Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Subsea7 Q4 2022 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, you can please press star one and one again. Please note that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand over to your speaker, Katherine Tonks. Please go ahead.
Welcome, everyone. With me on the call today are John Evans, our CEO, and Mark Foley, our CFO. The results press release is available to download on our website, along with the presentation slides that we'll be referring to during today's call. May I remind you that this call includes forward-looking statements that reflect our current views and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Similar wording is also included in our press release. I'll now turn the call over to John.
Thank you, Katherine, good afternoon, everyone. I will start with some introductory remarks before passing over to Mark to cover the financial results. Turning to slide three. 2022 was a year of strong momentum for Subsea7. The increase in tendering activity that we'd experienced a year ago translated into the highest level of order intake we've seen since 2013, at over $7 billion. This resulted in a backlog of $9 billion, up 25% year-over-year. We have good visibility on revenue in 2023 and improved visibility on 2024 and 2025. As the year unfolded and vessel availability became tighter, new awards began to reflect improved pricing. This underpins our confidence that EBITDA margins will return to a through cycle range of 15%-20% at the end over the long term.
During the year, we made good progress in our strategies for both the Subsea and Wind businesses, which I'll recap later. Turning to slide four for an update on our progress on our largest projects in the fourth quarter. In Turkey, the fast track Sakarya project has reached 89% progress, up from 73% in Q3. Seven Arctic, Seven Oceanic and Seven Pegasus were active throughout the quarter and the project is nearing completion in Q1 2023. Sangomar reached 72% completion as Seven Vega and Seven Sisters continued pipelay in Senegal. In Brazil, we began operations for Bacalhau at the Ubu spoolbase and the Seven Pacific commenced offshore operations. Procurement continued for Mero-3.
In Subsea conventional, our major vessels were busy on the TOPR project in Trinidad and Tobago on Mad Dog Two in the Gulf of Mexico, and they worked on the Hywind Tampen floating wind project in Norway. In renewables, we had installed 93 foundations and more than 50% of cables for the Seagreen project by the end of December. This has increased to 105 foundations installed as of today, allowing us to demobilize our marshaling yard in Scotland. We remain on track to complete the work in the first half of this year. We continue the offshore activities on Dogger Bank A and B with the Seaway Strashnov and have reached 33% completion. The vessel left the field for the winter season in early December as planned, will return this year to continue the offshore phase.
Turning to slide five. 2022 saw the highest order intake since 2013 and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.4. The recovery in the market is illustrated on slide six, where you can see the momentum in our order intake and backlog. With an industry downturn followed immediately by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the last cyclical downturn was prolonged, but the recovery is now well underway. On slide seven, we break down the backlog by year of execution. Our visibility on the year ahead is at a similar level to prior years, whilst the visibility for year two and year three has improved markedly as vessel availability tightened and clients began booking capacity well in advance to secure their project timelines. Turning to slide eight, you can see our historical group margins.
We have seen a strong improvement in the margins on the projects awarded during 2022 that sit in our backlog today. These projects will be executed in the coming three years and will gradually drive margins back to the through cycle range of 15%-20%. Now I'll pass over to Mark to run through the financial results in more detail.
Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll begin the financial performance review with some details of group and business unit performance in the year before returning to the group cash flow, guidance for 2023 and some comments on shareholder returns. Slide nine summarizes the full year performance of the group. As John has already discussed, we delivered strong order intake and backlog growth, driven by both new awards of $5.3 billion and by variation orders and escalations, which together represented $1.8 billion or 26% of order intake.
Group revenue increased moderately to $5.1 billion as we continue to execute large projects in Subsea and fixed offshore wind. Adjusted EBITDA of $559 million was up 7% compared with the prior year, and the margin increased 49 basis points to 10.9% from 10.4%, reflecting steady progress on major projects. A high effective tax rate due to a shift in operational profitability towards higher tax jurisdictions and the impact of irrecoverable withholding taxes negatively impacted net income, which was flat year-on-year at $36 million. I'll now discuss the drivers for the group performance in the next few slides. Slide 10 presents the key metrics for Subsea and Conventional. Order intake was $6.2 billion, equating to a book-to-bill of 1.6 times and resulting in a backlog growth of 37% to $8.2 billion.
Key contracts included Yggdrasil, part of the Aker BP awards in December in Norway, Búzios 8 in Brazil, Sparta and Shenandoah in the Gulf of Mexico, Gas to Power in Guyana and Block 3 in Angola. Revenue was $3.9 billion, up 6% year-on-year, reflecting good progress on the FastTrack Sakarya project, Sangomar, Bacalhau, as well as our other large EPCI projects. Adjusted EBITDA was $532 million, with a margin of 13.6%, up slightly from the prior year. This reflects a continued solid operational performance on projects won at reduced margins during the downturn. Selected renewables performance metrics are shown in slide 11. Order intake was around $800 million, taking the backlog to $800 million. Seaway7 has been awarded preferred supplier status on several projects, these should rebuild the backlog over the coming months.
Revenue was $1.1 billion, down 11% year-on-year, mainly reflecting a shift in activity on the Seagreen project. Adjusted EBITDA was $5 million, flat year-on-year, resulting in a break-even adjusted EBITDA margin. This weak performance reflected challenges on the now completed Formosa 2 project and the foundation installation scope of Hollandse Kust Zuid. Despite good progress on Seagreen, Hollandse Kust Noord, and the cable lay scope of Hollandse Kust Zuid. The adjusted EBITDA margin improved in the fourth quarter to 12.9%. On slide 12, we revisit our cost histogram that shows our costs segmented into four categories. 2019 and 2020 reflect the impact of the industry downturn, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated global economic slowdown. Since then, costs have trended upwards in line with the industry recovery.
Direct project costs are a function of the volume, mix, and phasing of our activities and the pricing environment for procurement. In 2020, despite high inflation in the global economy, our procurement costs remained stable at $2.9 billion, reflecting the phasing of major projects and the back-to-back contractor for contracts with our suppliers that lock in prices at the time of initial contract award. Our people costs increased to approximately $1.2 billion in 2022 as we expanded our engineering and project teams to address the continued increase in industry activity. Vessel and other costs increased to approximately $500 million. We ended the year with 36 vessels in our active fleet, up from 34 at the end of 2021, with the addition of sharp chartered vessels, including IRM and a heavy transportation vessel. Slide 13 shows the cash flow waterfall for the year.
Net cash generated from operating activities was $486 million, including a modest and $27 million favorable movement in working capital. The working capital outcome was better than anticipated at the start of this year as a result of projects rephasing into 2023, as well as management's further efforts to optimize cash. Cash conversion, measuring the conversion of adjusted EBITDA into adjusted operating cash was 1.1 times. Net cash used in investing activities was $220 million, mainly attributable to purchases of property, plant, and equipment, including vessel drydock and upgrades. This fell below our prior guidance of $420 million-$440 million, as stage gate payments in relation to the construction of Seaway Alfa Lift and Seaway Ventus were deferred into 2023. Free cash flow in the period was $255 million. Net cash used in financing activities was $221 million.
This included $111 million of lease liability payments, mainly related to chartered vessels. Return to shareholders of $78 million in the form of the regular dividend of $32 million and $46 million partial completion of our $70 million share repurchase program. The remaining $24 million will be returned to shareholders as part of the proposed 4 NOK per share dividend for payment in 2023. At the end of the year, cash and cash equivalents was $646 million, and net cash was $33 million, which included lease liabilities of $257 million. The group's liquidity included $1 billion of committed undrawn borrowing facilities at year-end. To conclude, slide 14 shows our guidance for the full year. I'll make some comments regarding shareholder returns.
Revenue and adjusted EBITDA are expected to be higher than 2022, where net operating income is expected to be in line with last year. Net finance cost is expected to be between $45 million and $55 million. This reflects the elevated level of reinvestment in the business in 2023, including the new build wind vessels, the SLB joint venture, and working capital commitments, which is amplified by the notable spike in borrowing reference rates over the last 12 months. Capital expenditure is expected to fall within the range of $625 million-$650 million. As I mentioned on the prior slide, this is higher than our prior 2023 capital expenditure guidance due to the deferral of some payments relating to Seaway Alfa Lift and Seaway Ventus.
There is no change in our current view of the capital expenditure required for these two vessels. Lastly, the board shares management's confidence on the outlook for the group and, as such, will propose a 4 NOK per share dividend at the AGM on the 18th of April, including the 1 NOK per share regular dividend. This proposed dividend equates to a 3% dividend yield based on yesterday's closing share price of 135 NOK or a 4.5% dividend yield based on the 12 months volume-weighted average share price of 90 NOK. I will now pass you back to John.
Thank you, Mark. On slide 15, we have a reminder of our strategy. 2022 underscored the importance of both traditional and new sources of energy in addressing energy security and the energy transition. Under almost all transition scenarios, the development of low-cost oil and gas alongside growth in renewables will be essential to deliver reliable, affordable energy to the global population. Subsea7's role across the energy landscape makes us an important contributor to this transition and more relevant than ever to our clients today. On slide 16, we have a recap of the good progress we made on our strategy this year. In Subsea Commercial, we capitalized on our strong alliances. With the evolution of our relationship with SLB, that will ensure we are well positioned for the future in Subsea, as well as generating an attractive standalone return.
In the fourth quarter, our alliance with Aker BP yielded us our largest award, worth around $1.8 billion, and demonstrated the benefits of collaboration from an early stage to optimize Subsea developments. Finally, in Subsea, we have a long health strategy to own our key enabling assets. These are our largest and most capable vessels that are critical to winning and executing projects. Demand for these vessels increased in 2022, and tightness in their availability supported improved pricing and margins. In renewables, 2022 had a couple of challenging stopping projects, and although the losses these generated were relatively modest in the context of the group, the performance was not acceptable. We have taken decisive steps to rebalance risk and reward on our future contracts, and we are confident that our pre-backlog and our ongoing tenders will deliver an improved financial performance.
We also recently agreed a collaboration with Saipem, targeting large integrated and EPCI projects. In our strategy for emerging energies, we also made progress. We attracted Ørsted as a cornerstone investor in the Salamander Floating Wind project. We're moving into the execution phase of the Northern Lights Carbon Capture project. Through our subsidiary, Xodus, we're building a presence in the hydrogen study market. Turning to slide 17, I'll discuss the progress we've made towards our sustainability goals, which form an important part of our strategy across all our markets. Starting with safety, 2022 was a year for Subsea7, achieving a very low lost time injury frequency of 0.01. Regarding emissions, we made good progress on the pathway to net zero with a successful trial of green fuels on the Seven Oceanic and a commitment to hybridize a second vessel, the Seven Arctic.
We also made progress in our environmental initiatives with the National Oceanography Center, with a further two BORAbox sensors deployed in Brazil and Norway. This is just a brief overview of our sustainability initiatives, and you can read about them in more depth in our fourth sustainability report that will be published in March. Turning to slide 18. This morning, Subsea7 has announced the acquisition of 21.52% of Seaway7 from Songa Capital, Lotus Marine, and West Coast Invest. All three parties have agreed to participate in exchange offer and receive one new Subsea7 share for every 22 Seaway7 shares they own. Following the transaction, Subsea7 will own 93.94% of Seaway7, and has launched a voluntary offer with the same terms to the remaining shareholders.
We believe the market significantly undervalues Seaway7, and that this transaction will be value accretive to Subsea7 shareholders. Moving to our customary review of our tendering pipeline across the Subsea and Wind businesses on Slide 19 and 20. Tendering remains very active, and we are very optimistic that 2023 will be another good year for order intake. The most active markets are Brazil, where we have a long list of prospects for both Petrobras and the IOCs, the Gulf of Mexico with multiple tieback projects in the tendering pipeline. Saudi Arabia, where we will bid a number of packages under the LTA, and Turkey, where we are bidding the second phase of Sakarya. Overall, we are confident that we have a robust tendering pipeline that can support continued momentum in the Subsea recovery. On the next slide, we have our Wind prospects.
We are the preferred bidder for East Anglia Three and Seagreen1A, these sit in our pre-backlog along with Hailong in Taiwan. In addition, we have a number of prospects that should mature in 2023 in the U.S., U.K. and Europe. Order flow in this industry remains lumpy, often subject to slow government processes, it's clear that the underlying demand is strong, we are confident that this market will drive strong revenue growth in long term with improved project returns. To wrap up, we'll turn to our final slide on page 21. In Subsea, we have a well-developed strategy that is delivering, we are solidifying our position for the future. A strong backlog supports our confidence in the outlook for the continued revenue growth and recovery in margins back to through cycle levels.
In Wind, we are poised for a long-term market growth with a rebalance risk and reward that should drive improved profitability. Our own new build program, in combination with our collaboration with Saipem on a job-by-job basis, should open up new opportunities in this evolving market. Finally, management's confidence in the future cash flow generation of the group is shared by the board, which has proposed a dividend of 4 NOK per share for a total return of approximately $110 million. With that, we'll be happy to take your questions.
Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, you can please press star one and one again. Once again, it's star one and one to register your question and wait for your name to be announced. We are now going to proceed with our first question. The question comes from line of Guillaume Delaby from SG CIB. Please ask your question.
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for taking my question. I'm going to start with highly politically incorrect question. We all agree about the outlook for demand. I would like to speak a little bit more about supply, because historically speaking, on the Subsea space, we used to have, let's say, a highly oligopolistic market with three players, Saipem, TechnipFMC and yourself. On the one hand, there is now a commercial agreement between Seaway7 and Saipem. Saipem has an agreement for its fleet with TechnipFMC, and you are increasing your stake in Seaway7. My question is it fair to say that this oligopoly is even more oligopolistic than before? This is probably further good news for pricing.
I would like maybe to have your comments about the supply for both fixed offshore wind and for Subsea. Thank you.
Okay. I think, you know, we've been in this industry for many decades, and so have many of our competitors been there. We also need to remember that McDermott have been a competitor for decades and continue to be a competitor in the Subsea space as well. I think that, as we've discussed with our shareholders and the clients that follow us over the years, we have seen a number of the smaller players fall out through the last industry shakedown. I still think that there is a fair supply capacity in the industry. Again, what we're seeing is a number of our clients do want to secure their capability in terms of assets and people at the right time in the cycle.
We're seeing projects being awarded earlier than they would have been two or three years ago, and we are seeing the margins improve. In Wind, as we discussed previously, there are plenty of players in the Wind sector, and it is supplied by many tier one players there, the large four dredgers along with Heerema, ourselves and Saipem. Saipem and ourselves are only coming together on a job-by-job basis for some of the very larger projects where the combination of the two capabilities is good and also from a risk-sharing viewpoint. Some of these larger projects need risk-sharing between big contractors coming together. I think the supply side on both markets has a reasonable supply side at the moment. The question is the timing at which the industry picks up its work and when that's awarded.
At the moment, I think we see two very different markets. Wind, with a number of big players. The subsea, there are four players in subsea, always have been, ourselves, TechnipFMC, Subsea7, and Allseas. There continues to be four big players that continue to bid these projects. That's how I would recap the market at the moment. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Very useful. I turn it over.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The question has come from the line of James Thompson from JP Morgan. Please ask your question.
Okay. Good morning, gents. Thanks very much for the presentation so far. A couple of questions from me. Firstly, John, I mean, escalations have obviously been a very significant contributor to order intake this year. You know, obviously pricing of materials and things like that have obviously gone in the way that it means that those contexts do need to be varied. Could you maybe talk a little bit about risk of reversal of any of that in 2023? Obviously, you know, the big tailwind, can that become a bit of a headwind to order intake with fuel costs going down and things like that? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the escalation piece first.
Yeah, James. Yeah, as we've discussed, we have a way of trying to pass risks that we can't control back to our clients through some escalation mechanisms. We have some open book mechanisms with our clients' fuel, for example. We have mechanisms that can take fuel up and down. And those mechanisms work both ways. Yes, we show $1.8 billion of escalations this year through our books. And yes, they will go up and they will go down as the markets that we seek in protection also go up and go down. I view that as a very positive process. Our industry is about allocating risk to the right people that can take the risks. For us, we want to mitigate that risk.
I would not bank on such a high level of escalations always coming through, year-on-year. Those mechanisms are working as they were designed.
Okay, thanks. Second question is, I mean, obviously this morning you announced that you're kind of taking back in-house Seaway7. I was wondering if you could maybe sort of reflect on some of the sort of decisions you made over in terms of OHT, Seaway7 over the past couple of years, because it feels like maybe, you know, in another world perhaps could have maybe tread a little bit more slowly in terms of the renewables build-out. You know, I just wondered if you could sort of reflect on how that's gone so far, and then how that's shaping your thinking for taking the business back in-house and sort of maybe positioning it more towards 2025, which I guess is always gonna be the sort of inflection year in offshore wind.
Yeah. I think two things to think about here. We are very, very clear, and I think the world is very, very clear that offshore wind will be a very, very major part of the energy supply position for the future. The question is the timing at which that comes together. When we initially did the Seaway7 OHT transaction, it was around quite quickly being able to put that business onto the main Oslo Børs and to create a free float. As we've seen in the last couple of years, the whole industry, be it ourselves, be it our peers in our sector, or be it the turbine manufacturer, even some of the developers, have seen that there are challenges in the growth of that industry. The explosive speed of that growth has also brought many challenges.
We believe in the long term that there is very much a role for companies like Seaway7, supported by Subsea7 as a parent, to really make its mark in that space. For us, it was about a timing question. We reflected on the fact that our view of creating a free float, that is a material free float in our business, was not gonna happen in the next one or two years as far as we could see. Bringing the business back inside Subsea7 was a good move. How the market was valuing the remaining stock, we believe undervalued Seaway7's earning capacity in the future.
For us, we decided to make the offers that we made to bring it back into the business and let it grow and let it get its good years in the market as part of a fully owned Subsea7 business.
Okay. Thanks so much. Just maybe finally me, from me, could you maybe give us an update in terms of your thoughts on timing of conversion of some of the pre-backlog stuff for Seaway7? Obviously, coverage is relatively light, but there's a lot of orders, you know, in hand. It'd be good to just get a feel for, you know, do you have expectations in this quarter or next quarter, or just some guidance there about when we might see some conversion. Thanks.
Yeah. As I said in my prepared remarks, one of the challenges in renewables, it's also subject to a number of regulatory and governmental influences. I think it's fair to say that in the U.K., the CFD round last year that generated the opportunities for these projects to go to sanction has seen some quite heavy squeezes. The cost of money for our developers has gone up. We have some protection mechanisms about what is the true cost of materials, but also pass cost increases through. Our clients are going through those processes now as to how they sanction those projects. We would expect to see some progress on those in the first half of this year.
Okay, great. thanks. And thanks for providing the medium term guidance as well on margin. That's helpful. I'll hand over there. Cheers.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The question comes from the line of Haakon Amundsen from ABG. Please ask your question.
Yes. Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. I have a question on the medium-term investments that you may conduct on. I was just wondering on the two segments. First of all, how will you address the possible tight market on the Subsea and conventional side? Do you expect to potentially resolve that through leasing of vessels or available vessels in the market today? Would you ever consider a kind of growth investments in Subsea and conventional? That's my first question. On renewables, when you complete the current new build program, do you expect to invest in new vessels in the medium term? Thank you.
Haakon, thanks for the questions. We normally attach a fleet listing at the back of these earnings release, you'll see that there are four more leased vessels in our fleet compared to where we were last year. We have chartered Jones Act compliant vessels to make sure we have the capacity of those jacked vessels to support our activities in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as a lighter/medium construction vessel also coming into the fleet. For ourselves, we continue to have the model that we've used for many years here is, which is to own the enabling assets and to charter then in the market the other additional tonnage that we need to bring.
That is the way I think we will see our oil and gas business continue to move over the next few years. In renewables, we have a plan to finish off the Ventus and the Alfa Lift, and then we have a plan to make sure that that business returns money to its shareholders and shows to us that the commitment that we're making can return into more, more returns for shareholders. Our view at the moment is that we have no near-term plans to either, on the oil and gas side or the renewables side, to continue to invest in the medium term. We talked previously that our priority is to look at shareholder returns and making returns to our shareholders in hopefully the good years they'll come out in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Okay, thank you. That's very clear. That's it for me.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The question's come from the line of Nikhil Gupta from Citi. Please ask your question.
Hi. My question is around the medium-term guidance on 15%-20%. One is, you know, how should we expect that level to reach in, you know, 2024, 2025 or beyond that? Secondly, does this include, you know, is it a combined guidance for including offshore wind projects as well, or just subsea?
The guidance is for the group. We would expect to be towards the higher end of that guidance by 2025. We're going up sequentially year-on-year. As I said in my prepared remarks, we've got some better margin work coming in through the more recent work, but we've also got to liquidate a lot of work that we took a couple of years ago when margins were tighter.
Okay, thanks. Just a follow-up on the order intake. I mean, is it prudent to assume like the 2023 to 2025 intake, you know, would remain around the 2022 levels, higher levels in the near term, or?
I think it's important to remember that 2022 had the Norwegian effect, which we've been guiding the market for 18 months, which is that every project that put its PDO paperwork into the government by the 31st of December had the benefit of a tax break. We won't be seeing that repeating. I do expect the rest of the market to respond reasonably well. I think we need to recognize that there was quite a surge in queue pull, which we certainly got our share of, and we're very, very pleased to have got that share. That will not repeat on an ongoing basis.
I think the Norwegian government have been very clear that it was a one-off initiative that they had made to support the industry primarily through COVID initiative, but that will not repeat.
understood. Thank you. I'll turn it over.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The next question's come from the line of James Winchester from Bank of America. Please ask your question.
Afternoon, guys. Just a quick two from me, if that's okay. On your 2023 EBITDA guidance, is there any change from your comments from last quarter relating to kind of being happy with the kind of $650 million ballpark, or is anything kind of incrementally better or worse from that? Following on from that, could you just provide a kind of an EBITDA to free cash flow bridge for 2023? Just kind of primarily interested in the working capital number because you haven't had the build that you expected. Is that because better terms elsewhere or is it kind of pushed into 2023? Sorry, just kind of adding on that, can you provide some color on the lease payments as well? Thank you.
Hi, James. This is Mark. In terms of your first question on the EBITDA guidance, we publish consensus on our website, as you know.
We're comfortable with consensus. If we weren't, we'd be obliged to come to market and say so. In terms of EBITDA free cash flow, John and I have been consistent now over several quarters, talking around the cash consumption, activities that we have in 2023. 2 of those impact on free cash flow. The, the first is the movement of what we expected to be the working capital build in 2022 into 2023, and similarly, the investment in the business, notably on the Seaway Alfa Lift and the Seaway Ventus. Those will weigh heavily on free cash flow in this year. Hopefully that answers your question.
Just on the lease payments, are we gonna see an uptick there, or should we kind of keep it constant? Thank you.
In terms of working capital? Our lease payments...
Just from lease.
Yeah. Lease payments don't form part of free cash flow, as you know, James. The lease payments will be slightly higher than those experienced in 2022.
Brilliant. Thank you very much.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The question's come from the line of Christopher Mollerlokken from SpareBank 1 Markets. Please ask your question.
Yes, good afternoon, gentlemen. In terms of the contract terms you are experiencing, you're quite vocal that pricing and margins have improved. Can you give some more flavor on how other contract terms have developed in terms of payment schedules, risk sharing, et cetera, with regards to you and your clients? Thank you.
Hi, Christophe. Yes. The way that we talk about the order intake in terms of quality is threefold. Firstly, we are seeing gradual improvements in pricing. However, as you note, it would be remiss not to overlook the better risk allocation that we've been able to negotiate with our clients as a result of the market becoming tighter. Clearly that's an often overlooked driver that we can leverage as the positioning of ourselves with respect to the clients in the market improves. Recently, at the downturn of the market, we ceded certain payment terms. We aim to have cash neutrality or cash positivity during the lifecycle of the project. What we're seeing now as the pendulum swings from the client back in favor of the contractor, we're able to improve the payment conditions.
Notably, that is larger milestones sooner in the lifecycle of the project, which contributes to an overall cash profile which is superior to what we've seen in the recent past.
Thank you. In terms of the geographical exposure in Subsea7, of course you're a global player, but in my view three key markets remain Norway, U.K., and Brazil. With the Norway activity now being record high due to the tax incentives that were introduced during COVID. U.K. Recently introducing a new tax on the E&P industry. Petrobras being hammered after the political election in Brazil last year. Do you see that your clients are skewing more towards Norway and other geographies versus U.K. and Brazil?
Well, first of all, I think, we try in Subsea and have a reasonably good balance of work. We do about half the work in the U.S., Gulf of Mexico, and in the Caribbean. We do about half. We are strong in Brazil. We're very strong in Norway. We have a good spread. We are strong in Australia. Africa, when it responds, we are there as well. Again, for us, we're very comfortable with a spread, and it's quite a deliberate spread of clients and geographies that we have to allow us to grow our business and adapt as the opportunities arise. We then look at wind then. That's primarily a German, Dutch, British, American business there as well.
In terms of each country, I think I've given my comments on Norway. You know, Norway is a very important market, always has been for us. I think we are very pleased with the share of that market picked up. Brazil, whichever way the political changes occur, the oil and gas industry in Brazil is absolutely fundamental to that country's success. The machine that is Petrobras keeps working and keeps moving and keeps adapting. It has its moments, but it continues directionally towards where it's at. As you can see on that list of tenders and projects, they are there. They have been bid, and they are available to us to go and deliver. The one market I would say that is not responding well at the moment is the U.K.
The U.K. has had two hits. It has struggled with the windfall tax in oil and gas and also windfall tax and a lot of issues with planning and grid connections in the wind sector. It's one of our markets where we are watching from a viewpoint that there is a number of things that need fixing in that market for it to come back to the strength that it was. We are comfortable that Turkey and Guyana and other new markets are very much backfilling that need. The U.K. teams are working on international projects for us.
It's a change from where we've been, and that's the only month that I would call out as being one where influences outside the general price of oil and the price of electricity are having an influence.
Thank you.
We are now going to take our next question. That question comes from the line of Mark Wilson from Jefferies. Please ask your question.
Thank you. Good morning. First question, just a follow on from previously, someone asked about the 15%-20% EBITDA guidance, and you said you expect to be at the higher end of that range by 2025. Could you just confirm, John, what the offshore wind margin expectations are within that? Now you're taking Seaway back in-house, are we still looking at a 10% margin on $1 billion of sales?
Mark, we gave that number as a group number, and that's how I'd like to leave it for today.
Okay, very good. The second question is, could you just help me out on the math regarding one of your projects, big offshore wind one, the Dogger Bank. You've done 17 foundations and started offshore works in July and stood down the Strashnov for winter in December. That's four or five months, and you've done 17 foundations. If I extrapolate that forward, you can see where that project timeline looks. Could you explain what I'm missing on that simple math there, please?
All our projects work on cost on cost. Percentage of completion is how we account for all our projects. You take the total cost of the total project, and then you work out how much cost you've incurred to date, and then you work it back through. We've had all the project management, the engineering, marshaling yards, the mobilization of the vessel, the start of the work, et cetera, that goes with it. All that has been put into the PoC calculation, and that's where we're at the moment in terms of where we will be. Generally then, the next phase of this project, the vast bulk of putting in the piles will achieve up to something like 95% of the PoC. That's how all our projects work.
It's the way the accounting rules require us to measure our projects, and so it's been through the auditors and stuff. Yeah, we'll be back out again in April, and we'll continue a full season of work with Strashnov this year, and that's how we will look at it aimed in.
Thank you. I mean, it wasn't actually the accounting I was asking about, the 33%. It's actually the time, John. I'm just, you know, 17 foundations in since July and you're back out in April. I just wondered how long that project's expected to take.
We did it, we did it in two parts. We brought a third party asset in for less than a month to do part of it, and then we came in at the end of Hollandse Kust and did some work before the winter season closed down. That's how we achieved 17. When we get the full run of it, if you look at Hollandse Kust, we did over 100 monopiles last with the Strashnov once we got bedded down and started. Again, we expect to see very similar performance coming through the season this year.
Okay, very good. Thank you.
We are now going to proceed with our next question. The questions come from the line of Daniel Thomson from BNP Paribas Exane. Please ask your question.
Hi, good afternoon. Two from me, please. Firstly, on the outlook you provided, the 15%-20% EBITDA, I was just wondering, are you assuming that leading edge pricing stays roughly where it is today? Or do you factor in some level of pricing improvement into that outlook? Secondly, you know, given there are many more opportunities to tender in oil, in your oil and gas market today, should we expect any change in the mix of work you're targeting between SURF and conventional? Or is that more just a function based on your vessel capabilities in these markets? Thanks.
Yeah, Daniel, the way we talk about our business is incrementally project by project as capacity gets taken out of the market, whether it's ours or our competitors, allows us to price the next portion of work generally better per season per individual year that we work in those key markets. For us, it's an incremental change. It's not a huge step change that we see, and it's very much done on where do we think the pricing can absorb in each market. We still will continue to seek improvements, but also we have some very smart buyers here that will keep the oil in the ground if they think the pricing gets too high and the economics doesn't work for them.
We've seen one or two projects go through that recycling, as our clients call them, where they take it back in again to see whether they found the right way to develop that particular field or the timing at which they do that. In terms of the opportunities for the mix of work, I guess the one area that I would call out is the conventional work in the Middle East was very, very quiet during COVID. COVID had a distinct impact on spending with Saudi Aramco, spending in Qatar. We have certainly seen the messaging back from the key Middle East clients that they are back to spending. I referred in my prepared remarks to the long-term agreement.
We have an activity agreement with Saudi Aramco. I can see that our conventional work will pick back up again and bring profitability back in. For us, the key aim is to work our key SURF assets in certain geographies and maximize the number of days they're working and minimize the number of days they're transiting. That's our objectives in the two different markets. As I said to an earlier question, we have brought in four chartered assets into the fleet to again free up our enabling assets to do exactly what they're designed to do, which are enablers at the very top end, which again allows us to bring more capacity into the industry for us as well.
Okay. Thank you.
We have no further questions at this time. I would now like to hand the conference back to John for closing remarks. Thank you.
Well, thank you very much for joining us here today. We know it's a very busy day with a lot of other companies reporting. We look forward to talking to you soon when our Q1 results come out in a few weeks' time. All the best. Thank you. Bye.
Bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you.