TGS NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA, with a market capitalization of $4.18 billion, reported robust financial performance for the first quarter of 2025. The company’s revenue increased to $451 million, up from $433 million in the same quarter last year. According to InvestingPro analysis, the company currently appears overvalued against its Fair Value, despite maintaining a stable dividend and reduced net debt. The company’s overall financial health score of 3.37 is rated as "GREAT" by InvestingPro’s comprehensive assessment system.
Key Takeaways
- Revenue rose to $451 million, marking a growth from Q1 2024.
- EBITDA improved to $258 million, reflecting increased operational efficiency.
- The company reduced its net debt to $450 million.
- TGS NOPEC announced a new multiclient project in the Barents Sea.
- Full-year CapEx guidance was lowered by 10%.
Company Performance
TGS NOPEC demonstrated significant growth in Q1 2025, with revenue and EBITDA both showing year-over-year improvements. The company’s impressive 23.7% revenue growth and substantial EBITDA of $624.33 million in the last twelve months reflect its successful expansion in ocean bottom node (OBN) surveys and new energy solutions. This growth can be attributed to expanded activities in offshore wind and site characterization. The company’s strategic focus on innovation and technology services has strengthened its market position, particularly in the imaging and technology segments. For detailed insights into TGS NOPEC’s growth metrics and peer comparison, check out the comprehensive Pro Research Report available on InvestingPro.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $451 million, up from $433 million in Q1 2024
- EBITDA: $258 million, up from $239 million in Q1 2024
- EBIT margin: 15%, up from 14% last year
- Cash flow from operations: $261 million
- Dividend: $0.155 per share
Outlook & Guidance
Looking ahead, TGS NOPEC is preparing for potential market changes with proactive cost management. The company expects a normalized OBN crew count of 2.5-3 for the year and anticipates strong activity in Brazil and the Mediterranean in the fourth quarter. Analyst consensus suggests moderate optimism, with price targets ranging from $26 to $34. The company’s strong fundamentals are reflected in its impressive Altman Z-Score of 9.03 and P/E ratio of 12.55. The company also revised its full-year CapEx guidance downward by 10% to NOK 135 million, reflecting a more conservative approach to capital expenditures.
Executive Commentary
CEO Christian Drehansson commented on the market uncertainty, stating, "We haven’t seen anything pulled back yet," indicating a cautiously optimistic outlook despite potential macroeconomic challenges. CFO Sven Borre Larsson emphasized cost management, noting, "We are constantly challenging ourselves on the cost base."
Risks and Challenges
- Declining reserve life among oil and gas clients could impact future demand.
- Potential market softening due to macroeconomic changes may affect profitability.
- Increased scrutiny on capital expenditures could limit growth opportunities.
- Competition in multiclient data acquisition remains strong, with TGS holding a 63% market share since 2018.
- Regulatory changes, such as Norway’s largest licensing round, could alter market dynamics.
TGS NOPEC’s Q1 2025 performance reflects its strategic focus on innovation and cost management, positioning the company well for future growth amidst potential market challenges. With a robust current ratio of 2.73 and strong return on equity of 18%, the company demonstrates solid financial fundamentals. Discover more detailed financial metrics, exclusive ProTips, and comprehensive analysis in the full Pro Research Report, available to InvestingPro subscribers.
Full transcript - TGS NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA (TGS) Q1 2025:
Boris Steinberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Good morning, and welcome to TGS Q1 twenty twenty five results presentation. My name is Boris Steinberg, vice president of investor relations and business intelligence in TGS. Today’s presentation will be given by CEO, Christian Drehansson and CFO, Svenbery Larsson. Before we start, I would like to give some practical information. For those of you on the webcast, you can type in your questions during the presentation, and we will address those after management’s concluding remarks.
For those of you in Oslo, there’s no need for a microphone, so the sound feeds automatically into the system. I’d also like to draw your attention to the forward looking statement showing on the screen and available in today’s earnings release and presentation. So please study that carefully. So with that, it’s my pleasure to give the word to you, Christian.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Thank you, board, and, let’s hit the q one highlights right away. So we had total revenues of about $451,000,000 that compares to 433 in the same quarter of last year, and those numbers obviously pro form a for PGS and TGS. EBITDA of $258,000,000 compared to $239,000,000 in Q1 of twenty twenty four. And these numbers are driven by strong multiclient performance. We had particularly strong sales and high interest for data in frontier areas, which is great to see that our clients are are finally coming back to frontier areas in their exploration efforts.
Significant year over year improvement in asset utilization also helped on the numbers, which means that we had a net cash flow of $78,000,000 in the quarter, which means that our net debt is now down to a level of about $450,000,000 So again, a solid balance sheet, which allows for stable dividend of US0.155 dollars per share. I’ll give you a brief business update and look at the acquisition activity in Q1 of twenty twenty five as well. And I think this map shows the diversity of our activities and our businesses based on some of the strategic actions we’ve made over the past few years. Starting with OBN, we had three OBN operations, all in The U. S.
Gulf Of America. 2 of these were four d surveys for contract clients and then one was a contract with a multi client player doing exploration seismic. In terms of NES operations, so new energies, operations, you see one dot in California. So we had a lighter buoy campaign for offshore wind in California. We had another one in Germany, and then we had a site characterization project in The UK that started very late in the quarter.
So we hardly had any revenues recognized from that in Q1. Going further down the line, we have onshore projects. We had an onshore project in Lower 48 in The U. S. And then we had MCs, so multi client vessel operations, two in Brazil, in the Equatorial margin of Brazil.
We had one in Angola as well. And then we had a third party vessel working for us on a multiclient project in Argentina, as you see from the map. Finally, on the contract vessel operations, we had one vessel in Brazil in the quarter, We had one vessel in Namibia and one in India. So a very busy quarter, and, I think the map really, makes a good job in showing where most of our activity is these days in terms of South Atlantic area that you see with Africa and Latin America dominated by Brazil, Gulf Of America, of course, Europe and then some activity in Asia as well. If we move on to the different business units, we had a very strong quarter for our multi client business.
It’s driven by high client commitment to ongoing service. And as I said, strong sales of vintage library in frontier areas, which is, of course, very positive in terms of the outlook for the market, where we see some of our clients are finally going back to to frontier exploration and realize that they haven’t really filled up their data needs over the past few And and as a result, there’s a little bit of a catch up there. We had multi client investments of about hundred and $30,000,000 in the quarter. And as you see, the last 12 sales to investment is about 2.2, which is higher than the average for TGS going thirty years back.
So 2.2 is a very, very strong figure and compares really well with last year’s last twelve months, which was about 1.6, as you see from the table below the picture. In terms of key projects, we have announced a new multiclient project in the Barents Sea. Barents Sea is obviously seeing a little bit of an upswing based on the need for or increased need for gas in Europe. This is scheduled to start early August. I already touched on the Palma phase one project in the Equatorial Margin of Brazil, where we actually had two vessels, so we switched vessel during the course of the survey.
And then we had the Malvinas Phase three survey offshore Argentina, where we now have a data library of about 25,000 square kilometers in the Malvinas Basin. And this was a project where we actually used a third party vessel, as I said previously. Talking about the strong performance in MultiClient, this one shows our performance over time in terms of sales to investment, and it also shows the market share that we have in the MultiClient market. And starting with the market shares, about 63% of all the global investments since 2018 has been carried out by TGS. And obviously, this is a pro form a number.
So it includes TGS, PGS, Spectrum, ION. I may have forgotten someone, but definitely have a a very, very strong market share in in multiclient. And I can’t say how how much of a strategic advantage it is to have such a big multi client library because it means that in all these areas where we have acquired data since 2018, obviously, we still have the underlying data, which is a great advantage in terms of understanding the geology. You already have built in relationships with your clients because they’re already there. And last but not least, you have a phenomenal position with the governments.
Back in the days when you acquired the first survey, you obviously had a permit to do that. So whenever you’re gonna come back, whether you’re gonna shoot an OBN or you’re gonna shoot streamer seismic, whether it’s multi client or it’s contract, you’re very likely to get the permit before anyone else. So it’s a fantastic advantage that I think a lot of people underestimate with TGS. So 63% of all the multi client data shot globally since 2018 is TGS. Moving on to contract, we had a significant uptick in utilization, solid OBN activity in a seasonally low quarter.
I mean, usually, Q1 is the worst quarter for our OBN business, but we had a good quarter with $90,000,000 in contract revenues from OBN versus $70,000,000 in Q1 of twenty twenty four. We had about 51% of our active vessel time used for streamer contract acquisition. It means that we had revenues in the streamer contract side of SEK130 million, and that’s slightly down from SEK158 million in Q1 of twenty twenty four. Gross revenues, pretty much at the same level as we had in ’twenty four. And you see our EBITDA margin stays or remains relatively strong.
Margins are still slightly higher for the streamer business than the OBM business, and this is mainly driven by more competition or what I would call slightly unhealthy competition on the OBN side. In terms of contract awards, we had a four d campaign. Offshore Norway announced we have been actually awarded seven four d contracts for the summer of twenty twenty five, which is record high in terms of four d activity on the Norwegian continental shelf. These projects have a duration of about two eighty acquisition days. In addition to that, we also announced an OBN contract award offshore Trinidad.
This is scheduled to commence in early Q3 and this has a duration of eighty days, so it’s a relatively sizable contract in Trinidad. And then on the new energy solutions side, we had a significant drop in contract revenues. I touched on this. We had a site characterization project that we started very late in Q1. But except for that, we didn’t have any site characterization, so no vessel activity related to our new energy business.
And you’re going to continue to see that this business is going to be very volatile in terms of revenue development quarter by quarter, and this is due to these projects are quite big. So when you do them, they’re going to have a significant impact on revenue. And when you have quarters where you have no acquisition activity, then all we have is a Lidar boy activity, which you will see under MultiClient and obviously, our intelligence revenues that are reported under the company 4Sea. Overall, the business is going well. ForeSea is developing as planned, and according to business case, it’s been a good acquisition for TGS.
The CCS business is slowly growing, but it’s still going to take some time before that business gets sizable. And then obviously, offshore wind in The U. S. Has seen a bit of headwind lately. And as a result, we’re putting less efforts and less money into that, and we’ve even scaled down that business since April 2.
We move on to Imaging and Technology. We’ve seen very healthy growth in terms of external imaging revenues. You see that from the table, they grow from $9,000,000 in Q1 of last year to $14,000,000 in Q1 of twenty twenty five. And if you multiply 14 by four, you get close to $60,000,000 for the year. I would say the ambition is significantly higher than that based on the very strong backlog we have in Imaging right now.
Not only that, but we’ve been able to turn a negative profit margin into a very strong EBITDA margin of 26% this quarter. And again, I’m very positive to the development on the Imaging side now where we’ve seen a combination of strong growth and better profitability. We also see a strong inflow of people. This is a people business. It’s really about having the right people.
We’ve seen a lot of competitors and people from competitors knocking on our doors, applying for positions with TGS. So this is a business where you will see continuous growth in the future. Talked about a couple of the new contracts or projects adding to the backlog. We have announced a mega three d reprocessing project in India, as you see. This is about 17,000 square kilometers.
And then we have completed the reprocessing of a multiclient three d GeoStreamer data offshore, the Lower Congo Basin. So our activities range all over the world and from processing centers in UK, Norway, Houston and Cairo. And again, I’m very optimistic about the future of this business. So with that, I’m going to hand it over to Sven Borre, who’s going to go through the financials, and then I will come back and talk about the outlook. Thank you very much.
Sven Borre Larsson, CFO, TGS: Thanks, Christian, and good morning to you all. Since Christian has already talked a little bit about the different segments, I’ll go fairly quickly through the headline numbers. Net revenues for the quarter were $451,000,000 That was made up by $268,000,000 of MultiClient revenues and $183,000,000 of contract revenue. And this $451,000,000 as you can see, it compares to $433,000,000 in the same quarter of last year. So a little bit of growth compared to last year as well.
These are pro form a numbers that we are comparing with here, of course. Net operating expenses were $193,000,000 This was based on a gross operating cost, total gross operating cost of $252,000,000 And then, of course, we capitalized a bit of that cost mostly to our multi client library. We as Christian will talk more about later, we will we have reduced our guidance for the full year gross cost down to SEK 1,000,000,000. So as such, we were pretty much spot on the average you should expect for the remaining three quarters in Q1. Then to depreciation and amortization.
Depreciation amounted to $57,000,000 in this quarter. So as you can see that number is reasonably stable, goes a little bit up and down. This includes, of course, also the yes, it depends a little bit on the investments that we do in each of the quarters. And then on amortization, we came in at $134,000,000 This number will vary a little bit from quarter to quarter. The straight line amortization part is fairly stable, whereas the accelerated amortization part, which is more linked to the investment levels and the activity we have on new multi client projects is a bit higher in this quarter than you have seen in some of the preceding quarters.
Then we ended up with an EBIT of $67,000,000 which corresponds to an EBIT margin of 15% in the quarter. This compares to $62,000,000 in the same quarter of last year. And then we had an EBIT margin of 14%, as you can see from the chart. Looking at the profit and loss accounts. As I said, we had $268,000,000 of multiclient revenues, dollars 183,000,000 of contract revenues, $451,000,000 in total.
Subtracting the different cost elements, we ended up with $258,000,000 of EBITDA. And then you can see the split here on straight line amortization and accelerated amortization. Straight line amortization, as I said, reasonably stable and accelerated amortization will vary a little bit. And this gave us this operating profit of $67,000,000 Cash flow was quite decent in the quarter. Things to note here is the that the paid tax is a bit on the high side.
That has to do with withholding tax, both withholding tax generated by the relatively high library sales that we had in Q4. As you know, Q4 is high season for library sales from our MultiClient library. And depending on the mix, the geographical mix, that will also come with some withholding taxes. And also, we had some withholding taxes related to sales in this quarter. Again, depending a little bit on the geographical mix, it varies a bit from the different places where we operate, what kind of tax regimes they run.
So a little bit high in this quarter compared to what you normally should expect. And then we got $31,000,000 of help from changes in balance sheet item, mostly working capital elements. And that is if you look at the revenues we had in Q4, that was $492,000,000 and compare it to the revenues we had in Q1, that was 400 which was $451,000,000 It means that we had a difference of $40,000,000 roughly. And here, we are collecting, say, 31,000,000 of that difference in Q1. So all in all, we had cash flow from operations of $261,000,000 and then we subtract the investments.
You can see the split between the booked or capitalized multi client investments and how much of that, that is noncash capitalizations and how much that was paid in other quarters, which means that we ended up with a paid multi client investments of $119,000,000 in this quarter and we subtract CapEx and add interest received, we ended up with cash flow from investment activities of $145,000,000 negative in this quarter. And then we had we paid $32,000,000 of lease cost in the quarter related to the leased vessels we have in our OBN activity mostly. And we also settled the last part of the refinancing that we did in Q4. So we paid down the export credit facility in this quarter and replaced it with a $45,000,000 term loan that had a net negative effect on financing cash flow of $8,000,000 which is also included in that number. Then we paid interest of $6,000,000 which is fairly low compared to the interest charge in the P and L, and that has to do with the fact that we pay semi annual we pay interest semi annual semi annually on the bond loan.
So you should expect to see a significantly higher interest payments later in the year. And then we had dividend payments of $30,000,000 which gave us cash flow from financing activities negative by $77,000,000 And all in all, this meant that we had $39,000,000 of an increase in the cash balance balance in the quarter. On the balance sheet, these are IFRS numbers, by the way. You should note that the right of use assets has gone significantly up because we have extended a couple of the charters on these vessels that we use for our OBN activity. And you also see that the lease liability has gone up by a similar amount.
We our balance sheet, of course, remains very strong. We have $622,000,000 of gross debt in the quarter, and this includes accrued revenues on the bond loan. And we had net debt of $453,000,000 at the end of the quarter compared to roughly $500,000,000 at the end of the previous quarter. This means that we can continue to pay the dividend of $0.01 $55 per share due to the fairly significant drop in the share price lately. It means that the yields go up, and we’re far above the historical average at 7.4% now in a dividend yield.
By that, I will hand the word back to Christian, who will take you through the outlook.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Thank you, Sven. I will start with a slide that is quite familiar to all of you, and it talks about the declining reserve life and the triple Rs among our clients. And again, this is this is well known to to everyone. The reserve life has has dropped to a level that that may not be may not be you going forward, this may not be a great situation. And as a result, you will see that all companies will eventually have to increase their spending on exploration.
The reason why we showed it this time is that we actually seen a bit of traction this quarter. We’ve actually had at least one company come back to us and say that we really need to renew our reserves. We really need to target exploration spending in frontier areas. And as a result, need to buy a significant part of your database in frontier areas. So, I mean, we see some traction, and and, that’s been obviously a a positive trend that we that we see.
If we move forward and look at the three d streamer contract tenders, we also shown this on on a quarterly basis. And what you see here is a big drop towards the end of the year. And that drop is caused by mainly contract awards. We had some big contract awards for the industry in India, for example. And, after these contract awards, which made the line drop down to to a level quite quite similar to the average, you’ve seen a little bit of a rebound.
So overall, there is a positive trend line there. And I think the contract market for three d streamer is relatively healthy. In terms of pricing, I think it’s fair to say that pricing is stable, and it’s been stable for the past twenty four months or so. And it also is important to say that TGS remains very disciplined in this market. We have the advantage that we can switch capacity going from contract to multi client, and we will use that very actively going forward.
I think it’s fair to say that whenever we see contracts that are below the return on capital requirement that we have internally, we would rather look for heavily funded multi client projects and carry out those projects with the same vessels. So again, we’re not interested in going into some kind of a price war here that we’ve seen in our industry for many, many times and which is not sustainable for the future, of course. But being able to switch and being able to switch when you see that the market is unhealthy, that’s a great advantage that TGS has. And as a result, you will see that some of our capacity will switch between multi client and contract sort of dependent on how the market plays out. And obviously, then some people would say, well, but are you then just putting vessels on multi client contracts to avoid, the cost or to capitalize the cost?
And I think you’ve seen from our multi client numbers that that’s clearly not the case. When you’ve seen that historically in this industry, you’ve typically seen multi client players who have not delivered results that are even close to what TGS has. So the combination of a very strong prefunding and obviously healthy late sales proves that TGS has been disciplined over time, and we’re going to continue to do that. But again, we’re going to stay very disciplined in terms of how we price our assets because they have a significant capital cost and they need to have a return that covers that cost. That goes with OBN as well.
If you look at the OBN market, and we’ve also shown this on a quarterly basis for the past few quarters, but it’s shown very healthy growth from 2020 to 02/2024. And then at the start of the year, we expected 02/2025 to be approximately the same as ’24. So we’re saying that the industry in general or the market in general is gonna be flattish. I think some of the work has been pushed out to ’26. And as a result, you’ll probably see a ’25 for the industry that is slightly lower than ’24.
And, again, TGS has the same OBM capacity in ’24 or in ’25 as we had in the previous two years. And then what you will see is is is based on what I said previously, you will see some of this capacity that we have go into multiclient programs rather than competing for contracts that have very unhealthy margins. The good thing is that we’re in the driver’s seat to influence that ourselves. We have a massive data library in The U. S.
Gulf Of America, and there’s still a lot of OBM surveys to be done to cover that library with better data. You’ve seen over the past few years that we haven’t used our own technologies and capacity to do that. We’ve actually used third party to do that, partly because MagSafe has been sold out and partly because we’ve not been in the driver seat in the partnership to make the decision that we’re going to use our own technologies. Now we are in that driver seat for quite a few projects, and we’re going to take advantage of that driver seat position to make sure that we use our own technologies. This is not only the OBN technologies, it’s also related to the low frequency source with Gemini, which is a leading low frequency source technology that we bought from ION as part of that acquisition a couple of years back.
So again, the fact that the market will drop slightly down in terms of overall revenue is not really a big issue for TGS because we have plenty of backlog and we have plenty of projects in the pipeline for MultiClient where we can take advantage of the strong technologies and assets that we have. Touching on the OBN market, this one is showing the commercial OBN bid values. This is public information from Brazil where all the tenders are basically made public. And what you see here is that the sum of low bids of three recent OBN contracts in Brazil versus the sum of the high bids, they have a variance of about 133 percentage points. What that means is that this is a very, what shall I say, early stage, immature, not very sophisticated pricing industry.
You hardly ever see this in mature industries that there is such a big gap. And further to that bar chart, if you also account for the fact that about 60 to 70% of this cost is actually external cost, where we all deal with the same suppliers, and you can probably assume that the range in price or cost there is within 10 percentage points, then you see that this is not sustainable. The reason why I want to show this is that we’ve seen this many times before in our sector. We’ve seen this with companies that has been taken over by TGS, companies like Polarcus, where we acquired the data library Dolphin that went bankrupt and we acquired the data library Seabird, we acquired the data library when they went into financial distress. ION is the most recent one.
We have long experience of seeing this and witnessing this. We’ve been very disciplined in terms of how we operate in this market. We’re going to continue to do that. And then we’re going to take advantage of opportunities that arise from this because this is clearly not sustainable for the long term. And it remains to be said, of course, that TGS is obviously part of some high bids together with one other competitor.
If we move on and obviously, we have witnessed a quite significant change overall in the macro over the past few weeks or since April 2, starting with, obviously, tariffs and the fear for a recession. And then, obviously, on top of that, you have OPEC that has announced an increased production quite recently. So obviously, not a great match, and we can’t be naive. We got to look back on history and see how has that hit the seismic sector historically and how can we be prepared if that were to happen. Saying that, I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t really seen anything yet.
If you look at the public statements from our clients, I think E and I is the only one who’s been out there communicating that they’re cutting CapEx. And then you obviously have a lot of onshore players in The US who who said the same thing. So for onshore, of course, this is gonna have an impact. There’s no question about that. But we have very, very low exposure to that, less than 5% of our revenues.
But I think for for offshore, it remains to be seen. And, we haven’t really seen anything in terms of our sales during the month of April or or what we hear from our clients. We basically hear the same as you would hear in terms of public statements that, yes, they may be a bit more cautious, but there are no significant CapEx cuts. What we’re doing is that we’re trying to stay ahead. We’re trying to make sure that we have plans in place if it were to happen and if there is a weakness to be seen in the markets.
And these plans are covering everything from increased sales and more initiatives related to sales and obviously concrete cost initiatives on top of that. So without going through the entire list, we’re planning to strengthen our sales force. We’re introducing global account management. We’re hiring people and strengthening overall sales across the the business. On the CapEx side, we’re introducing a very high scrutiny for all capital expenditures and defer all non critical investments.
And as a result of that, you will see that we’re taking down our CapEx guidance by about 10% already. In terms of asset utilization, I mean, is a big, big difference on the cost of having a vessel sit idle versus operating. Again, I touched on the point about multiclient, where we have this great advantage, and we already have projects lined up with prefunding to do good multiclient projects that could replace some of the contracts that are either unhealthy priced or they may not even be there if the market gets tougher. So good control of that situation. And then last but not least, r and d and and technology.
We’re a technology company. We need to stay ahead in terms of technology developments. But for a company like this, it is also extremely important to be picky and prioritize in terms of where do you spend your cash. And we’ve introduced a kind of a business case validation for all the projects and making sure that we prioritize the projects in terms of what is the payback time, what is the criticality of the project. And as a result, you will also see lower spending on R and D and technology for the time being.
So as a result of that, we see multi client investments unchanged. Typically, you would see TGS or historically, you would see TGS reduce multiclient investments in periods of high uncertainty. I think it’s fair to say that our multiclient investments are so heavily prefunded these days that it wouldn’t really make much of a difference if we cut $100,000,000 of our multiclient investments. The cash impact of that would perhaps be $10,000,000 So that’s why you will see that, obviously, we’re going to look at this. We’re going to make sure that we keep that healthy prefunding.
But overall, you shouldn’t expect to see a significant reduction in multiclient investments even in a slightly lower market activity. On the CapEx side, you see that we’re down from NOK150 million, which we guided for the full year. We’re down to NOK135 million, so we’ve cut about 10% of that. And on the gross operating costs, as Sembere mentioned, we target now about SEK1 billion, and this is down from about SEK1.50 billion. And obviously, there’s a lot of different initiatives going behind that and that number may obviously vary a little bit depending on the activity level too.
Utilization, we continue to see improved utilization of our three d streamer fleet. And again, on the OBN side, as I said, the market as such is probably a bit more down or slightly more negative than we expected about three months ago. But as I said, we have four crews, and we feel pretty certain that we’re going to have four crews operating for most of the time and they’re probably going to operate more on the multi client side and contract side for parts of the year. In terms of order backlog and inflow, you see we had healthy order inflow of about $300,000,000 in Q1 of twenty twenty five. You also see that Q1 is typically a low point in terms of order inflow, you look back on history.
So there is some seasonality in that number. And you see as a result and also as a result of very strong revenues, you see the total backlog is dropping slightly, in our opinion, no reason for any concerns. And then you see the regular pie chart there, which shows the expected timing of contract backlog revenue recognition. And expectations are still that we’re going to have a normalized OBN crew count of between 2.53 as an average for the year. Again, we’re not concrete in terms of how much is going to be used for multi client and how much is going to be used for contract, but we have that ability to switch.
On the streamer side, the three d fleet utilization is going to be in line with Q1 of twenty twenty five Q2 and then multi client investments of about $100,000,000 So that leaves me with the summary slides. Again, very satisfied with strong Q1 twenty twenty five results. I really want to thank the team across the world in terms of phenomenal work and making sure that we can not take the eye off the ball in terms of generating revenues and business in times when we are very busy, obviously, with integration efforts as well. Healthy multi client performance driven by high interest in frontier areas, significant year over year improvement in asset utilization. We are reducing our CapEx, as I said, and gross operating cost as well.
And the solid balance sheet allows for a stable dividend in line with previous quarters. So with that, I want to ask Sven to come up here and then we and Board as well, and then we’re going to go through some of your questions. Thank you.
Boris Steinberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Yeah. We can start from, the people here in, Oslo. So I think that, John was raising his hand first.
John, Analyst: Thank thank you for taking my question. Christian, you say you see no signs of slowdown as of yet. I just registered that the number of contract awards has been very, very bad since early February. And you announced one small and one mid sized contracts over the last three months, and your competitor, Shairwater, hasn’t announced anything. Looks like Shairwater has a pretty bad, poor backlog, at least judging from the announced orders.
I just wonder, isn’t that is that just a coincidence? Or is that one sign of weakness?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: It’s hard to say. When I talk about signs of weakness, we typically look at late sales and we look at multiclient library sales and that kind of stuff because it’s usually a very good indicator. I think in terms of contract sales, I mean, varies a lot. There is a little bit of seasonality. And of course, it varies between the quarter.
And if you go back another couple of months from your observation, we had really strong inflow, right? So we are kind of filled up now for the summer season. It’s been a it’s been a healthy backup for building of of backlog for a while. And then you you’re right. It’s been relatively quiet.
And then we announced the contract yesterday, which is fairly good. So, it is gonna vary, and it’s it’s definitely too early to say that the reason why it’s been relatively quiet lately is due to the market. I also think it’s fair to say we haven’t seen anything being pulled back yet. So there hasn’t been any tender process or active tender process where the client says that we we wanna pull back from that. Mhmm.
And, again, in terms of sales, I mean, is is usually not a great month for us, and and it wasn’t great this year either. But there is no data there indicating that it’s worse than what it’s what it’s typical is. There’s always, you know, June is gonna be the strongest month in terms of our late sales and library sales, and and it’s probably gonna be the same this year. So again, I definitely don’t rule it out, and there is a reason why we start these initiatives that we have done, but we don’t have any clear evidence. And I
John, Analyst: just wonder a little bit about the contract outlook, which could be an indication of everything since you report Q1. When you report sorry, Q4. When you report Q4, you said you’re more or less sold out for the first three quarters of the year. And we now see that the current backlog is very, very limited for execution in Q4. So it means that but I guess that’s pretty normal as well.
You normally start booking for the winter now from now on, I guess. But it is just the backlog when you compare the backlog this year compared to last year, it looks like it’s up 20%. But just for the record, last year doesn’t include it’s not pro form a with PGS, is it?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Not the one we showed.
John, Analyst: The one that you showed.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Not the one we showed.
John, Analyst: If I do pro form a, it looks like it’s down 20%, if I include pro form a for last year. So it makes me a little bit worried that the outlook for the vessel market and lack of contracts and the fact that, as you say, utilization will be in line in Q2 with Q1. Normally, utilization is better in the summer than in the winter. So is it too early to say something about utilization for Q3? And also if you could elaborate a little bit on the outlook now, what you expect for Q4.
Should we expect a lot of contracts over the next few months so that you just we should start getting visibility for Q4? If you could discuss a little bit about that, a bit about But
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: talking vessels and streamer seismic, I think you can probably expect to see quite a lot of work in Brazil in Q4. Without being too specific, there is no secret that TGS is in a very good position in Brazil. We have major projects that have either been kicked off or they will be kicked off with healthy prefunding. So I would definitely say that Brazil is going to make up two to three vessels, I guess, in Q4. And then we have usually, you will see strong activity in The Mediterranean in any given Q3 and Q4.
Norway is obviously going to dominate Q3, but it’s going to be less so in Q4. So I think as it looks right now, I think we feel pretty good, but it’s going to be a majority of multi client work towards the end of the year rather than contracts.
Sven Borre Larsson, CFO, TGS: Bear in mind that the lead time on multi client projects is quite often shorter than for contract work. And also permitting is playing a role here. We may have commitments or being close to having deals with customers and both on the multi client side and on the contract side, where we’re waiting for permits essentially, which also may shrink the lead time from when we announce a project and to start up of that project.
John, Analyst: Two more quick questions from me. On the OBN side, you said you expect the lower market to be low in terms of revenues, but it’s not a problem for TGS because you have backlog. Does that mean we should expect flattish OBN revenues year on year in 2025 versus 2024 for you guys?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: I don’t think we’re prepared to guide for that. I think you need to look at the gross versus net Tier two because if we do it on MultiClient, you will see that as lower revenues, but EBITDA would be the same, right? And that’s probably what you need to adjust for.
John, Analyst: And my final question on transfer fees. It’s possible to say like, what’s the highest transfer fees you ever received in history? Triple digit?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: No, I mean, I’m definitely not going to give you a number on that. But I mean, we’re talking somewhere between 50,000,000 and $100,000,000 for TGS standalone.
John, Analyst: And I wonder if there’s talk in the market that Shell is looking at BP and Potette’s motors as well. If one of the other majors acquired BP, would that be an all time high transfer fee?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: It would probably be up there for sure. But it all depends on whether this company that eventually would acquire that other company have the data from before and there’s a lot of factors playing there. But it would definitely be a big one for sure. Do you hope? And there’s another one that has been announced, which still hasn’t been closed, which is also a big one, of course, if it’s going to happen.
Are these good?
John, Analyst: Are these M and A among your clients, is it good or bad for you in a five year perspective?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Short term gain, long term pain. I mean, that’s what we like to say. It’s not great for the long term, for sure. But for short term, it’s really good, of course. And you would also sometimes, what you see in the cycles is that you see a lot of M and A activity, but that also drives new players into the market.
You haven’t really seen that over the past five, six years, but normally, you would see
John, Analyst: that. Thanks. Hey, Lucas.
Lucas, Analyst: I was just wondering on your comment on the OBN where, you see it may be tilting a little bit more towards multi client, going forward. That’s a bit of a change, I would say, compared to a couple of years back. So what is driving it? And how do you think sort of it’s going to play out in terms of who is doing it? Is it going to be a converted job?
What are the main regions?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: I mean, the way it works with OBN is pretty much 90% of what we do is what we call four d, and four d is, by definition, a contract. But then as OBN gets cheaper and more efficient and as you combine OBN with existing streamer data and you merge the two, there will also be a usage of OBN for exploration purposes. The only market where you’ve seen that to a great extent yet is The U. S. Gulf Of America.
TGS obviously has a big data library there. And we’ve been working with a partner for the past few projects. That partner had other preferences in terms of whose technology to use. And as a result, Magsars were busy elsewhere. Now we’re in the driving seat ourselves in terms of acquiring data over the existing TGS data, and we can make that decision ourselves.
And together with our customers, we have decided that TGS should be providing that technology as well. So you will see slightly more OBN activity with on our own multi client activity compared to what you’ve seen for the past two years.
Sven Borre Larsson, CFO, TGS: Bear in mind that we’ve used we’ve done a lot of OBN or multi client OBN investments, but we haven’t used our own capacity. Could be
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: only 25% plus. 25% plus.
John, Analyst: You. Erik?
Erik, Analyst: Yes. I just have one question on the cost and CapEx. I was just wondering if you could give some more color on what’s driving the production. You talked a little bit about CapEx, but also mentioned a little bit on the OpEx side and also how much is that is kind of driven by proactive measures in terms of you may be expecting some slightly lower activity on due to the oil price?
Sven Borre Larsson, CFO, TGS: It’s not I mean, we’re planning for the activity level that we were planning for at the beginning of the year. So we haven’t kind of reduced our ambitions at all in terms of top line. And then we’ll see what we are able to deliver at the end of the day. But our ambitions have definitely not been reduced, and we’re planning for a high activity level for the remainder of the year. Let’s must be clear.
But we are constantly challenging ourselves on the cost base and on how efficient are we in terms of using our capital both for CapEx and for OpEx purposes? How do we allocate our fleet in the most optimal manner? How do we allocate the support vessels in the most optimal manner? How
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: do
Sven Borre Larsson, CFO, TGS: we move vessels between regions? All of those kind of things. We’ve been turning every single stone to find savings and to find efficiency gains. So that’s it’s a mix of a lot of initiatives that’s behind this reduction that we’re seeing.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: And it definitely shouldn’t be seen as a negative that we’re putting in place actions to make sure that we are prepared for something that we haven’t seen yet, but it may still happen, right? I think that’s something that every company should do and it’s something that TGS has been really good at doing in the past and we will continue to do that. And not to forget that if things should even worse, then those have typically been the times that have built TGS and have built TGS the way it is today, but picking up other players and taking advantage of weaknesses in the market. Yes. Thank you.
Boris Steinberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Very good. We also have a question from the web. That’s for you, Christian. Can you elaborate on the issue of frontier activity and more exploration? Norway launched its largest ever round today.
So are you seeing healthy licensing rounds in other parts of the world as well compared to previous years?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Yeah. I think there’s been a healthy development. I’ve seen the news obviously about Norway, is fantastic to see that Norway and the government is supportive to even numbered rounds, which we haven’t seen in in quite a few years. I think there’s a there’s a great push now for Africa. Our clients are really looking at at frontier areas in in Africa, like, I shouldn’t say, like, never before, but definitely I picked up interest in that.
We’re attending a big conference in London next week where there’s there’s record high attendance in terms of of understanding Africa and and, seeing the potential of Africa going forward. So, yeah, I think we had some evidence this quarter that some of our clients are returning back to to Frontier and even admitting that they’re too dependent on a few geographical areas, and they need to broaden their scope.
Boris Steinberg, Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: We don’t have any more questions from the web. Any more questions from the audience in Oslo? Yes, John?
John, Analyst: Just a follow-up. You mentioned that one company had come back to you and said, we now need to start to replace our reserves and need to start buying more seismic data. Can I just ask, was that was that one of the majors?
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: I can’t tell you.
John, Analyst: No. No.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: I wasn’t an onshore player. I can tell you that, for sure.
John, Analyst: I could imagine. But then more more on a general note, you know, when the things were improving, generally, and P spending was improving and the optimism in the oil market was better, like ’twenty two, ’twenty three, ’twenty four. And especially in ’twenty three, ’twenty four, we didn’t see the same uptick for seismic. Could it be that the market has changed that most of the clients are majors and that there are very few midsized and smaller players, which will mean that they’re spending they’re more disciplined, so the volatility in the seismic spending is less than it’s been historically, I. E, the disappointments we had in ’twenty three and ’twenty four that didn’t we expected it everybody expected it to see improvements in ’twenty three and ’twenty four.
We didn’t see it. Do you think that could potentially lead to that? We’re not going to see the same disappointments now if oil price stays where it’s now compared to what we should have expected historically.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Yeah. I think that’s a fair point and an interesting point you’re bringing up. And I definitely don’t rule out that you may be right. And we had in our board meeting yesterday, we went through, you know, 30 clients and feedback that we’ve been getting from these clients. And and I think if if there’s any kind of indication of of a a drop in spending, it would be those small companies that you’ve hardly ever heard about.
While the big ones, they basically stay at a very steady course. So, I mean, that that definitely supports your your argument. But it’s still very early days. It’s it’s really hard to say. But I think it’s an interesting point for sure.
John, Analyst: Yeah. We’ll see. Thanks. Will do.
Christian Drehansson, CEO, TGS: Thank you very much for your attention. And, also for the people who follow us on the web, thank you for, attention and and your questions, and we’ll see you after q ’2. Thank you.
This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.