Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to SBO's first quarter call, that we are today doing here in Vienna. Nice and beautiful Vienna. I welcome you in the name of the executive board, and we will do the call together, me, Klaus Mader, the CEO, and Campbell MacPherson, Chief Operating Officer of the company. Today, we will talk about first, the business highlights and the performance of the first quarter, which will then followed by information about the market environment, which will be done by Campbell. I will finish the call with an outlook, and of course, as usual, this will then be followed by a Q&A, and we are very much looking forward to it. The important information, the disclaimer, is also shown at the presentation at the website.
I'm not going to read through that, in order to save time. Let me, in 3-4 sentences, summarize the performance of the first quarter, the financial performance of the first quarter. We had a solid start into the year, with sales continuing on a high level. The financial results reflect a mixed picture, and we will talk a lot about that during that call, due to different market environments across the regions. AMS continued to be on high levels, with high sales and high margins. Oilfield equipment, however, was impacted by the continuously getting slower U.S., and therefore, also getting more competitive market. We will talk about that.
Positive news on the booking side, after four consecutive quarters, we are recording a slight increase in bookings, for the first time in five quarters. Let us summarize the business and financial highlights on that one slide. As I already mentioned, the Q1 sales remained at a high level, with EUR 146.7 million, which was driven by the, again, and continuing excellent performance of the division Advanced Manufacturing and Services. OE faced market pressure in the U.S., sales slightly below the previous year. This was compensated by the acquisition of Praxis. However, Praxis could not fully compensate the slowdown on the U.S. market, which will be elaborated in more detail later by Campbell.
On the positive note, on the positive side, the bookings increased by almost 2% compared to the previous quarter. Group EBIT arrived at EUR 20.6 million, which was lower than in the first quarter of the previous year, and this was only driven by the performance of the OE division. The AMS division delivered another strong quarter with EBIT clearly above 20%, 21.7%, precisely. The operating cash flow was positive with EUR 10 million. The free cash flow was also positive. We will talk about that later in more detail. Also, an outlook for the second quarter cash flow and all balance sheet KPIs improved. Cash increased, equity ratio increased, and gearing slightly reduced from the end of last year.
In executing our strategy, let me briefly, and then in more detail, highlight some activities that we are doing. The capacity expansion in Saudi Arabia and Vietnam is on track. We have installed another 3D metal printer here in Austria, which will further expand our product offering, and which will help us to diversify our business. Further product developments were happening on the geothermal business, and I will elaborate on that now. Because what we would like to do from now and going forward is to give some insights about activities that we are doing during the quarter. And I have here selected four highlights, four building blocks in implementing our strategy. The one is Technology Day in Abu Dhabi. Why have I chosen that?
First of all, it is absolutely in line with the execution of our strategy to expand and to have growth initiatives in the fast-growing Middle East market, and to come up with product innovation. This Technology Day, with 75 participants of our main customers from the region, was important to present our capabilities, our cutting-edge technology, which is part of our strategy, coming up with product innovation, and also to have our complete product offering. Our trend is in going forward to also have more collaboration among the subsidiaries, that not only every company is going to the customer, but we go together to the customer, we present our product portfolio together, and this Technology Day in Abu Dhabi was very successful.
Another initiative in expanding in our core business is the expansion of our location in Saudi Arabia. This will increase our presence in this market, and you know, localization in that region is very important. This IKTVA scoring in the kingdom total value added will also help us to have further product opportunities and market opportunities. And of course, I mean, the sun is shining a lot in Saudi Arabia. It will be equipped with solar panels, as we already did in Austria, as we already did in Dubai or in Houston, in order to further reduce our carbon footprint. Important to note is the installation of the first Velo3D Sapphire XC.
It is not the first Velo machine, 3D metal printing, machine that we are installing in Austria, but it is by far the biggest one. The diameters are getting bigger, the heights are getting bigger, which will help us to expand our product offering, our capabilities, not only for our core business, oil and gas, but also for our diversified business. We have recently printed a prototype for a heat exchange for the hydrogen industry. Also to be mentioned is our further positioning in geothermal. We talked about our downhole drilling tool combo with the motor, the rotary steerable tool, and the circulation tool, which means drilling geothermal well, but the story continues. We have now made inroads also with our well completion products.
We have produced for one of the main players in enhanced geothermal systems, a company called Fervo Energy. A completely new plug. I can tell the name because currently there is a geothermal conference ongoing in Houston, and we are together there presenting this product. It is a unique product, exclusively built for the geothermal market. The geothermal market is growing faster, has high growth rates, drilling deeper, drilling hotter, and this plug can resist 350 degrees Fahrenheit in this application. From now on, we will come up with more and more business highlights, what happened during the quarter, but I know you are, of course, also interested in the financial performance of the first quarter.
And you see here that the sales remained on a high level also in the first quarter of this year. We are somewhere between EUR 142 million and EUR 148 million since the beginning of the previous year, but with a different development among the segments, resulting from a different environment and a different development of the markets. AMS continues to deliver strong. They generated almost EUR 82 million in sales, which is the same sales figure as in the previous quarter, sorry, previous year quarter, and an increase of more than 4% to the fourth quarter of 2023. Oilfield Equipment was almost on the level of the previous year with the support of the Praxis acquisition.
Without the Praxis acquisition, and you may recall, it was acquired in the first quarter of last year, sales would have been below the previous year as a result of the decreasing drilling, as well as completion activities in the U.S. market, predominantly. Also, compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, OE sales are down by 7%, which demonstrates the more competitive and slower market that we are seeing in the U.S. On a more positive note, the bookings for the first time after quarters have been increasing. When you look at the first quarter bookings of 2023, they're almost EUR 160 million. This was still the time, and we talked about a lot of during the last calls, a time when our customers were reserving capacity.
Abnormal high bookings in the first quarter of 2023, but also in the fourth quarter of 2022, and this had to normalize. Therefore, the bookings in the past quarters were going down, but now, for the first time after quarters, we see a slight increase of 2%. And we are now in the midst of the second quarter, but what I can already comment is that we will see a further increase in bookings also in the second quarter. Again, driven by the AMS division and supported by the international markets. EBIT and EBITDA declined compared to the previous year, and this was driven by the oilfield equipment division. Let me first summarize the EBIT figures and result figures on that slide before we then go one level down on the segment level.
EBITDA stands at EUR 28.8 million, after EUR 33.5 million in the previous year. EBIT came to EUR 20.6 million, which is a decrease from the EUR 26.7 million, but still delivering an EBIT margin of 14%, not to forget. A slower and a lower financial result ended up at a profit before tax level of EUR 19.2 million. And also here, we see a deviation compared to the previous year, but not to forget, it's still a pre-tax margin of 13%, which is at least, to say, a solid figure. When we go to the segment level, you see what I already flagged at the beginning of the presentation, the mixed picture that is reflecting our results.
AMS continues to be on high levels, slightly higher EBIT compared to the previous year, slightly higher EBIT margin, compared to the same period of the previous year. And we talked about that also, at the annual call. AMS is delivering EBIT margins currently, in the range of 20%-25%, which is a very solid and, not even solid, it's an outstanding and strong performance. The OE segment was impacted by the U.S. market. As I said, Campbell will give more color, but only that you are aware, the rig count decreased by almost 20% compared to the previous year. The completion activities decreased, drilled but uncompleted wells went down. This is impacting us.
It is a more challenging market, maybe also more challenging than many saw in the industry, because at the end of last year, everybody was talking about the flattish market and a slightly increasing market in the U.S. for the year 2024. And we do not see that trend in the first quarter and also not in the second quarter. So the main driver was the decreasing or the more competitive and the more challenging U.S. market, combined also with an unfavorable product mix that we had. And you know, product mix is not every quarter the same. It was definitely unfavorable compared to the previous year, and we also incurred higher costs in the OE segment in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year.
After we have discussed the P&L figures, let me briefly also come to cash flow, cash position, and balance sheet before I hand over to Campbell. We increased our cash position to EUR 169 million. The cash earnings stood at EUR 24 million. The changes in working capital was a EUR -14 million. This leads to an operating cash flow of EUR 10 million. It could be higher, it should be higher, to be open with you, because we mentioned it also in our report, we had some timing impacts in accounts receivable collection. End of March was the Easter week. We received many collections at the beginning of April. Therefore, I can already mention now that the cash flow in the second quarter will look better.
And also the free cash flow, that was EUR 3 million, should be higher in the second quarter, when we have overcome these timing impacts. On the net debt side, free cash flow of EUR 3 million and some exchange rate impacts reduced the net debt slightly from EUR 92 million rounded to EUR 90 million. This further decreased our gearing ratio to 18.9%, also as a result of a higher equity. And this means SBO continues to be solid in terms of financial position and also balance sheet, and this is reflected here. All balance sheet KPIs improved. Cash increased from EUR 162 million - EUR 169 million.
The equity from EUR 448 million to EUR 474 million, and is taking the equity ratio to 55%, and as already mentioned, reducing the gearing to below 19%. This was the summary of the financial performance of the first quarter, and I know you are all very curious about the markets, and, for that, I will hand over to Campbell.
Thank you very much, Klaus, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome from my side this morning for our quarterly conference call. So I'll give you an overview of the market environment as we've seen it this quarter and in most recent months. So I think just as we discussed back in March, the long-term fundamentals in the core business continue to remain favorable. And thanks to increasing demand, investment in our sector continues to grow. Oil prices increased in the first months in 2024 due to escalating security concerns, especially over geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the Red Sea. So if we look at the chart on the left again, this is in 2023, global oil demand and supply was approximately 102 million barrels per day.
For this year, it's projected to grow to 103 million barrels per day, and over 104 million barrels per day in 2025. For the next OPEC+ meeting, which is scheduled only next month, it's highly anticipated they'll extend the existing production cuts of 2.2 million barrels per day, with a focus on trying to maintain the global market stability. Moving to the chart on the right, I wanted to repeat our message from last call, because I think this is an important point that sometimes gets overlooked. To maintain current production levels and meet future demand, the industry also needs to replace depleting resources. Putting that into context, by 2030, nearly two-thirds of existing production capacity will need to be replaced to keep production stable.
That's approximately 63 million barrels per day of new oil supply for 2030. That's only six years away. Moving to exploration and production spending, after already an exceptional year in 2023 of 11% growth, spending is set to grow 5% in 2024 to $515 billion. The international and offshore markets are poised to lead this growth, driven by the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Digging a little bit deeper, let's have a look at the global rig count. Here I want to outline the development of the U.S. rig count and the international rig count separately, because they both tell quite a different story for different reasons, and they've affected our business during this period in time.
So you can see, starting with the U.S. rig count, it dropped to 603 rigs as of last week, down 22 rigs as of Q1, and that's 22% down from January 2023. I think mid-March, when we last presented to you, we did not have on the agenda that we would see such a drop down to near 600 rigs. Given such developments over these past few months, it would point out to a much more challenging market environment in the U.S. market for the near term. Excuse me. So operator consolidation has really affected this market from last year and going into this year. There's been at least five announced operator consolidations for this year, which include the merger of Diamondback and Endeavor, and Southwestern Energy's mega merger with Chesapeake.
These already follow large consolidations last year on the back of Exxon and Pioneer and Chevron and Hess. What does this mean? Well, number one, it means there's fewer but larger customers with greater pricing power. The second thing is these large companies are actively seeking to reduce costs, and right now, they're all about maximizing their shareholder returns. So this impacts our drilling and completions markets because these companies are not investing, and what they're looking to do is seek to eliminate the duplication of their newly combined portfolios. All of our major customers were down in Q1 in U.S. market year-on-year, and they also expect it continue to be a difficult market going forward. And they cite three reasons. Number one is low gas prices. Number two is the sustained capital discipline of their customers.
And number three is the ongoing consolidation that we've just spoken about. So as you see, over these past few months, we've seen an increasingly competitive environment in the U.S. oilfield equipment market, with lower customer demand and increased pricing pressure. However, I come back to it. As existing wells deplete in the U.S., this will tighten the U.S. oil market, and operators will need to initiate new drilling projects to maintain production levels. In the U.S., the declining number of DUCs, or drilled but uncompleted wells, underlines this situation extremely well. The DUCs have been declining now for three years, while the U.S. production has been continuing to rise. And at some point, there has to be a tipping point.
Another important factor and an impact in the U.S. market that should be supportive is an increase in activity, new LNG facilities and pipelines that are coming online at the end of 2024 and in 2025. These are going to significantly boost the U.S.'s LNG capacity and open up current bottlenecks. This increased capacity should help growing demand to supply Europe and Asia, supporting energy security and reducing reliance on Russian gas supplies. Onto the international rig markets. In contrast, the international rig count has shown continuous growth since January 2023, at a high of 978 in November, and again, at the end of April, another high of 978. This is a 9% increase since the beginning of last year. A very different trend from what we see in the U.S. market.
Once again, the international and offshore markets are poised to lead this growth, driven by the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And of course, we are very pleased about this development as it supports our strategy and our expanding footprint in the Middle East, in Saudi and in Dubai, and also in Asia and in Vietnam. And with that, I'll hand back to Klaus for the outlook.
Campbell, thank you so much. Let me, ladies and gentlemen, before we get into the Q&A session, close the presentation and summarize it with more or less what has already been mentioned. Campbell said that the industry fundamentals remain basically supportive. Rising demand for oil, also the needs to invest into the business in order to compensate the depletion rates, makes also the customer sentiment optimistic. When we talk to our customers, when we listen to our customers, they say this is another year of a multi-year coordinated, structured upcycle, especially regarding the international markets. The U.S. market is challenging at the moment. It will remain challenging for the moment. We see that also at the rig count development in April and May.
There will be a tipping point, but I don't know when. But with all the arguments that Campbell was giving in terms of LNG capacities, a couple of years of reduced DUCs, there has to be some tipping point. Some say it's in the second half, some say it's next year. We will find out. We will be ready, I can tell you. The bookings are continuously below the sales levels in terms of book-to-bill ratio, but we see a kind of a tipping point now. And we talked a lot about that abnormal bookings that we have experienced end of 2022, beginning of 2023. The backlog is reducing the order activities. More and more normalizing is also increasing.
We saw that for the first time in the first quarter, and it will continue in the second quarter, although the second quarter is not over yet. But what we have seen so far, after one and a half months, I can confirm that. Praxis is important because whenever you do an acquisition, you have to ask yourself, "Does it make sense? Did it make sense?" And here I repeat, Praxis acquisition does make sense. For the three reasons that I mentioned, investing in the fastest growing Middle East market, broadening the product portfolio of our well completion business, and also in addition, having a footprint into carbon capture and storage, which will further grow in the future. The company is delivering sales and profits, and is not diluting the performance of the SBO Group.
Then we come more to the strategy execution, expansion, our local presence in the Middle East and Asia. Campbell mentioned it. Those are the fast-growing markets. This will allow us to take better advantage. Localization in many countries plays a role, and also the continuous focus on growth initiatives. It is not just M&A. We talked in the last one or two years a lot about M&A. It is on our agenda, scalable innovations and M&A, if they add value to our business, but we also see a lot of initiatives on inorganic growth. We are a great company with great capabilities. We can offer those capabilities to other industries.
Of course, organic growth takes longer than when you acquire a company, but what we have seen on geothermal, we had a management meeting in April in Houston with all our presidents. It is gaining more and more momentum, of course, from lower levels, but we see the geothermal market more interesting even than it was one year ago. Because, as I said before, deeper drilling, hotter drilling, this will all play in our hands with our technological capabilities. So on both paths, strategy execution has to happen. We are strengthening our teams in terms of strategy. We are more involving also our organization into those initiatives, especially related to organic growth. And our commitment to strategy, of course, is a given and continues.
With that, let me close the presentation for now, and very happy to taking your questions. Please raise your hands.
Kevin?
Kevin, could you please speak up? We don't hear you.
Yeah.
Yeah, now we hear you. Kevin, good morning. Morning. Hi.
Good morning. Sorry, it was lagging. I don't know why I was not able to hear you. Can you hear me on this side?
Yes. Now we can hear you loud and clear.
Yeah, perfect. Thanks for the time. I would have some questions, if I may. Maybe the first one will be a negative one. You mentioned during the presentation several times that the U.S. market is becoming competitive, and you had also a comment saying that the clients are becoming bigger, and so they have better pricing power. So could you give us a bit of color here, what has been the pricing dynamic on your side on the tenders recently, and how it will impact the EBITDA earnings in the coming quarters? If we should expect the EBIT margin to be under pressure in Q2 and maybe until Q3 into [audio distortion]... the U.S. That would be the first question, please.
The second one is maybe the most positive, more positive one is related to the international activities. And here you mentioned the kind of inflection point in the order intake, of the fact that you have seen a positive dynamic Q1 versus Q4 and still positive outlook. So here, same question, but maybe with more, better answer. The expectation for the coming quarters in terms of volumes, pricing, and margin for the AMS division, please.
Do you wanna do it, Campbell?
Yeah, I can start that, and please chime in, Klaus.
Sure, sure.
So I think starting first of all, on Kevin, on the U.S. market, comparison. So definitely, just for the reasons we already explained in the market situation, the U.S. market is definitely getting tighter. The volume of work that's out there is less, and of course, it's becoming much more price sensitive. So in order to obviously maintain our market share, across our product lines, both in our oilfield equipment division and our AMS division, sometimes we need to participate in those tenders, and margin gets sacrificed, as a part of that. Yeah. On the international markets, particularly in relation to the AMS business, the volumes still look relatively solid. The order bookings, currently are still very strong, so still feel very good about that market going forward, particularly for AMS.
If I may add, Kevin, if I may add also to the U.S. market, totally agree about what, what Campbell said. In addition, what we were also experiencing, and this is when you do a quarter-to-quarter comparison, it has various influencing factors. And last year, we were also benefiting from higher margin, project sales, tool sales, in the first quarter. We also do expect them this year, but is it a second quarter event? Is it a third quarter event? It's a little bit under the horizon, but this was also one of the, one of the, the, the reasons why the OE was quite significant below the previous year performance.
Yeah, yeah, no, I totally understand this one, but it was more on a kind of state control basis, when you know, the top line has been a bit under pressure compared to Q4.
Mm-hmm.
The margin also.
Mm-hmm.
It's just if you mentioned that now the pricing on tenders is under pressure, just to try to understand what does it mean for the margin for Q2 and Q3, to say that-
Yeah
... it should be again a bit under pressure, or if you can maintain it at the current level with internal cost control measure.
Yeah. You know, as I said, if and Campbell mentioned it, when the market is reducing, it gets more competitive. That is one reason. Is it getting more competitive and more competitive and more competitive? Is it another percent or not? This is very difficult to foresee because it is also related to the product mix, to the regional distribution of the sales. But what I do not see in the second quarter in terms of the U.S. market is a tipping point. We have seen a further reduction of the rig count in April and May, and therefore, the market will remain challenged.
Okay, I understand. Thanks for that.
Very welcome, Kevin.
Can you ask Oleg?
Oleg, could you please speak up?
Please unmute.
Are you still muted, Oleg?
I-
Ah, now we got you.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, very clear.
Okay.
Thank you.
Yes, yes. Good morning, and thank you for the presentation and the opportunity to ask questions.
Sure.
I have several. The first one refers to the Adjusted EBIT-adjusted sales and EBIT. You were providing us some-
Mm-hmm
... details in the previous quarter. This quarter you didn't mention.
Mm-hmm.
Does it mean that the impact was negligible, or-
Mm-hmm
... you still can provide some details here?
Mm-hmm.
Second of all, looking at the evolution of bookings and order intake, they go a bit in a different directions on a quarter-on-quarter comparison. When trying to put this into perspective, maybe you can explain this difference in trend, and also hint what to expect going forward in terms of order intake, if this is only the U.S. market impact or there are other moving parts. And lastly, on the OE segment development. So first of all, the segment was expanding geographically, and I was hoping maybe you can tell us what currently is the share of revenues generated by the U.S. or North American market?
As second of all, when excluding Praxis from this segment, we're looking at some more than 8% decline probably of the revenues. Again, is this decline coming mainly and only from U.S.-
Mm-hmm
... or there are also other geographies which have contributed to this, decline? Thank you.
Oleg, thank you for your questions. More than welcome. Question number one, foreign exchange adjustment, you're absolutely correct. It was negligible. Foreign exchange loss was less than EUR 500,000, and therefore, it did not have the significant swings. We did not prepare these foreign exchange adjusted figures, but more than happy to mention that regularly on the calls, but this was really a negligible figure. On the bookings, it is a matter of fact, and here we need to differentiate AMS. You get the bookings, it is more for the international markets, for the big service companies, and those are more the longer-term bookings. So bookings that you get now could be one, two, three quarters.
Those bookings that we are getting now is maybe for later in the year, beginning of next year, and will depend, but definitely not for the next quarter. And, it was predominantly driven. You know us, since many years, we do not split the bookings between AMS and OE. But what I can tell you, OE bookings were going down, AMS bookings were going up, more than the 2%. On the share of the revenues of OE, I do not now have it, but what I can tell you is, the reduction is predominantly coming from the U.S. market.
Because the contribution from Praxis was about EUR 6 million, and this means without the EUR 6 million, and Praxis had, and this figure is in the annual report, about EUR 5 million in the fourth quarter. You can do the math, that this was coming from the U.S. markets. And the increase in the Middle East market is also predominantly coming from Praxis. Yeah.
I can add to that just slightly-
Please.
Klaus, that we grew, our Middle East market doubled across the group, going into the first quarter of this year, and also in Asia, it doubled as well. So yeah, the overall, definitely we're seeing a lot of good growth with our internationalization, of course, both the OE sector and the AMS sector. And as Klaus just said, predominantly, it's in the U.S. that we've seen the drop overall in terms of sales.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Richard. Richard, good morning!
Good morning. Can you hear me?
Oh, loud and clear.
Excellent. Good morning, yeah. Thank you for taking my questions. I suppose my first question is just to follow up on Kevin's question on the U.S. market, and I know it's still uncertain to an extent, but how do you see the second half of the year developing in the U.S.? And are you now sort of seeing a recovery more into 2025 rather than, than the second half of 2024? And then my second question is on working capital. You highlighted that working capital was- there was a big outflow in Q1 just through timing effects, which is understandable, and that should reverse in Q2. But what are you expecting for the rest of the year?
And just with your comments that some of your U.S. customers have started to have higher pricing power, do you start to see any changes in payment terms, for example, that make those collections longer?
Mm-hmm. You want to-
Thank you.
the U.S. market?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just... Hi, Richard. Just coming back to the U.S. market, just as we said before, I think definitely in the near term, it's going to be difficult. We're going to be faced with these pricing pressures. But we continue, particularly in our OE business, to advance the technology of our parts and the products, try and increase productivity, and of course, we're always selling at the high end and based on performance, and that's what we'll continue to do to keep our share in the U.S. market.
On the cash collections, working capital, payment terms, the good news is, no, we do not see any collection issues. We do not see any changes in the payment terms, not at all. I can clearly say that this is not the case. When you look at our balance sheet, you see that accounts receivable increased more or less by the amount that we normally would expect, because we have an increase in working capital, although the sales remained on steady levels. And you will see the turnaround in the second quarter, and in going forward, I see a cashflow generation that we normally have, yeah, as that we also had in the third quarter, in the fourth quarter. It was really in this first quarter, timing impact.
Okay, that makes sense. And maybe just as a quick follow-up on the OE segment, so as one of the comments in the release was that part of the margin issue was higher costs.
Mm-hmm.
Could you just give some color on what those costs were and if they'll be repeated?
What we have, what we have incurred was, and this is to some extent, a little bit connected, also to the pricing pressure, some higher input costs from components that we bought last year on a higher levels, that are difficult to hand over to the customer. Repair and maintenance of our fleet played, in this quarter, a role. And to the positive, we also had more than EUR 700,000 R&D expenses, higher than in the same quarter of the previous year. And R&D, we normally do in order to come up with new products, new technology, so this could even call it as a front loading of costs for hopefully good margin sales in the future. Those were the three main components of the higher costs.
Okay, that's clear. Thank you very much.
Very welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not have further questions now. If somebody has an additional question, please raise your hand. No further questions. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention. It was a very good conference call for us. Very good questions. Happy to continue our dialogue. Some of you, we will see in between. The others, we will see in August for the half-year figures. Wish you all the best. Stay safe, stay healthy, take care, and have a good day. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.