Okay, welcome back to day two of Sidoti September Virtual Investor Conference. Before I introduce our next presenter, I'll remind everyone we will have some time following the presentation for some questions. You press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, type in the questions, and we'll get to as many as we can, time permitting. Pleased to be joined by DNOW. We have Brad Wise, Vice President of Digital Strategy and Investor Relations, and I don't want to take up any more time. Let me turn it over to you, Brad.
Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Sidoti. Appreciate the opportunity to present today at the Small Cap Conference. I'll dig right into it. Just our standard disclosure statement. I'll move on from there. This is really kind of a snapshot of a why invest slide. Why invest in DNOW? You know, we've had over a hundred and sixty year history of delivering solutions for our customers. We really are a kind of in a leadership position in the upstream and midstream, you know, energy markets. We're predominantly upstream as far as revenue exposure, but we are growing in midstream and diversifying in midstream. We'll also talk about additional markets that are seeing growth that we're diversifying in as well, including the Energy Evolution markets and some industrial adjacent markets. I'll speak to a little bit later.
But for DNOW, you know, over the last several years, we've had some significant improvement in our financial results from our almost doubling of our EBITDA margins from, you know, say, 4% to approaching 8%. And that's given us opportunity to significantly grow free cash flow. And we'll talk specifically about that, and I'll compare, you know, four different time periods here. But we're in good shape from a balance sheet standpoint. We're debt free, got $197 million in cash, have access to a credit revolver, and you know, part of being a distributor is our ability to efficiently manage working capital.
We're doing a great job of that, and we'll talk about that a little bit better in a minute. Total liquidity of $579 million, and really to use that to grow organically, to pursue accretive acquisitions. Accretive being accretive, EBITDA margin to our core business as well as a gross margin, and then to opportunistically repurchase shares. We have an $80 million buyback in place, about $13 million left on it, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes. We also have an expanding set of solutions for energy transition, what we call the CCUS market, carbon capture. Under this umbrella of decarbonization, we have our customers reducing methane emissions, and so we're benefiting and capturing revenue from the reduction of methane emissions. Carbon capture, where we're capturing CO2 primarily.
Customers are investing increasing amount of CapEx in some long cycle projects. We're opportunistic and that we'll see some future revenue tied to that. We're currently getting revenue, although it's a small part of our overall revenue in that space now. RNG. We'll talk a little bit about the renewable natural gas market and how that is impacting DNOW. You know, coupling all this is we want to drive efficiencies and productivities across our business, make our workers or our employees more efficient and more productive.
That includes technology and some AI capabilities that we've been introducing into the business to help drive that, to not only what we call high- grade our gross margin, to improve our gross margin, but also, do more with less people to keep our WSA, which is our SG&A, in line to where, you know, that's at a reasonable level. Just at a glance, DNOW, roughly 2,600 employees, 170 locations in 17 countries. You know, really a comprehensive network of what we call Energy Centers locations. We use that term Energy Centers. It refers to our pipe valves and fittings distribution business. And then we also have companion on-site locations where we're part of our customer supply chain, and then our U.S. Process Solutions business.
All that's complemented with an online digital commerce channel as well. You know, where we are in major land and offshore energy-producing locations in the world. You know, our core market really US, comprising about 80%, 81% of our revenue, and then we've got 10% in international, 9% in Canada, according to our 2Q earnings. Usually, Canada will fluctuate, 2Q being the smallest of the four quarters because of break-up in Canada, which is where a lot of the road bans are in place in some oil and gas producing areas. They can't get the heavy equipment in there to extract oil and gas. We usually see a compression in revenue in second quarter and then recovery third quarter, fourth quarter, first quarter.
There's some seasonality there in Canada. Looking at our U.S. revenue, in roughly about 74% of that is what I call our U.S. Energy . That's our PVF distribution business, and then 26% is that U.S. Process Solutions business, which is predominantly a pump distribution business, but we also do some fabrication of some process production and measurement equipment, and we've also got some rental units in that business as well. Really our value proposition is to bring top-tier suppliers on your left side on the screen to many of the energy producing and industrial companies producing on the right-hand side of this slide.
So, you know, really our value is aggregator to aggregate, to inventory, provide a service model where we're delivering, you know, many of the products that we inventory or can source through manufacturer direct to our customers that consume it. We work across many different end markets. The drilling and production market is by far our largest market, followed by midstream, our second largest. We do have some downstream exposure into refining and petrochem and then industrial, renewable fuels and mining. And we continue to look to and seek to grow our industrial exposure as well. I touched on it briefly earlier, you know, look at our-- how do we approach the market? How do we service our customers? Really through these three different models.
One on the left being our Energy Centers model. That's a global footprint, a branch footprint, and we've done some rationalization since 2020, and some transformation. We've gone to what's called a Supe C enter strategy, where we do more of a regionalized fulfillment strategy, which has enabled us to scale up and scale down, depending on where we are in the cycle of the oil and gas industry, and we'll talk a little bit more about that Super C enter footprint in a minute. In the middle, I've got our Customer On-Site and Integrated Supply solution, where we're, you know, many of the top largest customers we have, call it our top 10 customers, we're on-site. We're working side by side with the customer. We're doing sourcing and procurement. We're managing inventory. We're managing warehouses.
I mean, we're a critical piece of their supply chain, and it's a highly sticky relationship. Often, we're not bidding on any products on a day-to-day basis, and really just bidding on large projects through their capital projects group. We like that business and we wanna grow, continue to grow our Customer On-Site and Integrated Supply business. And then on the right side is our Process Solutions business. This is predominantly a pump distribution business and a fabrication business. I'll have a slide a little bit, talks about tank batteries, but you know, here we're really a job shop when it comes to fabrication, so we don't hold inventory.
It's only in the form of WIP, and so that helps significantly keep our investment working capital lower in the fabrication side. In the pump distribution side, you know, we're a distributor of many tier one, tier two pump lines across really, you know, the U.S. and Texas, Louisiana, Mid-Continent, all the way up through kind of the Rockies and up into the North Dakota and Montana area. If you look at our full year, 2023 revenue, you know, roughly about 18% of what we sell is pipe. Then you got fittings, you got valves. We have kind of the MRO category is 17%, and then our pumps and production equipment, which we've been growing at 27%.
If you look at that pipe, about, I would say 16-17% of that is steel pipe. We do sell fiberglass pipe. The steel pipe is impacted by commodity steel pipe pricing, and so, you know, really, when you look at our gross margin and its fluctuations, we'll usually have some commentary around line pipe pricing and what the commodities are doing on a price per ton basis, but our value is in our people. Deep application knowledge. We leverage technology to grow market share and productivity, and then, you know, our footprint is really around maintaining proximity to customers. Here's our global footprint. Of course, U.S. and Canada is a large piece of our business. You can see our Super C enter locations here.
These are our large regional fulfillment centers. We'll spend a little bit of time here contrasting the last 10 years. We went public in June of 2014 in a much larger environment. U.S. operating rigs, roughly about 1,900. We're at roughly about 4.47% EBITDA as a % of revenue, and if you look at the last prior peaks in our core market, 2018, 2023, you could see U.S. rigs contracting, yet our EBITDA as a %, you know, improving, especially in 2023 and then first half of 2024, so we've really kind of transformed our business and been able to grow EBITDA as a % of revenue.
And we've done that in many different ways, just through transforming, going to our Super C enters strategy, high-grading the business, trying to improve and push price on gross margin, reducing our WSA, doing a better job managing working capital, we're turning our inventory about, you know, four to five times here. So much healthier business and then in prior cycles here. You can see free cash flow, first half of this year, $98 million. Our guide is the $200 million, and we're at the midpoint of that guide, to be able to deliver $200 million in free cash flow this year in a fairly kind of flat to softening market in the upstream. You know, from our strategy standpoint, you know, how are we going to grow shareholder value?
I want to talk about these six points, and I'll start at the lower left of the slide. Really kind of to defend and grow our core market, our core market being the upstream piece of our business in the U.S., Canada, and the Middle East and U.K., but here we're gonna continue to grow and invest in that area. Next, tied to decarbonization and Energy Evolution , we think there's a big growth opportunity, not only in methane reduction, but also the capturing of CO₂ and CCUS projects and the infrastructure required to build CO₂ to capture CO₂ and sequester that, and as well as in the RNG space as well.
And then, mentioned earlier, we have some industrial markets that we're excited about that lend themselves well to our U.S. Process Solutions group and our distribution of our pump product lines, specifically the mining industry, water, wastewater, the chemicals markets. You know, those are kind of key markets that we're growing today and will continue to grow and make investments in. And then we want to support our ability to grow the business through acquisitions. We're currently a low CapEx business, and so we want to support our organic growth through, you know, continually driving free cash flow, taking that free cash flow, reinvesting it in low CapEx business and the efficient work of working capital.
Yet then we also want to be highly accretive and buy, you know, really good business, better performing businesses than what we have today from an EBITDA percentage basis, from an operating profit percentage basis. So we want to layer on opportunities there. And then, you know, we just finished one of our largest acquisitions in our history, which was the Whitco acquisition we done in the first quarter. It's about $185 million, and so we'll continue looking to, you know, grow our PVF distribution business. That's the first PVF acquisition we've done in nine years. We're gonna continue to focus on our U.S. Process Solutions business to grow that business as well.
And then we have a share buyback program in place, $80 million, and we think we'll complete that by the end of this year. We got about $13 million left on that. Just the key results from the quarter here. You know, $633 million, up $70 million sequentially. You know, most of that was due to the Whitco acquisition against kind of lower declining U.S. well completions and U.S. rig count. EBITDA of $50 million, which is an excellent quarter and 7.9% of revenue for the second quarter. And then net cash from operating activities, $21 million during the quarter and to bring us up to $102 million year to date.
At the halfway point, you could see our guide here, that we gave on our last call. Here's just kind of trending, looking at the revenues and gross margins. Gross margins, you know, kind of recently for Q 2023 at 23.4%. One of the reasons gross margin's lower in the first half of the year was because of the Whitco acquisition. We had to do some inventories, step up charges, so we'll see our gross margin, you know, should bottom here and improve going into 3Q, 4Q, maybe about thirty to forty basis points. Usually in a declining market, though, we will have some pressure on price and so we're opportunistic where we want to compete on price, but we prefer to compete on value and our service level.
EBITDA's percent of revenue here, you know, 7.9%. I think our guide was for full year for 7-7.5% for the full year of 2024, and you can see $50 million in EBITDA, one of, one of the better performing quarters here, looking at, you know, kind of a trailing 8 quarters here. And then free cash flow, so far year to date, $98 million. Again, we, we think we'll do about $200 million this year in free cash flow, turning our inventory about, you know, 4-5 times. A lot of that free cash flow is coming off the income statement, but we are, we are getting some, some lift from the balance sheet this year as well.
Working capital is percent of revenue, excluding cash, about 16.5%. That's about at a point where we really like, maybe try to get it closer to 15% if we can. If you go back several years back, we were above 20%, so we've done a lot better job being more efficient with our working capital use. I mentioned our total liquidity at $579 million, with $197 million in cash. And then our share buyback here, $13 million left on the $80 million. We plan to complete it this year. Just a couple of examples on kind of where our products are used in the market is, you know, here's a tank battery.
If you're familiar with the Upstream oil and gas business, on the lower right-hand side of this slide, you'll see the oil wells, which is bringing oil, associated gas, produced water out. Those three media, phase, you know, commodities need to be separated. They go into a separation structure, and then the oil and, and, water is stored in the tanks in the middle. The gas goes to a gas metering leg and then sent to a gas pipeline. Within that leg, a lot of the storage, what we call the low pressure gas side, a lot of the gas storage, gas is, is VOCs are coming off of stored oil and produced water. We call that the low pressure gas.
That is cleaned up through our EcoVapor recovery product that cleans up that gas, removes oxygen and sulfur, and then dumps that into the gas takeaway line. The crude oil coming off the tank goes into the LACT unit. LACT unit is a fabricated unit that we produce that measures the crude oil, goes to the midstream. And then the rest of the time, we're just predominantly dealing with produced water, water transfer off to a water storage site that where we reinject it here with our produced water disposal. And kind of your top middle of your screen here, and then you have our Flex Flow products, which is our rental horizontal pump.
These are rental horizontal H- pumps that operators like to use in place of spending a large amount of CapEx to buy that SWD unit that generally can cost, you know, up to about $250,000, so they prefer to rent it. So we have both the permanent option and the rental option on the horizontal pumps. And then last but not least, you need to plumb all this up, so all the pipe valves and fittings are needed to plumb up all the different wells from the gathering lines to the tank battery itself. We also play in the midstream here with terminals, gas plants. Just another example of where our products are used here. We're also excited about growth opportunities, growth opportunities in renewable natural gas.
You can see a couple of pictures of gas plants here on the right, where we supplied our EcoVapor product, which removes oxygen from gas to allow that gas to be sent into the midstream takeaway line, so this is a patented process technology that DNOW owns. It was an acquisition we did in 2022, and so we're excited about growing this, not only in the RNG space, but also in the oil and gas space. I'm gonna move on to carbon capture here. Just a couple of demand points here. There's about 5,000 CO2 pipelines, 5,000 miles of CO2 pipelines in the U.S.
You know, according to estimates of some research, you know, we think that's gonna grow anywhere from four to 18 times by 2050, based on, you know, a lot of the CCUS type projects that have been either announced or projected. And so we're excited about this future demand for pipe valves and fittings, our process and measurement equipment, as well as, you know, really the full scope of products for DNOW. If you look at this slide, this is our kind of well permit applications. On the top right, you need a Class VI permit to be able to permanently sequester CO2 underground to get the maximum tax benefit from the IRA bill. So you can see the growth in announced, or the growth in Class VI permits here.
And then on the lower left, excuse me, is a pipeline of commercial CCUS facilities that are in process and early development, advanced development, and construction are operational here. And it looks that you can see kind of this exponential growth here and opportunity. All this speaks well for DNOW. You know, if you look at this category of Energy Evolution type projects, you know, last year, DNOW did about $30 million in these projects. This year, we think we'll double that to about $60 million, and in 2025, we think we'll grow it beyond that. Talk a little bit about acquisitions here. Won't belabor the point, just closed on Whitco. We're just a highly acquisitive company. We're debt-free, and so we plan to do more deals this year and next year.
You know, underpinning our capabilities is our IT and our system and our technology investments. And then also, we have a customer digital ecosystem called Digital NOW from our e-commerce platform to some, you know, what I call discrete spot solutions, specific tied to products of either our fabrication, asset management for valves and fabricated units to our OptiWatch system, to our Access NOW system, which is, inventory management, and security. And I think, my last, last slide I'll leave here, and I'll open up for questions, whatever time is remaining, is really our capital allocation pro- framework here. We wanna focus on organic growth. We wanna focus on making, good margin accretive acquisitions, and then we have a buyback in place. Again, 13 million left on it. We plan to complete this year.
With that, Steve, I'll kick it back to you to see if there's any questions.
Great. We are starting to see the queue fill in, Brad. As a reminder to everyone, we got about six minutes remaining. If you have any questions, press that Q&A button and type them in, and we'll get to as many as we can, time permitting. Brad, a lot of the questions, it's not gonna surprise you, is regarding the very significant free cash flow you've guided for generating this year.
Yeah.
It sounds like you're saying $13 million available left in the buyback. I know that's a Board decision. I'm assuming a renewal is on the table, but how are you prioritizing capital allocation? Would a dividend ever be on the table? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, we plan to complete the buyback, you know, this year. And every quarter with the Board, we have discussions on if we want to extend that buyback or create a new one or with a new timeframe. We did look at dividends. This is our inaugural first-ever share buyback authorization. When we looked at that, we did evaluate dividends. We felt like based on where DNOW was when we instituted this buyback, that that was a better better vehicle for us than a dividend. One, 'cause we're in more of a cyclical-
Yeah
... you know, end market exposure as we're kind of diversifying. And two, you know, we want from a capital allocation prioritization, we want to grow organically first. We're gonna feed organic growth. And then number two is we want to grow the company through acquisition. There's a lot of good companies out there that strategically fit in our portfolio. Whitco, for example, you know, $300-$350 million in revenue, and accretive EBITDA to our base business was a great acquisition. We want to continue to grow our U.S. Process Solutions business and further build out more pump companies, which tends to be EBITDA accretive to the base business. So for us, that's where we're focused on organic growth, inorganic-
Yep
... and then buyback. And we'll, I'm sure we'll say something about buyback program in our November earnings call. Certainly, we will in our February call.
Gotcha. How are you thinking about diversifying the customer base? Obviously, oil and gas can be tough from a value, from a company value-- stock valuation perspective. Is that a priority or that's your core? How are you thinking about that, whether it's inorganic or-
Well, yeah.
Organic.
I mean, that's a core piece of our business. We're not gonna walk away from it.
No.
We think long-term, oil and gas is a good place to be, and it will continue to grow. On the gas side, we're seeing, you know, the forward curve on natural gas being better than it is today-
Yep
... with, with LNG build-out coming, with the growth in AI and data centers, there's just more demand on, electricity. And, and, you know, there hasn't been a lot of utility companies that said: "Look, I wanna sign up a lot of AI and data centers for reliable, 24/7 electrical demand," and base that on wind with battery. So, you know, I think that speaks to more natural gas-fired, natural gas-fired, you know, power generation coming online in the future, and, and DNOW will benefit from that. Anything tied to natural gas, infrastructure, that, that's, that's a big win for DNOW, and, and we're gonna continue to grow our midstream, like we did-
Yeah
... with Whitco, which now roughly, I would say, 20% of our revenue. We're looking to make more acquisitions in our Process Solutions business to continue to grow there. You know, water is also an increasing commodity that's in short supply in certain areas of the country. With a big pump distribution model we have, we think, you know, municipal water, wastewater is a big growth area on some of these industrial adjacent markets. The mining industry, we're seeing that grow. The soda ash mines are growing. A lot of that, soda ash is used in the manufacturing of solar panels and the glass of the solar panels, so we're seeing growth there. So yeah, we are diversifying.
Midstream, we're diversifying the Energy Evolution with carbon capture and RNG, we're diversifying. We're growing our mining business, we're growing our water business. And then chemical processing, we got access to a really nice mechanical seal line on our pump side that has a lot of installed base in chemicals, so we think we'll get more business there.
Can you talk about the competitive nature of the industry?
On the PVF side, on the pump side?
Yeah.
Or-
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, we've got, you know, we've got probably one large competitor on the PVF distribution side, that's MRC Global. We're larger than them in the upstream market. They're larger than us in the downstream market.
Okay.
And then on the distribution side. I'm sorry, let me stick with PVF.
Yeah.
Then you have a bunch of conglomerates where, you know, you might have a pipe mill manufacturing facility that's got a distributor that sells its pipe into the market. Then you got some PE-backed PVF distributors, and then you got some small mom and pops. It's still pretty highly fragmented market. And, you know, I'll say on the pump distribution side, probably DXPE is a good competitor, peer of ours on the pump distribution side. And again, there's also a bunch of regional PE-backed competitors and private competitors in that space as well.
Gotcha. Now, we are just about out of time. Covered a lot of ground, Brad. Any closing comments before I wrap it up?
Yeah, closing comments is, you know, we think, you know, rig count is at bottom or near bottom here, second half of this year. You know, we think, twenty twenty-five will be better from a natural gas perspective next year, and certainly in twenty twenty-six. So we're kind of bullish on that area. We think crude oil will continue to, you know, kind of be where it's at as far as production. And even though rig count is declining, look at the production level-
Right
... of crude oil, 'cause it's pretty steady. And, you know, steady production is good for DNOW on the crude oil side, even though rig count's declining. Majority of our revenue comes from the E&P operator, not the drilling contractor. And so as they are producing more from longer laterals, you know, from less drilling rigs, you know, we still stand to benefit there. We like the diversification and growth strategy we have in place, that I highlighted with Energy Evolution , with midstream, with industrial adjacent markets. And then I'll leave it with probably the most important thing that this leadership team is focused on is free cash flow. We're gonna drive free cash flow. We're gonna deliver...
We plan to deliver that $200 million in free cash flow this year, coming off a really good free cash flow last year.
Mm.
And then we're gonna take that free cash flow and buy good companies and continue to grow our earnings capability, have more durable earnings, and generate more free cash flow, and then just kind of repeat.
It's a good, good, good plan. Thanks so much, Brad. That was a great way to wrap it up.
Yeah.
Brad Wise from DNOW. Thanks so much, and thanks everyone for joining us. Hopefully, it was an informative half hour. Hope everyone enjoys the remainder of the conference. Thanks, Brad.
Thank you, Steve.