Flowco Holdings Inc. (FLOC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Flowco Holdings, Inc.'s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Today's call is being recorded. We have allocated 1 hour for prepared remarks and questions and answers. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to [ Andrew Leopak ], President, Finance, Corporate Development and Investor Relations at Flowco. Thank you. You may begin.

Everyone, and thanks for joining us to discuss Flowco's second quarter results. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements. These statements, which are subject to various risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These risks, uncertainties, and assumptions are detailed in this morning's press release as well as our filings with the SEC, which can be found on our website at [ ir.gov ]. We undertake no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements or information except as required by law. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial information. We use non-GAAP measures as we believe they more accurately represent the true operational performance and underlying results of our business. Presentation of this non-GAAP financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures can be found in this morning's press release and in our SEC filings. Joining me on the call today are our President and Chief Executive Officer, Joe Bob Edwards, and our Chief Financial Officer, John Byers. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the call for your questions. With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Bob.

Thank you, [ Andrew ]. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I'll begin today's call with a review of our second quarter performance and key highlights. John will then discuss our financial results, segment performance, capital allocation, and balance sheet in more detail. I'll conclude with our perspective on the current market environment and our outlook for the third quarter. Flowco delivered solid results in the second quarter, generating adjusted EBITDA of approximately $94 million while maintaining our top-quartile adjusted EBITDA margins of roughly 40%. Revenue increased 13% quarter-over-quarter, while adjusted EBITDA grew 10%, reflecting solid execution across the business. These results were supported by better-than-expected performance from recently acquired Valiant, continued growth in rental revenue across our surface equipment and vapor recovery businesses, and a stronger quarter in downhole components product sales. Flowco generated $50 million of free cash flow during the quarter, further enhancing our balance sheet and reinforcing the strength of our business model. 56% of our revenue in the quarter was generated from rental revenue, which provide a high degree of revenue visibility, while our asset-light sales businesses continue to generate attractive returns and strong cash conversion. This balanced model enables us to consistently generate meaningful free cash flow while we invest in Flowco's long-term growth prospects. Overall, I am very pleased with our execution during the quarter. While we experienced the cost headwinds discussed in our mid-quarter update, which John will discuss in greater detail, our team remained focused on the factors within our control: superior service quality, efficient execution, and delivering the solutions that help operators generate more attractive returns from their existing assets. This disciplined approach enabled us to deliver results within our original expectations. Our second quarter performance reflects the demand for Flowco's production optimization technologies and the critical role they play throughout the productive life of the well. Whether we are enhancing production through our broad artificial lift portfolio, capturing high-value hydrocarbons through our vapor recovery solutions, or providing the surface equipment that enables more efficient production of oil and natural gas, our objective is the same: helping customers optimize production with the right solution for each well, every time. As operators continue to prioritize production optimization to drive their performance, we believe our differentiated platform is well positioned to support our customers throughout the lifecycle of the well. Looking ahead, we see opportunities to further leverage our platform and deliver even greater value to our customers. Valiant is an excellent example of this strategy in action. The acquisition of Valiant's ESP capability broadened our production optimization platform while enhancing our ability to better serve customers across the life of the well. By leveraging the operational data generated through platforms like Optimus, Valiant's ESP monitoring and optimization software, we are better positioned to identify customer opportunities earlier and deliver more integrated solutions. We believe this data-driven, collaborative approach is applicable across our platform and will continue to strengthen customer relationships, identify new commercial opportunities, and enhance the value we deliver. In summary, the second quarter demonstrated our ability to deliver profitable growth, generate meaningful free cash flow, and continue executing on our long-term strategy. With that, I'll turn it over to John.

Thanks, Joe Bob. Turning to our financials, second quarter performance was within our original guidance range, driven by growth in our high-margin rental businesses and a full quarter of contribution from Valiant. Total revenue increased 13% sequentially to $236 million, primarily driven by growth within production solutions. Adjusted EBITDA increased approximately $8 million from the first quarter to approximately $94 million. While higher operating and maintenance expenses within production solutions created modest margin pressure during the quarter, we continue to deliver approximately 40% adjusted EBITDA margins, highlighting the strength of our operating model and customer demand for our technologies. In our production solution segment, second quarter revenue increased 22% sequentially to $171 million, while adjusted segment EBITDA increased approximately 16% to $71 million. The increase was primarily driven by downhole components, including the contribution from Valiant, which is performing ahead of our expectations. Integration activities for Valiant are substantially complete, and our focus has shifted towards capturing incremental commercial opportunities across the combined platform as we continue to invest in the business. Turning to margins, adjusted segment EBITDA margin decreased 229 basis points quarter-over-quarter, reflecting a revenue mix shift towards downhole components following the inclusion of Valiant, as well as higher operating and maintenance expenses within the segment, including increased lubricant and fuel expenses. We expect these cost pressures to continue into the third quarter and have reflected them in our third quarter guidance. We are actively focused on mitigating these cost pressures through disciplined cost management, improving the efficiency of our rental fleet maintenance program, optimizing overtime, and reducing fuel and lubricant costs where possible. In our natural gas technology segment, second quarter revenue and adjusted segment EBITDA each decreased 6% sequentially to approximately $65 million and $28 million, respectively. The decline was primarily driven by lower vapor recovery system sales, which more than offset continued growth in our vapor recovery rental business. Turning to corporate costs, second quarter corporate expenses decreased to $5 million from approximately $5.6 million in the prior quarter, primarily due to lower professional fees. Overall, second quarter adjusted EBITDA came in at $93.9 million, underscoring the durability of our operating model and building on the momentum we outlined last quarter. In the second quarter, we generated approximately $50 million of free cash flow while investing $45 million of capital, primarily to expand our surface equipment and vapor recovery rental fleets and support the continued growth of Valiant. Our annualized adjusted return on capital employed for the quarter was approximately 18%. Capital investment was elevated during the quarter with the inclusion of Valiant and continued expansion of our rental fleet, but our full-year capital outlook remains unchanged and continues to support meaningful free cash flow generation. Our vertically integrated manufacturing model and 6-month lead time on equipment provide flexibility to respond efficiently to customer demand while focusing our capital on high-return opportunities. Turning to our balance sheet, liquidity, and capital allocation, we continue to strengthen our financial position during the second quarter and into the third quarter, increasing available liquidity while reducing leverage further below 1x. We had approximately $274 million of borrowings outstanding under our credit facility with a borrowing base of $722 million. We had approximately $446 million of available capacity. Our conservative balance sheet and consistent cash flow generation provide the flexibility to invest organically, pursue strategic acquisition opportunities that strengthen the business, and consistently return capital to shareholders through dividends and opportunistic share repurchases. Subsequent to the quarter, our board approved a 14-cent-per-share one-time special dividend to Class A shareholders only. This is in addition to our quarterly discretionary dividend of 9 cents declared on July 30th. As a result of our ownership structure, we've accumulated cash on our balance sheet and are returning this cash to our shareholders. We do not anticipate similar special dividends in the future. In summary, we delivered another strong quarter, strong free cash flow, disciplined investment and high-return growth, and a stronger balance sheet that provides strategic flexibility. We're well positioned for the opportunities ahead. Back to you, Joe Bob.

Thanks, John. Let me close by sharing our perspective on the current market environment, Flowco's positioning, and our outlook for the quarter. We believe we continue to benefit from our North American positioning, where reliable domestic energy production is playing an increasingly important role in meeting global energy demand. We continue to see an uptick in activity across portions of our customer base, which we expect will increasingly accrue to Flowco's benefit over time. With U.S. production expected to remain near record levels, operators must continue working to offset natural decline across a large and growing base of producing wells. This requires an increasing focus on production optimization, operating efficiency, and recovery, and consistent demand for our solutions. Against this backdrop, we anticipate third quarter adjusted EBITDA of $92 million to $98 million. We will continue to drive incremental efficiencies across our organization and further integrate our platform. Increasingly, that means putting our operational data and deep industry expertise to work, not just to identify cross-sell opportunities and the right solutions for each customer, but to run our broad-spectrum rental fleet more efficiently through condition-based maintenance powered by AI and machine learning. We also remain disciplined in evaluating strategic opportunities that complement our existing technologies, broaden our platform, and enhance the value that we deliver customers. Together, we believe this positions us to deepen customer relationships and drive profitability over time. We believe Flowco is the leading pure-play production optimization platform positioned to benefit from our customers' non-discretionary spending patterns in what has become an increasingly industrialized production base in North America. We believe our margins, returns on capital, consistency of our free cash flow generation, and capital-efficient growth are differentiated within our industry segment. As we continue to execute quarter after quarter, we believe these qualities will increasingly become evident, leading to long-term value creation for our shareholders.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Arun Jayaram with JP Morgan. Please proceed.

I was wondering, Joe Bob, if you could elaborate a little bit more on what you're seeing with the Valiant project. You know, kind of acquisition, you appear to be ahead of plan. I know when you guys got Valiant, they had about 30 to 35 customers. This compares to, you know, Flowco, I think you have over 300 customers. And then you'd highlighted expectations to deliver around $52 million of EBITDA, you at kind of 40% margins. Can you maybe give us an updated view on what you think Valiant can deliver and opportunities to further scale this part of your business?

Yes, absolutely, Arun, and thanks for the question. Listen, as we said in our prepared remarks, we are very pleased with how well the Valiant integration has gone and how well the culture that the Valiant team built has integrated into the Flowco culture. As it relates to customers, you've just highlighted exactly what we are doing, which is expanding the Valiant customer base through deliberate, intentional conversations with customers that we have a deep history with on the Flowco side, where Valiant might or might not have done work with in the past. But really using that platform and the integrated approach to business development to expand that customer base. Not quite ready to give you specifics on how much ahead of plan we are, but yes, the guidance that we provided looks eminently achievable, and we will report back once we have a little more visibility through the end of the year on kind of what our expectations are for Valiant on a full-year basis. But rest assured, things are going well and hope to have more space for you potentially next quarter.

Great. My follow-up, Joe Bob, just digesting the guide that you gave, call it $92 million to $98 million for Q3, which would be up slightly from Q2 on a sequential basis. Could you or John just provide a little bit more segment-level detail on your expectations for Q3, including thoughts on what would frame maybe the upper end of the guide versus the lower end, but maybe just a little bit more segment-level detail would be appreciated.

Yes, John can certainly dive into some specifics there, but look, at a high level, our capital deployment across really all segments is really unchanged. You'll see some quarter-by-quarter variation here and there just given the natural ups and downs of delivery times. But there's really no change in our expectation on a full-year basis for capital deployment. So that really at a high level will inform the guide and the range of outcomes. And before John goes into detail, what I'll also remind you is that our downhole components business, which now does include Valiant, is more variable on a quarter-by-quarter basis than our rental businesses. So I think the wide end of the range reflects that variability. We had a couple of months during COVID and Q2 that were behind expectations and a month that was ahead of expectations for downhole components. So I expect that variability will continue, but I also expect maybe slightly better-than-expected results as compared to history because of the inclusion of Valiant in the downhole components segment. John, did I say all that right?

Yes, I think you got it. I mean, kind of directionally, we expect surface equipment to be, you know, relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. We expect a little bit of an uptick in NGT driven by an increase in business at NGS, which is our packaging business that we use internally and externally.

Okay, great, gentlemen. Thanks.

Our next question is from Derek Podhaizer with Piper Sandler. Please proceed.

I just want to stick on the Valiant conversation. I appreciate, you know, we're not giving out too many details yet, but have you seen any immediate wins now that you had a few months with the company on the Flowco platform, as far as cross-selling opportunities? You know, obviously you have the starting artificial lift solutions in HPGL and ESP, but then as you kind of move towards that conventional gas lift into plunger lift, have you had a conversation around those or have seen any sort of immediate wins when it comes to cross-selling opportunities?

Derek, we have. It's off to a great start. A couple of examples. Recall that within legacy Flowco, we have what we refer to as our cap and spooling business. This is the actual service where an operator will really unbundle the installation of an ESP. They will choose a vendor to actually buy the ESP, and they'll choose a different vendor to run the cable and the capillary string downhole to optimize the performance of the ESP. Valiant historically had gone to market in two ways, on a limited basis themselves, but actually to a larger degree externally. Flowco, before the acquisition of Valiant, was one of the larger players in the Permian Basin on that specific product line, even though we did not offer an ESP product prior to our acquisition of Valiant. The low-hanging fruit is actually starting to come our way, which is on every Valiant installation, we are increasingly relying on our own internal capability to install the cap string and the ESP cable. So that's an immediate uplift, kind of a no-brainer, if you will. More broadly, on the customer-by-customer intentionality that I described earlier in Arun's question, yes, we're starting to see some good results there. Going to hold off on talking about, again, specifics around customers, but some household names are starting to engage with us on a more holistic approach to the early days' first form of artificial lift installation. That's been very promising. And then also, again, we're starting to see some very interesting signs internationally coming out of our Valiant acquisition. Not only does the team there have deep experience in international markets, many of which are very large ESP markets, but they're going to dovetail nicely with some of the organic efforts that we've had historically. So our ambition is to talk more openly and more specifically about some international wins in the coming quarters. Still a bit early though, but I think more broadly, Derek, the last thing I'll mention here is the Valiant acquisition and integration really, I think, the playbook for Flowco has been written. Okay, we've proven to ourselves, and hopefully this is demonstrated in our commentary to you, we've been very successful, I think, identifying and integrating acquisitions that make sense. And so keep an eye on that for us in the coming quarters. We hope to add more as our business progresses.

My follow-up, I just wanted to go back to some of the cost inflationary pressures that you felt during the quarter. It sounds like these will come up. What remains the lube oil side? I know your compression peers are also navigating and facing these pressures as well. Maybe can you help us understand how you expect or potentially lock in or de-risk some of these longer-term swings when it comes to lube oil and what you're able to do with your supply chain as we think about how much of an overhang this could potentially be for the business over the next, you know, 6 to 18 months or something like that? Just maybe a little bit more education and help as we try to think about lube oil's effect on your business.

Yes, so we procure a lot of lube oil for our fleet of compressors, over 5,000 units in our fleet. We have choice among suppliers, but we also try to manage that supply chain by locking in prices periodically. And just so you know, the suppliers of that commodity, it's tied directly to crack spreads. So everything you're seeing in the refining space with crack spreads being really at an all-time high, directly impacting the pricing of that product for us. We have very limited potential ways to pass that through. You know, contracts don't contemplate our ability to actually share that risk with customers, unfortunately. So we have to get more creative. And we're actively trying to manage that. The contract that we are currently living under, the most substantial one, is priced 90 days in advance. So I think for Q3, the cake is baked. I'm looking at John, he's nodding, I think that's right. But we're actively looking for ways to help there. Anything to add there?

No, I don't think so on the lube oil side. I do want to highlight, you know, operations and maintenance has been a part of the cost increase as well, probably a bigger part than lube oil. And that's something where, you know, I think I don't expect anything in the short term, but I think over the medium term, that's something, you know, we've got real expertise in operating fleets across the two segments. And so I think that's something that, you know, more to come in the next 6 months where we can make some progress.