Good morning. Welcome to the Genel Energy PLC trading and operations update. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. The company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Andrew Benbow, Head of Communications. Good morning to you, sir.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. As said, we are here partly to run through a short presentation, but also to answer any questions that you may have. Please do feel free to submit them on the right. If there's any that we can't get to today, then always do feel free to email me at any time. We always respond to emails very quickly after getting them and very happy to answer any of your questions. With that said, I'd like to hand over to Luke Clements, our CFO. Go ahead, Luke.
Thank you, Andrew. As Andrew said, my name is Luke Clements. I'm the CFO of Genel Energy. I'll run through the short presentation. Then we'll pick up any Q&A at the end. Next slide, please, Andrew. For those of you that don't know us, we are Genel Energy. We are an oil and gas business. We have a cash generative production business in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. We have four producing fields, primarily, the Tawke license delivers that cash generation with its two fields, Tawke and Peshkabir. We also have two exploration licenses, one in Somaliland and one in Morocco. We entered 2023 with a very significant cash balance of $500 million, net cash of $200 million, with no debt maturity until October 2025.
We've been pretty clear about our capital allocation in the past six months, focused around supporting our dividend program and extending it. I'll talk about that a little bit on the next slide. Our focus for the year ahead is very simple. We are focused on our cash generative production from our resilient production business. We will continue to maintain our strong balance sheet, which we have done for many years now. We see it as an important part of our investment case. If we add assets, we will ensure they are resilient assets. We find our business resilience is also important and a key part of that dividend program.
Key focus for 23 is putting some of that $500 million to work to add new assets to our production portfolio. We will continue to progress towards drilling our Somaliland exploration well around the end of the year or early in 2024. I mentioned our dividend program. This is really the focus of all our investment decisions. Key to our dividend program when we set it out in 2019, was it will be material, sustainable and progressive. Material means it's competitive with peers and the dividends that they're paying. Sustainable means it's repeatable. We keep paying it. We don't want our dividends to ever go down. Progressive means that over time it increases following the business as the business grows.
Since 2019, when we started the dividend program, we've paid out just under half our current market cap in dividends. We've increased it by about 19%. You can see the chart on the right shows the shape of the annual dividends since we started. Currently, our dividend at about $50 million is about 11% yield on our current market cap. The year just gone, what happened? Production was about flat at 30,000 barrels a day. Most of that, as I said, coming from the Tawke PSC. Zero lost time incidents. A lot of cash generation in 2022. Over $200 million of that came from old debts in various forms, deferred receivables and override payments, meaning our production business generated a lot of cash in 2022.
We invested about $50 million in appraisal at Sarta, where we drilled three wells, Sarta-1D, Sarta-5, and Sarta-6, and we gave the results for those quite recently. As I said, we put all that together, you get to free cash flow of just over $230 million. As I said, we paid a dividend of $50 million, and our cash is just under $500 million at the end of the year. As we look ahead, our guidance for 2023, production 27,000-29,000 barrels a day, down a bit from last year as natural decline on the fields is offset by drilling primarily at Tawke. Our focus this year is really optimizing costs and preserving that cash on the balance sheet for investment in new assets, so we're being very careful with our capital allocation to our existing portfolio.
That means we're in our production business, where the money comes back very quickly. About 80% of what we invest in our production business is recovered within three months under the PSC mechanism. That's about flat at $90 million and about $10 million on maintenance of our other assets, which includes Sarta. With up to $25 million progressing towards drilling our exploration well in Somaliland. In terms of the free cash flow, as I said, the override and deferred receivables, the old debts that came through over $200 million in 2022, won't repeat in 2023, but we do start the year with about $64 million overdue, and we expect the normalization of payments and the Erbil-Baghdad political and financial relationship to mean that we catch those up in the year.
The other item on 2023 is we'll progress towards arbitration in February 2024. In terms of what kind of assets are we looking to add to our portfolio, as I said, the lens we use is the dividend program, so material, sustainable, progressive. How does that turn into asset characteristics? It means ideally production or close to production. It means resilient assets with low cost, low break even. That probably means onshore or shallow water. Low carbon emissions because we want these assets to be around for a long time, whatever happens with the regulatory environment. Either through deal structure or investment plan, we wanna be able to mitigate the downside risks which come with any oil and gas asset.
Impact of these, we are pretty obvious, improve returns, strengthen the business, diversify risk, and ultimately, you know, priority Number 1, extend line of sight on payment of our dividend program. We can currently have line of sight on paying at midterm, we wanna extend that longer. Ultimately, as the business grows, we'd like to see that progressing the dividend to a higher dividend as well. This is really our outlook. The boxes along the bottom are the five items that I've walked you through in the presentation. You know, low cost, low carbon and resilient production supporting our dividend yield of over 11%. A cash balance of $500 million currently earning 3% or 4% in a BlackRock liquidity fund.
We want to get that invested in decent project or projects and transform the returns of our business and extend our dividend program. That cash will fund our investment in Somaliland. Back to you, Andrew.
Thank you very much, Luke. Now we'll run through some of the many questions that we've had. As you can imagine, Luke, we've had many questions asking about M&A and whether or not we have any specific M&A targets lined up and how we should think of the focus and timing.
Yeah. Okay. M&A takes time, particularly if you want to do a good deal rather than any deal. We have a dedicated team. You know, we didn't just pick up the pen last year. We've been working on it for a while. We have a number of opportunities at different stages of maturity. As I said before, we have a long list and we have a shorter list. The shorter list of less than 10 are still quite early stage in the process, but we're starting to get a feel for what they look like and what kind of shape a deal might have for those. We've got assets we like the look of. We've got assets that deliver the kind of return and cash profile that we're looking for.
M&A is hard and it's competitive, so we can't make any promises. We will continue to put all our energy into finding the right deal to fit our business and our dividend program and get that cash working. You know, it's an obvious thing to say $500 million sitting on the balance sheet earning 3%-4% is suboptimal. We need to get that working properly for us and supporting our dividend program and delivering investor returns.
If you can't find anything to use the money with, will you look to buy back the bond perhaps?
We bought back a bit of bond in September. We spent about $6 million in September when we bought it back at about 94, 95. I don't wanna buy too much more bond back now because bond market's quite tough. If I want the money for M&A, I think it's hard to try and raise money in the bond market right now. I'd rather have the bond levels a little bit too high for now than too low. That's not to say we might not nibble at the bond if opportunistically it's available at a price that I think I can issue it at. It's not a priority for now.
As we go through the year, if we haven't managed to do M&A and bonds are available at a sensible price, we might think about doing something. Right now, it's not a priority for me.
Thank you, Luke. A couple of questions come in as you'd expected about Kurdistan and payments. What is happening at the moment with Kurdistan payments and why the delay?
We are currently owed payments for August and September. We have, we're kind of two payments overdue. We have not had it explained to us why these are late. I think it's important to remember, and it's a bit different now, but last year there was a lot of turbulence in terms of news flow between Baghdad and Erbil. Partway through last year, Baghdad stopped making cash transfers to Erbil. I'm not saying there's a direct linkage to payments, but it just kind of indicates we were in a unusual situation between Erbil and Baghdad last year. That seems to be resolving since formation of government in Baghdad towards the back end of last year, and PM Sudani indicating that he wanted a normalized relationship with KRG. That was a good indicator.
We are just hearing last night that Barzani has talked about Erbil and Baghdad seemingly finding some deal space and middle ground on some of the issues that they've been talking about for the last month or so. We've heard that Baghdad is gonna start making payments again to Kurdistan. I think the last few months have been positive from a politics point of view, and it looks like normalization of the relationship after the six, seven months last year when this formation of government issue left a vacuum for people who don't want Kurdistan oil sector to sell its own oil to kind of ratchet up the pressure. Let's see what happens.
The next couple of months, I hope to see return to normal business as usual for Kurdistan, and I'd expect that to also mean a return to the normal payment timing of three months in arrears. Let's see. I'm hopeful that we'll catch up in the next few months and get back to normal payments.
Thank you, Luke. There's a couple of questions which I'll just take quickly 'cause one of which is asking about an updated CPR on Taq Taq and Tawke that will be done in line with our usual end of year reporting schedule. There's also been a couple of questions about the Moroccan farm out and how that's progressing in the expected timeline. I think to give a quick update on that, we're in the final stages of signing the petroleum agreement and the association contract with ONHYM. Once that's done, and we have that absolute clarity, which we know it's coming, but we're waiting for that clarity, then we'll really step up options around Morocco. Look, we've got a lot of prospects and leads identified.
There's a serious amount of recoverable resource potential, we have a team on the case of trying to get that farm. The aim of that, of course, is to try and do a deal similar to that we did in Somaliland, which is where we effectively get somebody else to pay for the exploration that is to come. That's the idea, and that's how it fits to our strategy. In terms of timeline, again, it's a bit like M&A. It's very difficult to put timeline on things such as that, conversation will step up. The team did a great job with Somaliland, look forward to them to do the same with Morocco.
Yeah, I'll just add on that. You know, it's early days, but we have got some quite big companies having a look around, so let's see.
The question we've had in as well asking about the oil seep news in Somaliland, is there anything you can comment on, Luke?
Yeah. We saw the news flow on that. I've, you know, I've been hearing about oil seeps in Somaliland for a long time. You know, we've heard about them for 10 years. you ask the technical guys, it's not necessarily the ultimate answer, but for the non-technical, it indicates that there might be oil there, right? Which is why we are thinking of drilling a well in Somaliland. the license we are planning to drill the well on is a different location to where that where that where that water well was drilled which had some evidence of traces of oil. but our priority is that other license where we plan to drill our well next year. it's interesting. It's good news flow. it's not new news flow.
What are your views in relation to new news flow on Somalia stating that the license is not valid?
This is frontier exploration. This is. You know, Frontier exploration is hard, right? Every step of it is new. There's, you know, no warehouses to store your kits, so you need to be able to build warehouses. There's not roads where we wanna drill our wells, so you need to build a road to the site. We saw the Somalia comment, and we saw the Somaliland response. It doesn't materially change our view on the risk in Somaliland. We've looked at it, and we will continue with our program.
Thank you. Back to Kurdistan. Can you comment on the change of the oil price adjustment, which seems to be in the pipeline?
Sorry, what's the question?
We've seen HKN and others talk about a change in Netbacks. Is that something you have any comment on?
Okay. Yeah. As reported by HKN and ShaMaran, they've signed a lifting agreement with a new pricing mechanism. It's been reported that the Kurdistan blend realized price per barrel that the government gets for its sales has deteriorated a bit in the last kind of 12 months as competing Urals crude, I think, has pulled down the price of the Kurdistan blend. KRG is looking to work out how that impacts the pricing mechanism it has with contractors. We have not accepted any change in pricing mechanism. If we had done, we'd have updated the market. We will update the market if it changes.
Thank you very much, Luke. In terms of back onto M&A, is there a particular size of deal that you're looking for?
I think we'd rather do a few larger ones than the lots of small ones, so hundreds rather than tens. Obviously, the more of our. You know, assuming we have the right minimum liquidity level left behind, the more of our cash we put to work on a good project. You know, it's obvious the more money we make and the better returns it delivers to shareholders. Do we have a specific number in mind? No, but we have $500 million on the balance sheet, and we'd like to use the right amount of that to add assets potentially with the right level of debt that doesn't overburden our balance sheet or damage the resilience of our cash flows. Look, we've lost a lot of cash generation between 2022 and 2023.
2022 benefited by over $200 million from old debts. We need to seek to replace that. If you're seeking to replace quite a lot of cash generation with production or near to production assets, that costs quite a lot of money. I think it's almost, it's almost obvious that we want to spend hundreds rather than tens on the right asset, but it's gotta be the right asset, and it's gotta be the right price.
Thank you, Luke. We've had more of a comment come in than a question, but it's worth it, but I'd like to just deal with it. Someone asking, saying, "It's very difficult to get a broker report on Genel, and many companies publish broker reports on the website." It is frustrating. That's the MiFID II regulations. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about that. We simply can't share analyst research on our website. The only way that you can have analyst research on the website is if we pay for it. We're well covered. We have seven equity analysts covering our story. They cover our story very well. It's a shame that regulations mean it's not so easy for retail shareholders to access that research. You'd have to contact brokerages directly and pay for the research to get that.
I can say that the overwhelming analyst view on Genel is positive, that we have two hold recommendations and all the rest to buy on Genel, even the hold recommendations are a significantly higher price than our current share price is. It is something we've looked at, doing paid-for research, our view is that the credibility that you get for non-paid-for research outweighs that although that is offset, of course, by the frustration. It can be quite difficult for some people to see. With that said, I think those are all the questions that we've had come in today. If anyone feels that we haven't answered their question, as I say, and as I always say, please do contact us directly. We always respond to all shareholders, large or small, and we always welcome any questions that do come in.
Please keep those questions coming, and I will pass over to Luke for any final closing remarks.
Thanks, Andrew. Probably quite a simple year ahead from an existing portfolio point of view, but we intend to take a lot of energy to the M&A, and you won't see it because of the nature of the work, and we won't be able to signal it. This business has the opportunity to use that cash to take it in a really good direction, support the dividend program and be the right shape and characteristics of the business to be fit for the ESG challenges that we face as a sector. I think we're one to watch. We've gotta get that cash balance and working, hopefully, we've been pretty clear about the business model frame within which we intend to invest that capital.
Hopefully, that makes us interesting for new investors who are looking at us for the first time. Thank you.
Luke, Andrew, thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Genel Energy PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.