Good morning, and welcome to TGS Q4 2025 presentation. My name is Bård Stenberg, vice president, Investor Relations and Business Intelligence in TGS. Today's presentation will be given by CEO Kristian Johansen and CFO Sven Børre Larsen. Before we start, I would like to give some practical information. For those of you present in the room with us today, please use the microphones provided when asking questions. For those of you on the webcast, you can type in the questions on the platform, and we will address those after management's concluding remarks. I would also like to draw your attention to the cautionary statement showing on the screen and available in today's presentation and earnings release. So with that, it's my pleasure to give the word to you, Kristian.
Thank you, Bård, and welcome everyone. So we'll start with the highlights for Q4 of 2025. So we had revenues of $363 million. Our revenues in Q4 were driven by strong multi-client performance, which is quite common for any given Q4. But I think we were particularly pleased about this year because it was a quite volatile market in terms of a sliding oil price during the quarter. But we still managed a very strong multi-client performance, which I will come back to. We had a EBITDA of $227 million. That corresponds to a 63% margin. And again, this is thanks to a very strong focus on cost, which again, has preserved our margins in the quarter. Our Q4 EBIT was $72 million.
That corresponds to a 20% EBIT margin. I'm particularly pleased about our order inflow for the quarter, so we had $598 million of new orders signed, and this is the strongest order inflow since pre-COVID. And that means that we have a total order backlog of about $706 million entering into 2026. We had a net cash flow of $206 million, and that means that we managed to reduce our net debt to about $427 million. And as you all know, we have guided a range of between $250 million and $350 million as a comfort zone in terms of net debt. And we've also said that when we get to that range or within that range, we're gonna increase shareholder allocation.
Whether that's gonna be in terms of dividend or share buybacks remains to be seen. But for now, we maintain our dividend of about $0.155 per share. So 2025 has clearly been a transitional year for TGS. We got off to a good start. We had a better-than-expected Q1 results, strong asset utilization and multi-client sales. And then Liberation Day hit us in early April, and obviously with a resulting macro and geopolitical uncertainty, which had an impact on oil prices. So we showed oil price weakness and volatility, which caused pressure on client spending. We, as a result of that, saw a challenging contract streamer and OBN market through the course of 2025. However, we've been preserving margins by reducing costs and CapEx.
I'm impressed about the way we have reduced our gross operating costs and CapEx by about $156 million of reduction in terms of operating costs, and $48 million of a reduction in CapEx versus the original plans for the year. As a result, we've increased our shareholder return, and we have reduced debt at the same time. So we had a net cash flow, as I said, of more than $200 million. We have reduced debt to a level or net debt to a level of $427 million, and we have increased our dividend in 2025 of 11%. So we're clearly benefiting from a unique business model. In fact, the only company in our space who has that business model where we are strong in all verticals of the seismic industry.
We have signed our first strategic partnership with one of the super majors, and we're capitalizing on opportunities in all geoscience markets. We clearly feel that we're strongly positioned for 2026. We have a strong order inflow and backlog. We have a robust balance sheet, and we're continuously optimizing costs and CapEx to be ready for the next upcycle of our industry. I'll give you a quick business update for Q4 as well, and the first slide here shows the global map. I want to draw your attention first and foremost to the blue color on the slide, and this shows the massive multi-client data library of TGS. So you see data in pretty much all the basins in the world. In fact, since 2018, we or TGS makes up about 60% of all the multi-client data collected in the world.
So a significant market share within the multi-client space, which again, gives us a unique opportunity to also utilize our high-quality assets. I'm not gonna touch on all the different basins where we have been active, but you see the usual basins, such as U.S. Gulf of Mexico. You see, we had 3 vessels in Brazil. We're strong in West Africa, with 2 vessels in Gabon during the quarter, and those vessels have now moved to Nigeria and Angola. We had a vessel in India, and then you see there's also some new energy operations, both in California, the U.S., and Germany and Australia during Q4 of 2025. Next, a quick update on the different business units. So we'll start with multi-client, and we start with the financials. So we had multi-client sales of $270 million in Q4.
That corresponds to 259 in Q4 of 2024. We had investments of 117, and most importantly, we had sales to investments over the past last twelve or the last twelve months of 2.0. Meaning that whenever we invest $100 million, we expect to see $200 million of sale, which is a very strong metric and where TGS has been unique in terms of the industry, in terms of being able to manage such returns over time. In terms of awards and key projects, we were awarded a project in Pelotas Basin. This is a phase 1 of a big project that we're doing offshore Brazil. It's a streamer survey, mainly targeting open acreage, but where we also have solid pre-funding before we started the survey. Number two is a project called Apex 1.
This is an ocean bottom node multi-client project in the Gulf of Mexico. This is actually a dense node grid, so compared to previous surveys, which are more sparse and take advantage of underlying data, this is a denser survey without reliance on underlying streamer data. The reason why we can do that is that we've had technology breakthroughs in terms of how we acquire ocean bottom nodes with new source technologies, combined with new ROV technologies that we have applied on this survey. We completed a big survey in Brazil called Megabar Extension Phase I. This is a joint venture streamer survey in the equatorial margin area offshore Brazil, and this is the area where Petrobras is drilling as we speak. I touched on the multi-client performance, and this one gives you more details about that.
So this shows our quarterly multi-client performance all the way back to Q1 of 2023. And what you see there, if you follow the line, is that it's quite consistent around 2x. Yes, it may drop in certain quarters down to a level of 1.7, but then you also see peaks that goes all the way up to 2.2 and 2.3. But the important thing here is that over time, we've managed an average sales-to-investment of somewhere between 1.9 and 2.0. And in that regard, I'm, I'm extremely pleased that we managed to a sales-to-investment of 2.0 in a challenging market in 2025. In Q4, we had multi-client sales that increased year-on-year, despite a 15% lower oil price quarter-by-quarter.
On the marine data acquisition, we had a negative development of sales and activity. We had OBN contract revenues dropping from $132 million in Q4 of 2024, which was extraordinarily strong, but still they dropped to a level of $47 million in Q4 of this year or 2025. We saw a drop also in streamer contract revenues, down from $131 million to $110 million, which means that the gross revenues came down from $263 million last year to $157 million, and this is obviously reflecting a very challenging market for both streamer and OBN, particularly in the last 3 quarters of 2025.
So that means that net revenues were $68 million for the quarter, but I'm happy to say that our EBIT margins are actually better than last year, and it's a combination of things. Number one, we had no operational hiccups in Q4, so very strong operational performance. Number two, we planned very well for the drop of activity in the OBN market, which means that we had no short-term leases during the quarter, so we managed to get rid of them when we planned for Q4, which obviously had a huge impact on our margins during the quarter. In terms of awards in Q4, we had a 3-year capacity agreement with Chevron signed in Q4. This is for streamer and OBN acquisition services, and as part of that collaboration, we also work together very closely on technology developments.
One example would be what we're doing on the OBN side now in terms of being able to have a more flexible model, where we are more efficient in terms of acquisition, and we don't have the same reliance on underlying data when we acquire these, these surveys, particularly in the U.S. Gulf. We have three OBN contracts signed in Europe during the quarter. These are for acquisition campaigns for Q2 and Q3, which means that we're filling up backlog in Europe pretty well. In addition to that, we had a 4D streamer contract in Norway. This is gonna commence in Q2 of 2026, and it has a duration of 65 days.
And last but not least, we also signed up a streamer 4D contract offshore Brazil, and this has a second half 2026 startup, and again, this one has a 75 days duration. On the imaging and technology, we had a strong quarter, and it's been a really good year for our imaging team. Gross imaging revenues growing from $30 to $32, but more importantly, the external imaging revenues grew from $15 to $18. But for the full year, we had a year-on-year growth of 65% for imaging. As you see, on top of that, we had a margin improvement from 20% to 30% on the EBITDA level.
Again, we have signed a multi-year agreement with a super major for licensing of our software, which is called Imaging AnyWare, and this is the second super major who signed up with TGS in a short period of time. And we now have multiple companies using our software when they do imaging, which again, creates a stronger link between TGS and some of our biggest customers. I touched on the year-on-year growth of 65%, and we expect further growth in imaging in 2026. It's not gonna be the same magnitude as we saw in 2025, because obviously we're starting from a much higher base. But overall, we will continue to see growth. Growth is probably gonna be higher in the second half than the first half, based on the backlog that we have right now.
But again, the positive development in imaging is expected to continue also for 2026. And then last but not least, the new energy solutions. Numbers are still fairly small. You see contract revenues dropping from $7 million to $2 million, and the reason for that is that we didn't have any site characterization surveys in Q4 of 2025. As you know, we stacked Vanguard after the summer season, partly because we didn't have the backlog that was needed during the winter to justify that vessel. Then we have multi-client revenues growing from $3 million to $4 million, total revenues down from $9 million to $6 million. But again, as we saw with imaging and acquisition, we've had a positive EBITDA margin development despite lower activity level. Some key awards, we have the first wind and metocean campaign in Australia.
This is a one-year deployment, and this is in the Gippsland region of Victoria. And then secondly, we're in collaboration with a company called EOLOS. We offer wind and metocean campaigns offshore Brazil. So with that, I want to hand it over to Sven, who's gonna go through our financials, and then I will come back and talk more about the outlook for 2026. Thank you.
Thank you, Kristian. Good morning. Okay, I'll start by going through the revenues. Our segment revenues came in at $363 million in the fourth quarter, which is down from the same quarter of last year, when we had $492 million. We saw strong performance in our multi-client business. $263 million of multi-client revenues, which is actually a little bit above what we had at the same period of last year. And then, of course, we had a significantly lower external revenues in our data acquisition business. $100 million compared to $231 million in the same quarter of last year.
On the operating expenses side, we see here on the top right-hand side, you see the dark blue bar shows the net operating expenses, and then we show the capitalization, and then we show the gross operating expenses. So gross operating expenses was down to 189 in the quarter. So we can see that we continue to reduce our operating expenses quarter by quarter. However, you should also note that there is approximately $15 million of release of accruals in Q4. So this is cost that we have charged to our P&L earlier in the year based on conservative assumptions on project performance.
Now that these projects are coming to an end, we can release some of these accruals, which has a positive impact of roughly $15 million on the gross costs, operating costs in this quarter. But it doesn't really affect the full year. In terms of depreciation, on the bottom left-hand chart here, you see that we had low net depreciation of $36 million in Q4. And that has to do with high capitalization of gross depreciation. We had approximately $42 million, so capitalization of depreciation in the quarter, and that is roughly $20 million more than it otherwise would have been.
And the reason for that is that we have reclassified some capitalization from cost of sales that were done earlier in the year to depreciation. So you have the opposite effect on the capitalization for operating expenses. And then you see that we have straight-line amortization of $58 million, more or less in line with the run rate we have had over the past few quarters. And we had a somewhat higher accelerated amortization of $62 million, and that, of course, relates to the higher multi-client sales. There is a certain correlation between accelerated amortization and multi-client sales. This gave us an EBIT of $72 million in our segment account, which corresponds to a margin of roughly 20% in the quarter.
This is down from $92 million in the same quarter of last year. Here, I'm not going to dwell too much with this table, but as you know, we report our revenues two ways. We report the revenues by nature, and we report the revenue, revenues by business unit. So we compile this table here to avoid any confusions on what numbers we are looking at. And as you see here on the multi-client business unit, we do actually have some contract revenues related to JV projects that we do.
So when our multi-client department engage in a JV project and we use our own vessel capacity or our own OBN capacity for these purposes, this JV partner will pay our multi-client department, say, 50% of the cost, and that is booked as contract revenues in the multi-client business. And then you also see that in the new energy solutions business, we have a little bit of multi-client revenues related to subscriptions of software that we provide to customers. As you saw from the chart earlier, we are very focused on cost and optimizing our cost base.
We have constantly been working on this since the merger with PGS that took effect from first of July 2024. So, initially, of course, we saw a reduction related to merger synergies. But also beyond that, we have continued to work on quite a few different efficiency measures. We are using technology in a clever manner to reduce costs. We have implemented AI solutions in a number of our functions, and we're constantly challenging ourselves in order to reduce our cost base. And you see the result here, 2024 compared to 2025. So 2025 is significantly down compared to what we had in 2024 and also the years before.
And this effort will continue. It's a continuous effort, of course, that is never complete. And for 2026, we guide for a gross operating expense of roughly $950 million, which is in line with the guidance we ended up with, or the last guidance we gave for 2025. But it depends, of course, on the activity level. We could come in below this if activity is lower than stipulated, and we could come in a little bit above if we see higher activity level. But the expectation as of now is for $950 million of gross operating expenses.
This brings us to the P&L, $363 million of revenues. We had a cost of sales of $48 million. We had personnel expenses of $60 million, and we had other operating costs of $28 million, which gave us an EBITDA of $227 million. If you look at the net effect of the release of these accruals and the reclassification of capitalization of cost, the adjusted EBITDA, I don't like using that word, but I'll do it anyway, would have been roughly $5 million higher than the $227 million, right? We deduct the amortization, some impairments and depreciation, gave us an operating profit of $72 million.
Then we had financial income of $2 million, interest cost of $20 million, and some exchange rate related losses, gave us a pre-tax profit of $52 million. So this is the produced account or segment accounts based on percentage of completion. You'll find the IFRS accounts in the appendix or in the quarterly statement. If you look at cash flow, we were, we're really happy with the cash flow development, both for Q4 and for the year as a whole. We've delivered actually quite well above our own expectation in that area.
That, of course, partially has to do with what I talked about earlier, related to looking after the cost base and reducing costs quite significantly in the quarter. We have been working on our CapEx plans, and we have been reducing CapEx quite significantly compared to the original plan. That is partially, obviously, based on looking at the needs and being more efficient in that area, but also, of course, stretching the CapEx plan a little bit compared to the original plan. So all in all, after paying total dividend of $122 million for 2025, we ended up with a positive net cash flow of $96 million for the quarter.
This, of course, led to a significant drop in our net debt. Of course, initially, when we concluded the merger with PGS and also the subsequent refinancing, we were obviously planning to and hoping for an even more rapid reduction on net debt. But, the market has gone a bit against us compared to those original assumptions. So we're actually quite happy that we are still able to deliver a significant reduction in net debt, despite these difficult market conditions and despite paying a dividend, as I said, of $122 million. So net debt is down from $500 million a year ago to $427 million at the end of 2025. So that's something we're really, really happy about, given the circumstances.
Our target is for $250 million-$350 million, and that remains firm. As I said, we need a bit more time than we originally envisaged, but we are clear that we want to get down to that level, and at that stage, we will look at increasing shareholder distribution, either through dividends or buybacks. Balance sheet, not too much to comment on this. Our balance sheet, of course, with the limited or fairly low net debt levels remain very strong. You see that our multi-client library is a little bit up over the past three months compared to what we had at the end of Q3.
But it's actually slightly down compared to what we had a year ago. You should also note that the right-of-use assets are down over the past three months from $200 million at the end of Q3 to $184 million at the end of Q4. And this of course relates to these IFRS 16 leases that we have. And it also means that the lease cost that you'll see in our cash flow will be lower in 2026 than in 2025. So we at this stage, again, it depends a little bit on the activity level. If we see that the activity in OBN is picking up, we may enter into some longer-term leases again, but that's not the plan right now.
So you should expect to call it quarterly or the annual run rate of lease expenses to be around $80 million-$90 million in 2020, 2026. And then, finally, to dividend, given the strong balance sheet that we have and the quite good cash flow, we of course continue to pay the quarterly dividend of $0.155. In this quarter, that corresponded to 1.47 NOK per share. The ex-date will be a week from now on Thursday next week. That's the 19th, and it will be paid two weeks after that, on the 5th of March. And by that, I'll leave the word back to you, Kristian.
Thank you, Sven. I'm happy to present the outlook that we see right now, and I think the first slide is quite interesting. This is showing IEA's World Energy Outlook from 2025, and it refers to the energy outlook in 2025 versus one year earlier, which is 2024, of course. What it shows is that the 2025 outlook basically says that oil and demand is not gonna peak until sometime after 2050. If we compare that to statements that were made back in 2021, for example, where the same institute said that we would have peak oil sometime in 2025, so last year, and where there was no need for more exploration, then it's remarkable to see what a change these guys have made over the years.
Just in the matter of 12 months, they have changed their view, where oil and natural gas will be up 25% compared to the previous estimate in 2050. The same situation for coal is that it's gonna be up 47% compared to what they said 1 year ago. What you see is that this is gonna be compensated by the fact that renewables is gonna show a much lower growth than first anticipated. So these numbers are changing, of course, every year, but it's obviously a quite significant change, and it provides a very positive outlook for a company that is heavy on exploration and very focused on exploration. As a result of this, obviously, our customers, the big energy companies, they're highlighting the exploration challenge.
They're highlighting the fact that their reservoir life is getting shorter. You know, we have super majors now who have reservoir lives of six to seven years, and they have a reserve replacement ratio of about 20%-25%. So it means that within 10 or 12 years, they will run out of oil if they're not successful in replacing the reserves. So we've been talking about this for quite a number of years, but the fact now is that we're getting very close to a situation where our customers will have to ramp up their exploration efforts quite significantly compared to what they were discussing about a year or even two or three years ago. If we go to the next slide, we're concluding that exploration is definitely moving up on the priority list, and we see that from earnings calls.
We hear that from CEOs when they talk to the investor community. They're, they're sort of preparing the investor community that we need to explore more, and we need to invest more and or more allocate more CapEx to exploration in the future, because they obviously see the same graphs as I showed on the previous slide. Just showing a couple of quotes here. One is from, from Shell, saying, "We're less pleased with the fact that we haven't found the bigger plays that allow us to potentially create big, new hubs.
And so, so that's a space we need to continue to work on to improve." Equinor said quite recently, "Now is the focus to deliver on that growth, finding more attractive exploration opportunities within those selected areas." And last but not least, from Chevron, who's one of our long-term partners, and when we just signed a three-year contract, "We need to ramp up some of the exploration activity beyond just the focus on near-infrastructure opportunities. So we'll move to a more balanced approach of mature areas that are well-known and also early entry, entry into high-impact frontier areas." So again, we're talking more about exploration, of course, but we're also talking about the need to do exploration in frontier areas. And this is a background or part of the background to our three-year agreement with Chevron.
We together are gonna start exploring new areas where oil has not been found before, rather than exploring more in areas where there is already oil. So again, oil majors are becoming more positive on exploration. This is evidenced by improving interest in frontier areas. Then the big question is, why don't we see a sharper pickup of activity than we've seen so far? The answer to that is on the right-hand side of the slide, and what you see there is that the orange line pretty much touches the top of the three bars for 2024 and 2025. That means, very simplified, that oil companies today, they basically spend their entire cash flow on the combination of dividend, share buybacks, and CapEx.
So one has to give, or you need to move the orange line, which means that the oil price has to come up. If you assume that the oil price is gonna stay where it is today, then one of the three needs to be cut. And what I've been through on the previous couple of slides is that that cannot be exploration, which is part of the CapEx. It will either have to be dividends, which we doubt is gonna happen, or it may be share buybacks, which we think is gonna happen. And we've already seen a couple of companies who've announced lower purchases of shares than they've done in previous years, because they need to free up capital to spend on future growth, where exploration obviously fits in.
So the impact on the seismic market of this challenge that these oil companies have is that you've seen a gradual decline of contract vessel months for the industry. So if you look back on this, that shows 2019, and it goes all the way to our expectations for 2026. What it shows is that in 2023, there was slight growth and some optimism in terms of the vessel market. This is coincidentally when we announced the acquisition of PGS; we saw that things are about to get better. That didn't happen for multiple reasons. So instead, we saw a gradual decline starting in 2024, going into 2025, and then we expect 2026 to be either flat or slightly up, based on our estimates right now.
If you look at the OBN market, it's quite a different picture, actually. We saw strong growth from 2020 to 2024. Obviously, some shift from the vessel market to the OBN market. But then we've actually seen now 2025 showing quite negative growth in that market. We expected that when we started 2025, so we have planned for that. And back to our margin improvement on the, in the OBN space, it's partly driven by the fact that we were ahead of the game in terms of managing our capacity and making sure that we didn't have too many leases related to short-term activity. In 2026, this shows further decline of the OBN market.
We still don't have a great visibility on that, so it could still be flat, and we're obviously pursuing multiple opportunities in terms of proving the estimates wrong and making sure that we can, we can have pretty much the same activity level for 2026 as we had in 2025, and that's, that's really what we're planning for as we speak today. So again, to summarize, streamer market decline of almost 50% since 2019. On the OBN market, we've seen rapid growth from 2020 to 2024, but then a rather disappointing picture since then. We think that's gonna kind of flatten out going forward and potentially start growing again. So the question is: How have we managed that challenging market? And, I'm proud to show the cost development.
If we start on the left-hand side, you see the gross operating cost, obviously pro forma numbers for 2024. What you see here is that we peaked in the overall cost level in Q4 of last year, of 2024, so $1.1 billion, and then we gradually decreased or reduced our cost base every single quarter since then. Q4 stood out as being quite extraordinary, which means that the last twelve months, from Q4 of 2025, our cost base was reduced to $894 million from a peak of $1.1 billion in Q4 of 2024. Very pleased about this, and this is obviously a combination of a synergy realization from the acquisition of PGS.
But we way exceeded the synergy expectations that we set, because in line with a more challenging market, we had to cut more. And we're constantly working now on making sure that we have the most efficient operations, the most efficient support and staff systems to support this market we're in. If you look at the cash flow, which is a result, obviously, of lower revenues, but significantly lower cost, we've managed to deliver a cash flow today of $206 million, and you see how that stacks up with the previous years. And it shows that the capital discipline of TGS have been very impressive for 2025, and I can guarantee you that we're gonna continue to focus very strongly on this for the future.
That means that TGS is extremely well-positioned to benefit from a market recovery with a cost base that is now trimmed for any given market. So if it takes longer, we're still good. We're managing a cash flow or free cash flow, $200 million+ in 2025. If we see improvement in markets, a lot of that is gonna go straight to the free cash flow. The fact is that we are the exclusive supplier to the world's largest buyer of seismic activity, and sometimes we have to remind our people about that. You know, when you look at the big super majors and you look at their seismic budgets, they tend to range from $150 million to slightly above $300 million per year.
We're announcing today that we're gonna spend between $500 and $575 million in 2026. So it means that we're by far the largest user and by far the largest buyer of seismic activity. What you see on the bar chart to the left-hand side here is that historically, we've been able to use far more than the six vessels or the six available vessels we have now. We've been using far more historically than those six vessels. Then 2024 and 2025 stand out in terms of we have not been able to move to the orange line, which is basically the vessel capacity we have, and the difference between there is called, you know, non-utilized capacity or white space.
In 2026, I feel very confident that we're gonna move towards and past the orange line, which means that we're gonna optimize the utilization far better than we did in 2024 and 2025. So again, a very good illustration in terms of highlighting the challenge we've had in 2024 and 2025. Also, a good illustration in terms of guiding how you're gonna see 2026, where our goal is that the dark blue is gonna get higher because we're gonna invest more in multi-client. The light blue, even if it stays at the low level that we've seen, we should be able to move to the orange line, which means that we should be as close as possible to a fully utilized vessel fleet. We have the luxury of deciding internally whether we're gonna pursue opportunities in the contract market or whether we're gonna do multi-client.
Obviously, these have different characteristics. Multi-client, they tend to have a slightly longer payback, slightly higher risk, but again, a very strong return over time. And I think we've proven that in 2025. We've proven that through some of the slides that we've showed you today, that our returns in multi-client don't need to be questioned. On the contract work, of course, you have lower returns, but you have quicker payback and obviously lower risk. But being in the position as the largest buyer of seismic activity out there, to always evaluate whether we should do a multi-client project or whether we should prioritize a contract opportunity, is a great position to be in, and it's a position that no other company obviously has. So that takes me to the guidance.
So on multi-client investments, we expect to be in the range of $500-$575 million for the year. The upper end of that range is where we have actually good visibility today in terms of our backlog and our planned surveys. The lower end of that range would depend on whether we do partnerships on some of this. So it all depends on whether we wanna go 100% solo or whether we're gonna do 50/50 joint ventures to spread the risk. And that's why there is a relatively large range. And of course, if we're in the lower end of the range, it means that we're gonna have higher contract revenues because someone else is gonna pay for 50% of our vessel or OBN crew.
If we're in the higher end of the range, it's gonna be higher multi-client investments, of course, and you know, lower contract revenues. Again, I feel very confident about the backlog as we stand here today. We announced a backlog at the end of 2025, that is pretty much on par with what we had in 2024. But what happened in 2024 or into 2025, is that we started to consume from that backlog very rapidly. What we've seen this year is that we've actually announced quite a few new programs in January, which means that the backlog continues to increase. I will come back to that.
But on the CapEx, it's gonna be at approximately the same level as it was in 2025, and again, it came down sharply during the year, and I think we're at the point now where we feel quite comfortable going forward. Gross operating costs, similar to the latest estimate that we had, or guidance for 2025, so around $950 million, and we're constantly working to reduce that number. And then, on utilization, we feel confident that we're gonna see a significant increase in streamer vessel utilization. This is gonna be driven by higher multi-client activity, and then the OBN activity is expected to be pretty much in line with 2025. Just wanna reiterate some important points that Sven also touched on.
The long-term net debt target range of $250 million-$350 million, which means that we're at $427 million today. As soon as we get to $350 million, we're gonna call a meeting with the board, and we're gonna say, "Okay, now we need to decide, are we gonna increase the dividend or are we gonna start buying back shares?" If we move on then to the order backlog and inflow, we have touched on this a few times already today. Very impressive order inflow during Q4, and some of that momentum has continued into Q1 of 2026. As a result, you see a backlog above $700 million at the end of the year. You see that it compares quite well to where we were in Q4 of 2024.
But what you saw that time is that we started to consume very rapidly from that, and we dropped down to $425 in Q2 of 2025. So our goal this time around is obviously we're gonna continue to run a quite significant backlog during the course of the year and not see the same type of drop. The right-hand side, you see the expected timing of the marine data acquisition backlog and the revenue recognition of that. In terms of our booked position, I'm not gonna touch on the details here, but you see Q1 and Q2 being relatively stable, and they're both at a high level in terms of booked streamer work. On the OBN work, you see a normalized crew count that is quite...
Pretty much around where we were in Q4, both for Q1 and Q2, so quite flat for the year is what we expect. Vessel utilization is expected to be around 85% in Q1. And you know you can never get to 100, because there will always be some steaming between different jobs, but 85% is historically a very good number, and that's really our goal, to manage that very, very carefully in 2026 and make sure that that number is significantly higher than it was back in 2025. Normalized OBN crew in Q1 of 2026 is expected to be around 1.8. So I'm pleased to present the summary of Q4. So we had strong multi-client performance, evidenced by a sales-to-investment for the full year of 2.0. We managed to reduce our net debt to $427 million.
We had record high order inflow, in fact, the highest order inflow since pre-COVID, and that provides good visibility into 2026. The short-term market development is sensitive to oil price, and I think there's been a belief out there that the oil price would have significant downside in the first half of the year. We haven't seen that yet, but we're still planning for a relatively challenging market in the first half, and then hopefully we'll see a pickup towards the second half of the year.
But the long-term market outlook remains very positive, and I think especially the slide I showed you from IEA shows that there's been a complete shift in terms of how we look at the need for oil and gas and how we predict demand for oil and gas, not only for the next 5 or 10 years, but for the next 25 years. We're also maintaining our dividend of $0.155 per share, and again, very pleased about 2025, given the challenging market conditions and the volatile oil price development, partly driven by the Liberation Day, early April. And with that, very pleased to take your questions.
Yes, we can start with the questions from the audience in Oslo. So, Kim?
Kim André Uggedal, SEB. A few questions, starting off with multi-client investments. How much of this $50,575 is external investments? Looking at your charts, you are probably at 4 vessels plus allocated to multi-client this year. Is that-
You mean using external capacity or?
Yes. Yeah.
It's the plan now is to use internal capacity for all of it. That's where we think we're gonna be. And if we need to source external capacity, we will do so, but we haven't started any negotiations in that regard.
There will, of course, be some dollars not related to acquisition capacity, but on certain contracts that we do JV on, there will be another company doing the imaging, for instance. And then, of course, you have some permitting costs and stuff like that, that's characterized as external cost. So there will be a little bit of external cost.
There's an OBN-
Yeah
survey, where we have already entered into a JV.
Yeah
where we're gonna use a different. That's true.
Yeah.
On the 100% owned TGS projects, we are using our own fleet on that.
Okay. Because last year, I think it was, like, 30% or so-
Yeah
that came from external.
That's right.
Yeah.
That was sort of something that came from before the merger, where we already had contracted an external party to do that.
In dollar terms, you can assume that that will be somewhat below $20 this year.
Yeah.
And then on the actual numbers, you're increasing 25% on multi-client investments. How big of a risk are you taking now, given you're still not down at the $350 million in net debt?
Yeah.
I assume you have pretty good, let's call it, pre-commitments in Brazil and Gulf of Mexico, et cetera.
Yeah.
But should we still- you have a chart showing that, sales investments is dropping in 2023 when you increased your investments?
Yeah.
Right? That's-
Yeah
Natural, I guess.
Yeah.
Should we still aim for 2x sales investment on the elevated investments in 2026, or how do you feel about that?
Yeah, we don't, we don't think about it on a year-on-year basis. As you saw from the slide, you know, we've been touching down to 1.7, we've been touching up to 2.3, and it obviously because, you know, sometimes when you ramp investments up, it may have a year-on-year negative impact, but over time, we target 2. And I think, you know, that's a question we've been getting since I joined TGS in 2010: "How are you able to keep 2x return?" Twenty- or 15 years later, we're still doing that. So I'm, I'm not questioning whether we should be able to do that, but I'm not gonna guide you on calendar years, because you're right. I mean, if you ramp them up, it has a tendency to potentially drop, but it hasn't dropped lower than 1.7-ish, historically.
I think, touching on those investments, you know, I would say a significant part is obviously Brazil. In Brazil, we have good funding on the projects. There's obviously one big client who's very keen to, to join us on, on this service, and then we have a couple of others who are now joining, this, this big company. And, and we see increased interest overall, and I feel very good about the risk profile of those projects. I would say a second, significant basin is obviously U.S., Gulf of Mexico, where we see a lot of OBN activity. While there is more streamer in Brazil, there is obviously more OBN in, in the Gulf of Mexico. That's also relatively highly funded projects, very good historical track records. Feel very good about risk level on that.
And then the third part is where we now are moving further towards frontier, and we take slightly more risk than we've done historically, because we see that this is picking up. You know, some of this is in close collaboration with one of our long-term partners, who, as I showed, one of the quotes from the CEO saying that, "We need to go frontier," and we have identified certain areas where we want to be stronger. We're following that company in some of the frontier activity, and that may have a slightly negative impact on the pre-funding levels, but we're very pleased to do that because we see that this is a company that is probably. There's gonna be quite a few companies following that, that number one.
And then just more overall picture. You have a comment in the press release saying you don't see any near-term improvements in the market. At the same time, I think I share your comments on reducing buybacks and super majors, in particular, super majors, grabbing acreage in more frontier areas.
Yeah.
Obviously, oil price dictates a little bit of this, but how what's the timeline you see for oil companies stepping into more frontier areas, West Africa, South America, et cetera, until you actually start to see seismic demand coming through? Have you entered into certain negotiations already, or how is this playing out now?
Yeah, I mean, it's moving in a positive direction, but I think the slide that we showed where basically concludes that all companies spend their entire cash flow on the three buckets today, and that's probably not gonna change materially over the next months or year. There is a positive trend, for sure. Our clients take a more positive view on frontier exploration. They're still not certain where to go, and then they have this kind of limiting factor of budgets and, you know, where do we take that money from, given the current oil price? So I think our kind of cautious statement on particularly the first half of the year is more related to uncertainty around the oil price and the fact that there may be some pressure on these budgets short term.
Long term, I mean, I can't see that this is not gonna get much better because, I mean, everyone we talk to have similar statements to what Chevron, Equinor, and Shell had. So BP is another one, of course, complete U-turn in terms of their strategy. We've already seen the results of that.
Again, let me add that, you know, when you look at the overall spending trends of oil companies, that's easier to predict when— But when you start to dig into the different spending categories, it becomes more complicated because they can reallocate between them. And we have examples of IOCs that, in their 2027 guidance, they say, "Cash flow flat or even a little bit down, but we are going to increase exploration," right? So it's not easy to get it completely right, but... So that's kind of a cautionary statement we should add to that.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay, we have a couple of questions from the people on the webcast. Jørgen Lande in Danske Bank, "Good morning. Can you perhaps provide some input to what level of pre-funding rate we should expect on the guided investment level for 2026?
Yeah, we're not guiding on the pre-funding rate, but we've been making comments today about a high pre-funding rate. Varies between the different regions, of course. I said, Brazil is usually quite, quite good. So is Gulf of Mexico, although we're prepared to take slightly more risk on that because of our historical track record and the new regime, which is obviously very supportive to continued oil and gas activity. The question mark that we have is on the third bucket, which is, you know, a lot of West Africa, frontier areas in Asia, et cetera, where, you know, it really depends on how we see the markets develop during the year. But I think, overall, I think we feel pretty good at or slightly below the levels that we've seen last year, so...
Very good. We have a couple of questions from Mick Pickup in Barclays. This one is for you, Sven Børre Larsen. Gross cost for 2025 ended at $894 million, versus your guidance of approximately $950. What change on plans? And, would you have guidance if you expected the cost to come in below $900?
Yeah, we probably would. I can say that when we released the $950 guidance in July, and we reiterated that in October, we were looking at cost that was closer to that guided level. But we've constantly been able to overdeliver or underdeliver, depending on how you see it. The point is that the cost has been lower than expected constantly through the year. And also on the contract side, we've seen slightly less activity than we assumed earlier in the year. So it's a little bit related to that as well.
Yes, very good. Following up on Mick's questions, when you talk about a flat contract market, do you expect your contract months to stay flat? This is probably more related to your vessel allocation for 2026.
Yeah. Do you want to touch on that, or?
Yeah, I, I mean, overall, the mix between contract and multi-client, we'll, we'll see. I mean, we, we certainly expect the total utilization to be higher in 2026, I'm talking now about the 3D vessels, than in 2025. And then potentially that will be more driven by multi-client than contract. So I would say contract is probably, probably not up, maybe a bit down, in terms of allocated vessel months.
And again, this points to the fact that we have that optionality that no one else has. We have a record strong backlog. We always have the option whether we're gonna do a multi-client project or whether we're gonna do a contract, and if the margins are too low on the contract or the payment terms may not be great, then we see a multi-client project that competes, and we are very likely to do that. So we cannot give you a precise answer to that, but what I can say is, like Sven said, it's probably gonna be above 50, but whether it's gonna be 65 or 57, we don't know.
Last one from Mick Pickup in Barclays. "Hearing a lot of impact on AI, especially on seismic from your clients. Can you explain the impact of AI to TGS? And, is this then analyzing your process data better or rather than less work for you? And, does it also mean more or less demand for data for TGS?
Yeah, it's a good question, and you know, when we look at AI and our AI strategy, I mean, it's basically stands on two legs. One is, how can we get more efficient in terms of what we already do? And that ranges from staff and support duties all the way to, obviously, vessel utilization, vessel efficiency, OBN efficiency. I touched on some of the improvements we made on the OBN side, as partly driven by AI or data science. On the probably what Mick is pointing at is more on the revenue side. You know, can you create new revenue streams? Can you license a product that you're not able to do today? Can you create or improve the efficiency on interpretation, for example?
You know, it's obvious that being the by far largest data company in the world, we're in a really, really good position. I think what we've done so far is that we've created something called Seismic Foundation Models, where we, we train the model based on, obviously, huge amounts of data, and then you can, you can use that model, number one, to become much more efficient in terms of interpretation of data. And number two, you can increase the predictability and the quality of your, your estimates. So I think that's probably where the industry is going. Whether that's gonna drive more data demand or less, it's a question we've had. We, we wanna be very careful that we don't cannibalize the existing business model.
What we've seen so far is that some of the biggest clients at TGS have laid off a massive number of geoscientists, and some of their excuses when they say that they don't buy more data is that, "We don't have the people to do it." So obviously, having a very strong and efficient foundation model is gonna help in that. And hopefully, that means that they're gonna buy more data because they're more efficient in the interpretation and the usage of the data.
Next question is actually from a private investor. "What's the plan for the Ramform Vanguard in 2026?" Which is our seismic characterization vessel.
Yeah, that plan is still under development. We're bidding for work, and particularly work in the new energy space. And if we get contracts, and if we get a good schedule for the summer and fall season, we may take her out of stacking. And if we don't have that, we're gonna keep her stacked. We don't see a need to take her out unless we have a really good pipeline of opportunities, so that's what the team is working very hard on doing that right now. So we'll probably have more clarity on that by the end of March, I guess.
Very good. Next question is from Lukas Daul in Arctic Securities, and that's for you, Sven Børre. "Can you give an indication on the projected depreciation and amortization run rate for 2026?
Yeah, I guess on depreciation, it shouldn't be much different from what we've had. Of course, the capitalization of depreciation will vary a little bit, but depending on how much of the vessel capacity we use for multi-client, so there is a clear link there, but on a gross basis, it shouldn't change that much. On the amortization side, I think on straight line amortization, I would expect it to be more or less flat. And then obviously, the accelerator amortization should increase in line with the more investments and more revenue related to those ongoing investments, right?
So there is obviously a clear correlation between multi-client revenues, particularly, and multi-client investments, and the accelerated amortization.
We have a follow-up in terms of the capacity allocation. It's actually Erik Fosså in Carnegie Investment Bank and Steffen Evjen in DNB Markets asking about the split between streamer and OBN on your 2025 multi-client investment guidance.
Yeah, we don't wanna give any further guidance on that other than the overall investment number, which is $500 million-$575 million.
Yeah, another one from Jørgen Lande in Danske Bank. "You're currently utilizing 2 OBN crews. Should we expect that to hold for 2026, apart from adding the third crew for parts of 2026, so around 2-2.5 OBN crews on average for 2026?
It's probably a fair estimate. It's gonna vary a bit, and especially during the summer months, where we have a node-on-a-rope crew, and we have the PRM activity in Norway. But overall, I think the estimate for the full year is pretty much decent. Our goal is to keep that number pretty much flat to what we had in 2025. But again, as we showed in Q4, being able to plan for a market with less activity is huge in terms of the margins of that. So...
Last question is from Lukas Daul in Arctic Securities: "your 2026 gross cost guidance is up versus what you delivered in 2025. What's the driver, driver for the year-over-year increase in costs?
Yeah, it's the cost is partially, of course, activity-driven. We've as we said, we expect higher vessel utilization in 2026. So it's mostly related to activity.
Mostly related to a very conservative CFO and finance department, I guess.
Yeah.
Okay, very good. Thank you all for coming to.
Do we have another question?
Okay.
N ot sure if you will answer this, but, give it a try. On the net debt target, when do you expect to reach the $350? And adding to that, you had a ramp up on receivables in the quarter as normal per Q4. Should we expect cash flow release or working capital release into Q1?
Let me take the first one. Obviously, we won't give a precise, but what I can remind you about is that if we have the same cash flow in 2026 as we had in 2025, we'll be there towards the end of the year, right?
But that's, you know, we'll see. In terms of the working capital question... Yeah, you should see some release of that, but also be mindful that we have a bit of investments in Q1. So right now, I would expect, yeah, you shouldn't expect a net cash flow to be far from zero in either direction, after paying the dividend, of course. But we'll have to see. These things are the short-term cash flow is a bit unpredictable because of working capital movements and certain other things. But that's call it as precise as I can be at this stage.
Okay. Thank you.
That concludes the Q&A session. So then I'll leave the concluding remark to you, Kristian.
Well, thank you very much for your attention today, and we're happy to see you after we report our Q1 number later this spring. So, thank you for your attention, and have a great day. Thank you.