Hi, everyone. We can go ahead and get started here. Thank you for joining us today. Our next presenting company here is Flotek Industries, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FTK. Flotek is a green chemical and data analytics company providing unique and innovative solutions that have proven positive impact on sustainability and reducing the overall environmental impact of energy on air, land, water, and people. Flotek has an intellectual property portfolio of over 170 patents and a presence in more than 59 countries throughout North America, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa. Here to tell you more about the company is Flotek's Chief Executive Officer, Ryan Ezell. I can turn things over to Ryan at this point.
One point to make, as we get into things, just with the structure of today, we'll go through Ryan's presentation, and at the end, we'll have Q&A. We are on a webcast, so for the Q&A portion, I'll pass around a microphone as well. I can turn things over to Ryan from this point.
Thank you, and I appreciate that warm introduction. As mentioned before, I'm Ryan Ezell, the current CEO of Flotek. As you can see, I've got this coveted post-lunch spot, so I'll try to be timely and exciting and keep everybody engaged through this, and hopefully, we'll have a good Q&A session as well. You know, to that note, honestly, I'm very excited to be here today to actually present on the progress of what we've done at a strategic turnaround of Flotek in the past few years, as this kinda represents, I would say, a turning point or a precipice in the business. We're really proud to be here today to talk about is. You know, my team and I both believe that this is a truly compelling investment story for the investment community.
So going back, I came to Flotek in two thousand and nineteen to head up a strategic and corporate turnaround of this business. And we laid out, for the organization, for our board, a three, five, and 10-year plan on transitioning this business back to success of what we had seen in the early two thousands. You know, and this thing was based, or this plan was based on two core phases. One was the restoration of our original completions chemistry business. This leverages over 170 intellectual property patents on unique surfactant and flowback aid composition that leads to improved ROIs on asset performance for operators.
The other one was the growth and emergence of our data analytics business that uses proprietary near-infrared measurement technologies, and we wanted to transition this sensor business into a data-as-a-service segment that would amplify our chemistry business and create a unique market entry for overall growth of the business and improvement in profitability, and both of these core components leverage chemistry as a common value creation platform. You know, and I'm proud to report today that we've been executing on this corporate strategy flawlessly for the past 24 months.
We've seen over seven consecutive quarters of EBITDA improvement over this period, and that's leveraged with a massive ten-year take or pay agreement that we have with one of the largest pressure pumping companies in the United States, which adds up to almost $2 billion of total revenue in that ten-year period, creating a significant backlog on the chemistry business. Our data analytics business is continuing to expand in unique upstream, real-time measurement opportunities, creating synergy between it and our chemistry business. We've also been able to execute this growth and profitability improvement with essentially no leverage on the balance sheet, keeping a very clean operating portfolio.
Finally, what's really important is we've maintained the core DNA of Flotek in creating differentiated technologies that create a handshake between total cost of ownership, environmental cost of ownership, as we look to create a more sustainable energy sector, as we make energy diversifications into other areas around solar, wind, and different components there. Now, looking at the overall structure of the company, as I mentioned, we have two core segments. One is our original chemistry technologies business that's been around for over 25 years, and the other one is the emerging growth around the data analytics. We still maintain Houston, Texas, as our main operating base, although we do have operations in multiple bases in the U.S. as well as internationally in the Abu Dhabi and some in Latin America.
I'd like to point out that our 2Q 2024 performance indicates us moving into the upper quartile of our peer group, as you see gross profit margin move to 20% and our EBITDA margin is moving to 10%. And again, as I mentioned, that's maintaining 0.4x leverage on the EBITDA, which is, you know, really keeping the debt low for what we do, and we really strive to be that in what we consider to be a services industry function. Man, you know, you look back, and you say, "Wow, what a difference a year makes." Bond and I got onto the investments road circuit probably 18-20 months ago, talking about what improvements we were gonna make in the business.
We initiated guidance for the first time since 2017 and 2023, and we hit those gross margin guidance and revenue. We look at it going forward, and when you look at our Q2 to Q2 performance from 2023 to 2024, gross margin profile improved 150% year on year. We just raised our midpoint of our guidance for 2024 by 23%, and we also... Most recently, we did a press release on our data analytics component on our flare, our VeriCal technologies became the first, you know, subsequent EPA-approved flare monitoring device for real-time measurements for the OOOb and OOOc regulations are gonna take place for E&P operators.
More importantly, we continue to improve our liquidity as we saw an improvement in our asset-based loan that increased by up to $20 million, which is a 45% improvement. We looked at that quarter-on-quarter performance. We sit there and take a step back and say: Wow, you know, we talked about executing the strategy flawlessly. If you take a trailing twelve-month comparison, we've seen a $35 million improvement in adjusted EBITDA as our strategy begins to take place on the restoration of phase one on that core chemistry business, and you start to see the differentiated technologies emerge... on the E&P side with our data analytics and JP3 business. Now, we get a lot of questions.
People ask, "What in the world are you guys doing different than what you did when the business, you know, before you started doing a strategic turnaround?" Well, the one thing that we maintain at core is we have a competitive advantage around our chemistry technologies part. Not only have we talked about our 170 intellectual property patents, but we have a unique engineering process called Prescriptive Chemistry Management, where we not only leverage what I would consider to be machine learning of completing over 20,000 wells in North America, but we also have, you know, that proprietary surfactant technology that lead to improved ROI performance. And the proof is in the pudding with these.
As we look at the last 3,000 wells that we've completed since 2021, when you use publicly available production data, in those first 24 months of production, the wells where our technology were used, we see an improvement of almost 30% uplift, which creates the significant ROI improvements for that E&P operator, and we've done all this field correlated to all diagnostics that we see going forward. Now, when I talked about the machine learning type capabilities here, having over 20,000 wells of production data and well performance is a huge component for us, as we always go back to the fundamental physical, chemical properties that we see. What does the reservoir look like? What geology or target zone? They're very geospecific at what we look at.
The cuttings and produced water, what type of frac water is gonna go down the hole? And the overall frac design are things that we all come into plug and play in terms of how we choose the proper friction reduction, the proper clay control, the proper scale and corrosion inhibition, and more importantly, does the well benefit from utilization of complex nanofluids or surfactants? All these things go into us evolving into a full cycle oil field services company to deliver the best reservoir and asset performance for our customers. And this has led to a massive diversification of our customer base, and that now, you know, we now have a fifty-fifty split between E&P operators and pressure pumping companies because we offer such a unique transition to the engineering and overall chemistry service delivery component.
And just to give you an example of how our PCM service works is that, you know, a lot of things you're seeing in the current market is that a lot of E&P operators are seeing a significant water flow back or high water cuts. One particular customer came to us and said, "Hey, we've been using this type of chemistry program for two years, and we just did a transition of a couple of miles down the road. We fracked the wells the same way, same engineering design. After 45 days, the flow back looked great and then began to die off and produce more water."
So we sat down and had a one-day technical workshop with them, came back and said, "Hey, you know, we looked at every fundamental property of that reservoir, and what we came to find out is there's about a 15-degree average temperature in the reservoir change from where they were in that current geologic location." But we went back to the fundamental properties of each component in their frac fluid and come to figure out that there was actually a cloud point indication by one of the stabilization agents in one of the clay control products. We went back, we did a custom formulation, removed that stabilization agent, raised the cloud point, and we removed.
Those little red things were emulsion blockages that were actually cutting off the flow of the hydrocarbon from the well. Once we did that, we fracked three more subsequent wells, and they all returned back to or actually slightly above what the predicted performance would have been, reducing the amount of water coming out of the well. So this is how, you know, what makes us different and why when you're starting to see a reduction in frac fleets year on year and why our business keeps growing and why we're gaining market share. And just an indication of that, when we put this strategy in place, we represented less than 1% of chemistry that moved to hydraulic fracturing locations and unconventional in North America land.
Today, we sit at almost 17% market share, and we think we could continue to grow that business to over 25% market share in the coming quarters. And then, you know, as I mentioned, what you saw an improvement here is that green line represents the original formulation, and the gold represents the changes that we did. And you see the significant improvement in flow back out of that well. That translated from what we saw in the microfluidics design to what they're actually seeing on production location, which again, in combination with our machine learning pieces, we're actually getting predictive analytics on well performance, something that hasn't been done very much in the completions business.
You know, and talk a little bit more in detail about the other core component segment of our business is around our data analytics, and this is something that we are extremely excited about. And I'm probably a little bit biased to this. I'm a PhD in organic chemistry, so the only way I always know to make chemistry better is to make your measurements more accurate. And one way to do that is take real-time measurements of hydrocarbon flow and the chemistry going downhole to allow us to make faster decisions and look at whole asset performance. Now, to
In the mid-year to end of 2020 , we completed an acquisition of a company called JP3 Measurement out of Austin, Texas, that has some proprietary near-infrared measurement technology that can actually go to location, monitor pipeline flow, wellhead flow, all the different components that look at hydrocarbon composition, BTU quality, net heating value, Reid vapor pressure. All these things can be done with this type of technology, and we're like, wow, you know, what would be a better way to understand the exact composition of the hydrocarbon that you're trying to stimulate and/or help flow better in the production side? And so we bought this company, and they were solely focused at that time in the midstream. They were literally a sensor business. So you looked at it as capital, one-off capital sales.
What we focused on is our MeasureMore strategy. We've converted this capital sale business into a highly accretive data as a service business, where over 60% of the revenue is now coming from subscription-based contracts, building a recurring backlog. We expect to exit the year with that approaching almost 70%. That business grew from 2022 to 2023. It grew 40% with a 200% improvement in data as a service revenue. We expect similar growth from 2023 to 2024. Now, what's really exciting is the recent EPA adoption of the OOOb and OOOc regulations. Currently, we had not in the past generated any revenue from this segment. However, with the adoption of these regulations in May, they go into full effect in November.
There's over 55,000 flare locations in the United States that have to be measured, and right now, we have. We've been building these carts. Every one that we've built is now on location. They're taking them out as fast as we can build them to monitor flare devices. So when you look here, the top picture that you see is actually live on a location for a big E&P operator in the Permian Basin. And they had been doing composite testing, which is where they go out, and they just take a sample of the gas, come back and run gas chromatography. There's a lot of inaccuracies that take place in one when they pull the sample, and then also the expense of having to use a calibration gas and the time turnaround to go to a lab and run on a GC calibrated component.
They had failed their flare testing twice. We went out with our new VeriCal unit, tested the flare for 14 days straight, and they passed the total testing protocol for the EPA. More importantly, what we have is we don't have any error in taking measurement. We're actually monitoring on the flow line with a validation cell that uses a calibration gas in real time so that we make sure that the laser monitoring from the near-infrared spectroscopy is always in calibration. This is something that the EPA loved and how we actually got the alternative test method through so quickly, as they believe it kinda sets a gold standard for monitoring these wells in real time.
More importantly, it opens up the ability to monitor year-round, which could then allow them to produce a little bit more gas because they actually get a higher carbon credit by monitoring in real time, which puts them even further out of the particular regulatory fines. So we're really excited about this business. We think that we're starting to see orders consistently come in. A lot of them are gonna be taking delivery in Q4 just because of November is when it becomes active. But again, this is a major, you know, billion-dollar type TAM that we see available to us in the current market. The other component, and where, honestly, the founder of JP3, who still works for us. Well, these sensors were built to address issues around chain of custody.
That particular employee actually owns a significant amount of acreage in South Texas, and they've always felt that when they were flowing these wells, they weren't getting an accurate composite sample of what the hydrocarbon looks like in flowing, that it never really matches what's coming, and they felt like there was consistent money left on the table for the resource owner or the E&P operator . If you look at this sample you see here, this is a 60-day measurement in real time, that background, those peaks of our Verax technology on the well site, taking a measurement every five seconds. And what you notice, those stars, those stars are composite samples that were pulled and measured by a GC.
At no particular point in time does the average of those composite samples and the average of the real-time sample come into place and get aligned with one another. Typically, they're almost 20% off. When you look at the flow rate of this well, you could see about a $4 million annual loss of proceeds from that well to an E&P operator or a resource owner. More importantly, those samples that get pulled consistently have errors of up to 16% composition. They literally can pull three samples at one time, and they vary in what they say because of the pressure drops of different components that they see. So when you put this thing, it offers a significant opportunity for true transparency in what's flowing and co-mingling in different pieces you see in the field applications.
What we're excited about from a chemistry side is that this now gives us a real-time analytic tool to autonomously predict production chemistry that can go into a pipeline for better flow, which kinda completes the circle for us to be a total asset management group. Currently, right now, there's fleets of trucks that drive well to well, and they do like, you know, I would say just qualitative bottle testing. It needs a dab of this and a dash of that. We could quantitatively measure that by the hydrocarbon composition we see from the new Verax units on location. Also, you know, we looked at this thing as that well was built to accommodate dry gas. But in reality, if you've seen that video, it actually has liquid and some condensate in there constantly flowing.
The resource owner is not getting compensated for any of that. Even when they take composite sampling and they test on a GC, the GC burns the liquid off before it actually takes a sample because of the way the testing works, this, I guess, chromatography. So when we looked at this on that current flow rate over the 60 days, you could extrapolate out to almost an additional $1.4 million of proceeds not being accounted for on top of the $4.4 million, which gives you almost $6 million on a normal, average flow-type well. So a significant opportunity in terms of the transparency that we can give to the hy-- to the hydrocarbon producers and E&P operators, as well as resource owners.
And just to give you an idea, there was a major operator in the Eagle Ford Shale that actually got sued for accusations of underpaying and not accounting for liquids that were in the flow, as well as failure to meet lease terms in terms of co-mingling, and they didn't feel they were getting the right allocation of money. This ended up settling out of court for a $24 million cash settlement over that period with an adoption of how they were doing the custody transfer on the future end. And so this was just, you know, a few of these royalty owners that were looking at this. You can imagine the scope you see. There's over 175,000 locations-...
that a Verax could be put to right now in the United States, to monitor and give transparency around that. And you look at your alignment with the Texas Railroad Commission and all these different components there, this could be a huge game changer in terms of how we manage hydrocarbons and the overall process that we see from the asset management. Again, leveraging to where if we think about chemistry as that value creation platform, we're not only bringing unique, better ROI-delivering chemistry downhole, we're also monitoring the exact composition of the flow and how we treat that to get maximum flow to a refinery. This is where we wanna go from a sustainability aspect in terms of lower carbon footprints and better understanding of what we get out of each well, a better ROI. You know, when you talk about...
We look at the potential risk here. If you were to accumulate what's going on with associated dry gas, BTU swings, sampling errors, volume and mass flow errors that you see because it doesn't account for the liquids and condensate when they do GC, you're talking about over $100 billion of industry risk that goes out every year in terms of where they're looking at, if you take 175,000 wells. So this is something that could be eradicated by paying $40,000-$80,000 a year just to monitor those wells. And you know, for us, we think this creates a significant opportunity for Flotek in the future.
So just to wrap up, again, I'm just really excited today to sit here to show you the fruits of the execution of a corporate strategy on a turnaround to create a unique chemistry and data offering inside the oil and gas community that is gonna create a significant value in the future because we consider this to be the precipice. We've pretty much completed where we wanna go on the initial reparation of business. This is all about where we're gonna go in the future and driving more shareholder value and improvements overall to how we look at sustainability in the community. And so that will open up for questions.
Historically, there's been moves in the class of the drilling cycle. Everybody seems to drill all at once, and then they run their wells out and, you know, depletion comes off, and they have to start again. One, how does that affect your business? And two, it sort of appears that we may be at the beginning stages of a new drilling cycle.
Yeah, so that's a great question, and that's been a part of the core strategy of what we're trying to do in the business because there's no doubt our fundamental completions business is very suspect to the cycle in that, you know, our activity is related to the number of wells that are being completed. And so we have seen and felt a little bit of that headwind in this back part of the year. I'm like you, I think that we're kind a in a lower contour of what we're gonna start to see an improvement in the cycle. I think that'll come on in 2025, it'll continue to improve into 2026, assuming if we all believe natural gas pricing returns, which if you think we're gonna do LNG exports and the power generation component, which we're very bullish on, is gonna happen.
But what I would say to that is what we've tried to do with the data analytics business and moving it into operational things that aren't related to drilling or frac fleet counts is one component of improving the overall sustainability of our business and the future value for shareholders. And we believe that this data business, it grows, increases, EBITDA trades at a much higher multiple being the data as a service. And I honestly think in two years, that standalone segment could potentially be worth the current market cap of Flotek, to be honest with you. And also our transition in production chemistry is very important, and I talked about the treating the flowing well. If we stopped drilling today, didn't complete another well, and we were in production chemistry, we could sell that for another ten years because that's OPEX expense.
It gives us less exposure to the cyclical nature of drilling. More importantly, it's higher margin products, and we have that differentiated component in doing that. That right now is a $6 billion segment that we don't even touch. So you can imagine if we come in and took 5% or 10% market share, which I think is something that's legit, considering if we've got an autonomous way to measure it. I mean, you're talking about adding, you know, anywhere from $300 million to $600 million to the top line, and you start to see the growth of JP3 business. Before you know it, we're back on track to get back to that $1 billion revenue, $1 billion market cap, that, you know, in my mind, that's what I came here to do. I was...
You know, prior to coming here, I was running a $4.5 billion segment, and, you know, we're not here to stay at the $100 million size. So, I think that, you know, there's no doubt that we've been exposed to the cyclical nature. I will say this, though. I'm also very pleased at the transition that the E&P operators and service companies made into better capital discipline, focusing on ROI, focusing on dividend returns to the shareholders. I think these things are great for the longevity of the business. They reduce the amplitude of the cycle, and I think that's something that we really support as you look at how we maintain our balance sheet, for sure.
On the JP3 side, is there a scalability? I know there's a scalability. Is there a time which you might wanna joint venture with somebody or get more, scale more wells out there or more analyzers out there than you have the balance sheet for? In other words, it seems like there's such a market for that, that there's an opportunity, and I don't know if you can bring the cost down by bigger manufacturing of that product.
So I definitely think what we did
Thank you.
and 'cause it's a great point, we have to look at growth capital versus where we stand on our balance sheet and cash access to us is that there's no doubt that we've been on the market looking. We first have gone to channel partners so that we have six major channel partners that we work with that help deliver service to the field because we don't, we haven't traditionally had that big chain of custody service arm or that flare gas service arm. So we're working with companies like TechStar, SPL, different ones that we are out there doing a lot of things with now. How we look at a JV of growth, I think kind of depends on, you know, the acceptance rate and who we may work with the best. But there's. We haven't. We've definitely discussed those.
I wouldn't say we have anything going just yet, but we're having pretty strong discussions on that, on which partners work, whether the best share similar value propositions that we do. But I think it's something that we may need, particularly, you know, you look at a lot of cost to build a big service arm, to go out there and go to every one of these wells and sample them. So I think it's a good way for us to maintain cleaner cost on the direct cost side about partnering with somebody like that. We provide the technology and monitoring and software, and they're the big service arm for that. So that's something we are looking at.
[audio distortion]
That's correct.
[audio distortion]
That's correct. And they pick up a component of delivery on the service, and then we have all the software and the recurring revenue pieces, right? Good. All right. Thank you, guys, for your time. I appreciate it. Thanks.