Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. For today's call, phone participants are in a listen only mode. Following the prepared remarks, the company will conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will be provided at that time for you. If anyone has any difficulties hearing the call, please press star followed by zero for operator assistance at any time. I would like to remind everyone that this conference call is being recorded on Thursday, August 12th at 10 A.M. Eastern Standard Time and is being broadcast live via the Internet. During today's call, management will make statements regarding management's expectations for the company's future financial and operational performance. These statements are considered forward-looking statements.
Each forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date of this call, and actual results may differ materially from management expectations for a variety of reasons, including market and general economic conditions and the risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in the company's SEDAR filings. I will now turn the call over to the President and CEO of Geodrill Limited, Mr. David Harper, who will review the company's operations and performance for the quarter. Geodrill CFO, Gregory Borsk, will then give us a more detailed review of our first quarter financial results, followed by an outlook from Mr. Harper. I'll now turn the call over to Mr. Harper. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good morning. I hope you and your families are all staying well. In the first half of 2021, Geodrill recorded its highest ever quarterly revenues underpinned by strong market fundamentals, robust demand for drilling, and a proven business model of operating a fleet of high performance rigs. In Q2, we generated revenues of $30.6 million USD. That's up 47% year-over-year. We continued to realize strong profitability, increasing net income to $4 million USD. We generated a return on capital employed of 21% and an ROE of 16%. We continued to maintain high utilization rate of 70%, supporting an increase in pricing power, and we increased our rig fleet to meet the strong demand in drilling activity.
We continue to benefit from a robust exploration environment evidenced by extensions of contracts in our core operations in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mali. We also continued to diversify geographically, increasing our regional reach as we mobilize two rigs to Egypt and expect to be drilling in this current quarter. In addition to expanding our rig fleet, Geodrill also expanded its client base to include a mix of majors, intermediates, and juniors, which has contributed to the increase in overall drilling activity and a well-balanced mix of drilling services. Strong tailwinds and a solid balance sheet positions us well to continue executing on our growth objectives for the remainder of the current year. I'll now turn the call to Gregory Borsk to comment on the quarter's overall financial performance.
Thank you, Dave. As a reminder, all figures are reported in U.S. dollars. The company generated revenue of $36.6 million in Q2 2021, being an increase of $9.7 million or 47% when compared to $20.9 million in Q2 2020. This is a significant achievement for the company as this is the second highest quarterly revenue ever recorded in the company's history. The increase in revenue is a result of the increase in demand for the company's drilling services. A strong gold price has increased cash flow of mining companies and their exploration budgets, which in turn is driving increased drilling activity. Geodrill has benefited from increased exploration budgets over the first half of the year and is also well-positioned for the second half of 2021.
The gross profit for Q2 2021 was $8.3 million, being 27% of revenue, compared to a gross profit of $6.6 million, being 32% of revenue for Q2 2020. For the six months ended June 30, 2021, the year to date gross profit was $18 million or 29%. The EBITDA for Q2 2021 was $7.4 million, being 24% of revenue, compared to $6.5 million, being 31% of revenue for Q2 2020. Overall, the net income for Q2 2021 was $4 million or $0.09 per share, compared to $3.3 million for Q2 2020 or $0.07 per share. At this point, I will turn the call back to Dave.
Thank you, Greg. Before I go to the Q&A portion of the call, I'd like to provide a brief outlook for the remainder of 2021. Fueled by strong gold prices and increased utilization, our outlook for the second half of the year remains exceedingly positive. We enter the second half of 2021 focused on growth and being drill ready. We continue to accelerate our growth by expanding our geographical footprint into South America and Egypt and strengthening our competitive advantage to drive profitability. They're also strengthening our leadership in building a diverse, sustainable drilling company that encompasses all of our ESG initiatives. I'm proud to say that the Geodrill team has made us a serious contender in our industry, equipped with a modern fleet of rigs, a clear vision, and a solid financial foundation.
Geodrill is ready to achieve our audacious goal to be recognized as the customer-preferred partner in providing drilling services in West Africa, the African Copperbelt, Peru, and ultimately, outperforming our competitors. Thank you for participating in today's call. We'll now be pleased to answer any questions which you may have. At this point, I would like to ask the operator to provide directions for anyone who wishes to ask a question. Thank you.
Your first question comes from Anthony Prost, Stifel GMP. Anthony, please go ahead.
Anthony, good morning.
Hello all. Wanted to ask you a little bit about, first off, the impact of cost inflation, because it seems to be a theme for a lot of companies right now. Things like labor, fuel. Can you speak a little bit more about how you feel cost inflation is going to impact you in the second half of the year?
We're seeing costs rise. To offset that, we're seeing drilling prices increase as well. I think the result will be somewhat benign.
Thanks.
Just to add to that, Anthony, too. We set all salaries, and that are done on an annual basis, so that's already been set for 2021. We don't expect a significant increase in the second half of the year.
Perfect. Have you seen any of the supply chain issues affecting your own inventory? Because it's my understanding that you pride yourself on having a well stockpiled inventory of drilling rods, things like that. I wanted to know if there's been any impact on your ability to source those inputs.
None whatsoever, Anthony. You're correct, we do pride ourselves on that, and I can honestly say that during the entire COVID period, we lost zero time through lack of availability of inventory. We're almost 30% or 40% self-sufficient at Geodrill. It's one of the things that is the Geodrill difference.
You actually see that, Anthony. It's actually the opposite for us. If you just track the company back the last few quarters, we've been increasing inventory. If you look at where we are at June 30, 2021, we have inventory of $25.5 million. That inventory is in the countries that we operate. It's cleared customs, it's ready to go, which is why we're able, when a large drill program comes up and we can tender on it, we're ready to go. We have that inventory in place. We've looked ahead and actually thought that out and have significant and sufficient inventory in place.
Perfect. One last question from me before I pass it over. I saw that you announced a new underground contract. I wanted to get a better idea of how you see that part of the business evolving over the coming years. Do you expect it to be a bigger part of the company? Also, if you could provide any sort of color on the margin profile, it'd be appreciated. Thanks.
We entered the underground market in 2017, I believe it was. It was the right decision for us to do that. It's a way of us expanding our services and focusing on mine-based drilling, which tends to be more counter-cyclical. We have a fleet of six underground drills. Essentially what this does is it takes the entire fleet. We have 100% utilization now across that particular unit. At this point in time, we need to take a decision, do we need to expand that? If we look at the standard Geodrill operating model, it's based on each time we get 70% utilization, we start to expand the fleet. Whilst we have this year already made plans to expand the exploration surface fleet, this now accelerates our thinking in terms of adding to the underground fleet.
In terms of margin, well, historically, underground margins are lower than surface margins, and that's because of the larger longevity kind of style of production drilling as opposed to exploration drilling, which is typically characterized by three to six-month contracts. Underground contracts are typically characterized by longer term, so lower margin style working. In the overall scheme of things, I don't expect it's going to affect us greatly. It'll actually just improve model. We'll see increased revenues, and for that particular division, we will see lower margins. Overall, the blended margin is still in the order of 25%+ across all of the business units of the company.
All right. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Ahmed Shaath , Beacon Securities. Ahmad, please go ahead.
Ahmed.
Good morning, David Harper. I guess my question is maybe a little bit of an update on the South American initiative. How many rigs do you have right there, right now? Growth potential, how many rigs are you shipping? Any bottlenecks? Just a general update on the South American expansion.
I can now say that we've got a quarter of drilling behind us in South America. We actually started into our first hole the last week of December, so we've just treated that as a bit of a training run. The quarter went very well, and the customer gave us an initial three month contract to see whether we would be able to deliver on what we said we could. Customer's very happy. Contract has been increased fourfold, and they've written a very nice testimonial for us. I think what's important is we're hitting their targets and we're doing them under budget. It's something that hasn't been accomplished by that particular company in the past. Peru, as far as that particular project is concerned, is we couldn't be happier with that outcome.
As far as the country Peru is concerned, we've been dealing with COVID and we have been dealing with a contested election. COVID is obviously, it is what it is, and we are where we are. It's something that will resolve itself in time. Some countries are affected more so than others. Peru is certainly not alone in saying that it would've affected most companies' operations out there. We've actually done reasonably well. We haven't lost any time because of COVID. We have had a couple of cases of COVID. We managed to isolate them very quickly and get back to business. We haven't had any adverse effects on that particular project. However, I would say that it has put a couple of projects, in terms of the tendering process, on hold.
The other thing that has been going and brewing in the background has been this contested election. The good news is that contested election is now resolved. Regardless of your political faction, who you support or who you don't support, we now have some clarity as to who the president is. I think that most international mining companies operating there are pleased to have a result. As a result of that result, we are currently receiving an elevated amount of inquiries and tenders. As a result of that, we're encouraged by that. We've actually added to the fleet by adding one additional drill. Even though we had three drills and only one of them was working, we see that as just being a short-term thing. We're bullish, Peru, and so bullish that we've actually, on speculation, added one new rig to the fleet.
We're currently at four rigs, and we're at 25% utilization, which doesn't sound great, but that needle will move very quickly. The most important thing we were looking for in South America was a soft start and a satisfied customer. On that score, we've checked both those boxes. The trick for us here, going forward now, is to increase our customer base as we slowly start to roll out things like training, and just the infrastructural workings of getting three rigs into the field and drilling and getting them vehicled up and tooled up and personnelled up. Sorry for the long-winded answer, but it was not a and/or yes/no sort of question.
No, that's a great update and really what I'm looking for. Just to confirm, the three-month contract was extended by another year? Did I catch that correctly?
Yeah, open-ended.
Open-ended.
It's a fourfold increase in the initial contract. If what you were looking for was a customer that was basically saying, Let our actions speak louder than our words. Let's vote with our purchase order book and give you guys a bit more work, and a fourfold increase in your initial contract, you couldn't be happier with that. We're very happy. We're very okay with that.
That's great. I guess you're satisfied with having four rigs on the ground right now, given what you're seeing, the tendering activity. You think that's sufficient for now? Or any of the upcoming rigs that you're planning to send over to South America as opposed to West Africa?
Looking at the current tendering landscape, if we were to win one or two of these jobs that we're tendering on, we'll be totally maxed out. We've got a comfortable startup fleet, initial fleet in country, I believe. We certainly don't want to leave our potential customers wanting. As we speak, plans are afoot to grow the surface fleet, and some of that growth will find its way through to Peru based on how things play out over the next couple of months. Copper's not going down any time soon. Peru is the second-largest producer of copper in the world. Political situations come and go, presidents come and go, COVID will come and go, but the need for copper will not go. It will only increase from here with all these rollout of electrifying vehicle markets.
We're very bullish on green metals, and we didn't go to Peru chasing gold. We built plenty of gold in West Africa. We saw it as a grander in the overall scheme of things, a strategic geographical step out as much as it was a commodity base.
That's great.
Just quickly, the point to reiterate on that rig is we were able to secure that rig in Peru. That's significant because as busy as we are in West Africa, we can't really be sending rigs that are working in West Africa to Peru. We were very fortunate to be able to add a rig locally, and then you'll see the benefit to that through the economies of scale as we get all those rigs working. A significant win for us.
Is that the case for the other three as well?
No, that was the one we started off with.
Yeah.
Sorry, what was the question? Sorry.
No, I was just wondering.
It's the same for the other three.
The other three rigs, were they secured in a similar fashion, or did you ship them out of West Africa?
No, we shipped them out of West Africa. We had the opportunity at the time, and we had the spare rigs. We don't have the spare rigs now. When a rig became available in the immediate market, which was exactly identical to the rigs that we have. We're sticklers for the standardization model. If we look at our 70, what is now post-quarter end, 70 rigs. Across that 70 rigs, we've only got eight different type of rig. When a rig becomes available in your immediate market, it just sits so well with our model of standardization. For us, it was a total no-brainer. Rig becomes available in our market identical to the rigs that we currently have. At some point in time, there's gonna be the need for that rig, so grab it. We did.
That's right. Maybe a couple of more follow-ups, then I'll jump back on the queue. The first is, operationally, from the first three months of operation, you're confident with your margin profile and operational performance to be similar of what you've been achieving over the years in West Africa. Secondly, any bottlenecks on acquiring new rigs? How is the lead time on buying new rigs from your favorite supplier, in light of the logistics kind of bottlenecks around the world as well? That's it for me.
We're operating in an unusual world, right? This is a COVID-stricken world. The interesting thing that sort of sticks out when you look at today's numbers, I think the first thing that you see is why was revenue flat quarter-over-quarter, when in fact we're basically citing that we have strong utilization. I guess the question is, well, if that is typically a strong quarter and Q2 is usually stronger historically over Q1, why was this not the case this year? Coming back to my point of we're living in a very different world these days. Effectively, if you recall, we had the peculiarity of is we had a very strong Q4. In fact, our strongest Q4 ever on record. I believe it may have been actually, at the time, our strongest ever quarter on record.
We immediately back to back that with a stronger again quarter one. Two very peculiar, very unusually strong quarters when you don't normally expect them. That is, to a large extent, the sort of wound up elastic band effect that you get when you release it because of the COVID slowdown. As we come into what is traditionally been our quarter two, you would naturally expect a slightly stronger quarter two than quarter one. What was peculiar about this particular quarter four was that wet season came upon us a little earlier. We did in fact have a very strong April, May. June was soft. Whilst it was a solid result, it certainly is eye-catching, the fact that it was weaker than quarter one.
On that, what normally happens and what in fact is happening is when we have an earlier than usual wet season. The wet season ends sooner than normal, and that is in fact the case. Whilst we have a soft June and a soft July, we're actually experiencing a very strong August, and we'll see an even stronger September. What I'm saying, without giving guidance, is that whilst Q2 was, I think, a solid result, and you'll be expecting to follow up with a traditionally weak Q3, I think what you can look forward to, in fact, I know you can look forward to, is a very solid quarter three. In fact, at this point in time, it's shaping up to be our best quarter three on record.
As far as margin is concerned, and Greg could speak to this better than I can, we put in an extremely solid quarter one in the 30-plus range. We've put in a 24 or 25 this current quarter. A lot of these are just accounting issues where we get stock returns and things like this in the inventory. Greg, would you like to just jump in? I'm not sure if I'm answering that correctly.
I think, Ahmad, on the margins, what you really want to look at is the year-to-date margins. Like Dave said, through Q1, we were ramping up. By that, January, we started off strong. The holidays, this is what Dave said earlier. In Q4, we had a very strong Q4 2020 because we had clients drilling up right up to the holidays and kind of even through the holidays. Typically, in Q1, it takes a while for clients to get back and ramp up after the holidays. Sometimes we don't get really going until mid-January. What we saw in Q1 2021, which was a carryover from Q4 2020, is we saw robust activity right at the start of January. I think we communicated this when we did the Q1 call. We had a very strong January 2021, and that continued to ramp up throughout Q1.
We had an even stronger February and an even stronger March. When that happens, your margins are higher. In Q2, what Dave was saying is we started to ramp down in Q2. Even though the revenue Q1 to Q2 is kind of the same, within $100,000, we started to head into wet season a bit earlier. That does affect the margin, because you start to slow down, your revenue starts to slow down, but you still have some labor costs and demob costs and leads, et cetera. There is a bit of choppiness between quarters, but I think if you look at where we are through the first six months of 2021, we're very, very comfortable with our margins. Like a gross margin of 29% is stellar.
Our revenue, if you look at the year-to-date revenue, we're at 58% increase through the first 6 months of 2021 versus the first 6 months of 2020. Again, I would focus more on the year to date and the fact that we're still very bullish on Q3 and Q4 and what we're seeing going forward. I think 2021 is still going to be a spectacular year for us.
That's great color. What I was trying to get at is your margin in Peru, which we spoke about before, is that given your business model in West Africa, I was just wondering if you still believe that your margins in Peru, given the pricing environment and how competitive it is, you can maintain a similar profile in Peru as you ramp up there? I think the previous answer was yes, but just confirming if that's still the case, given any changes in the landscape.
That is the case. In fact, we're doing very well and we're very happy with the results.
That's great.
Exceeding our expectations.
That's great. Thank you.
It's only going to do better as we get more economies of scale.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star one on your touch-tone phone. Your next question comes from Brett Rosen. Brett, please go ahead.
Hey, Dave. Nice quarter. Congrats.
Hey, thanks. Thanks, Brett.
Wondering if you could talk about your CapEx here. I think I saw $3.6 million in the current quarter, which is higher for you guys, which is generally encouraging. Do you have any thoughts, I guess, on CapEx going forward, where that might be deployed? I'm not sure if I heard the answer on the last question, but what kind of delays are you seeing in procuring rigs right now?
So we-
Sorry, Greg, go ahead.
No, you've got the CapEx numbers in front of you there. I can speak to the delays, but you've got the numbers. You can quote them straight from the.
Yeah. CapEx. Okay, sorry, Brett, I missed the second half of the question. CapEx is, as you know, the Geodrill model, we're very bullish on adding rigs to the fleet in that. That's kind of been our model. As Dave said, when we hit 70% utilization, we add rigs, and when you add rigs, you add all the ancillary equipment, our boosters, rod carriers- vehicle. You'll see through the first half of the year, CapEx was about $5.6 million. We also have some CapEx in our prepayments, that as soon as those rigs are shipped to us, that will flip from prepaid into CapEx. Right now, what we budgeted for the year in terms of rig additions and ancillary equipment, we're right on schedule.
We're a little behind if you just look at the PPE additions, but if you factor in that some prepayments and which will flip to PPE additions in Q3, we're right on target. We're very comfortable with what we budgeted at the start of the year in terms of additions and where we are. You'll see, I don't know if you looked at the cash flow. What we've done is we've actually utilized some of our credit lines to make sure we have sufficient inventory, and we're able to keep on our path of adding PPE. Right now, if you look at the working capital, there's a bit of money tied up in receivables.
As you're busy in Q1 and as you're busy in Q2, the receivables may either build or stay the same, our trade receivables, and that normalizes and you start to see that cash come in. The point I'm trying to make is, we're very fortunate that we have a strong balance sheet and that we can wait for certain things to normalize. We didn't let that hamstring us. We were able to continue on our path of adding PPE and inventory as we're extremely busy.
Okay, that makes sense. Are you envisioning kind of this run rate for the first six months? Is this more than likely what we're looking at for, say, the next six months or the next year?
Uh, this-
CapEx budget for this year.
Sorry. Oh, yeah. CapEx budget. Yeah. We try to do the CapEx budget evenly throughout the year. Again, some of it is opportunistic. If a rig comes up and it's available and it makes sense to us, like the one in Peru, we'll grab it. Our CapEx budget, we try to spread out evenly throughout the quarter.
Okay. Are you guys seeing significant delays in rigs right now?
From the manufacturers, yes. We're fortunate, Brendan, in that we make a lot of stuff ourselves. To the previous caller, I was saying we're about 30%, 40% self-sufficient within our Anwiankwanta facility. What we tend to do is buy rigs in kit form, bring them to West Africa and assemble them. We are experiencing some delays, but I think our situation is much better than our competitors, put it that way. Nothing that's going to affect business adversely, no.
As far as deploying those, do you guys plan this in advance, or is it kind of opportunistic as far as where those are deployed? Anything you can offer directionally, I guess, on where you see the best opportunities to deploy new rigs right now. Is it in Africa? Is it in Peru? Or I guess, where are your best options?
On the opportunistic question that you asked. If we were to wait for when a customer ordered a rig and then we decided to go and build it, we would have never expanded beyond our first two rigs. Modus operandi for us is we hit 70% utilization, have a look at the macros. If gold's good, environment's good, everything's good, and if we have the cash, then we go and just place orders for rigs knowing that eventually, at some point in time, they're gonna hit the go line and eventually one of our customers is gonna take them. That model has served us extremely well since the get-go. Where will they go? Well, I think it'll just really determine where the business is when rigs become available. At this point in time, we have an expectation that things will ramp up in South America.
We've just entered a new market, which no one's asked about on the call, funnily enough, Egypt. That's an extremely interesting proposition for us. We've just landed with two drills. Those two drills are booked for the next one and a half years. Whenever there's a new drilling company in town, there's always a lot of interest. That's a market that has been left to probably one drilling company for the longest time. Now there's some real competition that has arrived in the arrival of Geodrill. I think most customers will be very keen to know that there's going to be some price and some service competitiveness into that market. If the level of inquiries that we're receiving at the moment is anything to go by, I would say that Egypt is probably the next place I'll be considering expanding into.
This all plays very well into our geographical expansion and our diversification model. Now, for the longest time, we have been strong in West Africa. Now it's time to go up and go out, both from a geography point of view and from a commodity point of view. Currently, the job that we're drilling in Egypt is gold. South America gives us the commodity diversification with copper, zinc, and base metals. Of course, we've got our bread and butter market, which is the West Africa market, which is also growing. Where will all the new CapEx be deployed? I can't honestly say at this point in time. I think it's gonna be pretty much an even split between the three regions.
I appreciate that. Thanks a lot, Dave. Congrats again.
Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Brendan. Cheers. Thanks for your question. Cheers.
Thanks.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn it back to Mr. Harper for closing remarks.
Okay. Thank you very much, everybody, for participating on today's call, and have a great day. Thank you. Bye.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen.
Thank you, everyone
this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.