary section. So let me try to summarize what we have been through today. On the first one, the clear strategic priorities for the new TGS. Kristian and Carel have done a great job in terms of going through this in detail, so I'm not going to repeat all the story lines of the bullet points, but I'm going to give you some examples on each one. And I think in terms of value and the fact that our ambition is to enhance a leading position in key basins, we want to work in partnerships with our clients, rather this very transactional relationship that has been the case for seismic for many, many years. I'd like to call it the Turkish bazar at the end of every quarter. But we want to work as partners. And I think this company has a fantastic opportunity in doing that, and I've gotten some feedback from our clients is that, that's really what they want to do too. So if you want to partner with a government or you want to partner with a client, you need to go to some kind of beauty contest and you need to show off what do you have. And I think this company has it all. If we go to a new government or a government where we see great potential from Tier seismic, they're going to ask us, how do you know? How do you know that we have a petroleum system? We're going to turn back. We're going to show them our existing library that in most basins are already covered by TGS and PGS data. It's a huge advantage. And then the second question, how can you help us in extracting value from that basin? We have OBM technologies. We have streamer technologies. We have imaging technologies that can help you do that. There's no one who has everything other than TGS. If you go to a client, it's a similar discussion that you have in terms of how can you help me cut the cycle time. Well, I think we gave you an excellent example in terms of the Palma 3D, how we can cut the cycle time, but we can keep the entire value chain internally with TGS, and I think that's a great example of how we can extract more value as an integrated company that we could do as individual companies. Well, the second one on resilience. Again, Carel touched on also this. I just want to repeat the message on balance sheet because this is not only about getting the cheapest possible debt. It's part of that, too. And that's why we set a target. We want to be between $250 million and $350 million in terms of net debt. We're pretty close to that number already, and we're going to get there pretty soon. But more importantly is to have that optionality that you can always act and you can react when other players are not in a position to do that. And if you look at the benchmarking [indiscernible] showed you in terms of not only seismic peers, but other oil service companies we're truly unique, and we're going to get even more unique in terms of our balance sheet and our capital structure going forward. On top of that, we're going to be in a great position to pay a dividend, and we're also going to introduce buybacks on top of that. Then the last one is the knowledge piece. And again, excellent presentation by Kristian in terms of describing how we are different. I want to touch on the point on AI because this is kind of a hot topic these days. Some people would say it's a buzz word. But I think -- and I have a real term or a real-life example of that. Every year, I write something called the shareholder letter. Most of you probably don't read it, but it's in the annual report, is Page 2 and 3. And I'm kind of a last minute guy. So sometimes marketing has to come back to me and say, "Hey, Kristian, you have to get it done by Friday because it's being printed on Saturday." So this year was very similar to previous years. I had to -- if you'll find my pen, then I had to start kind of drafting my shareholder letter. And then I figured, okay, this is a great opportunity for ChatGPT. This is where ChatGPT can really prove its value. So I go down to our technical people. We have 37 data scientists on the second floor, I said, "Can you help me with the shareholder letter." They said "absolutely, give me 5 minutes." And said so what do you need? Well, I need the 3 last years shareholder letters,and I need the quarterly reports for the last 12 quarters, fine. So I gave them all the information they needed. And they came back within 5 minutes, and it was good, but it wasn't great. So actually, what you read for 2023 is what I wrote. I can assure you about that. But it was actually pretty close to the same standard. And I went back and I said, "What does it take to actually make it much better than what I did." The guy told me is that, well, I probably if I could have all the SEC filings for the past 10 years from every single public company in the U.S., and I have every single detailed information from TGS on top of that, I would be able to do something that is perfect. So then I met with one of our clients. And he said, we're working on this AI initiative. It looks really, really good, and I think it has great potential going forward. And I asked him, so how do you think the results will be if you had 3x as much data as you have dear clients? And he said it would probably be 5x or 10x better. And I said, that's why we need to work together in a very different way. We need to give you access to everything. And that's how we need to work together rather than come back in last week of September and fight about the $5 million seismic deal. That's how TGS is going to work in the future. That's how we can differentiate that in the future. And that's just one example of that. Okay. We are probably a bit biased when we say that this is a very compelling investment case, but are still going to go through it. I think there are so many reasons why we are excited about this. It starts from the left-hand side. We're a unique play on increasing exploration activity. If you want to make any bet that our analysis that we showed you today and specifically Slide 2, when we show you that the decline curve going forward and exploration activity in the world today and the reserve lives, et cetera. If you believe in that, there's only one investable company in the world where you get this type of exposure, that's TGS. The second one, a preferred partner through the entire value chain, I think I've been kind of repeating that for 5 times today, so I'm not going to do that again. The fact that we are exposed to a rapidly growing business towards energy evolution that is already profitable and that is growing by significant percentages. It's another plus. I think we've made the point about having an extremely attractive and industry-leading assets that we got at a very cheap price. Regardless of how you do the PPA, how much value do you allocate to the library, how much value do you allocate to the fact that these companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in technology? How much value do you apply to the vessels? It doesn't matter. The fact is that when you break this company into pieces, we're an extremely strong company. The sum of the parts here is extremely strong, and we strongly believe that we've gotten this to a very, very good entry price. Last but not least, the balance sheet and cash generation capacity, I think Sven already did a great job in going through that. So in summary, we have executed a very ambitious consolidation plan to address changes in the marketplace. Hopefully, you've seen that this is not something we're not shooting from a hip. This has been part of the plan that we developed back in 2020. Yes, it's taken longer than 1 or 2 years to do it. But as you see, we've gone through several steps in getting to the place where we are today, where we're truly unique. It's been opportunistic, and it's been opportunistic in terms of sometimes picking up assets very cheap as is the case with [indiscernible]. And we have been able to do that because we have a strong balance sheet. And you're going to expect to see a strong balance sheet going forward. This is really what has created the TGS that is TGS today. Leading positions in all segments and a very strong track record of integration. We've done this for living for the past 5 years, and we can do it again. Yes, PGS is far bigger than what we've done before. But I think the first couple of months since we merged with the company have just been excellent in terms of seeing how people are able to work together, how they're able to get together and solve their problems for our clients together rather than individually. We have clear new terms priorities, realizing synergies. We're on track to that, reducing debt. We're on track to that and becoming the preferred partner absolutely on track. We've set really ambitious targets for our new energy business. And again, we're excellently positioned to capitalize on the growth that will eventually happen in exploration. And again, if you go back to that slide with the client curve and future demand, and if you believe in exome, we're running into some kind of a crisis, and they even alluded to that in the report. World-class leadership team, best combination of talent from acquired companies. And of course, this is a people business. Unless you have the best people on the bus, you're not going to be successful. I feel so good that we have the best people on the bus and the bus is running at 100 miles per hour. Thank you very much, and we're going to open up for questions. So we're going to have the executives sit down in chairs in the front here. And the Board is going to be standing here and facilitate and then [indiscernible].

Unknown Executive

executive
#8

Thank you Kristian. I suggest we start with the audience [indiscernible] we also have a backlog of questions from people on the web. But are there any questions from people in [indiscernible], John? Just speak up. We have the microphones in the ceiling, so it feeds automatically to the webcast.

John Olaisen

analyst
#9

A question related to your ambitions on the multi-client sales investment ratio going forward. You said you're still targeting about 2. I just wonder now that you're using your own vessels means that costs are lower, doesn't it? So before, if we invest $100 million to sales investment ratio too, you would have $200 million of revenues. Now if you collect the same data with your own vessels, of course, will be [indiscernible]. 60 x 2 is 120. Does that mean you are giving $80 million away to the companies and cheaper data -- but one of the big advantages [indiscernible]?

Sven Larsen

executive
#10

No. I mean -- and that's what I alluded to in when we talked about the reporting structure to make sure that there are no -- absolutely no value leakages across the value chain, that's extremely important. And that's why we set it up as we do with internal pricing between the different business units. So our multi-client business will have to pay a full price for the vessels and the same price as an external customer would have to pay to make sure that they do their calculations based on the full market price rather than the cost price. So that's the whole idea with the structure [indiscernible].

John Olaisen

analyst
#11

Maybe 2x the cost.

Sven Larsen

executive
#12

Yes, yes, yes.

John Olaisen

analyst
#13

But, when you report multi-client investments, will that be a multiclient investment at full cost or a cash cost?

Sven Larsen

executive
#14

That will be at -- not at cash cost, we will report the capitalized cost, but that cost will be without that internal margin that will be eliminated out.

John Olaisen

analyst
#15

And we do our sales investment ratio calculations, we will get a higher number.

Sven Larsen

executive
#16

You will hopefully get the higher number, yes. That's the plan.

John Olaisen

analyst
#17

And for next year, of the 7, 8 vessels that you have at the moment, 7 pure [indiscernible] vessels, how many do you plan to use -- or is that too early? How many of would you guess that of those vessels will you be using for your internal multi-client work?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#18

Yes, we haven't lined up our plans for next year, but I think we just announced a big project that we could potentially put 2 vessels on it. We may only do one. It depends on how the market plays out. I think having that flexibility is really something we're going to capitalize on. And I'm not prepared to say whether it's going to be 50-50 or 70-30 in one way or another. It really depends on the backlog for multiclients, who is going to compete about these projects, and they're going to compete with external clients. So we're running these as a very separate business in a way, and then we're trying to stitch everything together at the top. It's an interesting question you asked on that, are you targeting a higher sales to investment. And this project that I went through today, I talked to the multiclient people and they said, the prefunding was x, and they were quite pleased about that. And I looked at numbers. I know, it's not x, it's x plus, another 25%, because there was already a margin there. I mean the project is much better when you look at it from corporates because you have an internal margin there itself.

John Olaisen

analyst
#19

Yes. My second question before I leave the word to others is regarding the market outlook. We didn't have any slides on that. But if you're going to say something about the market outlook for the different segments or maybe the biggest multiclient and contract, please, if?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#20

Yes, I think there is still some uncertainty for sure. I mean -- I think you've wrote in your report that the feedback from image is that it's still slowly getting better, and that's probably a good way to look at it. It's getting better, but it's not getting better as quick as we thought about a year ago, but it's definitely we see -- we see a continuous improvement in the market, which is good. It's also important to say that the markets develop, not necessarily in tandem. And that's a beauty of having -- or being exposed to everything, I mean OBN has been really good, and there's no question, every single meeting we have, the clients want to talk about OBN and their OBN plans and they want to understand and see our existing data and see if this really gives that uplift that, that rumor says. And so that market has been really good. But at the same time, it's a relatively fragmented market. There's a few new players in that market, may not have the same type of return of capital approach to business as we have. But again, they will eventually loan out. And then you have the vessel market, which is probably weaker in terms of utilization. There's no question about that. But pricing is really good. Pricing is really good in the vessel market. And you had 2 very strong players, 2 players are well capitalized. They're very professional. They're going to be around for many, many years. And we're happy to be part of that market to be honest, and happy to be using a lot of these assets on the internal multi-client programs as well. On imaging, it's actually a really good market. We've seen order inflow of imaging that we've never seen before at TGS. It's partly due to getting these teams together, improving our reputation, getting a few new managers in our imaging business. And that business has developed very positively over the past 3 to 6 months, which is good to see. And then on new energies, I mean, I don't need to add anything to what Carel said. But as I said, I mean, there are pockets of growth within every single segment, but the segments don't necessarily move in tandem. The reason for OBN is good is that you get more exposure to the production budget, so the PE rather than [indiscernible]. The reason why the streamer market is relatively challenging is that streamers are probably more suited for Frontier than to the closer you get to infrastructure, the more OBN has an advantage. So there are different reasons for that. But of course, there will be a time where they all kind of move in tandem, and we're going to be extremely well positioned.

John Olaisen

analyst
#21

And then in [indiscernible] sales potential -- I know if I understood you correctly, you want to report late sales anymore [indiscernible]?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#22

It's not going to be reported. But I think overall, I think MultiClient is -- while the OBN market is growing fast, the streamer market is a bit challenging right now in terms of utilization, but pricing is good. I would say MultiClient continues to be the most volatile. And it's going to swing a lot from quarter-to-quarter. But overall, I see that same kind of trend, it's getting better.

John Olaisen

analyst
#23

Okay. I've got more questions, but I'll leave it to [indiscernible].

Kristian Johansen

executive
#24

[indiscernible] we cut you off.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#25

Yes. I'm wondering about the dynamics in the OBN market. We saw some aggressive players. We think fairly very low, say, how is that sort of developed now? Has it sort of stabilized a little bit? And how do you see margins developing now given that backdrop?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#26

Yes, I think what you're referring to is probably Brazil. Because Brazil, I mean, it's an open envelope. I mean anyone can see the prices. And what you see is that there's probably 2 players who have been underbidding significantly in the past. One player who is now probably coming back a little bit to the levels where it should be and another player who bid it extremely low, by the way, never done the type of project like that before. And then you see TGS and Shearwater being quite disciplined in terms of pricing overall. What we see is that I was probably more concerned if you go back 8, 9 months. Our order inflow was not great, but then it was fantastic in Q2. And the fact that it was fantastic in Q2 was a lot of the same reasons. A lot of our biggest clients and super majors coming back to TGS, who left us for a while and then they came back. And we're obviously welcoming them back. And we've done nothing in terms of our calculations and our pricing. We continuously try to get better in terms of operational efficiency, but we're not willing to sacrifice on margins because you need those type of margins in terms of justifying the return on capital.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#27

Got you. And I don't know if it's still a [indiscernible] confirmed, but I thought there was that in terms of your node inventory that you bought something from a third-party supplier. And I'm just wondering if that's the case and if you are going to continue to develop the technology internally [indiscernible] going to instead buy from a third party vendor?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#28

Yes. We're kind of in the middle of a strategic consideration in terms of what to do. We still have our own people who do technology development, and we're also talking to third party in terms of outsourcing that, potentially in the future. No decision has been made in that regard. So I understand that and maybe some rumors about that, and we will do whatever is best for our return on capital.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#29

Yes. Maybe I can start with -- you provided a multi-client investment guidance for this year. You didn't say anything about a prefunding level for the second half or the average of the year?

Sven Larsen

executive
#30

Yes. I mean we are going to stop reporting that. So it's kind of unnecessary to guide on it. But of course, I think in -- I think initially, we guided for 85% or more minimum 85%. And I think at the PDS side board, you said 80 to 120 or something like that.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#31

That was the target.

Sven Larsen

executive
#32

Yes. So I think we're still maintaining that guidance without saying it explicitly in the guiding statement.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#33

And then on the dividend going forward, what's the starting point? Is it the level that you had per share for several quarters? Or is it the nominal dollar level, which is going to go up because of that?

Sven Larsen

executive
#34

No, I mean it's -- on a per share basis. We don't want to punish our shareholders for the acquisition.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#35

And then Kristian, if you could sort of weaker utilization but good pricing, that sounds a little bit contradictory. How is that working?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#36

In terms of what?

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#37

You were saying that in the streamer market, it's a weaker utilization, but good pricing -- so it's a bit contradictory?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#38

Disciplined supply and a willingness to [indiscernible]. I mean that's -- it's been like that for the past 2 years. Utilization has probably surprised on the negative, but the fact is that pricing has been really good. It means that you have 2 players in an industry, and they both look at their pricing in terms of what return on capital do you need in terms of justifying owning the assets, and that's the way it should be.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#39

And then when you talk about the robust balance sheet going forward, you kind of have that countercyclical approach that you have had in the past. But other potential opportunities could there be with the market being so consolidated. There is one [indiscernible] that is 3x your size.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#40

Yes, we're not going to buy that library.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#41

Two libraries left, outside of that, that you would consider being strategically important?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#42

Yes. I think first of all, I think M&A is pretty far down the list right now. I think you all would understand that, and I think you would probably appreciate that. I think now all the focus is on capitalizing as much as we can on the acquisitions that we have made. We see great potential and the fact that we now guide up on the synergy level of PGS means that we feel very confident about that and that we have a really good line of sight, and we're probably ahead of our schedule. So now the focus is on that, and we don't have any like big gaps in our portfolio right now. But I mean if someone is going to go bust in any of these industries where we play, we're going to be optimistic, and we've done that in the past, and we're going to continue to look at that.

Christopher Møllerløkken

analyst
#43

I just have 2 short questions. First of all, you mentioned, Kristian, you have recently been at the Image Conference and met clients there. Could you tell us a bit about what they're telling you regarding their future plans to use your services?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#44

Yes. I mean there is no standard answer to that. I think most of the clients we talk today would say that their exploration budgets stay pretty much flat. Some would guide that they're up. I haven't thought anyone is cutting, which is good. I think it's more important, given that an exploration budget is probably 80%, 85% drilling and the rest, data and seismic. You need to dig deeper in terms of, yes, okay, if your exploration budget is $1 billion, what happens to wells that you're going to drill compared to your data needs. And I think there is a favorable message in that regard. There's quite a few companies who are actually drilling less wells in 2025 than they do in '24, which means that with a flat budget that should be actually quite a lot of old increase in seismic and data. But, again, there is no standard answer as they all differ. I think one point I would like to make here is that if you listen to the Q2 calls, which you probably do of our clients, I think I counted at least 5 or 6 that use the word seismic or definitely exploration in their earnings call. It was Chevron. It was Cosmos. It was [indiscernible]. They all talked about seismic or exploration seismic. Few years ago, it would never happen. It's really good. We even have clients took out the word exploration for their annual report, like you find and replace. And it's really good to see us back. And I think the best one is Chevron, where actually the CFO who want to talk about exploration. It probably should be the last person, but it's really good to see. So there are definitely positive signs out there.

Christopher Møllerløkken

analyst
#45

And my final question is, you mentioned that the first couple of months have been excellent after the merger with PGS. So what surprised you the most?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#46

I think probably the cultural integration. You meet people who are just smiling and happy and you would think that they would be super skeptical and one day at a time. And I heard some examples just a few days ago about people at PGS, they obviously had streamer technologies and top notch streamer technologies for many years at [indiscernible], they have their OBN technologies. And the industry has been talking about it, can you combine that two. If you asked PGS people 2 years ago, they were very skeptical to that because they didn't have nodes. If you have max-sized people who didn't have streamers, very skeptical to the combination of nodes and streamers. Now the same people who have been around for 30, 40 years in that business are saying, there is a great potential to combine the two. I mean that's just an example of how people really shine up and they say, wow, we're getting a bigger toolbox here and more tools to play with. We have a question back there.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#47

Last year on your Capital Markets Day, you showed a chart where you illustrated the company had a cash flow potential of around $200 million to $400 million. And now you got [indiscernible] and we still have a cash flow potential of $300 million to $400 million, so why is this a good deal?

Sven Larsen

executive
#48

I don't remember exactly what we showed in that chart. But bear in mind that this what I showed here in the presentation today is based on the market conditions that we see right now. And that Capital Markets Day last time around, that was I guess, March '23, and personally, I was extremely optimistic at the market conditions at that point in time. And unfortunately, I've been proven a little bit wrong in my optimism about the market. So the answer is that the market conditions that we are seeing now and that we put into the calculations now aren't as favorable as we hoped for or we're seeing at the time.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#49

Let me take it longer. I mean, things have been pushed to the right for exploration. No question about that. Other questions?

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#50

First of all, thank you for the presentation. It was really good. I was wondering about the transfer fees, I don't think you can answer too much in details. But so far, I think we haven't [indiscernible] see them coming up at the end of year?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#51

Yes, I think we said at the start of the year that 2024 was going to be better than '23 in terms of transfer fees. And at the time, we knew about a couple of transactions. Since then, there's been a few new ones announced. One has been significantly delayed, which is Chevron Hess. We'll see if that happens next year. There is a few out there. The question is whether that's going to be closed in Q3 or Q4. I mean we don't have any rush in that regard. We just want to make sure that we get paid the contractual value of the transfer. So, again, there's probably a handful of transfer fees when we get to 31st of December, probably a handful, a couple of them have been closed so far this year. Any other questions from the audience in Oslo?

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#52

On your free cash flow number, do you have a number based on your calculation for the last year for the combined entity for '23, just as a [indiscernible]

Sven Larsen

executive
#53

Yes. I mean what we show today is also call it a simplified version without working capital movements, just to be clear on that. And in 2023, I don't have the exact number on the top of my head, unfortunately, but it wasn't a great year in terms of cash flow, both because we invested heavily. We -- on the TGS side, and in fact, also on the PGS side, there were a significant increase in multi-client investments. So you saw sales to investment of almost 2.5% in 2022, going down to 1.6%, 1.7% in 2023, partially by design because you know that when you almost double your multi-client investments, that will hurt yourself investment, and it will hurt your -- it will hurt your cash flow. So 2023 wasn't a very good year in that respect.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#54

Yes. And I was just basically based on the way you calculate it, but to get an idea what the way you've done it now with that outlook [indiscernible] ?

Sven Larsen

executive
#55

Yes. We've obviously done those calculations, but I need to come back to you with those numbers. I don't have them on the top of my head.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#56

And then maybe quickly a more strategic one. So you always talk about 2 players in the market, and there are some Chinese players on the streamer side. Are you not worried about them at all or maybe just in Asia, Middle East regions? How do you view them? I mean I know they're maybe a bit more limited in what they do, but they can also be cheaper. So what do you think about that?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#57

And actually, we have a long-term agreement with one of them. So we have access to that capacity too, if we need some. I think overall -- I think we see less competition specifically in mature areas because we don't have the multicomponent streamers that you require in most mature areas. So -- but again, in certain frontier areas, you will still face competition from that. And then you have also, I mean, actually a growing number of jurisdictions where they probably cannot play U.S. being a great example, Norway possibly being another example where Chinese vessels may not be able to compete in the future.

Unknown Analyst

analyst
#58

Do you see that as a boring OBN as well or mainly on stream?

Kristian Johansen

executive
#59

I have a shallow water and onshore rather than deepwater. Yes. We have come to the other, but we also have a couple of questions from the web. So if you can stay with us for some more time, we can address at least a couple. We have a private investor who is asking [indiscernible] in terms of the deferred tax assets -- can you give an indication of how much of that you will benefit from on an annual basis and also in terms of the share buyback program, an indication of the percentage [indiscernible] you start buying back shares?

Sven Larsen

executive
#60

All right. Yes. On the buyback, let's take that first. We want to buy back shares so that we -- to use that as a tool to manage the net debt level within that guided range of $250 million to $350 million. And, so when exactly we start -- as I said, we are above that range now when exactly we start to buy back shares will depend on when we get into that range, which again is a function of the market conditions and how much business we can bring in. So being exact on timing on that is difficult, obviously, at this stage, it will depend on market conditions. And, as you know, these buyback programs are fairly restricted in terms of the way you conduct them with all the rules and regulations in Europe. You cannot buy more than this and that every day, and you have to stick to a price range and all of that. So we will obviously be -- we will obviously have to adhere to those restrictions in terms of exactly how we conduct the program. In terms of the tax losses carried forward, there is a tax loss in Norway of more than $230 million. And then there are some tax losses also in other jurisdictions. We earn most of our profit in Norway. And in Norway, it's also fairly straightforward to move tax losses between group entities as long as this is the same line of business that you're operating in. So in Norway, it's straightforward to use it, and we simply need to -- and how quickly we can use it depends on the profitability, right? It's hard to say exactly. We've done our internal estimates, of course. But as you know, the market is cyclical and somewhat unpredictable. So, I don't want to attach a number to it. But you probably can make your own assumptions and divide that and see that in context with the tax losses carried forward that we have.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#61

Very good. Last question. When is the attention launch of a refinancing process of the debt? Give an indication on that?

Sven Larsen

executive
#62

Yes. I mean we have already started the work, of course and preparing for doing that. And then exactly when we do, it will depend on a combination of factors. We will, of course, try to read the market and obviously be in a position to use a good window in the market and also we will look at the call option structure of the debt to optimize the timing. But it will most likely happen in 2025, but we won't rule out that we will do it in -- towards the end of 2024 either.

Kristian Johansen

executive
#63

All right. I think we're at the end. And I want to thank you all for your attention today, and I want to thank everybody who listens to the webcast and we're going to be back here in mid or late October for the Q3 presentation, but it was great to give you or get the opportunity to provide more insight into our business. And as you hopefully see, we are excited about journey behind us, and we are really excited about the journey ahead of us, and we think we are in a sweet spot in terms of where we want to be for the future. Thank you very much.

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