All right. Good morning, everyone. My name's Derek Podhaizer, Senior Analyst for Oilfield Services here at Piper Sandler. Up on stage with me now, we have Doug Pferdehirt, Chair and CEO of TechnipFMC. The theme of our discussion today is Innovating the Subsea Market. Doug, thank you for joining us this morning.
Thank you, Derek. Thanks to Piper Sandler. Thanks to all of you for being here this morning. For those on the webcast, thank you for participating.
Great. Let's just start with your confidence in the subsea outlook. You recently confirmed the $30 billion order number target over three years ending 2025, including over $10 billion of orders this year. You talked about not seeing a plateau or a cliff beyond 2025. Can you just expand on that and maybe the drivers where you could potentially see that $10 billion run rate through the decade, as you described it on the call?
Sure. I think that the level of confidence in the offshore market is quite high right now. With that is creating the follow-up question, which is, for how long, or what is the duration or durability? What I would like to share with you is our belief, and hopefully, we will be able to convince you that you should not be thinking about this as the normal offshore cycle. There has been a structural change. That structural change is really driven by two things. Let's start first with simple capital flows. We just heard it from the prior speaker from AMR with Chevron, who, when asked about opportunities, talked about offshore. The opportunities are offshore. The quality of the rock is there.
The really only other place that you have access in terms of spending your capital, assuming the majority of the Middle East is not accessible to capital infusion, i.e., it is driven by the NOCs, is the U.S. unconventional. When we think about it, we think just about capital flows. What do we have to do as the leader in offshore? What do we need to have to do to make offshore attractive to the capital flows? Pretty simple. You have to reduce cycle time, and you have to improve your client's confidence in the certainty of the project delivery. In the past, what has negatively affected the durability of the offshore investment was the lack of execution performance. We were part of it. You have to acknowledge you have a problem before you can fix the problem.
We were part of that, and so was the rest of the industry that was supporting these offshore projects. We took a fundamental rethink in 2013. Over a decade ago, we recognized this. We said, "How do we build a different company that can really improve the offshore economics on a sustainable level and then have a level of execution certainty and surety that will make our investors confident to continue to invest in their offshore resources?" They've done the exploration. They've done the delineation. These are sitting out there just ready to be developed. That's what created the company. We launched things like our Subsea 2.0 configured to order architecture. We created the integrated iEPCI model to remove a lot of the risk and uncertainty in the scheduled delivery.
We really focused internally on what we call SSI, Simplification, Standardization, Industrialization, all around the lean principles of how do we improve that execution performance. We're doing that today. I believe what you're seeing is a level of investment in the offshore that will continue because there are no other real viable alternatives. The economics are far better. The decline rates are far less. Therefore, the capital will continue to flow to the highest quality rock. We just have to perform and give our customers the confidence that they can make those investments, and we can execute continuously and flawlessly on those projects. I point you to one indicator to judge beyond the level of the inbound, which, yes, that's why we have the confidence that we'll be able to continue the trajectory that we're on.
Also look at the level of direct awards that are coming to our company. In our subsea business, the offshore business, over 80% of the revenue is direct awarded to our company because we've created something unique and different that gives our customers the confidence to be able to execute on these projects.
No, that's helpful. Maybe just to drive home the point on the decline curve, I think you were mentioning this at dinner last night as far as maybe give us those percentages between the U.S. unconventionals and what offshore is because I think it's an important part of it.
Sure. I'm a reservoir engineer, but I don't want to get into a debate with the other reservoir engineers in the room. I'll preface this by saying these are approximations, right? The approximations are that in the offshore, you have more of a traditional decline rate between 4% and 6% per year, whereas in the unconventionals, we know we can see up to 60% decline rate within the first two years. A very long tail, I want to be clear, but a significant decline rate in the early years, which leads to a rather significant repetitive capital investment to be able to maintain the production level.
No, I appreciate that. Just to expand on, because I want to dig a little bit into the mature and frontier basins because you touched on this a lot on the last call, but maybe expand on the opportunity set that you're seeing. I mean, we have U.S. Gulf, the Paleogene, North Sea, Brazil, West Africa, parts of Asia, Guyana, Suriname, Namibia, Mozambique. A lot of reasons, but maybe just kind of what gets you most excited from the mature side and then also the frontier side?
Wow. That is a lot to cover. I guess that is really the takeaway, right, which is there is a lot to cover. Look, in my career, I have always enjoyed traveling, meeting new people, experiencing new cultures. The amount of new countries to visit, particularly because of their offshore resources, is at a level that certainly I have never experienced before. The opportunity set in the emerging markets continues to grow. As importantly, the level of expediency, the level of desire to move those projects forward is something that we have not seen before. Obviously, ExxonMobil has had tremendous success in Guyana and kind of set a standard in terms of moving quickly. Now others, and when I say others, meaning other countries, are looking at that and saying, "How can we do something similar?" The reservoirs are obviously going to be different.
In terms of creating an environment that attracts investment in these countries, they are very serious and in some cases modifying their prior behavior to really ensure that they can get capital flows and their resources developed as well. If you just kind of go through that long list of countries, I think we know the quality of the reservoirs there. We know that the countries are being much more receptive in terms of petroleum laws and governance and requirements in terms of attracting the investment. We have a very strong playbook in terms of executing in these frontier regions. First and foremost, we start by hiring local engineers and developing local talent.
Before there's even a contract tendered, if we believe that there's the potential to be a contract tendered, we start hiring engineers and training engineers in other countries where there is activity so that if we are the recipient, then we have a talented local workforce. That means a lot when you're talking to the host governments, and it means a lot to the people in those countries. We've done that in places like Guyana. We're doing that in places now like Namibia. We've done it in Mozambique. It's a very strong playbook that we continue to execute. Most recently, at the end of last year, we announced the first mover advantage in Suriname, and we're doing the same in Suriname today. Look, it's an exciting opportunity set.
For me, it's motivating personally just because I'm getting to visit some countries that I have never visited before and getting to meet people and the institutions in those countries. It is an extremely rich opportunity set that is highly motivated, highly motivated to move their resources forward to the development phase.
That's helpful. That's a lot of exciting opportunities on the greenfield side. I want to touch on the brownfield tieback opportunities as well because I think this is a big part of your confidence in your outlook. Maybe just expand on the opportunities there, the developments that you're seeing. It's more economical. The facility capex has been set. Maybe some more help around what that tieback brownfield opportunity looks like.
Sure. Again, prior speaker AMR from Chevron, when she talked about the opportunity set, she went pretty quickly to brownfield. Look, it's very real. Let's talk about the—we always talk about improved economics in the brownfield, shorter cycle time, etc. Let's just talk about kind of the principles for a minute. First and foremost, whatever you're producing the hydrocarbon to has to be designed for peak production for whatever's going to be the highest flow rate or the highest daily production. I think we all understand that's day one. We just said there's natural decline rates, much lower offshore, but there's always decline rates. You're literally designing your facilities, a floating facility or a terrestrial facility, it doesn't matter. You're always designing it for the first day. In theory, after the first day, it's oversized. Okay?
Now, the oil companies are clearly not doing anything wrong. It's just a function of natural decline rates. If you kind of look at it on a global statistic and take all the offshore facilities today, they operate at about 60%-70% of nameplate capacity, which means they can absorb another 30%, 40% of hydrocarbon through those facilities. Hence the opportunity to do tiebacks. Historically, the tiebacks have been limited in the radius from the host facility because of the use of hydraulics to actuate the subsea equipment. The valves, etc., are all actuated with hydraulics, which means whatever's above the water, you have a big hydraulic tank, you have motors, and you have pumps, and you have to pump that fluid down a very small diameter, very high-strength Inconel tube all the way down the water column.
Remember, when we're talking offshore, we go up to 2 miles of water column, 2 miles deep. I think a lot of people think of it as 100 feet or something. It's 2 miles deep on the upper limit, average about 3,000 ft-6,000 ft of water depth. We go down, and then you have to go out. You have all that friction pressure associated with pushing that hydraulic fluid through the water column and then outwards to the wells that you want to tie back to the host facility. There is a radial limit to how far you can go. With the All-electric technology that we've developed, and we announced the first All-electric subsea field development, which is happening in the U.K., actually for carbon storage. We're taking carbon offshore and sequestering or storing it offshore.
That technology is what will enable us to increase the radius around that host facility. That is one big enabler. We are talking about increasing the radius two to three times the distance that you can go today. What that does is open up an additional opportunity set for what used to be called stranded reservoirs that can now be tied back to that host facility. The other real opportunity is historically, whoever owned the host facility just looked at their own stranded assets around the host facility. We are playing matchmaker a little bit now by working with other operators who might have little pockets of hydrocarbon that do not warrant building their own host facility and saying, "Why do we not get the two of you at the table?
We can enable with our All-electric system to be able to bring your hydrocarbon back to another company's host facility. They just have a negotiation around a throughput kind of charge to be able to use their host facility. It is obviously advantageous to who owns the host as well because otherwise, their utilization of that host facility would just continue to decline as their reserves would decline. This is an untapped opportunity. I think it is a significant growth opportunity and will go on for decades as these host facilities will be there for decades to come.
That's really interesting. I mean, I haven't heard that before. As far as the untapped market, significant opportunity. I mean, any sort of a timeframe where we can expect the first announcement around this type of matchmaking brownfield? Is it a 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028 event? Any sort of sense of timing?
I don't want to commit just right here right now, but these discussions are ongoing.
Great. No, that's very interesting. Let's jump to Saipem- Subsea7 merger. Obviously, that's gaining a lot of attention right now. One of the two-part question for you, really. You spoke about it when asked about your most recent earnings call, but was wondering if you could share your current thoughts around the potential impact to your business. Then secondly, you spoke about the vessel ecosystem, can you expand that opportunity set for your integrated execution. Some investors are concerned this merger has reduced your opportunities given the potential loss to the access of Saipem's fleet. Maybe can you speak to that concern, such as overall impact of the merger and then just around the vessel ecosystem?
Sure. Let's maybe step back to 2017, again, almost 10 years ago. That's when we made our strategic move. We absolutely contemplated consolidation, I'll be honest, but we saw value in integration versus consolidation. We chose not to consolidate and continue to choose not to consolidate, but to focus on integration because that's how we could create iEPCI, accelerate time to first oil, improve offshore economics, and improve certainty of delivery. That's what was important to us. What is interesting is around us, if you will, the others have chosen consolidation. I mean, let's be very blunt. It's a good outcome to see consolidation happening around you. It has now created a very discreet set of subsea companies going forward with us being the only integrated subsea company and the only company with the Subsea 2.0 offering. Look, we're excited.
I'll stop there. We'll see how it plays out. In terms of the vessel ecosystem, what is the vessel ecosystem for those who we haven't been able to talk to before? The vessel ecosystem was a concept that we developed that said, "If you own fixed assets, you're better off being of the mindset of being willing to cooperate at times and compete at other times." Most fixed asset companies do not believe that, right? They get into what I call the arms race where they're always building another fixed asset. That is a huge capital draw that has implications on the balance sheet. We are a technology company. We always lead with technology, Subsea 2.0, iEPCI, All-electric, and some of the things we've talked about today. That's what differentiates us. We've actually reduced the size of our fixed assets and grown the company.
That is really the solution. Now, how do we do that? First and foremost, we shorten the cycle time. We have shortened the cycle time of offshore projects by 0.3. We have created 0.3 more capacity with the same assets. I know it sounds simplistic, but it was a lot of work to get here. If you are able to do that, and if you are of the mindset that we can continuously reduce the cycle time, we are going to be able to do more with less. That is what we continue to demonstrate both with our manufacturing footprint as well as with our offshore floating assets.
In terms of, as we look at opportunities around the world, we've gone out to all of the vessel operators and said, "Would you like to be part of an ecosystem?" An ecosystem is an opportunity to work with us on our integrated projects that are direct awarded to our company. In other words, they do not have access to that portion of the market. That is now a significant portion of the total market. We have said in our last conference call that in 2024, 50% of our inbound, which was in that $10 billion-$10.4 billion range, was direct award or was iEPCI, was these integrated projects, which are the vast majority direct awarded to our company. Imagine owning fixed assets and not having access to the available market. It just would not be a good business model. We have multiple companies in the ecosystem today.
We'll continue to add companies to the ecosystem. It is true. Saipem is one of the companies in the ecosystem. We would fully expect them to want to continue to be in the ecosystem because it's advantageous to them to have access to this very significant portion of the market. In the meantime, we're adding other companies with similar capability into the ecosystem, and we'll continue to have an open environment. We just look at a project. Understand, 90%+ of the projects, we use our own resources. From time to time, if it's better for the project economics, we will work with somebody else's resource because, again, we put the project economics first to ensure that our clients are successful and they do more and more projects offshore.
Yeah. I appreciate that. That's very helpful. Just on that competitive landscape, you talk about integration and consolidation. I know you don't like to talk about market share, but there's plenty of third-party reports out there that show you have a dominant market share position. Do you have any sort of concern around undisciplined behavior from some of your peers in order to chip away at that market share over time? Maybe some thoughts around that.
No. I will tell you that the consolidation has helped in that it's helped give me more confidence in that the consolidators are extremely mature and disciplined companies.
Got it. Okay. Very helpful. Let's go over to iEPCI, Subsea 2.0, just further adoption penetration outlook. You have already kind of told us where you are on the adoption curve there. I think a lot of the questions I get from investors is just like, "Could iEPCI Subsea 2.0 ever reach 100% of market adoption?" Maybe let's start with that. Just give us the numbers again, and could we ever get to a point where this is fully adopted across the land?
Sure. I'm smiling because when we first introduced the concept of the merger back in 2016, consummated in 2017, I was up on the stage and talking about this whole concept of iEPCI. At the time, there had been zero integrated projects ever done in the industry, meaning back then they hired somebody to make the equipment and somebody else to install the equipment and connect all the pipes, risers, and flow lines. Two separate contracts, lots of inefficiency. We said, "We're going to bring these together and be able to basically go from the architectural phase all the way through the commissioning on the sea floor." We're the only company who can do that. I was selling this vision when there was zero market opportunities. At the time, I was asked the same question, and I'm smiling here today.
I said, "Look, if it ever got to 25%, that would be significant. If it ever got to 50%, I'd retire." I kind of regret saying that because in 2024, we reached 50% and have no intentions to retire. Look, the market acceptance has exceeded our expectation simply because of the value that we're creating. Our clients are driven by value. Our clients are driven by very discreet offerings that they have confidence in that we can do on a repetitive basis. Most of our iEPCI awards are repeat awards from clients who give us multiple opportunities as well as Subsea 2.0. Where are we? iEPCI has reached 50% of our inbound in 2024. Again, we have the very vast majority of that because of having the only truly integrated offering.
In terms of Subsea 2.0, Subsea 2.0, we actually said exceeded 50% in 2024, and that will continue to grow. You ask a very interesting question because honestly, I ask myself it often, and my team often is, "Why not 100%?" At one point, that probably seemed a little bit overly optimistic. If you look at the market today, there will probably always be non-integrated projects or Subsea 1.0, meaning the old architecture, which is what our competitor continues to—they're in that 1.0 world. There will probably always be those opportunities, but for TechnipFMC, perhaps we should take an ambition of achieving 100%. That is just a function of what we concentrate on, what we bid on.
The value to us is far greater in an iEPCI 2.0 world, and more importantly, the value to our clients is far greater, and therefore, they're willing to share that value with us. One could challenge and say, "Why not go all the way?" The upside is certainly there. I'll also point out on the Subsea 2.0, the orders are at 50%+, but what's flowing through the manufacturing facilities is only about a third of our manufacturing capacity is on 2.0. The rest is on the legacy 1.0 projects. As that starts to get absorbed by more of the 2.0 because the orders will flow through the plant, that is what gives us also confidence in our ability to improve our execution performance, which will also show up in our margin performance.
Right. On that point too, plenty of runway as far as growing Subsea 2.0. You do not need more roof line. You have the capacity, like you said, 1/3, that there is no material CapEx bubble out there that would really need to ramp up to.
No, look, it's a fair question, Derek. I think everybody's kind of waiting for this big CapEx infusion because many companies kind of fall into that. To me, that's the old traditional way of thinking. I really, really strongly encourage you to think of us in a different kind of mind frame. We have a completely different product architecture, and we have a completely different operating model than we did in the past. Therefore, we are able to put through twice the capacity through our existing roof line. We've doubled our throughput capacity. Now, as more 2.0 goes through the plant, we actually think it could be more than 2 mi the throughput capacity in the plant. No big capital infusion on our fixed asset base. We're going to continue to grow this company smartly. What does that mean? Higher returns.
Appreciate that. We got about five minutes left, so I want to make sure we get to a couple of the main topics here. How do we throw a little love to Survice Technologies? Now, obviously, it does not get a lot of airtime, but I think there are some really interesting things going on, especially on the international side of the business as you create that local content, especially in Saudi. You are gaining natural market share. Maybe just a couple of minutes on that, how you are approaching it on the U.S. side, maximizing free cash flow, and then you are seeing some nice growth in the Middle East from this natural market share progression.
No, for sure. Surface Technologies is similar. We do the same things we do for subsea for the land wells, and we call that Surface Technologies. The technical content is far less, and the cost per unit is far less because everything we do in subsea, again, very deep water depths, everything is controlled by advanced automation, robotics, and control, very advanced material sciences to be able to design this equipment into an incredibly high manufacturing specification. We partner with NASA. That's our technical partner. So that's kind of the world that we live in. Surface is kind of a tale of two cities. The North America market, we have many competitors that do what we do. From a product architecture, it's fairly commoditized, and it all comes from the Asian market.
We are moving more towards a digital integrated offering to where we put the digital interface that not only controls our part of the process, but also the fracturing and the wireline part of the project and our process, which gives our customer the only agnostic open architecture digital interface in which to increase the efficiency of their projects. In terms of the international business, much higher standard, mainly driven by our activity in the Middle East. We have completed our manufacturing facilities in the UAE and Abu Dhabi as well as in Dammam in Saudi Arabia. These have been very well received by the clients. That is leading us to get preferred orders and premium orders for building the local content and having the manufacturing capability in-country. Yes, we see continued growth coming out of that region, and that is a higher value portion of the surface portfolio.
I want to point out that if you look at the total revenue of the company, only 10% of our revenue comes from the U.S. It is a much smaller portion of the revenue because I know I just mentioned commodity, and I know I just mentioned supply chain in Asia, so that could raise some concerns. I want to make it very clear that we have the least exposure. We are a truly international company. Our manufacturing footprint is international, and we service the markets from those international manufacturing facilities. It is really only that small portion. It is the smallest portion of our smallest business, which is surface, that is exposed in the U.S. market.
Fair enough. That's great. Last one for you. Just wanted to clarify or expand on a comment you made from your most recent earnings call as far as the outlook for FTI for 2026. I think you said it's going to be a more significant year. Is it your view that orders, revenues, and margins will all be up when compared to 2025?
You were not going to let me get off the mic, were you? I think we just gave 2025 guidance just a few weeks back, but let's talk about 2026. No, look, this is a unique attribute of our company. We are a backlog company. We do have a much greater visibility, I think, than many companies do. Because of the level and relationship we have with our clients in these direct awards, they give us visibility through the end of the decade that I think is kind of unique. I am not going to hide and not answer your question. Why not go for the trifecta? I think there is high, high probability that revenue grows. That is simply a function of look at our order rate. Look at our book-to-bill is well above one. Our order rate would certainly support revenue growth.
We're obviously going to have growth from 2025 versus 2024, but now we're talking 2026 versus 2025. Everything we just talked about, more Subsea 2.0 orders, more iEPCI execution, that should certainly help the margin performance. We certainly don't think that 2025, which is now at 19.5% at the midpoint of guidance, is any sort of a peak or a high margin. We could expect that to expand. In terms of orders, certainly the opportunity set is there. The only thing it'll be is a function of the calendar. Our clients sometimes will accelerate FIDs towards the end of the year to absorb a capital budget or defer to the beginning of the following year if their budget has already been spent. It's really just where it falls on the calendar.
Literally, the last week of December or the first week of January are our two busiest weeks in terms of inbound. Let's see how it plays out. Certainly, the opportunity set could also support growth in orders in 2026. Let's call it the trifecta.
The trifecta. I love it. All right. That's a great place to leave it. Doug Pferdehirt, CEO, TechnipFMC. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Derek.