Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Anton Oilfield Services Group 2023 Annual Results Announcement webcast. I'm Cheng Lei, in charge of Anton's capital market issues. I will be the moderator of the webcast today. [Foreign Language] First, I'm glad to introduce to you the management who attend the presentation today. They are: Anton Oilfield Services Group [Foreign Language], Mr. Luo Lin, Chairman of Anton Oilfield Services Group, [Foreign Language], Mr. Pi Zhifeng, Chief Executive Officer of the Group, [Foreign Language], and Mr. Xu Hongjian, Chief Financial Officer of the Group. [Foreign Language] We will have two sessions for the meeting today, which includes results presentation and a Q&A session. For the presentation, Mr. Pi Zhifeng will give us a briefing on the business performance, operating and finance overview of the Group in 2023, as well as the outlook of the Group's business development in 2024.
[Foreign Language] After the presentation, we will have a Q&A session. We would like to remind our investors that according to the webcast platform's requirement, if you need to communicate with the management online, please click on the button below the presentation document area to complete the real-name authentication. Once the authentication is completed, you can send your question in the chat box in the right corner. Your question will be read out later by the moderator and forwarded to the management to answer. [Foreign Language] After the Q&A session, we will invite our Chairman Mr. Luo Lin to make a conclusion. [Foreign Language] Now I will pass the time to Pi Zong.
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to the 2023 Annual Results Conference of Anton Group. First, let me report to you on the overall performance of 2023. In 2023, revenue was CNY 4.4 billion, up 26% from the same period last year. Profit attributable to equity holders was approximately CNY 197 million, representing a decrease of 33%. But that's because we have a one-time USD bond repurchase gain in 2022. Excluding that gain, our net profit to equity holders was CNY 195 million, up 18%. And the free cash flow was about CNY 500 million, up 70% from last year. The performance in 2023 has the following highlights. First, revenue from the overseas surpassed 60%. Revenue of the group hit a historical high. Business structure optimized. Innovative business continued to grow. Traditional business further transformed driven by breakthroughs in precision engineering. Platform cooperation flourished, empowered partners to achieve shared development.
Efficiency improved through intelligent and informational management. Free cash flow continued to grow, announced a dividend payment to improve shareholder return. Empower industry in green transformation to jointly achieve sustainable development. In 2023, the business continued to grow rapidly, and our revenue created a historical high. At present, the proportion of our international business has exceeded 60%. Anton will continue to transform into a global company. Business from the international business maintained a rapid growth, increasing by more than 33%. Moreover, in Iraq market, major oil fields maintained full workload. Our customers actively expanded production. Our business has also increased steadily. In other overseas markets, the scale of our business remained stable. Meanwhile, the successful application of the completion tools in Algeria further opened the market.
In the Chinese market, the business recovered quickly, and business was optimized and upgraded with rapid growth in asset-light and high-return precision engineering, innovative asset leasing service solutions, inspection, and other businesses. Meanwhile, the asset-heavy drilling rig business continued to decrease, and overall revenue in the Chinese market increased by 16.9%. In 2023, our innovative business grew by more than 37.4%, and the revenue share of innovative business also reached 51.8%, which indicates that our business structure has been further optimized, and our business has achieved comprehensive upgrading. In terms of oil field management business, our IFMS project in Iraq has successfully created a record of more than 2,000 days of lost-time injury-free work hours. Anton has become the most trusted oil field management services provider for customers. Our oil field management project in Chad has also achieved 3 million lost-time injury-free work hours.
The stable development oil field management business has made a major contribution to the business upgrading. In 2023, our natural gas process project in Sichuan was put into operation smoothly. This project integrates asset leasing plus operation and maintenance plus digital technical services, which is another innovation of our service model. In terms of digital business, we have promoted a digital remote drilling command system for the need of oil fields, which has been successfully applied in Iraq and helped the customer improve efficiency. In terms of traditional business, we continue to transform and upgrade around reservoir geological research. Under the guidance of reservoir geological research, the traditional business has been visualized, digitalized, and intelligent, greatly improving efficiency, helping customers to accurately develop oil and gas, and the revenue growth of over 15.9%.
In 2023, our platform cooperation fully blossomed, realized the comprehensive platformization of business expansion, resource sharing, information sharing, and marketing promotion, enabling sharing with partners and driving common development of partners. Anton Online Service is a business development platform. Through Anton Online Service, we have realized the comprehensive online consultation and services for all our businesses. The AT Mall is a resource sharing platform. Through AT Mall, we have jointly launched more than 1,000 products and services together with our industry partners. The Oil Mates is an information sharing platform, and we continue to empower industry employees through it. In 2023, the number of followers of Oil Mates in the whole network successfully expanded exceeded 100,000. The Oil & Gas Expo is a marketing platform.
We have invited more than 1,000 manufacturers entering into the oil and gas exposition, which has formed a strong attraction for oil and gas development customers. In terms of management, we continue to strengthen management in 2023 to fully implement the information and digital tools, the online marketing management, the operation management system, intelligent production, and the management platform, the PMS, and Anton GPT. Our global management efficiency comprehensively enhanced. We have always taken cash flow operating as the core of our business. In 2023, our cash flow cooperation continued to deliver good results. The cash flow continued to steadily grow and reached a free cash flow of CNY 500 million. With the continued improvement in free cash flow and the net profit from continuing operations attributable to shareholders, we resumed dividend payments again, announced a dividend payment of CNY 39 million, which will further improve shareholder return.
In 2023, we further developed our green business by applying fiber optic monitoring technology to the development of a geothermal well in Northeast China. We applied the gas leaking inspection technology to CCUS well in Northwest China. We further provide natural gas decarbonization services for our customers in the Southeast Asia market. We fulfill the sustainable development through our continuous effort. Looking forward to 2024, the main aspects include: First, global oil and gas industries enter a green development era. Anton will empower the industry's sustainable growth through its comprehensive solutions. Second, fully deploy the global market, promoting continuous growth in international business. Third, transform the business model by advancing digitalization and platform-based development. Fourth, globalize the money management and operations, further improve efficiency. Last, continue to implement asset securitization strategy, promote business growth, and enhance investor returns.
In terms of the industry, on the one hand, global oil and gas demand continues to grow steadily. On the other hand, the industry is entering a new era of green development, upgrading to intelligent, green, and low-carbon, and finally achieving long-term sustainable development. In the face of this industry trend, Anton launched eight comprehensive solutions for the sustainable development of the oil and the gas industry. They are oil and gas overall solutions, production and efficiency enhancement services, visualization and digitalization monitoring, precision engineering technology, quality and safety inspection, artificial intelligence solutions, green development asset solutions, and external resource platform services. Through eight solutions, Anton will continue to contribute to the sustainable development of the industry and achieve sustainable and steady growth in performance.
In terms of market, we will fully develop the global market to provide our services to IOCs and NOCs, including the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. We believe that we have 8 overall solutions. We always need customers' needs. In 2024, we will accelerate the pace of our globalization. In terms of business, we will continue to realize digital transformation to connect the industry needs and the resource supply. In the meantime, we will further enhance the influence of Anton to provide precision services for customers. Anton will be a platform digital business. Achieving our global goals, we will build a globalized company. In terms of global operation and management, we have initiated 2 actions. Firstly, we are recruiting talents with the international perspective and capabilities to join Anton to globalize our talent team.
Secondly, we are relocating our sales, management, and finance teams to Dubai to enhance efficiency. The senior management all go overseas to support Anton's global business. Development of asset securitization is a strategy that Anton has been implementing for years. We will continue to maintain the independent development of each business segment. We will gradually securitize our quality business. We will promote the rapid listing of Tong Ao inspection. Meanwhile, we will continue to promote the sustained and steady growth of various business segments to realize the steady improvement of cash flow and return on equity. In 2024, with a globalized market, platform-based business, digitalized management, and the internal internationalized talents team, and securitized assets, we will create brand new opportunities to development and deliver performance for our investors. Thank you.
[Foreign Language] We will now move on to the Q&A session. Please type in your questions in the chat box in the right corner after you completed the authentication. Thanks. [Foreign Language] So the first question is about the group's business development. As we see that the overseas revenue grows at a very fast pace, and as the company had always mentioned, that globalization is still the strategy when considering the market deployment. So in 2024, whats kind of detailed—is there any detailed strategic plan to deploy the overseas market?
[Foreign Language]
So yes, for the company's strategic plan in 2024 in the overseas market deployment, we actually have some specific strategies. We have distributed our overseas market into three kinds of large business zones. The first one is Iraq, and the second one is West Africa, and the third one is Southeast Asia.
[Foreign Language]
We also have seen a lot of opportunities for us to further deploy our businesses in the overseas, especially after our formal launching of our eight solutions. In Iraq, we think our services, especially for the stimulation services, our oilfield management services, our inspection services, our artificial intelligence solutions, as well as our green asset leasing solutions to our customers, will have very good opportunity to keep further growth.
第二，我们的西非大区最近刚刚把总部搬到了埃及。那么意味着在西非我们不但有以前的乍得业务、阿尔及利亚业务，我们还将以埃及为中心覆盖非洲多个国家市场。
And for our West African businesses, in fact, recently the company had just moved our West African country's headquarters to Egypt. So beyond our traditional markets in West Africa, including Chad, Algeria, etc., we will further expand our West African countries' markets surrounding our Egyptian headquarters.
而我们的全球直销大区是覆盖了除了伊拉克、西非以外的所有国家市场。
For our direct selling sources, that will cover all the other emerging markets except for Iraq and West Africa?
在这些国家包括了东南亚的印度尼西亚、马来西亚、中东的阿曼、阿联酋、卡塔尔，以及中亚的哈萨克等国家。这些国家有比较大的减排、减碳的需求。我们认为我们的一些新的技术、绿色开发的解决方案、检测等业务都会在这些国家有大的发展。谢谢。
For our global direct selling sources, we will cover the markets, which include our Southeast Asia markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, and some Middle East countries like Oman, Qatar, and some other countries like Kazakhstan. So within these regions, we think our green development solutions, including inspection services, will have good opportunity to growth. 好的，第二个问题是看到公司的收入其实近年都保持了一个比较稳健的增长。那对于我们的一个净利率水平，公司有什么指引？ The question is about the net profit margin because as we have noticed, the company had kept steady growth for recent years. What about the trend for the margin?
我来回答这个问题。我们也看到了在2023年我们的收入增幅是26%。那么相应的归属股东的利润是增加了18%。那么的确我们的利润的增幅是没有收入快。
First in 2023, yes, our revenue had achieved 26% growth, and our profit attributable to equity holders growth at 18%. It is a little bit lower than the rate of the revenue growth.
[Foreign Language]
So first I think it is due to the overall macroeconomic environment because under such an environment, in fact, it is not only for the oil and gas industry, it's for all the industries. We will face severe competitions as well as all kinds of pressures during our operations of businesses.
[Foreign Language]
Under such a complicated operating environment, on one hand, the company needs to make every effort to achieve revenue growth. At the same time, we need to keep our efforts on the control of our risks. Such risks, including the cash flow risks, including the market risks, no matter if it is for the political or some other operating environment risks. On the basis of controlling all of these kinds of risks, we will try to keep our steady growth.
[Foreign Language]
Along with our business scale's growth, we will make various efforts to decrease our costs as well as lift our operating efficiencies through using our new technologies and all kinds of process controls. We are trying to adopt all kinds of management measures to minimize the effects of the macro environment.
[Foreign Language]
As for the specific businesses, first in the domestic China market, we still see severe competition trends. The competition in price, especially, the pressure is quite higher comparing with the price pressure from the overseas businesses markets and also from our traditional services, as it is already a very mature market. We also see severe price pressure.
[Foreign Language]
It is also one of the reasons why the company makes such large efforts to fully promote our new technologies, to upgrade our business models, and also to fully deploy our overseas markets.
[Foreign Language]
So our strategy is, on one hand, to further make stricter control on our cost and at the same time to fully deploy our new business model to expand to the new markets. So through these all kinds of matters, we are trying to improve our margin from the businesses and trying to make the margins growth catch up with our revenue growth. [Foreign Language] So the question is about the company's oilfield management services. We have seen this service sector had achieved a large growth in 2023. So how long the term is still left for the company to maintain the integrated oilfield management project in Iraq? And is there any further project opportunity for the group to further expand the business?
[Foreign Language]
First, for our oil field management businesses in Iraq, in fact, it is not come from a single project, not only from Majnoon oil field. We also have a lot of other services like the oil field operating and maintenance services in other oil fields.
[Foreign Language]
These contracts have different contract terms. Some are from 2-3 years and some others from 4-5 years.
[Foreign Language]
We had already operated for Majnoon oilfield for a consecutive 6 years since our getting of this project in 2018.
[Foreign Language]
As for the Majnoon oil field management project, it is with a contract term of 2 years fixed plus 1 year extension. For each time, the company can successfully manage the extending of the contract terms.
[Foreign Language]
We will continue to negotiate with our customers, to talk with our customers to further extend the contract one year after when this one-plus-year due.
[Foreign Language]
Judging from the current cooperation with our customers, our customers and our cooperators highly appreciate our services and really need our oilfield management services there.
[Foreign Language]
Beyond the Majnoon oil field management, we are also trying to pursue other oil field management services, not only in Iraq but also for other countries like the other markets in Africa or Southeast Asia. We are also trying to get oil field management services for the gas fields. [Foreign Language] So the next question is about the other payables and other receivables large increase. What is the reason?
[Foreign Language]
This increase in the other payables and other receivables, in fact, it's just from the large expanding of Anton's platform businesses in recent years. Because for Anton's platform businesses, we provide our platform to all of our customers and our cooperators. So taking advantage of Anton's brand, our management, and our market advantages, our customers and our cooperators can also expand their businesses on our platform. So with this kind of platform services, it will not occupy Anton's own cash flow to deploy this kind of services, but there will be some settlement of this cash flow on our platform. So according to the business expanding in recent years, it is recorded as some of the increase in other receivables and other payables. [Foreign Language] The company had announced the payment for the final dividend. It is good news to the investors of the company.
Whether the investors can expect a stable policy for the company to pay dividends in the following years?
[Foreign Language]
So for the dividend payment, in fact, before the year 2014, Anton had kept our tradition that is to take out 30% of the profit that is attributable to equity holders as the dividend payment. After 2014, we had faced the drop in oil price as well as the pandemic. During the past 10 years, our industry faced large volatilities. For this year, after our overall judgment of our cash flow status as well as our expectation for our business growth in the following years, we just resume our payment of our dividend. We hope that for the following years, we will keep our tradition that is to take 30% of the profit attributable to equity holders as the dividend payment to our investors. [Foreign Language] So this question is about asset leasing solutions.
Whether the development of asset leasing businesses will have conflict with the company's asset-light business growth strategy?
[Foreign Language]
These asset leasing solutions to our customer. Our target is to help our customer to have a solution for their own CapEx expenditure and to develop their oil and gas resources with an asset-like model.
[Foreign Language]
Our business model is to fully take advantage of Anton's market platform and our digitalized solutions as well as our supply chain powers to help our customers to be connected with the asset manufacturers as well as to be connected with the financial institutions and to help our customers to get the asset they need without any capital investment on these assets.
[Foreign Language]
The core of our business model is just one word that is for sharing.
[Foreign Language]
The earliest asset leasing model of Anton is to provide the leasing of the drilling pipes. What we do is to efficiently mobilize these drilling pipes between different drilling companies to share these kinds of assets.
[Foreign Language]
As I had introduced in my presentation, our industry is currently facing the intelligent transformation as well as the digitalized and green transformation. The usage and the investment requirements from customers are mainly from one aspect.
[Foreign Language]
First, that is from our customers reluctant to invest in assets. They are more willing to lease the assets and share the assets.
[Foreign Language]
For the asset manufacturers, they are also not only want to make equipment leasing, but they also need some supporting services.
[Foreign Language]
And also for the institutions like the financing leasing companies as well as some banks, they are also willing to enter into the oil and gas industry to provide services into the industry. So they also have interest to do this kind of business.
[Foreign Language]
Our model is not the traditional one. It's not to buy assets and to lease the assets to our customers. Instead, we fully take advantage of our global market network, our globalized supply chain power, as well as our digitalized services and our operation maintenance services, etc. By that, we can help our customers to get the assets they want without large capital investment. Also, we can help the equipment manufacturers to have a higher utilization rate of their assets.
[Foreign Language]
And I think the largest highlight for our asset leasing services is the green development model. So on one hand, we can help the equipment manufacturers to make some transformation on the green development road, like to help them to upgrade their equipments to a more cleaner way, like to use the electrical equipments instead of the traditional ones that are using diesels, etc. And on the other hand, we can help our customers to achieve some kind of carbon decrease goals. We can provide some solutions for them to clean their flaring gas, to make some kind of services to make a cleaner development. And also, we can provide the services for them to construct CCUS storage services, etc., to help them to achieve their road target. And so for Anton's asset leasing services, we make our propaganda as the green development, anything can be leasable. [Foreign Language]
[Foreign Language]
Okay, first, thank you all for attending Anton's 2023 annual results presentation. And in fact, for me, for the results in 2023, I'm not quite satisfied with the growth. In my expectation, it should be more, the growth should be faster than the current pace.
[Foreign Language]
In fact, Anton also has already made a series of our efforts to promote our faster growth. On one side, we had constructed our globalized market platform, and we had also launched our online services platform. On Anton's platform, we cooperate with our external collaborators, and we are inviting all of our collaborators to join us and to share our resources. Through these ecological platforms, we can promote a shared development not only for Anton but also for our cooperators in the industry.
[Foreign Language]
So for the current new year, we had named this year as a year for our sales. For this year, we will fully make our full effort to further deploy our globalized market to pursue for a faster growth. Judging from the current operating situation, I think for the first quarter, although it is the kind of extension of our businesses from past year, but we had already found a very positive trend on the aspect of our orders increase.
[Foreign Language]
So Anton had already constructed our ecological platform, which is bearing with the characteristics with the decentralization, and it can also better help our multi-entity development. And also under this model, it had higher risk resistance. So for some of our independent operating brand names, we had already expanded our businesses maturely in the domestic China market, and also we had promoted this kind of services in the overseas market as well. And for this kind of high-quality services, we are also planning to make it separately listed in the capital market. So for one of our services names, Tong Ao Inspection Services, we are already in the tutoring process, and we are in the process of promoting it to be separately listed in China capital market. And it is hopefully to be the first one for us to put into the capital market.
[Foreign Language]
Currently, we have also newly launched our full coverage general solutions, which is facing to the industry's sustainable development trend. For our full coverage general solutions, we think there is at least one solution that is adaptable to our customers' needs. All of these kinds of solutions we are providing to our customers are focusing on our customers' new needs facing the transformation of the industry, like the green transformation as well as the high requirement on the safety of operations. That are actually our Anton's focus of providing services. We are providing a more general solution to fulfill our customers' needs, and that is what I think a great company should have.
Under this kind of general solutions, we will be more adaptable to fulfill our customers' all kinds of services needs as well as have larger room for us to expand our businesses in the future.
[Foreign Language]
In fact, during the past several years, Anton had already lifted out our development goal to achieve $1 billion, not only to achieve $1 billion revenue, but instead, we at least need to achieve $10 billion. So although during the past several years, we had faced large volatilities in the macro environment, Anton had stuck to our targets and made every effort to achieve our growth target. So recently, Anton has already achieved $600 million-$700 million in scale, and we think we will achieve our $1 billion target very soon. So how to keep the future faster growth under our current large scale of businesses is the kind of efforts Anton is making.
[Foreign Language]
So it is kind of easier for a company when they have a smaller scale of businesses to grow fast, but it is always harder for a company who already got a large scale of businesses. So how to do this? I think one good solution is through a platform-based development model. By doing this, we can take advantage of our platform and take usage of our external resources to provide very good solutions to our customers, which include the core technologies to help customers to solve their problems as well as provide precision designing for our customers and to provide general management for some large and important projects to help our customers to solve some bottleneck problems and create value for them.
[Foreign Language]
And also by our deployment of our platform services, we can also break our bottleneck of businesses' development as well. So what is the next bottleneck for Anton's development? I think it should be the globalized leadership power. So Anton is also promoting our globalized transformation as well as promoting a full lifting of our Anton's leadership through our talent recruitment and also transformation of our businesses' focuses. So currently, we had continued to strengthen our power in our overseas headquarters, Dubai, which is more near our global businesses. And we hope through this kind of global leadership strengthening and through our innovative business upgrading, we can achieve our long-term goal, that is to become an innovative global leading services provider in the emerging markets.
[Foreign Language]
[Foreign Language] Okay, thanks all for your participating in our presentation. Have a good day.