Good afternoon, and welcome to TGS Capital Markets Day. My name is Bård Stenberg, responsible for Investor Relations in TGS. Before we start, I would like to give some practical information for those of you present here in Oslo. I would like to inform you about the emergency exit, which is the same way as you entered the building. There is not any drills planned, so if the alarm is sounded, please evacuate immediately. I would also like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements showing on the screen and available in today's presentation, so please study that carefully. Today's presentation team comprises of our Chairman of the Board, Chris Finlayson; Kristian Johansen, CEO; Sven Børre Larsen, CFO; Kristin Omreng, EVP People and Culture; and Carel Hooijkaas, EVP, New Energy Solutions.
Today's agenda is showing on the screen, and Chris, he will start with an introduction. Then Kristian will give you the state of the market and our position, and then we will follow on with the TGS strategic priorities. And then Carel Hooijkaas will continue with the priorities for resilience, and Kristin Omreng will address the knowledge aspect. She will also continue on with an integration update, and then Sven Børre Larsen will do the financial strategy. At the end, Kristian will do a summary, and then we will open up for questions. So, the people on the webcast can type in questions while we present, and we will address those along with the questions from the people in Oslo after management's concluding remarks. So with that, I give the floor to you, Chris, for your introduction.
Thank you. Oh, good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to add my welcome to this Capital Markets Day, and in particular, I'd like to thank you all for coming today in the midst of what is a busy season of conferences and the like. As you're aware, we successfully completed our game-changing acquisition of PGS on the 1st of July. This has established TGS as the undisputed industry leader in terms of its range of services, its technologies available, and its geographical spread, as we saw Kristian talking on the video there. Today, we want to share our strategies for translating this into shareholder value, realizing the many strengths of the new, new TGS, and achieving our ambition of being the world's leading energy data company. Today's presentation will be led by Kristian, supported, as we've seen, by members of his management team.
However, I would like to open with some context and some observations about our direction, our aspirations as a board on behalf of our shareholders. Now, I would identify two critical success factors which have driven TGS's progress over the last decade. One has been our success in acquisition-led growth, frankly, something at which most fail. This means success in identifying the right targets, moving at the right time, paying the right price, and having the financial capability to execute rapidly. Then, success at integrating the newly acquired companies, realizing promised synergies rapidly, retaining top talent, and maintaining TGS's inclusive but performance-driven culture, which I view as a pretty unique blend of Norwegian and American values. I'll give you two examples. Firstly, our acquisition of ION, fully paid for within twelve months from Multi-Client sales alone, and additionally giving us enhanced technologies in acquisition and processing capabilities.
Secondly, our acquisition of Magseis took us from having no position in ocean-bottom node technology, which is of course, the fastest growing seismic segment, to being the industry leader with strong technical and operational capabilities and a very healthy order book. Now, of course, we look to an exciting future, getting the best out of the PGS takeover. Today, you'll hear presentations from leaders with TGS, PGS, and Magseis heritages, all now driving the strategy of the merged company. This successful acquisition strategy has only been possible thanks to the robust financial position that the company has maintained over the years, almost unique amongst oil service companies. This financial resilience means TGS has paid dividends continuously for fourteen years through the economic cycles that the industry has encountered. It's allowed us to move countercyclically and acquire at the right time for the right value.
It is very much the view of the board that financial robustness remains a critical success factor for the future. We are 100% committed to prioritizing reducing debt levels, leading to lower borrowing costs and more financial flexibility. Indeed, the improved financial position of the merged company will, of itself, lead to reductions in the cost of debt servicing and give the opportunity to utilize significant inherited tax losses. As soon as possible, our ambition is to enhance shareholder returns through a combination of improved dividends and share buybacks, and Sven Børre will be taking you through our financial plans. Once we've achieved our aspirations in terms of financial robustness and shareholder returns, we will seek to grow, both in our traditional business and in the New Energy space. We don't want a token New Energy business. We certainly don't want greenwashing.
We want to grow new and profitable business areas, which can really add to the bottom line, even of a two and a half billion dollar or more company. You'll be hearing more from Carel of our impressive progress and future plans in this area. We'll complete our integration and realize additional synergies rapidly, effectively, and at minimum cost. As I've said, I see this as a core skill of TGS, and Kristin will be telling you more about our progress. As an example, all our office integrations will be completed within six months of closing, allowing us to operate as a single team with duplicate locations eliminated and surplus property ready to be realized, released rather.
Detailed preparation and effective processes will mean that staff, staff rationalization and the savings that go with it, will be completed on a similar timeframe by the end of this year, allowing the organization to focus solely on the future. Clearly, one thing that has changed with first the Magseis acquisition and now the PGS acquisition, is our move from being an asset-light company to one with significant owned assets. As you can imagine, this is something that we have debated extensively as a board. We have come to a clear view that the changes in the marketplace have made this not just acceptable, but absolutely essential. Consolidation, both in our customer base and amongst our suppliers, means that to maintain our success, we need to be present across the value chain, including guaranteed access to streamer acquisition vessels at competitive rates.
As a result of the PGS merger, we have acquired top-quality assets for a great price. These will be an additional source of revenue and profit in a highly consolidated market. We will ensure that the necessary expertise to run these assets in a safe and efficient way will be maintained. We will also apply TGS's historic financial discipline to these new areas of the business. Kristian has chosen a great leadership team to support him and to realize the value growth I am confident TGS can achieve. Our determination is to be financially robust and investable through the cycle, to enhance shareholder returns, and still have the capacity to pursue further growth opportunities. On a personal note, I have invested in this company because I believe it has an exciting and profitable growth story ahead of it.
With that, I'll hand over to Kristian and his team to take you through their plans.
Thank you, Chris, and thank you for a good introduction and nice words. Welcome, everybody, to this session. I'm super excited to be here and present to all of you. I actually got here late last night from Houston, and I don't say that because it should be a disclaimer to the fact that I have a major jet lag and may fall asleep. But the reason why I say it is that I came from a big industry conference, which is called IMAGE. It's the biggest seismic conference in the world. It happens once every year in Houston.
The reason why I want to look back on that is that for the first time ever, and I've been with this company for 14 years, I feel like we can sit there and meet with our clients and address every single need they have in terms of their exploration ambitions. That has not always been the case, but I left five meetings with five of our biggest clients, and I feel every time the needs are different. One company wants to pursue a long-term agreement on the OBN side. Another company would like to address some streamer challenges that they may have in Africa. Third company wants to do a look into a library subscription, for example. Fourth company has some interest in the New Energy space, and they've heard that TGS have offerings in that, in that space as well.
And the fifth company may be interested in either imaging software, that we have now started to license, or having TGS to IMAGE or re-image their major databases. So again, in every single meeting, I felt like we had products and services that we could be proud to supply to these clients at the best possible quality and service. I'm gonna go through the status of the market and TGS position in that market, and I'm gonna start with a slide that you guys are all very familiar to, and it shows on the right-hand side. It shows the oil and gas supply until 2023 . Then it shows the estimated production from current producing fields. As you see, the decline rate is very high, and it's very high for the next decade or so. And then it shows three different estimates for demand.
It shows OPEC, which continues to grow in the same trend line as you've seen for the past few decades. You see Exxon, and this is not updated with Exxon's long-term energy outlook or new, long-term energy outlook that was, posted on Monday, which is even more optimistic, actually. And then it shows the IEA STEPS scenario, which is the most conservative in terms of where is demand going for oil and gas in the future. In every single alternative, you see that there is a huge gap to be closed over the next decades. And it's interesting to look back on Exxon, and I have huge respect for Exxon, both as a client but also as a one that has been really good at predicting the market for decades.
If you look at the long-term energy outlook of Exxon that they released on Monday, what they're saying is that the demand for oil in 2050 is gonna be 2% higher than today. It's not gonna be 20% lower. It's not gonna be no need for oil. It's actually gonna be 2% higher in 2050. That's a long time, and I think most of us are probably not gonna be here in 2050, but our kids are probably gonna be here, and it means that TGS is also gonna be here. For gas, their outlook is 20, it's gonna be 21% higher in 2050 than what it is today.
In terms of the overall energy mix, we all know that oil and gas represents about 56% of the energy mix today. Exxon says that's gonna drop to 54%, but again, the cake is bigger, so we will see continued growth in a market that three years ago, in 2021, IEA came out with a report and said there is no more exploration needed. Probably the toughest day of my life, but fortunately, they were wrong, and fortunately, things are looking far better today. I think that goes back to the ONS conference last week. I wasn't there, but I read a lot of newspaper articles. I talked to a lot of people who've been there, and I think the whole atmosphere has changed significantly. I think people are getting more fact-based.
People understand that this is gonna continue to be a major part of the energy mix going forward, and the focus is on how can we make sure that we add additional energy sources to limit the growth of oil and gas and limit emissions of oil and gas? And how can we come up with economically feasible ways to reduce emissions from oil and gas? In that regard, it was great to read the Aker BP report in terms of, you know, how Norway can play a role, not by cutting production, but actually increasing production on behalf of other countries who have significantly higher emissions than what we have in Norway. It's also interesting if you go back on the left-hand side and you look at the trend line of...
We're talking about a 50-year history here, and the fact is that COVID was just a little dip. We're back to growth again. We're back to a level that is higher than pre-COVID, and if you draw a straight line, whether you do it on oil or you do it on gas, you see that we're back at the same trend as we used to be, and what Exxon is saying is that that trend is gonna continue. What does that mean? Well, if you look on the right-hand side, you look at the reserve life of major IOCs, and you see pretty much the opposite trend. For oil, it's actually getting quite dramatic. It's dropping from thirteen years to nine years on average, in the matter of ten years.
It's actually reduced by four years over a 10-year period, meaning that we only replace about 40% of what we find. That is something our clients will have to take into consideration. They will have to take this seriously, and it's really interesting. Obviously, we have a breakdown of who are these companies and what's their average lifetime, and we actually see some correlation between the interest they have in exploring and the average reserve life. There is no secret who's at the bottom of this list, and that company is being very vocal now about, you know, doing more exploration and how important exploration is. And of course, if you're down to six and a half or seven years, you have a major issue. The good thing is that Wall Street has also started to realize that.
If you go back five years, every time Hess announced a new discovery in Guyana, their share price dropped 5%, and it dropped 5% because more oil means that more CapEx is needed to develop and get that oil into production. When Galp announced a discovery in Namibia quite recently, their share price went up 23%. So Wall Street has also changed in terms of how they look at exploration, and I think our clients need to look at that, and they gonna be under severe pressure to increase exploration. What they've done so far is that they've done a lot of M&A. So in 2023, there were about $200 billion worth of M&A transactions in E&P. That's probably gonna keep continue, but it doesn't solve a big issue, it just solve your own issue.
So that's important points to take from this first slide. I'm also gonna talk about the energy macro trends. You know, what do we see today, and what do we gonna see over the next few years? And partly to explain the quite aggressive consolidation and diversification strategy that TGS has carried out over the past few years. So if you start on the left hand with the oil and gas industry, increased recovery rate, near field exploration, and reduced cycle time, that's really been the focus, and this didn't happen overnight. This has been the case over the past five years or so, and obviously, as a result of that, we see more demand for 4D, which was addressed with the acquisition of Magseis. We see more near field exploration.
So 10 years ago, 70% of our business was frontier, 30% of the business was mature. Now, it's flipped. The cake is getting smaller too, but it's flipped, and we still see significant opportunities in near-field exploration, and frontier will eventually have to come back if you believe what I presented on the previous slide. Significant M&A activity, I've already covered that, and then we see a gradual increase in exploration spending. Not enough, and again, if I go back to the previous slide, it should and will have to be significantly higher. But for now, at least we see trends in a positive direction, and that's what we hear from our clients as well. If you look at the seismic industry, again, most activity in mature basins switched from 30/70 to 70/30 over a 10-year period. Continued Multi-Client investment opportunities, absolutely.
In this market, I think, if you go back 10 years, you could basically go out anywhere, which was called frontier and had a petroleum system, and you would see demand for your data. Today, our clients are much more selective, but there are still pockets of growth, and it's still extremely important for a company like TGS to, at any point, make sure that we are represented in the pockets of growth. The best starting point to find those pockets of growth is to have the existing data, and we have data all over the world. In fact, we've invested $4 billion in seismic data over the past eight years. That represents about 62%-65% of the overall global market. That's what we have in terms of data. That's a huge advantage when you're gonna find the next basin.
Number three is that we see a significant consolidation of the seismic vessel supply market. For those of you who have been in this industry for some time, you remember back in 2013, there were about 65 vessels. The 65 vessels were owned by seven or eight different companies. Today, there's 15-17 vessels owned by two companies. So Shearwater and TGS control this market in many ways. That's just happened to be the case because a lot of the different players who've been participating in the vessel market are not there for obvious financial reasons. If you look at the New Energy industry, and Carel is gonna talk more about that today, but energy evolution, or I like to call it energy addition, drives new data needs. There is no question about that.
If you look at the maturity of these industries in terms of data knowledge and data needs compared to oil and gas, and we're still at a very, very early case. Our intention is to be part of that growth story. We've actually grown our revenues in the New Energy space from $7 million- $70 million since 2021, and that's gonna continue to grow at double-digit percentages, which means that this is gonna be a sizable business for TGS going forward. These companies are also focused on providing secure, affordable, and sustainable energy, and that's obviously doesn't go for new energies only, it goes just as much for oil and gas in the future.
But again, the bottom line there, and what we are gonna make sure that you leave with today, is that there are significant growth opportunities in these markets because data is just as important for an offshore wind, a solar, a deep sea mineral, or a CCS company, like it is for oil and gas. I'm gonna take you through, on the next slide, the journey that we've been through since 2020. And I'm gonna start with how TGS looked back in 2020. And I think most of you were here, most of you were following TGS at the time. I was definitely here, so I know the story quite well. But in 2020, we were the number one Multi-Client company in the world, but we were pretty much tied with three other companies who had strong offerings in the Multi-Client space.
And then in imaging, we pretty much spent all our imaging resources on imaging and re-imaging our Multi-Client products. So we didn't really have a lot of proprietary revenues in that regard. So we were not really seen as an external imaging provider back in 2020. 95% of what we did was internal work. And then for new energies, yeah, we were kind of dipping our toes into the CCS market just by selling data or licensing data that we already had acquired for oil and gas purposes. But again, a company that was not very well diversified, very successful because we were riding the cycles of frontier, we were riding the cycles of being asset light in a market that had multiple opportunities in terms of sourcing assets whenever you needed it, to very favorable economics. So what happened since then?
Number one, we were hit by COVID in March 2020. I think, going back to that IEA report, it obviously made us a little bit nervous about putting all eggs in one basket, and that basket was oil and gas, and we did a deep dive into the renewable markets. It didn't take us long to realize that this market is also based on subsurface data. Whether you do offshore wind and do those major offshore installations for offshore wind, or you do CCS, or you do deep sea minerals, or you do geothermal, what you need is deep subsurface data and subsurface knowledge, and that's what we have. What we did is that we made an acquisition of a company called 4C Offshore.
4C Offshore is an offshore wind market intelligence company, and the question at the time was: Why do you buy a market intelligence company when subsurface data is your core competence? Well, because our core competence was subsurface, but nobody knew about TGS, and nobody knew that our core competence was subsurface data. So what is then better than going out and buying a market intelligence company who's got two thousand subscribers, and you get your name out there? And that's been a very successful strategy, which means that a company that was basically used to have 25 clients in oil and gas, all of a sudden had access to thousands of clients in the offshore wind space. So that's been a good strategy, a great company. It improved.
As you see, we added a cake to the pie New Energy Solutions, and it's been a company that has grown rapidly in line with our business case when we acquired them at the time, and with good margins, and that's gonna be the future as well for 4C. Then we realized that we did have, not have any offerings for solar. So if you wanted to be fully diversified through the New Energy space, you also needed to have an offering in solar. Prediktor gave us a foothold into the solar market. They're doing asset management solutions for solar, but not only for solar, because the biggest client at the time was Scatec. But they also have Equinor, they have Aker BP, they have a lot of traditional energy companies on the client list, and what they do for them is asset management on big installations offshore.
Huge potential in terms of growing that to other clients or existing clients of, of TGS. And of course, the second growth engine here is gonna be the solar market. That is the fastest growing New Energy market today. Prediktor is based in Fredrikstad, has about 35-40 employees, very highly educated science people. And again, we have already contracts with a lot of our traditional oil and gas clients, in addition to solar-based companies. And the software is installed at, I think, 3 out of the 5 largest solar parks in the world. In 2022, we also acquired ION. ION was probably a more opportunistic acquisition. ION was a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that went into some financial difficulties.
I think I don't disclose too much by saying this is the best acquisition we've ever done. Chris said it in his intro, we got our money back in 12 months. I think the actual answer is nine months, but, gotta be careful, we don't wanna make the sellers feel bad, but it was a really good acquisition. I think what is important with ION, yes, it gave us a Multi-Client business that we returned our money very quickly on. But it actually did more than that. Number one, it improved our imaging reputation and our overall offering in imaging, and in fact, last week, we signed a relatively large contract, software contract with one of the super majors, who's now gonna use the former ION software for all of their own internal imaging needs. The contract is so much more than just a, a software license.
The contract also allows the two parties, so TGS and the super major, to work together on developing the next algorithms and really do R&D together as a joint team. So again, that's probably the highlight of the ION acquisition, on top of the fact that it was financially a very good return in a short period of time. Multi-Client business of ION was about 20% of TGS in terms of the size of the overall library, so has huge potential going forward, and we got this for basically pennies on the dollars. Then after ION, we did Magseis Fairfield, and you see that Magseis Fairfield is a transitional acquisition for TGS. It adds a completely new pie to our service offering.
What we saw at the time is that this trend of going from frontier and closer to infrastructure, including the reservoir, of course, was happening very fast, and we saw that the OBN market for the future is gonna be the fastest growing segment of seismic, and we need to have some kind of access or control over that market. The acquisition of Magseis was perfect in terms of timing. I think it was a win-win for both parties. Magseis got access to a stronger balance sheet, got access to a couple of super majors that TGS was already very close to, and it's been a great success, no question about that. You see, obviously, Magseis added a big pie on the OBN side, where we have about 40% market share in the deepwater market.
In addition to that, we also added technologies that are being newly used by Carel and his team in new energies today, so a great strategic move so far, and we're two years into this. It's developed probably better than we expected at the time, and then the big game changer, of course, or another big game changer is PGS, and you clearly see from this slide that PGS adds another dimension to our business. It adds streamer capacity, and a lot of you would say, "But do you really need streamer capacity? Utilization has been pretty low," well, the fact is that there are two players in that market. The fact is that pricing is really good.
The fact is that being on the outside of that market and paying for those services would be rather expensive for TGS, and I'll give you a great example of that in a few minutes. So PGS obviously covers a 3D streamer side, covers a Multi-Client side. I mean, it's a great performing data library that has returns above 2X over a long period of time. It's got a strong imaging base and of course, new energies on top of that, which fits very well into the overall picture. So the summary of that is basically a company that is fully integrated and who can certainly say that we are best in class or very close to the best in every single segment of the industry we're playing.
So that's a reason for my opening statement, where I sit there and meet with five of our biggest clients, and we feel like we can help them with any need that they have, rather than having them go into the room next door. Another way to look at that would be to split up the different businesses we have. Multi-Client, of course, clear market leader. As I said, we've invested $4 billion over the past eight years, 62%-65% of the total global investments in Multi-Client carried out by this company, and obviously the companies that used to be under different ownership, but is now controlled by TGS. On the streamer acquisition, again, no secret, we've been using PGS a lot. We've talked to a lot of our clients.
Obviously, some of these clients we've been using PGS for acquisition in partnership, and then we're facing the clients, and we get best first-hand information about the quality of the GeoStreamer, and it's really, really good. No question about that. When you talk to ten of our largest customers and ask them, "Who do you prefer to do business with?" We score really well, and that was part of the due diligence that we already did for many, many years before we acquired PGS. On the OBN side, again, the acquisition of Magseis leads us to a strong position in that market. I've covered the imaging side as well, but I think the combination we have now, where we get much more scale, particularly relative to some of our suppliers of cloud compute, gives great synergies in that regard.
The New Energy side, I'm not gonna steal the thunder from Carel, so he's gonna get his ten or fifteen minutes to talk about that. Then you may ask yourself: Okay, but how does that work in reality? You know, yeah, there's a lot of nice words about how good it is to be fully integrated, and you cover every single part of the value chain, but how does that work in practice? The way it works can be very well illustrated by a contract that we announced last week. It's called PAMA 3D. It's in Brazil, and this is the first time we get the opportunity to leverage the fully integrated model. First of all, the project is huge.
We're talking about close to 20,000 sq km, and we have a total permitted area of 55,000 sq km, meaning that TGS could be playing in this basin for many years. We could use one vessel if we want, we can use two, we can even use three vessels if we have to, and if the market allows us to do that. We manage the project from A to Z, meaning that we do everything. We got the permit, we're shooting the Multi-Client, of course, we're developing the survey design, we're acquiring the data with a PGS vessel, we're doing imaging in-house, we're doing data management, and we finally sell the data. I wanna give you a comparison because a year and a half ago, we did a similar survey.
It was about half the size, and at that time, we didn't have a fully integrated model, so we ended up with a Multi-Client. We had to partner 50/50. On the 3D acquisition, we had to use a third-party vendor, who probably made their 20%-25% profit on the project. We had to use a third party on imaging as well. Data management, we did as a consortium, and sales we did together. Now, we're doing everything from A to Z. And if you look at all the inefficiencies in the value chain here, where people are gonna have their share of the cake or their share of the profit, and you compare to what we have on this survey, this survey is gonna be a great success for the company, and it's a blueprint about how... what we're gonna do in the future.
All the value kept in-house. Promised to talk about the Executive team. Of course, I really apologize that not everyone is here, and for obvious reasons, because the imaging or the image conference in Houston is very important to us. This is an avenue where we get to meet all our biggest clients and most of our Executives are there, and they should be there, and I think you would also be better off that they are there than they are here. So in that regard, I'm just gonna go quickly through it. Legal counsel continues to be Tana Pool. She was with TGS and has been with TGS for more than 10 years. So has Whitney Eaton, who's our head of sustainability and communication. Kristin Omreng, who's gonna speak today, is in charge of People and Culture. She came from PGS.
And then, our CFO, Sven Børre Larsen, obviously, with about 10 years from TGS, is also part of the new team. Then we get Carel Hooijkaas, who's a former CEO of Magseis and came in through the acquisition of Magseis in 2022. He's now looking after New Energy Solutions, and he's gonna present that today. Multi-Client is David Hajovsky from TGS, but he's actually he has a background with PGS before that. So he was with PGS from 2010 to 2015. Imaging and technology is the only external hire. Wadii El Karkouri came from AWS. He's been with AWS for the past three years. Before that, he headed up global imaging for WesternGeco or SLB. Nathan Oliver, you all probably know, he had a similar position with PGS for many years, and then in operations, we have Rob Adams from PGS.
So as Chris said in his intro, a great combination of people from three different companies, TGS, PGS, and Magseis. Again, I wish they were all here, but hopefully, they do even better where they are right now. I'm crossing fingers for that. So with that, I'm gonna talk about some of the strategic priorities going forward. We have characterized or categorized our priorities in three different buckets. One is related to value. I'm gonna cover that myself. One is on resilience, which is very important for a company like TGS. Carel is gonna go through that. And then knowledge is gonna be Kristin. And if you look at the three different buckets, what we're gonna talk about is on value, you know, how do you enhance that leading position? What do we do with all these very strong market positions in different segments?
How do we stitch that together and become a truly unique company in the seismic space? Partnerships, we're gonna talk about that, and of course, our goal of being a preferred imaging provider. On diversification, Carel is gonna touch on HSE and sustainability, and of course, our balance sheet strength, and obviously, on our diversification and the fact that we're continuing to diversify a company that used to be very, very targeted at one small segment of the seismic industry, and then most people forget the fact that TGS is a knowledge company. One of those great examples where the CEO probably don't rank in the top 25 of IQ of the overall organization, but the fact is that we have very, very educated employees with 6% PhDs, and, you know, a typical blue-collar company for.
Which is very different from most other old service companies in that regard. Kristin is gonna talk more about that. So talking about value, so number one, the industry's largest Multi-Client library. This one does a good job in terms of not only showing the size and what PGS did to the size of the overall library, but also showing the pricing of that library in terms of enterprise value over the book value of the library. So you see that's pretty close to an all-time low as we speak, and the library size is pretty close to an all-time high. So obviously it's gonna be our job for the future to make sure that we close that gap going forward.
And you can also see at the bottom of the left-hand side. You see the current EV to MC library with 1.8 X, so we trade at 1. X, our current book value. And that compares on average from 2011 to 2024 , so 2011 to 2024 or 2.8 . If you adjust that for the COVID years, which most people would probably say is makes sense, we're talking about 3.3 . If you look at that from 2016 to 2024, the numbers are 2.2 and 2.9 . So you can conclude that whatever you like from this slide, but again, we're just pointing to the facts, and the fact is that we have grown the library significantly with the additional PGS library.
And I think it's fair to say that that library has a performance that is just as good as a vintage TGS library. Second bucket of value is the industry's most capable seismic-3D vessel fleet. Again, very favorable market dynamics. I talked about the fact that the supply side is extremely consolidated with basically two players. The second important point here is that there is no new building activity. Let's face it, there are probably no banks who are willing to supply parties with funds to build new seismic vessels. If you look at the age of these seismic vessels that we have acquired, they're about ten years on average. These vessels have a lifetime of probably somewhere between 30 to 35 years. Some people would argue they can probably last for 40 years.
So this is it in terms of what's gonna be built for the future and what's gonna be available for the industry in the future. And keep in mind, a lot of these vessels can be used for offshore wind. They can be used for CCS. In fact, I saw one of the competitors of TGS talking about a need for five seismic vessels for the CCS industry by 2027. That's a lot. If that turns out to be the truth, we may run short out of vessels. Very attractive entry point. So we got seven high-spec 3D vessels acquired at an average price of less than $100 million per vessel, if you look at the PPA.
If you look at how that compares to new build cost of about $270, the age-adjusted new build cost of $200, and what we call the replacement cost of a broker value of $200, it's clear that we got these vessels very, very cheap. Number three is that the OBN business is a great standalone business in itself, and look at the EBITDA of that business, slightly better in 2024 than it was in 2023. Revenue is pretty much flat. And again, this is after a very strong 2023, with significant growth, and where we turned around the business that was negative by a few tens of millions of dollars to a very positive EBIT.
As you see, we acquired Magseis Fairfield at an EV of $238 in 2023. Their EBITDA contribution that year was $132. That gives you an EV/EBITDA of 1.8x. And then the 2023 EBIT was $55, which again means that we acquired Magseis at an EV/EBIT of 4.3x . So again, an acquisition that was very accretive for TGS shareholders, and that was made just at the right time. And then last but not least, the fast-growing New Energy exposure. I think, again, Carel is gonna talk more about this, but if you look at the growth in this industry, it's been phenomenal by, you know, every single year. Yeah, it was only 22% in or it will be 22% in 2024.
But the fact is that we're growing this business with very strong margins. You look at the EBITDA margin, that we expect more than 20% for 2024. It's up from 15% in 2023. When you grow a business that fast, typically it has a negative impact on short-term margins. We have been able to show profitable growth, and Carel is gonna talk more about that. Finally, on the strategy going forward, and one of the things I discussed on my previous slide is partnerships, and the fact that we're a one-stop shop for seismic and energy data. We can pretty much do anything for anyone who's interested in either exploration or New Energy. So I'm just gonna cover some of the key basins and some of the opportunities we see before I pass it over to Carel.
So let's start with the U.S. Gulf of Mexico on the left side, left upper corner. So very strong technology intensity in the Gulf of Mexico. Gulf of Mexico has, in very many ways, been a playground for seismic in terms of testing new technologies and applying new technologies, and that continues to be the case. I think we're at the sixth generation of seismic technology now in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. And keep in mind, we've been there since the early 1980s, but the Gulf never stops surprising in terms of being or absorbing new technologies and demanding new technologies. And then you can test those technologies in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and then you apply that similar technology elsewhere in the world. So that's been the case for more than 40 years now, and that's gonna be the case going forward as well.
Obviously, needless to say, a very strong TGS data position. We have data pretty much across the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and new technology breakthroughs, partly on the OBN side, means that we are now able to shoot the entire western GOM, where TGS had no presence historically, and we're just about to carry out big programs there, which already started back in 2023. Norway, I think those of you who read the Norwegian newspapers last week or those of you who attended ONS, I can't stop but becoming more bullish on Norway for sure. If I listen to Aker BP, Equinor, and Vår and their plans, there's a lot of activity happening in Norway as we speak. There's a push for new technology in mature areas, very similar to the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.
There are still areas with lots of needs for streamer data. In fact, the different basins of Norway have a very different kind of profile in that regard. You have the Barents Sea that is very frontier, you have the Norwegian Sea that is semi-frontier, and then you get the North Sea that is more mature. But I think the combination of that is a beauty for a company who can basically cover any type of technology. Middle East is interesting in terms of we all know that that's where the last drop of, or barrel of oil is gonna be produced sometime in many, many years after we pass away. But I think Middle East is important in terms of there is great data needs, relatively low quality of enormous amounts of data today.
TGS has a you know weaker position in that market because there's a lot of onshore and less offshore. But of course, our aim is that we're gonna break into that market. We're gonna do that partially through imaging technologies, and then there will be need for our services and technologies also in you know onshore or transition zone areas. Southeast Asia is probably the one that ranks relatively low in terms of current activity, but ranks extremely high in terms of future activity. There is an enormous need for data. Governments are committed to build better so self-sufficiency of energy. Take a country like India, where 85% of their energy need is imported, and what we see in India now is a huge pressure to find their own petroleum basin. Both mature and emerging basin, a lot has already been done.
Malaysia is probably more mature than India and Indonesia, but a lot of our activity going forward is gonna be in this basin. We have a strong data position already. West Africa, it's one of those examples we've been talking about West Africa for many, many years. Keeps sliding to the right, continues to be the case, and I mean, but there is no question about the fact that Africa is key in terms of sorting the challenges that I've touched on, on my first slide of the day. There's gonna be enormous amount of exploration activity. Again, the fact that it keeps sliding to the right is more related to government bureaucracies and permits and that kind of stuff. But again, this is gonna happen, and we see some of the exploration success that have been announced over the past six or twelve months.
Obviously, it's gonna drive more needs for data in West Africa. So TGS and PGS, very strong combined data positions. And then Brazil, probably the country where I would rank the highest in terms of what is hot at the moment and what is gonna continue to be hot for the next three to five years. We have a phenomenal position in Brazil. Again, the permit I referred to today of 55,000 sq km, it's fantastic. And it's actually due to a long-term, very patient people who started permitting this in 2018.
It was actually Spectrum who started to permit that, and TGS took over Spectrum, and we continued to develop that permit until quite recently, when we got this approved, and now we're shooting data as we speak, with great pre-funding and a big, big project that is gonna last for hopefully years. So that's all I had for my part, and I'm gonna come back and do a brief summary at the end, but I'm gonna hand it over to Carel, who's gonna talk about resilience. So the floor is yours.
Thank you, Kristian, and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Carel Hooijkaas, EVP New Energy Solutions. and when we talk about resilience, we talk about three things. We talk about HSE and sustainability, we talk about highly scalable and cost-effective fleet that we now have, and we talk New Energy Solutions. and I will touch on each of these during my presentation. So when it comes to new standards in HSE and sustainability, clearly, that's an important starting point for us, and we can very much build on the leading HSE performance from both PGS and Magseis Fairfield. We've traditionally set the standard, and we continue to do that going forward, where we want the industry and our customers to focus on incidents with the highest consequences and focus our attention there.
We've started these discussions with our clients and suppliers, and the initial feedback is extremely positive to move in this direction. It will ultimately provide the next step change in HSE performance, and it's these kinds of proactive HSE initiatives that our customers welcome from TGS. From a sustainability perspective, I want to start by circling back to a presentation we gave to you at the last Capital Markets Day, where we made a very clear pitch that energy creates prosperity, and lifts people out of poverty. This is a great responsibility for us, and we take pride in that, and we take energy from that to make that happen, and we have an important role to play in that.
We also have an important role to play when it comes to helping our customers achieve their aspirations with regards to reducing carbon emissions. Ultimately, we help them to produce lower carbon barrels, and we do that through very efficient exploration, 4D acquisition, and a reduced cycle time. I will come back to carbon in a minute, but in a world that Kristian described, where oil and gas continues for longer, having a CCS solution is crucial and will ultimately be part of a license to operate for our customers. Now, those were all external points with regards to sustainability. We're also very focused on what we can do as a company.
As you see here on the graph is the tremendous reduction in emissions per seismic unit data acquired over the last years, from 2011 to 2023. We will continue to deploy technologies and initiatives to continue down this trend. Let me now talk about the highly scalable and cost-effective fleet. Kristian made a point already through the PGS transaction. We now have a very young Ramform fleet of around 10 years, very high-capacity vessels, which on average tow around approximately 16 streamers. But we need to see this in the bigger context of the new TGS because we have many other vessels that we use in our acquisition business. So the 7 Ramforms represent around 40% of our total fleet that we use.
We have additional 3D towed streamer capacity that we can charter in, and all of our OBN capacity is either on long or short-term charters. So again, this provides great scalability where you have assets that you own, assets that you have on a long-term charter, and assets that we hire on short-term leases. So again, huge scalability and a cost-effective fleet for TGS. Let me now move New Energy Solutions. and I want to start by showing you the macro outlook. Starting on the left, and Kristian already referenced these graphs. This is from ExxonMobil. And what they show is that oil and gas will be with us for longer, well into the future.
But to an earlier point I made, to make that a palatable solution from an overall environmental perspective, we need to have a proper CCS solution, and we will very much play in this market, and ultimately, it will become a license to operate for our customers. Moving to the picture on the right, this is from BP, and as you know, they have different scenarios that they present in their outlook. And there you see the current trajectory and the Net Zero scenario. Whichever scenario plays out, there is tremendous growth. In the current trajectory, renewables will double, and in the Net Zero scenario, it will triple. So it's a huge market opportunity for TGS.
I now want to talk to you about, okay, so what's our offering in this market, and why are we so excited about this? Let's use what our customers do to develop or to enter this market. They first need to have a global view of where to potentially focus, and this is where we have our Multi-Client and well data that can help them identify areas where they should focus on. We also have on-demand market intelligence, referencing Kristian's comment about 4C Offshore, the acquisition we did a couple of years ago. Again, both provide a great vehicle for customers to do screening and to identify where they potentially want to go. Once they've identified an area of interest, we can then offer new data acquisition, and we have a selection of options here.
For example, in the wind market, ahead of licensing rounds, we've deployed multiple floating LiDARs that measure data, wind data, over a long, long period of time, and with that data, our customers can make data-driven investment decisions on whether to take a license or not. If they decide to go ahead and have the license, we can then provide the acquisition for new data for them, using, as described here in the picture, a Ram form, but we can use many of our vessels in this regard, to image the subsurface so that our customers can determine where to put the foundations for the turbines, for the wind farms. As you may know, some of our, or all of our customers also need what we've referred to as auxiliary measurements, additional measurements, gravity, magnetometer data, and so on, to make their decisions.
With the vessels that we now own, we have those measurements already installed on our vessels, and can acquire all of those, all of that data at the same time. And at last but not least, particularly when it comes to CCS, we've used OBN, combined with towed streamer, to create the imaging that we need for that market segment. But the story isn't finished here. We need to turn this data into knowledge, and what we do in all of our acquisition is that we provide imaging solutions and answer products to our customers. So again, we want to provide a solution to our customers so that they can make proper decisions based on the data that we provided to them. What you see at the bottom right is what we do in solar, where, as you know, solar parks are becoming absolutely enormous.
There's a lot of data there. How do you manage these solar parks? So through our Data Gateway solutions and asset management solutions, we are now supporting 50 solar parks with this solution to manage these over time. I don't think there is a company out there in the New Energy space that has such a depth and breadth in this offering, and it's really exciting to see how we've built that up over just four years. And we just got started. So what you see here is the growth we've seen so far, and as Kristian mentioned, there are very clear ambitions to grow this into the future. And we'll do this into four areas specifically.
We will focus very much on knowledge, so we're moving from providing data in a database to how do we provide knowledge so that customers can make data-driven asset management decisions. This is obviously underpinned by a very clear understanding and pioneering technology, the best people that we have, and ultimately, again, the answer products that we give to our customers so that we truly become their trusted partner in everything that they do. In wind, I mentioned that we already deployed floating LiDARs in many areas, but clearly, there's significant scope to expand on what we do there, so we will certainly do that. And we will capitalize on the wide tow capabilities that we now have through the PGS transaction to create significant efficiencies in this market.
From a carbon perspective, it's very critical that we get into a space where we can offer monitoring solutions over the long- term. These reservoirs are gonna be with us for decades, and it will be, or it is a great business to be in that monitoring business. So we will spend a lot of time and effort to make sure that we have the right offering in this space so that we can generate this long-term business for TGS. We need to recognize that this is very much an evolving business, a very diverse customer base, from oil and gas customers to private equity companies, so we need to be extremely flexible in how we deal with that. And then the last one is around solar. Again, we're supporting 50 solar parks right now.
There are many, many more in the world and many more to come, so we have fantastic growth opportunities when it comes to providing Data Gateway and asset management solutions. So I hope I conveyed our enthusiasm about what we do in new energies and what our plans are. And with that, I'll hand the presentation over to Kristin, who will talk about knowledge.
Thank you. Knowledge. Knowledge is at the core of everything we do, and, people and technology are critical to our knowledge creation every day. First of all, I would like to talk about our people. We have been recognized as one of the best places to work in global energy by a number of indexes and organizations during the past years, and our ambition is to be the best place to work in global energy. We have a highly skilled workforce with excellent skills and capabilities. Kristian already mentioned that 6% of our office-based workforce have PhD degrees. 30% of our office-based workforce have master's degrees, and 70% of our office-based workforce have a higher education. In other words, the numbers speak for themselves. We have a highly educated and skilled workforce.
But there are many important ingredients to making sure that you are truly the best place to work in energy. Not only is it important that our employees have the skills and capabilities they need to perform and deliver really well every day, but it's also extremely important that we have the learning and development culture, and the platform, and the systems to make sure everyone is developing their skills and capabilities every day at work in order to continue performing in line with our business needs. That our employees feel safe and well at work, to make sure that they're doing well and can bring their best self to work every day is also very important.
Global reach when it comes to our employees, close to our customers in all corners of the world, and close to talent pools across the world, allow us to embrace diversity among our workforce and unlock the best potential among all our people. Cross-functional collaboration and making sure that our employees have access to excellent processes and tools, these are all important ingredients to accelerating value creation through our people and technology. But in the end, it actually boils down to our culture. It's the vibe that you get when you walk into the TGS office every day, and it's also the feeling that you get when you walk onto one of our vessels. It has truly excellent HSE culture, a culture that comes with the legacy companies, PGS and Magseis. Something we can be very proud of.
It's about how it feels to be a part of the TGS team and how things are done, how people treat each other every day, and also what work is valued in our office place. My experience so far is that the culture of the legacy companies are actually quite similar. We are all very results-driven, we're passionate, we are hardworking, we're truly dedicated, loyal, and we really care. We create an environment that attracts, retains, develops, and excites exceptional talent in our industry, and we focus on building a culture that is inclusive, that fosters well-being, and that supports the development and performance of all individuals. Our culture brings together the best of our legacy companies. It's sustaining a culture that's adaptable and resilient. For us, the core is about engaging and empowering employees across the world. It's about securing role clarity, which fosters performance.
It's about value-adding processes and tools, and a strong connection to the organization's purpose and strategy. Why are we here? Our people-centric approach strengthens employee well-being and performance. We, as a company, set bold aspirations and prioritize the development of our people to build the needed skills and capabilities to deliver on our business today and in the future. We really recognize the importance of people, culture, and technology, and how critical it is that these elements truly play well together. We are a company that is well-positioned to accelerate knowledge and insights through our people and technology. Technology is part of the core of knowledge. We are well-positioned to embrace and accelerate technology as a fully integrated energy data company. Our strategy and priority is to align technology development along the same value chain, to lead technology development from acquisition to imaging, to reservoir characterization.
We aim to provide best-in-class solutions to our clients through close collaboration. We make use of digital technologies and AI and ML to improve the speed and quality for our end users and for our customers, to extract more value, reduce costs, and reduce cycle time. We have a strong foundation building on our digital maturity among our workforce. This is a key component to securing that our people and our technologies play well together. Through our digitally savvy workforce, with joint domain and digital knowledge, we have best-in-class technology driven by end-user value. Our focus is what brings value to our customers every day. Our aspiration is to provide Tier 1 imaging technologies by leveraging our hybrid cloud capabilities jointly with our technology platform. Our hybrid cloud capabilities enable seamless end-to-end digital workflows supporting our Tier 1 imaging technology.
Now, keep in mind, we are one of the largest users of high-performance compute capacity in the cloud in the world, so it's quite an astounding capacity. Through leveraging AI, we are able to capture insights and incremental value from the largest Multi-Client data library in the world. We have a strong track record of integrating AI technologies into our processes and tools, and with the skills and capabilities in our organization, we are accelerating data value creation through our people and technology interactions. The R&D investments made by the combined legacy companies that today make up TGS amount to more than $500 million throughout the last 10 years. A nd now we build on all of these investments to further accelerate value creation for our customers, and we'll continue making the needed investments that make sense.
There is enormous potential, and we are ready to embrace and accelerate. A few slides updating on our integration process. We've made significant progress when it comes to our merger integration activities, and I've been through a number of processes like these several times throughout my career in the global energy space. And I've learned a lot about what's important to focus on. Throughout the process, we must do what we can to take care of our people so that they can perform well, also during times of change. But I must say, I am very pleased with how efficient the process has been kicked off, and also the speed that we've been able to implement the process so far. Our merger integration efforts are centered around our predefined merger integration goals. And we have some very clearly defined merger integration milestones and synergy targets.
First of all, one common culture, bringing together the best competence and best combination of talent and culture from both companies. Second of all, the best energy data company. We're building a fully integrated company with the best combination of solutions and technology from both. And lastly, creating shareholder value. We have clear ownership and accountability to deliver on the synergy targets and the value creation that we've set out to achieve through this merger integration process. On the slide, you see a number of milestones, and there was someone who commented that it looks a little bit like a calm, windy forest road, but it is a little bit more like a highway right now. It's been a speedy process so far, and as I said, I'm proud of the achievements so far and the speed at which we've moved.
First of all, on day one was at July 1st, and on day one, we had our new executive team in place, and by mid-August, we had the next two layers of leadership in place across our global organization. Since mid-August, our global organization and new organization has been up and running. We have already engaged our employees across the world in updating our new vision and mission statements, aligning our teams around the world, around our new updated common purpose. Our teams will be co-located under the same roof across our five biggest locations around the world, within six months of the merger, within six months of July 1st. Actually, a number of them will already be under the same roof within three to four months. We have already secured the two first milestones related to our refinancing efforts, and the next one is planned for 2025.
With regards to technology and IT integrations, we were able to secure significant integrations already prior to day one on July 1st, when all our employees were on the same Microsoft platform with the same email system, the same Teams channels, same SharePoint, and even the same cybersecurity solution. When it comes to HPC, we are now consolidating our respective contracts, cloud contracts, which enable us to make use of each other's capacity commitments, which forms an important synergy also. On data management, we are combining our solutions, allowing us to take advantage of significant scale benefits. And as mentioned earlier today, with regards to our imaging platform solution, we are working towards integrating our people and teams around one common solution, which secures that we bring together the best elements of both legacy companies.
On the right-hand side, you see our milestone connected to one common ERP system, and the team has completed a very thorough analysis to understand which modules we'll prioritize, but the end game is one end-to-end solution across the company. As you can see, we've made important progress towards our integration goals and milestones. And looking ahead, we will, of course, continue our focus and priority on securing this merger integration, and that we are bringing together the best of the two legacy companies. We are well on track to deliver the merger cost and synergy run rate targets. We originally guided the market that we expect synergies between $90 million and $110 million.
However, based on our ongoing work to validate our progress, we're pleased to inform that we expect the top range - We expect to exceed the top range and deliver between $110 million and $130 million. As you can see from the timing of the synergies, we see approximately $45 million by end of Q3, and approximately $60 million by the end of Q4, and the remainder in 2025. Our synergies are divided into a few different buckets. Personnel costs are related to removing overlapping roles and capacities when combining the two organizations. Other OpEx are related to travel, IT costs, trade shows, compute costs, data management. We also have important buckets related to refinancing synergies and vessel utilization. Our integration costs are listed on the right-hand side, and they are estimated to amount to between $20 million and $25 million.
The majority of these costs are related to redundancy costs, but they're also related to co-location, IT, and technology integrations. So those are the key highlights, and we are well on track, as I mentioned. Over to you, Sven.
Thank you for that. Not only is the integration process on track, but we're actually ahead of schedule here at the Capital Markets Day as well by a few minutes, so that's really good to see, and I'm really happy also to see as CFO that the integration process is going so well, because that means that there will be money on the bottom line from the synergies realized as planned, or maybe even a little bit ahead of plan, so that's really good to see. I will start off by talking a bit about our capital allocation priorities going forward. We have divided it into three parts: the investments, the balance sheet policy, and our shareholder distribution ambitions. First, about our disciplined approach to organic investments.
So there we wanna maintain the approach that the historical TGS philosophy of being extremely disciplined and being extremely value-focused in everything we do in terms of investments. As for the Multi-Client investments, they will be managed to yield a sales to investment over time that that's in line with the historical average of around two. So it means that it will still fluctuate a bit with the cycles and may go up and down, depending on the opportunity set that we are facing at each and every point in time. Maybe lower than two in certain years, higher than two in certain years, but the ambition is to keep it around two.
Based on the experience we have had by doing several M&A, several acquisitions in this space, we've seen that this is also a great opportunity to high grade our portfolio. Which means that there may even be some synergies on the Multi-Client investment side, which allows us to harvest an even higher sales to investment than we otherwise would do. In terms of the fleet, streamer fleet, we have no ambitions of growing that fleet. We are happy with the vessel capacity that we have for the time being, but we have a clear ambition of maintaining a top standard fleet that is the most capable in the industry.
On the OBN side, our ambition is to grow in line with or more than the market, but we're going to do it in an extremely disciplined fashion. As of now, getting margin further up from where they are now has priority above increasing the volumes at this stage. In terms of our CapEx, beyond Multi-Client investments, we expect the run rate to be between $120 million and $150 million on an annual basis for the next few years, and then potentially lower than that once we have completed our streamer renewal program that we're going through.
This year, however, it will be higher than that indicator range because we are indeed doing some growth investments in new builds and some technology investments. But a lot of that is some costs that were done already in the first half of the year. In terms of the balance sheet policy, we obviously wanna maintain a strong balance sheet. It's extremely important to keep a strong balance sheet in our industry, mainly for two reasons. First of all, we know that it's a strongly cyclical industry, and during those down cycles, you wanna have a strong balance sheet to cope with the market conditions.
Secondly, a strong balance sheet allow you to do counter-cyclical investments that in the past has proven to be the winning strategy in terms of value creation over time. So for that reason, it's super important to maintain some dry powder in terms of being able to do those organic and inorganic counter-cyclical investments when the market conditions are less favorable. Because that's mostly when you can do the most value creative investments, so as you can see on the chart on the right-hand side, we have already one of the strongest balance sheets in the energy services industry, and we obviously have the ambition of keeping it that way, so our aim is to keep the net interest-bearing debt level between $250 million and $350 million on an ongoing basis.
This is to be compared with a pro forma net debt level as of end Q2 of $416 million. We have a little bit of deleveraging to do to get into that range. Then, to our shareholder distribution policy, we have an ambitious ambition of growing the distribution to shareholders over time. The first bullet there reads, "Pay a stable dividend on a quarterly basis." That doesn't mean that we will not grow the dividend. What it means is that we will continue the policy of deciding the dividend for that coming year, in first quarter every year, and then we will keep it stable in the three remaining quarters. Then the year after, we will decide a new dividend, and then we will keep it stable for the three next quarters.
And the ambition is, of course, to gradually grow that over time. In addition to this, we wanna buy back shares or distribute additional dividend to manage the net debt level in accordance with our indicated range of $250 million-$350 million. And we are convinced, given the cash flow profile of the company, that this will allow for growing shareholder distribution going forward. As a CFO, what really makes me excited about the transactions we've been through over the past few years, and now lastly, obviously, the PGS transaction, is the cash flow potential that we see in this new company.
So this chart here is an illustration of the cash flow potential that we see, given market conditions that are fairly similar to the ones we are facing right now. So, on the two bars on the left-hand side, we show average revenue in the different categories that we achieved in 2022 and 2023, and we show the average Multi-Client investments for the same two years, simply because we feel that those years on average are fairly representative for where we stand today. And then we subtract the current cost base before synergies.
We subtract the maintenance CapEx, and we also subtract the net interest that we have before any refinancing, and then we add back the synergies, and we end up with a cash flow potential between two equity holders of between $300 million and $400 million. But this is given the market conditions we are facing currently. On the two bars on the right-hand side, we illustrate the upside if we were to experience the 2019 market conditions again. 2019 is probably in the recent few years, probably the best year we have seen, but as you know, it, we've had peak years well above 2019 in the more long-term past.
So clearly, there is both a quite good cash flow potential in the company as is, with the current market conditions, but with significant upside from improving market conditions. Then I wanna touch upon how we're going to report to the market going forward, because as we've been through earlier in the presentation, the structure of the company has changed quite significantly over the past couple of years, which basically gives us the opportunity to start reporting in a somewhat different manner than what you've been used to when we were a pure Multi-Client company. So first of all, we will continue focusing on produced financials or percentage of completion, POC financials, as we used in PGS language.
We are going to use the term produced, because that's actually a very good description of how that revenue is generated in our segment reporting. And we have split up in three, or sorry, four business segments. We have Multi-Client, we have Contract, we New Energy Solutions, and we have Imaging. And all those businesses will be reported as profit centers. It means that we will present the numbers on a gross basis, including profit on any internal transactions. And the reason why we're doing this is basically twofold. First of all, we of course wanna visualize the values represented by all by these four businesses, as Kristian already went through earlier.
And secondly, we want to make sure that there is no value leakage across the value chain, that we take the margin in every single service that we provide throughout the value chain, and that we don't lose out of any opportunities in that respect. Shared services includes overhead expenses or general and administrative expenses, and also what we do on the technology side, and that will report as a cost center. And then we will also then deduct, obviously, the intercompany eliminations and arrive at the group numbers. In terms of revenues, we will reduce the number of categories to two. Multi-Client revenues will be reported on one line.
That means that we will stop reporting all the little details on Multi-Client revenues, early sales, and pre-funding and late sales and whatnot. And then we will report contract sales across these different business units. And then depreciation, amortization, and investments will be presented on a group level. And we have listed some of the key performance indicators that we intend to report on the bottom there, contract backlog, streamer fleet utilization and also the number of OBN crews that we have in operations, and there may be more also as we prepare for the first report as one company towards the end of October. Then, about the backlog that we currently have.
On the dark blue bar on the left-hand side there, you see the backlog that we reported as TGS without PGS on the thirtieth of June this year. We have added on the PGS backlog at the same point in time, obviously eliminated any intercompany backlog from that number. The blue bar to the right represents the gross order inflow that we have seen quarter to date. As you can see, this stacks up to more than $1 billion currently. In terms of financial communication, we just wanted to make it clear what criteria we will apply to send out stock exchange notices and such.
For Multi-Client programs and contract other contracts, we will report or send out stock exchange notices for everything above with a value of more than $5 million. In addition to that, we will report the strategically important contracts and New Energy Solutions related projects that we commence. Then we will still pre-announce our activity level during the quarter on the sixth trading day of the quarter, but this will not include the revenue figures. You will have to wait until the full quarterly report to get the revenue numbers, but you will get all the key performance indicators at that point in time.
And then, of course, we will have the ordinary media releases and marketing releases and all of that, which will not be necessarily reported to the stock exchange, but I'm sure you will pick up that as well. We have updated our guidance. It has basically not changed. The Multi-Client investments, our guidance is, if you add the old TGS guidance of $300 million-$350 million for 2024, and the approximately $185 million guidance from PGS, and then you align the accounting principles and remove approximately $40 million of that, you end up with a range of $450 million-$500 million for the year as a whole.
It's essentially the same as we guided before when you take those eliminations into account. Of this, 189 million was incurred already in H2. It means that we will see significantly higher investments. No, in H1, sorry, and we will see significantly higher investments in H2 of this year. In terms of the synergy, let me make it clear, this is the run rate, the annualized run rate that we're looking at here. We expect to realize approximately $60 million of annualized run rate by year-end, whereof approximately 55 is OpEx. And for the total synergies that we expect to realize by end 2025, we expect $110 million-$130 million, whereof 70-75 is OpEx.
By that, I hand the word back to Kristian, who will summarize and conclude.
Thank you, Sven. I can tell you, you're still ahead of schedule, so that's great. And we're at the summary section. So let me try to summarize what we have been through today. On the first one, the clear strategic priorities for the new TGS, Kristin and Carel have done a great job in terms of going through this in details. I'm not gonna repeat all the storylines or the bullet points, but I'm gonna give you some examples on each one. And I think in terms of value and the fact that our ambition is to enhance our leading position in key basins, we wanna work in partnerships with our clients, rather this very transactional relationship that has been the case for seismic for many, many years. I like to call it the Turkish bazaar at the end of every quarter.
But we wanna work as partners, and I think this company has a fantastic opportunity in doing that, and I've gotten some feedback from our clients is that that's really what they want to do, too. So if you want to partner with a government or you want to partner with a client, you need to go to some kind of beauty contest, and you need to show off what do you have, and I think this company has it all. If we go to a new government or a government where we see great potential for frontier seismic, they're gonna ask us: How do you know? How do you know that we have a petroleum system? We're gonna turn back, we're gonna show them our existing library, that in most basins are already covered by TGS and PGS data. It's a huge advantage.
Then the second question: How can you help us in extracting value from that basin? We have OBN technologies, we have streamer technologies, we have imaging technologies that can help you do that. There's no one who has everything other than TGS. If you go to a client, it's a similar discussion that you have in terms of, how can you help me cut the cycle time? Well, I think we gave you an excellent example in terms of the PAMA 3D, how we can cut the cycle time, but we can keep the entire value chain internally with TGS, and I think that's a great example of how we can extract more value as an integrated company than we could do as individual companies. The second one on resilience, again, Carel touched on most of this.
I just wanna repeat the message on balance sheet, because this is not only about getting the cheapest possible debt, it's part of that too, and that's why we set a target. We wanna be between $250 million and $350 million in terms of net debt. We're pretty close to that number already, and we're gonna get there pretty soon. But more importantly, is to have that optionality that you can always act and you can react when other players are not in a position to do that, and if you look at the benchmarking that Sven Børre showed you in terms of not only seismic peers, but other oil service companies, we're truly unique, and we're gonna get even more unique in terms of our balance sheet and our capital structure going forward.
On top of that, we're gonna be in a great position to pay a dividend, and we're also gonna introduce buybacks on top of that. Then the last one is a knowledge piece, and again, excellent presentation by Kristin in terms of describing how we are different. I wanna touch on the point on AI, because this is kind of a hot topic these days. Some people would say it's a buzzword. But I think, and I have a real-time or a real-life example of that. So every year, I write something called a shareholder letter. Most of you probably don't read it, but it's in the annual report, it's page two and three.
I'm kind of a last-minute guy, so sometimes, you know, marketing has to come back to me and say, "Hey, Kristian, we have to get it done by Friday because it's being printed on Saturday." This year was very similar to previous years. I had to, you know, find my pen, and I had to start kind of drafting my shareholder letter, and then I figured, "Okay, this is a great opportunity for ChatGPT. This is where ChatGPT can really prove its value." I go down to our technical people. We have 37 data scientists on the second floor. I said, "Can you help me with the shareholder letter?" They said, "Absolutely, give me 5 minutes." I said, "What do you need?
I need the three last year's shareholder letters, and I need the quarterly reports for the last twelve quarters." "Fine." So we gave them all the information they needed, and they came back within five minutes, and it was good, but it wasn't great. So actually, what you read for 2023 is what I wrote. I can assure you about that. But it was actually pretty close to the same standard.
I went back and I said, "What does it take to actually make it much better than what I did?" Now, the guy told me, he said, "Well, I probably if I could have all the SEC filings for the past ten years from every single public company in the U.S., and I have every single detailed information from TGS on top of that, I would be able to do something that is perfect." So then I met with one of our clients, and he said, "You know, we're working on this AI initiative.
It looks really, really good, and I think it has great potential going forward." And I asked him, "So how do you think the results would be if you had three times as much data as you have, dear client?" And he said, "It would probably be five times or ten times better." And I said, "That's why we need to work together in a very different way. We need to give you access to everything, and that's how we need to work together, rather than come back in last week of September and fight about the $5 million seismic deal." That's how TGS is gonna work in the future. That's how we can differentiate that in the future, and that's just one example of that.
Okay, we are probably a bit biased when we say that this is a very compelling investment case, but I'm still gonna go through it. I think there are so many reasons why we are excited about this. It starts on the left-hand side. We're a unique play on increasing exploration activity. If you wanna make any bet that our analysis that we showed you today, and specifically slide two, when we show you that the decline curve going forward and the exploration activity in the world today and the reserve lives, et cetera. If you believe in that, there's only one investable company in the world where you get this type of exposure, and that's TGS. The second one, a preferred partner through the entire value chain. I think I've been kind of repeating that for five times today, so I'm not gonna do that again.
The fact that we're exposed to a rapidly growing business towards energy evolution that is already profitable, and that is growing by significant percentages, is another plus. I think we made the point about having an extremely attractive and industry-leading assets that we got at a very cheap price. And regardless of how you do the PPA, you know, how much value do you allocate to the library? How much value do you allocate to the fact that these companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in technology? How much value do you apply to the vessels? It doesn't matter. The fact is that when you break this company into pieces, we're an extremely strong company. The sum of the parts here is extremely strong, and we strongly believe that we've gotten this to a very, very good entry price.
Last but not least, the balance sheet and cash generation capacity. I think Sven Børre did a great job in going through that. In summary, we have executed a very ambitious consolidation plan to address changes in the marketplace. Hopefully, you've seen that this is not something. We're not shooting from our hip. This has been part of a plan that we developed back in 2020. Yes, it's taken longer than one or two years to do it, but as you see, we've gone through several steps in getting to the place where we are today, where we're truly unique. It's been opportunistic, and it's been opportunistic in terms of sometimes picking up assets very cheap, as is the case with ION, and we have been able to do that because we have a strong balance sheet.
You're gonna expect to see a strong balance sheet going forward. This is really what has created a TGS, that is TGS today. Leading positions in all segments and a very strong track record of integration. We've done this for a living for the past five years, and we can do it again. Yes, PGS is far bigger than what we've done before, but I think the first couple of months since we merged with the company have just been excellent in terms of seeing how people are able to work together, how they're able to get together and solve the problems for our clients together, rather than individually. We have clear near-term priorities, realizing synergies. We're on track to that. Reducing debt, we're on track to that, and becoming the preferred partner, absolutely on track.
We've set really ambitious targets for our New Energy business, and again, we're excellently positioned to capitalize on the growth that will eventually happen in exploration. And again, if you go back to that slide with decline curve and future demand, and if you believe in Exxon, we're running into some kind of a crisis, and they even allude to that in their report. World-class leadership team, best combination of talent from acquired companies, and of course, this is a people business. Unless you have the best people on the bus, you're not gonna be successful. I feel so good that we have the best people on the bus, and the bus is running at 100 mi per hour. Thank you very much, and we're gonna open up for questions.
So we're gonna have the executives sit down in chairs in the front here, and then board is gonna be standing here and facilitate, and then, we'll take from there.
Thank you, Kristian. I suggest that we start with the audience in Oslo in terms of your questions. We also have a backlog of questions from people on the web, but are there any questions from the people in Oslo? Yes, John?
Yeah. Should I wait for a mic, microphone?
No, we just speak up. We have the microphones-
Okay
in the ceiling, so it feeds automatically to the webcast. Yeah.
A question related to your ambitions on the Multi-Client sales investment ratio going forward. You said you're still targeting about two. I just wonder, now that you're using your own vessels, means that costs are lower, doesn't it? So before, if you invest $100 million at two, in sales investment ratio two, you would have $200 million in revenues. Now, if you collect the same data with your own vessels, those costs will be $60 million. $60 million x2 is $120 million. Does that mean you're giving $80 million away to the oil companies for cheaper data? I thought one of the big advantages was that you-
Yeah. No, I mean, and that's what I alluded to in when we talked about the reporting structure, to make sure that there are no, absolutely no value leakages across the value chain. That's, that's extremely important, and that's why we set it up as we do with internal pricing between the different business units. So our Multi-Client business will have to pay a full price for the vessels and the same price as an external customer would have to pay, to make sure that they do their calculations based on the full market price rather than the cost price. So that's the whole idea with the structure that we put together.
Still aiming at two times the
Yes, yes
full cost?
Yes.
But when you report Multi-Client investments, will that be a Multi-Client investment at full cost or at cash cost?
That will be at, not at cash cost. We will report the capitalized cost. but that cost will be without that internal margin.
Right.
That will be eliminated out before.
So when we do our sales investment ratio calculations, we will get a higher number.
You will hopefully get the higher number, yes.
Yeah.
That's the plan.
For next year, how many of the seven or eight vessels that you have at the moment, seven pure 3D towing vessels, do you plan to use? Or is that too early? How many would you guess that of those seven vessels will you be using for your internal Multi-Client work?
Yeah, we haven't lined up our plans for next year, but I think, you know, we just announced a big project that we could potentially put two vessels on it. We may only do one. It depends on how the market plays out. I think having that flexibility is really something we're gonna capitalize on, and I'm not prepared to say whether it's gonna be 50/50 or 70/30 in one way or another. It really depends on the backlog for Multi-Client, who's gonna compete about these projects, and they're gonna compete with external clients. So we're running these as very separate business in a way, and then we're trying to stitch everything together at the top. It's interesting question you ask on the, you know, are you targeting a higher sales to investment?
You know, this project that I went through today, you know, I talked to the Multi-Client people, and they said, "You know, the pre-funding was X," and they were quite pleased about that. I looked at the numbers, and I said, "No, it's not X, it's X plus another 25%," because there was already a margin there.
Mm.
I mean, the project is much better when you look at it from corporate because you have an internal margin there, Exxon.
Yeah, sure. My second question before I leave the word to others is regarding the market outlook. You didn't have any slides on that, but if you're going to say something about the market outlook, if for the different segments or, or for maybe the biggest Multi-Client and contract, please, if.
Yeah, I think there is still some uncertainty, for sure. I mean, I think you wrote in your report that the feedback from IMAGE is that it's still slowly getting better, and that's probably a good way to look at it. It's getting better, but it's not getting better as quick as we thought about a year ago, but it's definitely we see a continuous improvement in the market, which is good. It's also important to say that the markets develop not necessarily in tandem, and that's the beauty of having or being exposed to everything.
I mean, OBN has been really good, and there's no question, you know, every single meeting we have, the clients wanna talk about OBN and their OBN plans, and they wanna understand and see our existing data and see if this really gives that uplift that rumor says. And so that market has been really good, but at the same time, it's a relatively fragmented market. There's a few new players in that market, may not have the same type of internal capital approach to business as we have, but again, they will eventually learn, I hope. And then you have the vessel market, which is probably weaker in terms of utilization. There's no question about that. But pricing is really good.
Pricing is really good in the, in the vessel market, and you have two very strong players, two players who are well-capitalized. They're very professional. They're gonna be around for many, many years and, and pretty happy to be part of that market, to be honest, and happy to be using a lot of these assets on the internal Multi-Client programs as well. On imaging, it's, it's actually a really good market. We've seen order inflow of imaging that we've never seen before at TGS. It's partly due to, you know, getting these teams together, improving our reputation, getting a few new managers in our imaging, business, and, and that business has developed very positively over the past three to six months, which is good to see. Then on new energies, I mean, I don't need to add anything to what, what Carel said.
But as I said, I mean, there are pockets of growth within every single segments, but the segments don't necessarily move in tandem. The reason why OBN is good is that you get more exposure to the production budget, so the P rather than the E. The reason why the streamer market is relatively challenging is that streamers are probably more suited for frontier than to y ou know, the closer you get to infrastructure, the more OBN has an advantage. So there are different reasons for that. But of course, there will be a time where they all kind of move in tandem, and we're gonna be extremely well-positioned.
The near-term late sales potential of- I know, you know, if I understood you correctly, you won't report late sales anymore. You will split them on the report once-
Yeah, it's not gonna be reported, but I think overall, I think, you know, Multi-Client is while the OBN market is growing the fastest, the streamer market is a bit challenging right now in terms of utilization, but pricing is good. I would say Multi-Client continues to be the most volatile. And it's gonna swing a lot from quarter to quarter, but overall, I see that same kind of trend, that it's getting better.
Okay, I've got more questions, but I'll leave it to work on this.
About two, three, then we cut you off. Go ahead, Perry.
Yes, I'm wondering about the dynamics in the OBN market. Saw some aggressive players bidding, I don't know, fairly low, you'd say. How does that sort of develop now? Has it sort of stabilized a little bit, and how do you see margins developing now, given that backdrop?
Yeah, I think what you're referring to is probably Brazil, because Brazil-
Yeah
I mean, it's an open envelope. I mean, anyone can see the prices, and what you see is that there's probably two players who have been underbidding significantly in the past. One player who's now probably coming back a little bit to the levels where it should be, and another player who bid extremely low, who's, by the way, never done a type of project that like that before, and then you see TGS and Shearwater being quite disciplined in terms of pricing overall. What we see is that. I was probably more concerned if you go back eight, nine months. Our order inflow was not great, but then it was fantastic in Q2.
And the fact that it was fantastic in Q2 was a lot of the same reasons, a lot of our biggest clients and super majors coming back to TGS, who left us for a while, and then they came back. And we're obviously welcoming them back, and we've done nothing in terms of our calculations and our pricing. We continuously try to get better in terms of operational efficiency, but we're not willing to sacrifice on margins because you need those type of margins in terms of justifying the return on capital.
Got you. And I don't know if it's still a rumor or if it's ever confirmed, but I thought there was that in terms of your node inventory, that you bought something from a third-party supplier, and I'm just wondering if that's the case, and if you are gonna continue to develop the technology internally or gonna instead buy it from a third-party vendor?
Yeah, we're kind of in the middle of a strategic consideration in terms of what to do. We still have our own people who do technology development, and we're also talking to third party in terms of outsourcing that potentially in the future. No decision has been made in that regard, so I understand that there may be some rumors about that.
Yeah.
We will do whatever is best for, you know, our return on capital.
Yeah. Gotcha. Thank you.
Vikas?
Yeah, maybe I can start with, you know, you provided a Multi-Client investment guidance for this year. You didn't say anything about a pre-funding level for the second half or the average of the year?
Yeah, I mean, we're going to stop reporting that, so it felt kind of unnecessary to guide on it. But, of course, I think initially, we guided for 85% or more, minimum 85%. And I think at the PGS side, Børre you said 80%-120% or something like that.
Yeah, that was the target.
Yeah. So, I think we're still maintaining that guidance without saying it explicitly in the guiding statement.
And then on the dividend, going forward, what's the starting point? Is it the level that you had per share, for several quarters, or is it the nominal dollar level, which is gonna go up because of the-
No, I mean, it's per share, on a per share basis. We don't wanna punish our shareholders for the acquisition.
Okay. And then, if you, Kristian, if you could sort of, you know, weaker utilization but good pricing, that sounds a little bit contradictory. How is that working?
In terms of what?
You are saying that in the streamer market, it's weaker utilization-
Yeah but good pricing. Yeah.
It's a bit contradictory.
Disciplined supply and a willingness to pay. I mean, that's it's been like that for the past two years. Utilization has probably surprised on the negative, but the fact is that pricing has been really good. And it means that you have two players in an industry, and they both look at their pricing in terms of what return on capital do you need in terms of justifying owning the assets, and that's the way it should be.
Okay. And then when you talk about the robust balance sheet going forward, you kind of have that countercyclical approach that you have had in the past. You know, what other potential opportunities could there be with the market being so consolidated? There is one less owner that is three times your size.
Yeah, we're not gonna buy that one.
Two libraries left.
Yeah, no, I think we-
Is there anything outside of that, that you would consider being strategically important?
Yeah, I think first of all, I think M&A is pretty far down the list right now. And I think you all would understand that, and I think you would probably appreciate that. I think now all the focus is on capitalizing as much as we can on the acquisitions that we have made. We see great potential, and the fact that we now guide up on the synergy level of PGS means that we feel very confident about that, and that we have a really good line of sight, and we're probably ahead of our schedule, you can assume. So now the focus is on that, and we don't have any, like, big gaps in our portfolio right now.
But I mean, if someone is gonna go bust in any of these industries where we play, we're gonna be optimistic, and we've done that in the past, and we're gonna continue to look at that.
Thank you.
Yeah, Christopher?
I just have two short questions. First of all, you mentioned, Kristian, you recently been at the IMAGE conference and met clients there. Could you tell us a bit about what they're telling you regarding their future plans to use your services?
Yeah, I mean, there is no standard answer to that. I think most of the clients we talked to, they would say that their exploration budgets stay pretty much flat. Some would guide that they're up. I haven't heard anyone who's cutting, which is good. I think it's more important, given that an exploration budget is probably 80%-85% drilling, and the rest data and seismic. You need to dig deeper in terms of if your exploration budget is $1 billion, you know, what happens to your wells that you're gonna drill compared to your data needs? And I think there is a favorable message in that regard.
There's quite a few companies who are actually drilling less wells in 2025 than they do in 2024, which means that with a flat budget, there should be actually quite a lot of increase in seismic and data. But again, there is no standard answer as they all differ. I think one point I would like to make here is that if you listen to the Q2 calls, which you probably do, of our clients, I think I counted at least five or six that used the word seismic or definitely exploration in their earnings call. It was Chevron, it was Kosmos, it was Aker BP, Equinor, and BP. They all talked about seismic or exploration seismic, which, two years ago, would never happen. It's really good.
You know, we even had clients who took out the word exploration for their annual report, like you find, replace. And it's really good to see it's back. And I think the best one is Chevron, where actually the CFO was the one who talked about exploration. It probably should be the last person, but it's really good to see. So there are definitely positive signs out there.
My final question is, you mentioned that the first couple of months had been excellent after the merger with PGS. What surprised you the most?
I think probably the cultural integration. You know, you meet people who are just smiling and happy, and you would think that they would be super skeptical and-
Mm
Take one day at a time, and you know, I heard some examples just a few days ago about people, you know, at PGS, they obviously had streamer technologies and top-notch streamer technologies for many years. At Magseis, they had their OBN technologies, and the industry has been talking about, "Can you combine the two?" If you asked PGS people two years ago, they were very skeptical to that because they didn't have nodes, right? If you asked Magseis people, they didn't have streamers, very skeptical to the combination of nodes and streamers. Now, the same people who've been around for 30, 40 years in that business are saying, "There's a great potential to combine the two.
Mm.
I mean, that's just an example of how people really line up and they say, "Wow, we're getting a bigger toolbox here and more tools to play with.
Thank you.
Again, we have a question back there.
Yeah, last year on your Capital Markets Day , you showed a chart, where you illustrated the company had a cash flow potential of around $300 million-$400 million. And now you bought PGS, and you still have a cash flow potential of $300 million-$400 million. So why is this a good deal?
I don't remember exactly what we showed in that chart. But bear in mind that this, what I showed, here in the presentation today, is based on the market conditions that we see right now. That Capital Markets Day last time around was, I guess, March 2023. Personally, I was extremely optimistic at the market conditions at that point in time, and unfortunately, I've been proven a little bit wrong in my optimism about the market. The answer is that the market conditions that we are seeing now and that we put into the calculations now aren't as favorable as we hoped for, or were seeing at the time.
And it's taking longer. I mean, things have been pushed to the right for exploration. I mean, no question about that.
Other questions? Yeah.
First of all, thank you for the presentation. It was really good. I was wondering about the transfer fees. I don't think you can answer too much in details, but, so far, I think they haven't, they've been pretty flat so far in 2024. Do you see them coming up at the end of, the year?
Yeah, I think we said at the start of the year that 2024 was gonna be better than 2023 in terms of transfer fees, and at the time, we knew about a couple of transactions. Since then, there's been a few new ones announced. One has been significantly delayed, which is Chevron Hess. We'll see if that happens next year. There is a few out there. Question is whether that's gonna be closed in Q3 or Q4. I mean, we don't have any rush in that regard. We just want to make sure that we get paid the contractual value of the transfer. So again, there's probably a handful of transfer fees when we, you know, get to 31st of December, probably a handful. A couple of them have been closed so far this year.
Any other questions from the audience in Oslo?
Yeah, on your free cash flow number, did you have a number based on your calculation for the last year for the combined entity for 2023, just as a ballpark?
Yeah, I mean, what we showed today is also, call it a simplified version without the working capital movements, just to be clear on that, and in 2023, I don't have the exact number on the top of my head, unfortunately. But it was not a great year in terms of cash flow, both because we invested heavily on the TGS side and, in fact, also on the PGS side, there were a significant increase in Multi-Client investments. So you saw sales to investment of almost 2.5 in 2022, going down to 1.6 , 1.7 in 2023.
Partially by design, because you know that when you almost double your Multi-Client investments, that will hurt your sales to investment, and it will hurt your cash flow. So 2023 wasn't a very good year in that respect.
Yeah, and I was just to basically based on the way you calculate it, but to get an idea of what the way you, you've done it now with that outlook, what would have been on there in 2024?
Yeah, we've obviously done those calculations, but I need to come back to you with those numbers. I don't have them on the top of my head.
And then maybe quickly, a more strategic one. So you always talk about two players in the market, and there are some Chinese players on the streamer side. Are you not worried about them at all, or maybe just in Asia, Middle East, regions? How do you view them? I mean, I know they're maybe a bit more limited in what they do, but they can also be cheaper, so-
Yeah
What do you think about that?
Actually, we have a long-term agreement with one of them, so we have access to that capacity, too, if we need so. I think overall, we see less competition, specifically in mature areas, because they don't have the multi-component streamers that you require in most mature areas. So, but again, in certain frontier areas, you will still face competition from them. And then you have also, I mean, actually a growing number of jurisdictions where they probably cannot play, U.S. being a great example, Norway possibly being another example where Chinese vessels may not be able to compete in the future.
Do you see that as worry in OBN as well, or mainly on the streamer side?
Yeah, but it's shallow water and onshore rather than deep water.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, we have come to the hour, but we also have a couple of questions from the web. So, if you can stay with us for some more time, we can address at least a couple. We have a private investor who is asking, this is for you, Sven Børre, "In terms of the deferred tax assets, can you give an indication of how much of that you will benefit from on an annual basis? And also in terms of the share buyback program, an indication of the percentage when this will--when you start buying back shares?
All right. Yeah. On the buyback, let's take that first. We wanna buy back shares so that to use that as a tool to manage the net debt level within that guided range of $250-$350, and so when exactly we start, but as I said, we are above that range now. When exactly we start to buy back shares will depend on when we get into that range, and which again is a function of the market conditions and how much business we can bring in, so being exact on timing on that is difficult.
Obviously, at this stage, it will depend on market conditions. As you know, these buyback programs are fairly restricted in terms of the way you conduct them, with all the rules and regulations. In Europe, you cannot buy more than this and that, every day, and you have to stick to a price range and all of that. We will obviously have to adhere to those restrictions in terms of exactly how we conduct the program. In terms of the tax losses carried forward, there is a tax loss in Norway of more than $230 million, and then there are some tax losses also in other jurisdictions.
We earn most of our profit in Norway, and in Norway, it's also fairly straightforward to move tax losses between group entities, as long as it's the same line of business that you're operating in. So in Norway, it's straightforward to use it, and we simply need to. How quickly we can use it depends on the profitability, right? It's hard to say exactly. We've done our internal estimates, of course, but as you know, the market is cyclical and somewhat unpredictable, so I don't wanna attach a number to it.
But, you know, you probably can make your own assumptions and divide that and see that in context with the tax losses carried forward that we have.
Very good. Last question. "When is the intended launch of a refinancing process of the debt? Can you give an indication of that?
Yeah, I mean, we have already started the work, of course, and preparing for doing that, and then exactly when we do it will depend on a combination of factors. We will, of course, try to read the market and obviously be in a position to use a good window in the market. And also, we will look at the call option structure of the debt to optimize the timing. But it will most likely happen in 2025, but we won't rule out that we will do it in towards the end of 2024 either.
All right, I think we're at the end, and I wanna thank you all for your attention today. And I wanna thank everybody who listens to the webcast. And we're gonna be back here in mid or late October for the Q3 presentation, but it was great to give you or get the opportunity to provide more insight into our business. And as you hopefully see, we are excited about the journey behind us, and we are really excited about the journey ahead of us, and we think we are in a sweet spot in terms of where we wanna be for the future. Thank you very much.