Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of TGS presentation of Q1 2026 results. 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 draw your attention to the forward-looking statements showing on the screen and available in today's presentation and earnings release. After management's concluding remarks, we will open up for questions from the audience on the webcast. With that, I give the word to you, Kristian.
Thanks, Bård . Before we kick off with the highlights of Q1, please allow me to provide a quick backdrop to recent market developments impacting our business going forward. Just a few months ago, the market expected 2026 to be defined by oversupply and continued capital discipline. Today, the picture has changed dramatically. The conflict in the Middle East has disrupted supply, effectively trapping significant volumes of oil, tightening the market and driving higher prices. More importantly, it has fundamentally shifted how our clients think about exploration. Energy security is once again a top priority. Strategic reserves are being drawn down, and reserve replacement has moved back to the forefront after years of underinvestment. Activity is beginning to pick up, particularly outside the Middle East, as operators look to secure new diversified sources of supply. That said, this will not happen overnight.
Industry budgets for 2026 were set in late 2025, it will take some time for this shift in sentiment to fully translate into increased spending. However, the direction is clear. What was expected to be a gradual recovery is now shaping into a more urgent and potentially stronger cycle for exploration. We have good reasons to be increasingly optimistic about the outlook for 2027 and beyond. In this environment, TGS' data and insights are more relevant than ever, helping our clients move faster with greater confidence as they respond to a rapidly changing energy landscape. If I move on to the highlights for Q1 of 2026, we had revenues of $321 million driven by high multi-client activity on the investment side, and as a result of that, we had a utilization of 91% in the quarter. Our Q1 EBITDA was about $200 million.
That corresponds to a 62% margin, which is up from last year and pretty much in line with Q4 2025. Our Q1 EBIT was $64 million. That corresponds to a 20% margin. We had a net cash flow of $29 million. We have successfully continued to reduce the net debt now to a new level of $424 million. Our order inflow was strong in Q1. We had order inflow of $392 million. That means that our total order backlog is now $779 million, which is the strongest order backlog TGS has had since 2019. Last but not least, we're maintaining a quarterly dividend of $0.155 per share. Moving on to the business update for the quarter. The first slide is showing our data acquisition activity for Q1.
You can clearly see from this map that we have the majority of activity in multi-client. The light blue here, showing the multi-client activity for our streamer vessels in the South Atlantic area shows that we had five vessels operating in Q1. We had three in Brazil, one in the Equatorial Margin, two in the Pelotas Play, you see two vessels on the other side of the margin, one in Nigeria and one in Angola, and I will come back to that. We had only one contract for our vessel operations, and that was in Indonesia, as you see in the lower right-hand corner of the map. Moving on to starting with multi-client. We had external revenues of $240 million for multi-client, and we had investments of $178 and a sales to investment for the last 12 months of 1.7.
1.7 is down from the 2.2 that we had about a year ago. This is partly driven, as we have announced previously, with a delay in pre-funding of one of the active projects in the South Atlantic area. If you summarize the activity for the quarter, we had the APEX 1 ocean bottom node project in the Gulf of America. This is a dense node grid. Thanks to new technology development developed between acquisition and imaging of TGS, we can actually acquire that data without reliance on underlying streamer data, which is a huge advantage and opens up a new opportunity for us in terms of using OBN for exploration elsewhere in the world. We had a multi-client campaign in West Africa consisting of two projects. We commenced a big project in Nigeria. It's called Laide. It's a multi-client 3D survey.
Then we also had a project in Angola, which is the Ultra Profundo multi-client 2D survey that we did in the quarter. We have, as mentioned previously, high multi-client activity in Brazil's exploration basins. Three Ramform Titan- class vessels. As again, as I said, one in the Equatorial Margin and two in the Pelotas Basin. We also see a pickup in terms of frontier activity, and you see that the evidence of that with two agreements signed with governments in the quarter, and we see a pickup in interest from governments in terms of signing new MOUs and exclusivity agreements with TGS. We have one signed in Republic of Equatorial Guinea, then we have an LOI with a subsidiary of the Libyan National Oil Corporation that was also signed this quarter.
These are two of the most prospective frontier areas, further showing evidence that frontier is gradually coming back on the agenda for the, for our clients. On the marine data acquisition, we had external revenues of $58 million, internal production of $137 million. If you compare that to Q1 of last year, you see that the activity level overall is about the same. You see a complete shift in terms of how we allocate the vessels. Far more vessel activity on internal projects, so multi-client, you see less contract. This is very much in line with the strategy that we lined up and we talked about after Q4. We said 2026, you will see more multi-client activity.
You will see in a relatively weak vessel market, we allocate more of our vessels to multi-client. This plays out in terms of Q1 exactly as we planned, where utilization is as high as 91%, so sharply up from the average of last year because we have the flexibility and the ability to move our vessels between contracts and multi-client as where we see the highest revenue potential and profitability potential. You see that from the EBITDA margin as well. We have 19% EBITDA margin in the quarter. Keep in mind that the $137 million of internal production has a zero margin, which means that all the margin is coming from the external revenues of $58 million. A strong quarter in terms of profitability as well.
In terms of the activity summary, we were awarded an extension to a multi-year OBN contract in the Gulf of America. This is an agreement that we've had for the past three years. Now we've extended that further with one of our key clients who's very active in the Gulf of America, particularly in terms of OBN usage. This is a frame agreement, and again, it goes over the next three years. In addition to that, we reintroduced, I'm very pleased to see Ramform Vanguard back in business again and out of stacking. We have a solid backlog now for the Ramform Vanguard in Europe for the summer season, and we will run a long campaign now, funded by multiple parties, for offshore wind and site surveying using Vanguard.
We also saw contract streamer activity in both West Africa and Indonesia in the quarter. We recently signed an OBN contract in the Gulf of America. Moving on to imaging and technology, sort of a similar picture there with a little bit of a shift from external to internal. You see, the majority of our production is internal, $17 million in internal production versus $10 in Q1 of last year, $15 million in external revenue. You see we're able to even grow our external revenues in a quarter where we use most of our capacity on internal production as a result of higher acquisition activity on our vessels for multi-client. Strong margin there, 19% margin, and again, internal production, we don't charge any margin, strong margin on external projects.
In terms of activities, we announced a multi-year strategic agreement with AWS, so Amazon Web Services. I'm extremely excited about this because not only does it provide us the compute that we need and flexibility and scalability in terms of compute, but probably more important and more interesting is the fact that we're working now very closely in a partnership with AWS on Gen AI and what you can do with AI on seismic data. We've already developed very promising models for called seismic foundation models, where you're able to increasingly or get increasingly more efficient in terms of interpretation of data. You can do things in days now that you spend weeks or even months in the past.
I'm super excited that together with AWS, we can continue to break new barriers in terms of AI for seismic and seismic data. Again, as we say here, the collaboration is designed to create a foundational shift in geoscience, and again, very excited to follow the outlook of that going forward. New imaging center in KL this quarter, and this builds on a very similar model to what we do in Brazil. Strong utilization at all imaging centers. You see the total of internal production and external revenues is significantly up from last year, and we expect to see that continued activity growth throughout 2026. With that I want to hand it over to Sven who's gonna go through our financials, and then I will be back talking about the outlook for the rest of the year and the future. Thank you very much.
Thank you for that, Kristian. I'll start by going through the revenues for Q1. You see here the revenues by nature listed on this page. On the left-hand side, we show a waterfall of our MultiClient revenues in the quarter. Of course, the MultiClient business unit is behind most of the MultiClient revenues, $207 in this quarter. Then we also have a component of $5 million coming from the other category, and that is mostly related to offshore wind measurement and Metocean measurement campaigns. In total, MultiClient revenues amounted to $213 million. On the contract revenue side, you see that MultiClient business unit contributes by $33 million in the quarter, and that is related to revenues from JV partners on ongoing MultiClient projects.
The MDA, the Marine data acquisition business, amounted to $58 million in the quarter. We had $15 million of external revenue from our imaging business and the other category accounted for $3 million, resulting in total net contract revenues of $108 million for the quarter. If you look at the results by Business Unit, you see the MultiClient Business Unit on the top left-hand side, with the split by the MultiClient revenue and the JV revenue, in total $240 million. You have MultiClient investments of $176 million. As you can see, a sharp uptick in MultiClient investments, as Kristian talked about.
On the MDA side, data acquisition side, you see that we had $58 million of external revenue, but you also see the internal production on top. As Kristian said, we charge a zero EBIT margin on the internal production. As you can see, the activity level is pretty high in the quarter and sharply up from Q4 when you also include the internal production. Imaging revenue is a bit down on the external revenue part, $15 million, whereas the internal part related to our own multi-client projects also is up here related to the higher multi-client activity. As you can see, the overall activity level is more or less flat.
We feel quite confident that we will grow the total amount of activity in our imaging business this year versus last year. If you look at the consolidated numbers, $321 million of revenues that have been well covered by now, I won't go into more detail there. You see our operating expenses, $122 million net operating expenses in the quarter. This excludes one-off or an extraordinary item, non-cash of $8 million. We had $262 million of gross operating expenses in the quarter. As you can see, that is a bit higher than what we have seen in some of the preceding quarters.
This, of course, is partially related to the higher activity level and the high investment activity and partially related to geographical uplifts. When you work in regions where you have more geographical-related costs that are also reflected in the revenue line, you see that the gross cost will go up. Also, you should also see gross cost to some extent in a longer-term perspective because there are also some periodization effects between the different quarters. Looking at depreciation and amortization, we had $36 million of net depreciation in the quarter after capitalizing some of it to MultiClient projects.
We had straight-line amortization on our multi-client library of $56 million, reasonably stable from the preceding quarters. We had accelerated amortization of $43 million in the quarter. All in all, this gave us an EBIT of $64 million, excluding this $1 million one-off cost. This corresponds to an EBIT margin of $20 million, which is actually significantly up from the EBIT margin that we saw one year ago. Looking at the P&L total revenues, $321 million. We had an EBITDA, including this $8 million extraordinary cost of $191 million and $56 million of EBIT including this cost.
Adding on financial income and financial expenses, and impacts from currency movements, we ended up with a result in, before tax in our produced P&L of $44 million in this quarter, which is slightly down compared to the 47 that we had in the corresponding quarter of last year. Looking at cash flow, cash flow was quite strong in the quarter, supported by working capital movements, which is quite normal, of course, in a Q1. There are, as you know, some seasonal impacts or seasonal effects in our, you know, cash flow and working capital movement. We had cash flow from operations of $249 million. We had cash flow from investment activities of $168 million in the quarter.
We paid down approximately or a little bit more than $30 million of debt in the quarter. We had, and in addition, of course, we have some cost relating to IFRS leases. Interest paid were $29 million in the quarter. We pay interest on the bond loan biannually, so Q1, Q3, Q1, Q3, and so on. We pay that in Q1. We had normal dividend payments of just above $30 million in the quarter. All in all, this gave us a net cash position at the end of the quarter of $184 million, as I said, after paying down a bit more than $30 million of debt, then after paying $30 million of dividends as well.
You, as I said, we tend to have some seasonal patterns in our working capital development. Q1 is typically quite strong from a working capital viewpoint, and Q2 tend to be weak. You should expect to see weaker cash flow in Q2 as a result of the seasonal fluctuations. The balance sheet, and note that this is on an IFRS basis. I won't go into details on any of these items other than, once again, noting that the balance sheet remains very strong and net interest-bearing debt is now down to $424 million as per the end of Q1. This gave us the confidence to continue to sanction a dividend of $0.155 per share.
The ex-date is set to 8th of May. The payment date will be on the 27th of May. I'll leave the word back to you, Kristian.
Thank you, Sven. I'll talk about the outlook now. I think the first slide sort of speaks to itself, and it repeats my introduction message. Exploration is back. If you look on the left-hand side of this slide, you see five different recent reports. It's McKinsey, WoodMac, Goldman Sachs, Financial Times, and last but not least, IEA concluding that the exploration activity that you've seen ever since COVID is not sustainable, and it has to come up. Not only does it have to come up, it has to come up sharply compared to where it's been for the past five years. There are five bullet points that I wanna go through in more detail in this presentation. Number one starts with peak oil being extended by more than 20 years.
This is a conclusion of the IEA report that came out in November last year. Think about it for a second. If your doctor told you that you had another 20 years to live, you would probably change your priorities, and that's exactly what the oil companies are doing right now. They've been told that peak oil is not gonna be 2030 or 2032. It's probably gonna be sometime after 2050. The models of IEA only goes to 2050, so they can't conclude that it's gonna peak in 2050. What they're saying is that it's definitely not gonna peak until after 2050, and that means that oil companies have to go back on the drawing board.
They need to relook at their plans, They need to start investing in projects now that are gonna get in production in 2035 or later, which again, is very good news for frontier activity going forward. This doesn't change overnight, I think for Q1, obviously it doesn't happen overnight, it's not like you're gonna see increased spending immediately. We are increasingly optimistic for the future in terms of exploration, we get that signal from our clients as well. The second point here is that reserve life continues to decline. I will show a slide showing the development of reserve outlook, it continues to go sharply down every year. The reason for that is obviously that the RRR, so the Reserve Replacement Ratio, is below 1.
If it's below one and you keep on producing as much as you do, then you know that it's just a matter of time until your reserves are going to be unsustainable low. Number three is, as a result of that, the renewed focus on energy security and geopolitical risk. This actually started late last fall. We started talking about the energy security and geopolitical risk, and then it was further accelerated, of course, by the war in the Middle East, and now it's on everybody's agenda right now in terms of what do we do when 10 million-20 million bbl are under high risk going forward, and obviously inventories are drawn very, very quickly as we speak.
As a result of that, investor sentiment is changing. It used to be that investors expected all the capital allocation to go back to share buybacks and dividends. We actually see now that investors actually prefer companies to continue to reinvest in the business because they see that today's production is not sustainable in five or 10 years if you keep on under-investing in your own business. Last but not least, exploration successes, which we have seen in 2026 are supported by TGS data, which is always a great sign that TGS has data in the right places. Going into further detail, the first one I have covered before, and I talked about that, but again this refers to IEA's World Energy Outlook from November 2025, where they make a U-turn compared to what they did about a year before.
In terms of oil and expected demand for oil, you can see the dark blue line, it continues to grow. It continues to grow every year between now and 2050, and that's a significant change from what IEA predicted about 12 months ago. Natural gas is the same thing. That's a lighter blue, and you see it continues to grow. If you look at the change in demand expected in 2050 from what IEA said one year earlier, oil and natural gas is up 25%. You see that the one that is down is renewables, which is down 25%. We're getting more pessimistic about the growth of renewables, and we're getting more optimistic about the growth prospects for oil and gas. It doesn't mean that renewables is not growing.
You see it's growing faster than anything else, but it's just not growing as fast as we expected about a year ago. Again, a very positive slide in terms of the outlook for especially frontier exploration, where you will see oil companies are returning back to frontier. The second point is on declining reserve life and what we call an unsustainable RRR. You see the RRRs on the right-hand side, and then you see that they've been consistently below 100%. As a result, you see a sharp decline in the reserve life of the major IOCs on the left-hand side. Again, this is obviously not sustainable.
It would be sustainable if you had peak oil in 2030, but it's not sustainable if you get another 20 years' life expectancy of oil and gas, which is what we have seen quite recently. Moving on to renewed focus on energy security and geopolitical risk. Of course, this has taken a major change over the past few years, kicking off with the war on the 28th of February. It seems like it's just gonna continue like that. The global oil supply actually plummeted by 10.1 million bbl to 97 million in March. This is the largest oil supply disruption in history, and obviously we're gonna see the impact of that in the months to come.
In March, oil prices posted the largest ever monthly gain in wake of the most severe oil supply shock that the world has ever seen. That again means that the investor sentiment is changing. The graph on the left-hand side is showing companies that reinvest in the business, illustrated with a dark blue line, versus companies who under-invest in their business with a lighter blue line. Basically the definition of that is based on the CapEx to cash flow ratio. Whenever your CapEx to cash flow ratio is over a certain point or over the median, you would belong to the dark blue line, and if you're below the median, it would be the lighter blue. What you see is a significant change here starting in late October of 2025.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's about the same time as IEA released their report on another 20 years of extension to peak oil. What you see now is that companies who are reinvesting in their business are trading at about 20 percentage points higher share prices than the companies who don't reinvest and allocate all their capital to share buybacks and dividends. This is a big change compared to what you've seen over the past few years, where investors were demanding that you pay out all your excess capital to shareholders rather than reinvesting in your business.
If you look at what some of the CEOs are quoted here on the lower right-hand corner, you see Mike Wirth, who's the CEO of Chevron, who's saying shale oil production in the U.S. has probably plateaued over the past six to 12 months. This is a statement from the CERAWeek in Houston quite recently. BP, Meg O'Neill, who came in as the new CEO of BP, one of the first public statements she made is that they've set their self a target of 100% reserve replacement by 2027. That's a big change to where BP has been in the past, and it obviously requires more exploration spending and obviously more data in terms of finding those new barrels.
Last but not least, from Galp, Maria said that, "I know that exploration is all that the industry is talking about these days. Quite a change from a few years ago." Again, she can't be more right in terms of making that statement. We've seen a significant change in terms of our clients really getting back to the drawing board in terms of setting plans for exploration for the future. Number five, this is probably my favorite slide of the deck. It's showing exploration success, which is supported by TGS data. You see some of the commercial discoveries that have been made in 2026, ranging from Norway all the way to Brazil, and you see three discoveries in the South Atlantic area, you see two discoveries in Gulf of America, et cetera.
The point of this slide is that pretty much every discovery that is made in the world today, we go in and we check, do we have data? Pretty much 10 out of 10 we have data underneath the discoveries that have been made, which is always great. You know, every morning I wake up, I read the news, and I see there's been a discovery, and the first thing I check is our TGS database and see whether we have data there. Again, this year has been fantastic in terms of strong exploration success, but also supported by TGS data, which is also a great proof and evidence that we have. Not only do we have a lot of data, but we also have data at the right places. To summarize that, we're extremely well-positioned for an exploration upcycle.
We've been a major consolidator during the five-year industry downcycle. There has been times when I've been thinking you know, are we, are we too brave? Because it's certainly taken longer time for this recovery to happen than we thought at the time. Nobody expected this to be a five-year industry downcycle or even six years. We thought it was gonna be a relatively quick rebound. It's great to see now that industry partners, clients, and you name it, they're all talking about exploration these days. TGS is obviously in a unique position, having almost 60% of all the multi-client data in the world, having about 50% of the global fleet for seismic acquisition, having the largest OBN counts for deep water, et cetera, et cetera. We have, through these acquisitions, gained a unique geophysical technology suite.
If you look at all the technologies that we have today, whether it's a GeoStreamer, whether it's a Ramform vessels, whether it's a Gemini low-frequency source, imaging technologies, and you name it, these are all technologies that TGS has gotten access to through acquisitions of four companies during the last five years. It's great to see, you know. TGS used to be asset light. We didn't even have access to the GeoStreamer. We didn't have access to the Gemini low-frequency source that was marketed by ION at the time. Now we have all these technologies in-house, and that is probably the key reason that an increasing number of clients prefer to work with TGS, whether it's in streamer business, whether it's OBN or, of course, multi-client. Talking about multi-client, we have multi-client data covering all major basins.
I touched on the fact that we have about 60% of all the data that has been acquired since 2018. It's obviously a great position to be in. As you saw from our Q1 numbers, we continue to invest in the business. We continue to be brave, bold. We think that this will benefit TGS and our shareholders in the future. Last but not least, we have an efficient cost base and a strong balance sheet. You shouldn't take that for granted in our industry. Looking forward, order backlog and inflow. We had an order inflow of close to $400 million in Q1. Q1 is usually a rather weak quarter in terms of order inflow. You see that Q1 stands out this year as a very strong quarter.
That means that our total backlog is close to $800 million now. If you look at historical data on that, you have to go all the way back to 2019 to see a backlog that is as strong as TGS is reporting for Q1 2026. Right-hand side touches on the expected timing of the backlog, and you can read that yourself. I'm not gonna cover that in much detail. Next slide is showing booked positions for both streamer work and OBN for the next two quarters. As you see for Q2 2026 on the streamer side, we're pretty much sold out.
We have a strong backlog and pretty much all our vessels are now working 100% which means that utilization will probably be in line with what we saw in Q1, which is record strong, by the way. You see in Q3 there is still some work to be sold, but it's mainly multi-client. You see that there is a pickup in activity on the contract side, which is a good sign. We believe that the contract market will strengthen during the summer and into the latter half of or second half of 2026. Again, there are still multiple multi-client projects that will fill up the capacity, such that Q3 will probably be at a satisfactory level in terms of utilization as well. On the OBN work, it's slightly different.
You see a relatively low crew count in Q2 of 2026. This market has been a bit challenging over the past year and a half. We see some signs of improvement. If you look at Q3, it doesn't look good. I mean, it's pretty much the same contract allocation as we had in Q2. Keep in mind that the long-term agreement that we signed for Gulf of America with one of our key partners covering OBN work for the next three years, that is already sold. Now it's more about timing. When do we decide to go on and acquire the first project? It will most likely increase the size of the dark blue bar quite substantially. I'm not too worried about the OBN allocation for Q3 and then Q4. It's still early days.
It's always good to have some of these long-term contracts with clients because you only sell them once. It's more about timing, and it's more about discussions with the clients in terms of when do you start the project rather than being part of a tender where you need to spend weeks and months to plan for a project. If we move on to the guidance, as Sven said, no changes in the guidance for 2026. We still expect our multi-client investments to be somewhere between $500 million-$575 million. You've seen that we've gotten off to a very good start in that regard.
I think first half may be slightly higher than the second half because there is a capacity constraint now in terms of vessels, and we're using all our vessels except for one on multi-client in Q1. That's probably not gonna be the case for the full year. There's probably gonna be a slight shift from multi-client back to contract in line with a better market. On the CapEx, we expect the same level as in 2025. We get sometimes a question whether we can cut the CapEx further. Yes, we can, I don't think it would be smart. I think we keep on investing in new technologies. We're really proud of some of the technologies that we have acquired over the past five years, and we wanna continue to develop these technologies.
I think the level that you've seen in 2025 is quite sustainable also for at least 2026. Gross operating cost, Sven touched on that. In terms of utilization, we're expecting a significant increase in streamer vessel utilization for 2026, and you've already seen the signs of that in Q1. You've seen what is already booked in Q2, so I feel pretty good about that statement. We said that OBN activity is expected to be in line with 2025, and I think that still stands as it looks right now. Our long-term net debt target range is between $250 million and $350 million.
You saw that we're getting close to $400 million in net debt now. Obviously our plan is as soon as we get down to the guided range, we wanna look at capital allocation, see if full assessment of what does our shareholder prefer. In summary, a high multi-client activity in the quarter measured as multi-client investments, of course. As a result, very strong vessel utilization. I think I talked about it last quarter that in 2025, we had a lot of waste. We had wide spaces between different contracts, which cost us a lot of money. We've started out 2026 in a much better way, where we've been really efficient in terms of booking vessels, making sure that the next project is ready, such that you can move a vessel from A to B very quickly.
We've already seen the results of that in terms of increased utilization, but also lower cost and lower waste, which is great to see. EBITDA and EBIT margins, 62% and 20% respectively. Very strong order inflow, which means that we have the highest backlog since 2019. Again, as I've said multiple times, exploration is back. There is renewed focus on energy security, and most importantly, the investor sentiment has changed. We're not changing our guidance, our 2026 guidance stance. Last but not least, we maintain our quarterly dividend of $0.155 per share. Thank you very much, and I will now open up for questions, and I will ask Sven to come and join me on the stage. Thank you very much.
Yes, we have a series of questions from the people on the webcast. Starting off with John Olaisen in ABG. Have you seen any tangible signs of improvements in oil companies eager to buy seismic data? In example, the number of client meetings, leads, tenders, vessels, requests, et cetera. In which of your segments do you expect to see improvements first? Should we expect any improvements in your 2026 P&L, or is it more a 2027 event?
I think in terms of client meetings and client interest, everyone's talking about exploration these days. As I said, it doesn't change overnight. It's not like a war that kicks off in late February is gonna impact spending on seismic in March. I think there are clear signs that companies are now going back to their strategy plans. They're meeting with their boards. They're discussing what do we do as a consequence of this. I think one of the challenges that you've seen over the past few years is that oil companies spent all their cash. They spend it on dividend, buybacks, and CapEx. There is no more cash unless they're willing to compromise on shareholder allocation. That is gonna change now because now they have more cash.
What happens with the higher oil price is that you will have higher revenues and better cash flow, and we think, and we have reason to believe that some of that will benefit seismic and exploration going forward. I guess the answer is yes, there is more optimism. I've had recent meetings with heads of explorations of some of our biggest clients, and they're definitely confirming that they are back to the drawing board in terms of making plans for the future. Again, as John knows, budgets were set in when the oil price was 62, and with an expectation that it would drop down to the 50s, and now we're in a different world, and oil companies and especially the super majors don't move very fast.
We think that for 2027 and onwards you will see a change. Whether it's gonna happen in 2026, based on the stronger cash flow, it's still early, too early to say.
We have a somewhat related question from an investor. You mentioned expectations for more contract work in second half of the year. Are you seeing firm tenders supporting this already? When could we expect to see more contracts being awarded?
Yeah, there's been a pickup in tender activity both in OBN and streamer. As we said in Q4, we don't wanna go and compete for, let's say, streamer contracts where the margins are unsustainably low. We actually shifted a lot of our activity to multi-client, which you saw the results of in Q1 with more multi-client investments and higher utilization. I think we see some signs of a pickup in terms of tender activity and we are competing for some of that. We're not gonna sacrifice on our margins. We're gonna be very disciplined in that regard. We see that there is certainly a volume of contracts out there that justifies that we can switch some of that activity back to contract if the pricing is good enough.
Kevin Roger in Kepler Cheuvreux, this is one for you, Sven Børre . You also mentioned it in the presentation, you can probably repeat it in terms of working capital. Can you please comment on the working capital movement over the past quarters and what to expect for the coming quarters?
Yeah. It's, we're typically seeing, as I said, strong working capital developments in Q1. That's a seasonal pattern, we always, almost always see a weaker development in Q2, and we don't expect it to be very much different this year. There, as I said, there is a pretty significant seasonal pattern where Q1 is strong, Q2 is weak. Q3 is also normally a little bit weak but much better than Q2 normally. Q4 is typically better than Q3 again. Q1 is normally the best one. It varies a little bit from year to year, the relative strength in working capital movements between the quarters.
Over time, that's a reasonable pattern to assume.
Yeah. Kevin Roger has also a question regarding if we could indicate the amount of the delayed prefunding that we did not secure in Q1.
Yeah, we don't wanna give a number on that, but of course, I mean, you can do the math yourself. It's a big survey. It's a high technology capacity vessel, and we've been acquiring data there for quite some time. Again, on that question, we've been quite transparent on that. We have no reason to believe that we're not gonna get that funding from our client. That client is funding multiple projects for TGS in that area. They never let us down, and we would never have started that project and definitely not continue to acquire data if we didn't know that this is more related to bureaucracy and slow internal processes rather than a willingness to buy data over their own blocks. We're not concerned about that.
We feel very, very strong that it's gonna happen during the acquisition of that.
If the recovery plays out the way you project, can you give an indication of what kind of multi-client investments and activity that would imply?
I think we've probably been a bit ahead of schedule in terms of we upped our investments quite significantly in 2025 because we have expected that the market would rebound, and then it may happen quicker and more significant than we put in, into our own plans because of the war and the increased focus on energy security and investor sentiment that is changing. I guess we've already started. Whether we're gonna continue to increase multi-client investments, it all depends on client interest, client funding, et cetera. And keep in mind, we, you know, we have somewhat limited vessel capacity too. I mean, in Q1, we pretty much used all our vessels but one to get to the multi-client investments that we reported.
There's not a whole lot of flexibility in continuing to increase unless we're going to use third-party vessels. On the OBN side, it's a bit different. There is still capacity there. We can still grow the revenues quite substantially on the OBN side with the current count and the current crew availability.
Now a question from Steffen Evjen in DNB Markets. How does a higher oil price environment impact fuel costs on your streamer vessels? Would there be upside to your gross OpEx guidance if we stay at current oil price levels? To what extent can you push these costs over to the clients?
Yeah. It's obviously we will have to pay a bit more for fuel than we assumed some months ago given the situation, and that impact, do impact the gross cost. We've seen a little bit of that in Q1. It's not too bad. On our contract work, we typically are well protected in our contracts where we can where there are clauses that are pushing that additional cost over to the customers. That's valid for almost all a few exceptions, but almost all contracts will have that. It will of course affect gross cost and then a corresponding component in revenues.
Very good. I don't see any further questions from the people on the webcast. Unless there's any last last-minute questions coming up, I think that concludes the presentation. I'll leave the concluding remarks to you, Kristian.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I think it's obviously after five or almost six years where exploration and seismic has been completely out of, out of favor, it's great to see all the, all the news flow, all the reports, all the discussions now with clients that are taking a very different tone to what it did quite recently. It's great. We're prepared for this. This is really what we've been working on for the past few years in terms of our strategic agenda. It's taken longer than we expected and it will still not change overnight, but we definitely see the early signs of a very strong cycle going forward.
Being probably one of the companies in the world with the highest exposure to exploration is a good position to be in. Really wanna thank you for your attention today and hope that you come back in Q2, which is gonna be reported in the middle of summer in July. Thank you very much for that, and have a great day. Thanks.