Hi everyone. Good morning. I'm Jeff Grant from the research team at Northland. Thanks for joining our fireside chat session today with Flotek, ticker FTK. We currently have an outperform rating and $16 price target on the stock. With us today from the team, we have CEO Ryan Ezell, CFO Bond Clement, and Director of Investor Relations Mike Critelli. We'll start this off with just kind of a brief overview of the business for those who may be a little bit newer to the Flotek story. We can do a Q&A session after that. Please send any questions through the Zoom portal, or you can email me directly as well, jgrant@northlandcapitalmarkets.com, and we can get those addressed in the Q&A portion of our call. With that, I'll pass it over to the guys for a little bit of an overview before we get into the Q&A.
Hey, good morning, Jeff. We appreciate you guys having us on the fireside chat today. I'm Ryan Ezell, the CEO here at Flotek. Flotek is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. We've been around for over 30 years. What I'd like to update you on today is kind of the revolution that we've undertaken here at Flotek since, I would say, starting at the end of 2020. I myself came on board in 2019, over 25 years in the energy chemistry sector. I'm a chemist by trade. We came on as part of what I would really fundamentally look at as a turnaround story here at Flotek. The company had begun to lose revenue and profitability in the late teens due to some strategic transitional issues in the way chemistry took place here in oil field services.
My initial discussion with our board at correcting that trajectory at the end of 2020 as we came into 2021 was that we laid out a plan to build Flotek into an innovative chemistry and technology company that was going to be propelled into the future by our innovative approach to real-time data measurements of our chemistry. We wanted to create a convergence of these innovative solutions to not only work inside of the energy infrastructure sector, but also broaden the horizon in the company as we looked at a three, five, and 10-year overlay. In doing so, we laid down the foundation of creating a plan to repair our fundamental and innovative chemistry technology segments, which had forged the way for improved ROI from oil and gas reservoirs and improved performance.
Combining that with real-time data analytics, particularly around our proprietary near-infrared measurement technologies that allow us to look at chemistry in a way that's never been seen in terms of what we look at in oil and gas, particularly the energy infrastructure. More importantly, how fast we see the measurements, how accurate the measurements are that can actually drive fundamental, I would say, decisions that impact the overall performance of any operation. In doing so, we laid out a plan around prescriptive chemistry management in 2021. I would say our initial market share going into 2021 was about 1% of the chemistries moved to North American land. As we exit or move into Q3 of 2025, we now represent almost 20% of the chemistries utilized for North American depletions.
Most importantly, what's really exciting is the growth of our data analytics segment, where we've continued to see not only a business transform from an acquisition we made of JP3 Measurement in 2020, which was, I would say, 100% capital sales. They were just selling instrumentation. Since 2021, we've been able to transition that business to where 70% of it are DAS or recurring revenue service models and continue to grow. We're going to more than likely, when we see the end of 2025, we will double, more than double our data analytics revenue from 2024, which is $8.5 million. We'll come in at plus $20 million in revenue from the data analytics segment.
Most importantly, we've now moved those measurement technologies into the upstream, where you look at the growing power generation segment, where we condition gas to run generators for data centers and power for peak power support, where you're going to see massive growth here in North America of electricity needs and also the global demand overall. What we're looking at is digital valuation on how you actually monetize the measurements of oil and gas, improve valuation for reservoirs and their background production over the next two decades. Also, what we're looking at on EPA regulatory bodies. Finally, when we look at in terms of a long-term play, you're starting to see in real time Flotek Industries transition and make an industrialized pivot to where we're no longer going to be held to the cyclical nature of the oil and gas operations for rig caps or frac numbers.
We're going to move into the downstream OpEx-driven components. We're also looking at adjacent markets for, I would say, other industrial chemical applications, water treatment, advanced analytics for chemical plants, and what we're doing in the agricultural landscape. In the long term, this strategy that we've laid out has helped us turn the company EBITDA positive in 2023, where we generated about $1.5 million adjusted EBITDA. In 2024, we saw that grow to $20.3 million of adjusted EBITDA. In our current guidance, we have a range between $36 to $39 million of adjusted EBITDA. There's a great trajectory of growth. The big component of that is going to be delivered by our data analytics segment as that helps us make this massive transition. Resultantly, we've seen significant improvements in our share price over the last 18 months. I'd say we're up almost 230%.
That value creation of the strategy has now transitioned to our ability to deliver value for our shareholders. When you lay out, you know, things I would say in a long term, we're in the first inning of a nine-inning baseball game for what Flotek Industries is going to be. We've seen our addressable market in 2021 of about $2.6 billion expand to almost $20 billion at where we sit currently in Q3 of 2025. We believe that, you know, Flotek Industries represents a very strong and strategic investment opportunity for the markets today as we continue to execute on our strategy, improve profitability in every metric for the company, and enter into what we consider to be a long-term play leveraged on real-time data. You know, that's extremely exciting for us.
That's kind of the rapid, I would say, 30,000-foot overview when you look at the improvements in adjusted EBITDA, revenue growth. We're early into our data analytics recurring revenue base where we're starting to record backlog. We've actually secured almost $180 million in recurring revenue backlog, which gives continuity for growth and financial performance. Most importantly, we're now delivering value to our shareholders as we create, you know, really complete this turnaround and start to move the company forward. When you look at it on a high-level overview.
Perfect. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate that. As a reminder, we can hop into the Q&A here with those comments in mind. You can either submit that through the Q&A portal on Zoom or, again, email me directly. Maybe just to kick it off, Ryan, I think, as you kind of alluded to, kind of shifting the business away from being tied to rig caps or Frac Fleets, I think most people just kind of say this is an oil field service company that's going to kind of ebb and flow with cycles. Is there a way to quantify how that business has shifted in terms of how much of the business today is not necessarily tied to those metrics and what could that be over the next couple of years in terms of that shift?
Yeah, so that's a phenomenal question in terms of how we're starting to convey that message to the public markets in terms of, if you look at 2021, I would say that 99% of our revenue and what a little bit of profitabilities that we were incurring as a company would have all been related to frac, I would say cyclical nature of business, right? As we exited 2024, we saw that transition to where the data as a service really started to make a transition to where 10% to 15% of the revenue would have been coming from recurring revenue type service models that we had either in chemistry and/or data analytics. Where we sit and as we exited Q2, more than 26% of our gross profit actually comes from recurring revenue data service.
You've seen it grow from 0% to 26% in just the profitability side in those prior years. Along the way, we've been able to secure a $2 billion recurring revenue type chemistry contract as well as secure another $160 million data analytics contract. It's just to name a couple that's helped to stabilize the business and I would say insulate us from the cyclical nature of a lot of the commodity-driven focus. I expect to see that continue to improve as we exit Q3. More importantly, as you look out to the horizon of 2026, we expect adjusted EBITDA to grow from what our guidance, we haven't given that guidance yet, but we do expect it to grow year over year.
We also expect that 60%, roughly, or an anticipated around 60% of that adjusted EBITDA to come from data analytics, which would be a massive shift from where we said it in 2021.
Great. Thanks, Ryan. I guess just to build on that last point, how much for that 60% metric to kind of ring true, how much success or momentum needs to continue from some of those data analytics growth vectors from, you know, power, custody transfer, flare, and some of these other markets you guys have talked about?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I would say a lot of it is already showing in our recurring revenue backlog. You look at it in 2023, I'm sorry, 2024, we did about $8.5 million in the data analytics segment alone. Our current, or just one of our single PowerTech contracts, will deliver just under $30 million alone in 2026. Just that single PowerTech contract, where we're now moving into multiple contracts. I believe that when you look at it just from that basis, you'll start to see a pretty strong directional indicator that we're going to be able to achieve that kind of growth in our adjusted EBITDA, particularly with being a percentage of the data analytics revenue. We're continuing to see the growth of our digital valuation or custody transfer pieces. We've got almost 30 units out.
Up until Q2 of 2025, we had never had one single dollar recorded in revenue. Now we've got 30 units out on a recurring basis. We're having more and more Verax and gas treatment skids going out in PowerTech, and our entire flare monitoring fleet is active right now testing flares in the U.S. We're pretty confident in being able to hit those growth metrics. Hopefully, we typically take a conservative approach because as part of a turnaround business, as we're recurring in profitability, we like to set some strong guidance out and hit those metrics and deliver continuity to our shareholders and our stakeholders within the company.
Perfect. Thanks, Ryan. One of the questions we had on the contractual side of the business, can you just touch on, I guess, typical contract structure, the duration of these contracts, and how that might vary by application?
Yeah, for sure. You're talking specifically to data or chemistry versus data?
Let's talk more on the data side.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's interesting because traditionally speaking, when we look at the data business as a whole, we break it into downstream, midstream, and upstream. When you look at the, I would say the downstream to midstream section, it is kind of a blend between recurring revenue services and still what I would consider to be capital sales. When you look at a big installation, like distillation plants or crackers or different components like that on the refinery side, most of those are capital sales that come with a maintenance and services software contract. We still do some of those. As you move further into the midstream, we look at transmix, rebate for pressure monitoring, etc. Those go into a hybrid between an upfront capital purchase and a recurring revenue model.
As you transition fully to the upstream where we have our PowerTech business, our digital valuation, and flare monitoring, those are over 95% recurring revenue model. It's interesting because as we're seeing the evolution of each one of those businesses in the upstream, we're starting to see it play out as the use cases come above. I'll give you an example on PowerTech. Traditionally, on power services, when we look at conditioning fuel, we essentially serve as a smart or a modified carburetor to feed dual fuel engines, turbines, or different components. We break that segment up into four or five major categories where you're looking at rig operations, which can include frac or rig power. We look at peak power units that help provide power support to the grid during high points of summer or during storms, etc.
We look at data center power, and then we look at industrial applications. It's unique. I would say all of the contracts that go into rig power or oil field services are all recurring revenue anywhere from six months to two-year type contracts, right, on a fixed basis. As we move over into the data center side, those tend to go five to ten years that we see in a hybrid. There's a capital purchase upfront, and then it comes with recurring revenue rental services for some additional measurements that go along the way. Peak power does similar to oil field services because those can tend to be mobile generation, and they are mostly recurring revenue models. On the industrial side, those are similar to data center because they're fixed installation. Those come with some capital purchase upfront for the fiber, etc., for the installs.
Then they have a recurring revenue model. They'll typically go anywhere from five to ten years. As you can imagine, the oil field services and peaker plants tend to move around and are more mobile. They have a little bit more, I would say, transactional in nature where the bigger installations have that five and ten-year revenue layout.
Got it. That's really helpful, Ryan. I guess that's kind of an interesting commentary. I don't know if you guys saw there's a Wall Street Journal article out in the last week or so about some of these mobile power fleets in data centers, which I think is one of the markets you guys have talked about. The article seemed to kind of hint that this was a kind of shorter-term gold rush, yet you're talking about five to 10-year contracts. It would be interesting for you to maybe clarify how you guys can penetrate that market in a more durable way.
Yeah, I think what they're starting to see, and it's something we've been studying, and the reason why we talk about we want a balanced approach to our power services is that a lot of the larger, I would say, data centers that get above a gigawatt are now looking at, they run a lot of the times on what we call city gas quality. In other words, it has very little fluctuation in the quality or type or composition of it. What they're concerned about is consistency and continuity. Most of the other, I would call, support power. They're seeing some massive swings in needs for power. They happen very rapidly. We'll have these peak power support comes on. What Flotek does in that is we help monitor and distribute the gas. There's not a whole lot of conditioning that goes on on main line from a refinery.
We help monitor and distribute power equally so that they can handle the big swings and fluctuation for those well-thought-out plants. For those that move further into remote locations that take straight from the wellhead gas, that becomes more of an issue of where we have our skids that actually condition either one, removing water or removing different components of NGLs or doing conditioning with CNG to keep the BTU quality flat. I think that, you know, these guys look out for how they support because they have this quality where they need the five nines, as they call it, the 99.999% of the time uptime. If they have anything lower than that, the centers can tend to overheat and they have some other electrical issues.
You're going to see a unique, I would say, transition there to where it's very fixed installation, high-quality gas, et cetera, for some of the mega centers. There are those that are out, I would say, in West Texas, South Texas, some of the ones that are moving in Mexico that use straight from the wellhead. Our value proposition is extremely strong in those, helping condition the gas. To me, the interesting market for us is still there are a lot of remote areas for grid support where they move power into that help handle the swings depending on the weather, where it's cold during some areas or hot during other ones. We move with these megawatt installations to provide off-the-wellhead grid support. That's another exciting market for us, I think, as well.
Got it. Okay. That's really helpful. On the custody transfer side, we have a question. If you could kind of touch on the growth trajectory expectations there. Maybe for those newer, Ryan, if you want to spend a minute just kind of giving an overview of what specifically that application entails for you guys.
Yeah. We look at custody transfer as part of our digital valuation component in that when you look at our technology, whether it's a Verax Analyzer or an Expect unit, these are near-infrared proprietary devices that plug directly into hydrocarbon flow lines, whether a direct wellhead, a gathering section of high volume for rich natural gas or liquid hydrocarbons, et cetera. What we do is we take compositional analysis of this flow, BTU values, net heating values, et cetera, in real-time measurements taking anywhere from five to eight seconds, which provides constant flow rate monitoring. The reason why this is important is because most of the valuation of reservoirs, hydrocarbons, inventory, et cetera, are taken on composite manual sampling that only takes place once every six months at a certain time of the day.
As you can imagine, if something is flowing in real time every single day, 24 hours a day, there's potential compositional changes, fluctuations in quality, et cetera, that compositional testing doesn't catch. We see this all the time where we see as much as 25% changes in BTU values during a single day. More importantly, the manual sampling itself, depending on what ASTM or standardization that they're following, often introduces error into the sample and doesn't always catch the natural gas liquids that could come along in rich gas and they bring it to run it on gas chromatography. It's not that we're saying that our instrumentation is more accurate than gas chromatography. What we're saying is there's a methodology issue in terms of the way they look at doing the measurements. Obviously, real-time data points are more accurate.
If you can look at the slide that we have up on the screen now, those stars represent a composite sample test where they test it once every two, four, or five days on a 60-day window. That curve you see in the background is the real-time monitoring measurements taken every eight seconds. What we are typically seeing is that most of the time there's a negative 3 to 5% bias by manual sampling in GEC versus what the real-time data actually says. As you can imagine, these are huge swings in overall evaluation of production whenever you have that kind of thing. When you look at the volume and the time period, some of these sites we're seeing up to $4 million annually per measurement point.
We believe that we'll be, we're one of the only, or the only optical unit that can measure in real time that gives us ASTM standardization levels for doing digital valuation. We've gone out and worked on this for over a year and a half, proving these points out with customers. That's where you saw us bringing this. We started talking about these pilot programs last year, and they started to all convert over to revenue creation here in Q2. We believe that now they're being considered the standard on the new wells that are being built. We're going to see prolific growth in the future with these. There was initial concern that doing them on older production wells could potentially open a liability of a resource owner or a production company that felt they had been underpaid. Our E&P guys have been underpaid.
We're actually, in most cases for that, typically brought in to resolve an issue or a conflict over what they think the value should be. That's worked out pretty well for us just because we don't want to be the, we just want to be the truth teller on what the data says. We look at it as being a data company. When you look at the potential impact, there's over 250,000 of these sites currently in the United States that could utilize real-time measurements, not even counting all the interchanges and junction points where they collect all these fuels. We think this is a huge opportunity for Flotek in the future. When you look at our instrumentation, these units go out, they have no moving parts. They have on-site calibration. We have what we call a proprietary or patented validation cell.
There's a calibration gas that's shot through that the laser goes through at the same time that it's monitoring the flow so that we ensure the unit stays in calibration throughout its lifetime. We see all these on a real-time monitoring dashboard through our VIPER technology and other proprietary software that we have, which we think is, again, going to give me even further growth from a software aspect for Flotek in the future. There's no doubt, and as you can tell, my excitement around the digital valuation piece, I think this is going to be an extremely valuable sector for Flotek in the coming years.
Great. Thanks, Ryan. Is there a way to kind of quantify how big could this market be for you guys? I mean, is this something where every new well in the country should have one of these or only certain centralized gathering facilities? How do we wrap our head around this?
Most of the companies that we're working with have different value statements for what we do with the instrumentation. What started out for us was at these larger junction sites where you have a solid amount of flow, and we really started to see the impact there. Most of these on the 30-day trials were creating anywhere from $750,000 to $1.2 million of initial value in the first month, which was huge for the operators. These things are sensitive enough that if you've got multiple wells flowing to a case location, as soon as you turn another well on, we can see it instantaneously. We can see when a junction facility doesn't do a maintenance over the weekend and they have changes in water content. We give them all that data in real time.
It expanded to what we're seeing at the wellhead where operators are starting to understand that we could impact the overall inventory of an entire set of wells or reservoirs that they have. I think, depending on what the operator's intentions are with their future, we see this, like I said earlier, we would base these things on revenues of anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000 a month per unit. We could put in there, there's opportunities to have hundreds of thousands of these deployed. That would be assuming we took all the market. We do see over 250,000 measurement sites currently in the U.S., and that grows every year as they drill new wells.
Got it. That's really helpful. Is it fair to think, I guess it's kind of a two-part question. How do you guys envision a typical contract for custody transfer being structured? From a practical standpoint, given that these are kind of built in line, no moving parts, all that, I mean, this is like, I don't know if life of the well is a fair kind of duration of contract, but why wouldn't these just continue to have, you know, near 100% renewal rates over time?
Yeah, I mean, we typically push anywhere from 24 to 36 months type contracts and have like an evergreen renewal, right? As long as they want the measurement service, the device stays at the wellhead. In my opinion, I feel that, I mean, this thing proves out the life. Even if an E&P operator has production for the first 24 months and then they sell it to non-op, the non-op guys want to ensure they're getting paid for what's being produced. You're seeing a long lifetime of these potential assets for us on the recurring revenue models. What's interesting though is it does take a little bit longer sales cycle as you introduce new operators. They want to ensure because you've got to realize you've got 75 years, 100 years plus of using gas chromatography as the standard for the valuation component.
There's a lot of people, they just like to see the real-time valuation and prove it out against an ASTM, do a pilot phase, and then do a transition. For the once, I would say in the history of our data analytics business, these are the ones that are reaching Senior Executive enterprise level buyers to where we're seeing double-digit units going out at one time for multiple installations that we still select out over X number per week or per month. That's really what we want. Most importantly, these contracts drive that plus 80% gross margin on the basis. That's what's really exciting for us.
Got it. Sorry, I was just taking notes. There's a lot of good stuff in there. We've got a question on the data center market. Can you clarify, is that a market that Flotek's currently generating any revenue on? What is kind of the progression or commercialization pathway there?
We're definitely, what I can say on that is, without getting anything ahead of the skis here, we are pursuing those opportunities. I think that we're in a good position for that. We haven't disclosed any on what in that particular specific revenue to that area is just yet. We're definitely, I think, making a lot of headway in those areas, not only for fixed large installations with city gas, but even further support in these, I would consider to be more remote locations that use from the wellhead gas. It's pretty interesting. We're working with a lot of major players in that. We're hoping to provide a pretty detailed update to that at the end of Q3 in our earnings call. I'll save a little bit of that for what we're going to talk about in earnings.
Okay. Perfect. Can you touch on it, or I think right in the prepared remarks, you talked on, you know, just all the data that you guys get from, I guess, both the data analytics and, you know, your history in the chemistry side. How are you guys able to leverage that data into any particular insights or strategies and penetrate the customer base? Does that provide any kind of durable competitive advantage in any of your end markets?
Yeah, you know, it's honestly, you know, Jeff, I think it's interesting because when I laid these strategies out back in 2021, a lot of people that we talked to, because the company was still in such financial strain, most people were just caught up at how much money we were losing coming in those years and weren't fully grasping the impact that real-time data analytics is going to have on our business. Whether we're looking at the growth of the pure data segment or the impact that our chemistry business has, what we did in terms of building out prescriptive chemistry management in combination with data analytics is that we combined, on the chemistry side, we've completed over 20,000 wells globally in the U.S. We have the database of not of every single chemistry type and what the production output has been from those wells, right?
We leveraged that data in combination with our chemometric modeling for our data analytics segment with the over 70,000 crude samples that we have already modeled globally from over 1,500 measurement points. What that's allowed us to do is fundamentally, when we go to an operator, we do a joint sale approach. Hey, we receive anywhere from five to eight, what I call physicochemical properties of where they want to drill and complete a well. We look at target depth, temperatures, pressures, the XRD analysis of what the reservoir looks like in terms of composition, what that crude looks like from those areas, what the carbonate water would be, et cetera. We plug that into a chemical, a chemometric model that pulls from these different databases in real time, which we have been building. Those things update every week. They update in the backlogs.
For that, where we used to spend anywhere from $11 million to $12 million a year on technical service and R&D, we're doing it for less than $1.2 million a year now. We generate solutions faster and modifications to the chemistry. We've combined that to real-time microfluidic modeling that's allowed us to advance our understanding of reservoirs and deliver more impactful chemistry. What's the best part is that we work with the operator to say, hey, you can leave an Expect unit or a near-infrared monitoring device just at the wellhead. When you bring this production on, you can actually see the impact of the chemistry. We're monitoring what chemicals go downhole and their efficacy in real time. We're also monitoring the impact on the production side of the well as a total solution.
This drives massive understanding and removes the, I would say, used to be the veil of what does a chemistry do? How does it work? We're providing a level of transparency and real-time data that's never been achieved before in the U.S. frac space. More importantly, how to handle the quality of production on the backend. We've advanced what we're doing at the well to where now we're actually monitoring the water quality, et cetera. We have built a proprietary chem-edge system in combination with our biggest customer, ProFrac, on the pump side to where we're not having to bring eight to ten massive tanks out there of this diluted chemistry to pump down. We're bringing out five totes on a single trailer with this chem-edge unit.
Based on the water quality in real time, we change the concentrates utilizing the water on location as they pump it down the hole. That's faster, quicker, less carbon footprint, operational efficiency, and in terms of accuracy for the chemistry that goes down hole, that's never been achieved before in frac locations. That's how the real-time data drives reservoir performance improvement, operational efficiency, cost, carbon footprint reductions. We're hoping to get to that holy grail of making this tier two acreage receive the economic impacts of tier one. That's going to be a big thing, I think, for the future. What that also does for us from a chemical landscape is, look, there's no doubt we have 170 patents in the chemistry space. We're going to continue to look for novel, innovative solutions there.
The ability to monitor the data and make real-time decisions on operational efficiency helps insulate the commoditization of the chemical business for us. As long as we have our service revenue components in there, that drives the growth of the business. It's highly profitable in comparison to just selling commoditized chemistry. That's been the whole shift of what we look at. That's just on the chemistry side. Then you move over to the data components to where we're out monitoring and we find issues on flow. Even in industrial applications, we can identify where they've got acidic conditions with H2S or other products. We actually sell chemistry to treat the things that we find by the data business. They've now truly had a convergence. The data business is driving what we do better on the chemistry side.
Got it. That's super cool stuff, Ryan. There's a lot of headlines now about inventory exhaustion, like you mentioned, operators being forced to kind of tier two acreage or maybe deeper, gassier zones that are not as preferable as some other tier one rock. How much is that a tailwind for your business, given that operators seem to be needing to get a little more creative to earn the returns that they're accustomed to seeing?
I would say that this fits honestly where we are now, fits in the wheelhouse of what this business was designed to do. That is provide transparency, efficiency, and innovative technologies for what we do. If you were to go back and look since 2021, public available data, and anywhere where our PCM service combined with our data analytics modeling has been applied, most operators are getting, on average, 26.3% better production out of target zones. That's on average across all basins in the U.S. There are some where we're getting over 35% better production in comparison. That alone should drive better adoption for what we do on the chemical and data side. Also, when you combine that with being able to look at things that, for us, when we monitor this data, we can detect paraffin builds. We can detect when there's additional water influxes.
Anything that needs to be modified to improve flow performance, we see these things in real time. We don't have to wait for six months till there's some issue downstream from there to do it. All these things just overall make better decisions for the E&P operators and, I would say, the OpEx component of the energy infrastructure. This not only just plays in what we do on the oil and gas side, but you look at the fact of on most of these wells, if we stopped drilling today and we kept doing production, we produce around 10 barrels of water per one barrel of oil in the Permian Basin.
We're now moving into the understanding and measurements of these waters and how we treat those for additional, what we call beneficial reuse, whether you put them back into agriculture or you put them in other industries, or it permits you having to do the additional disposal down hole, which can cause other issues with the subterranean environment, particularly around, there's all this talk about injection sites and seismic issues. This helps minimize those impacts as well. There's a huge proliferation and what we're going to do, I think, is going to continue to drive efficiency and improvements on the environmental aspect, the efficiency aspect, and the overall return on the investment inside this energy space. I think Flotek Industries is going to be spearheading those improvements for a time to come.
Great. Thanks. Shifting back to custody transfer, one of the questions we got was constraints that an E&P may have in adopting the custody transfer solution on all or most of their well sites. Is there, are there costs or labor or kind of ROI hurdles, or what's the main bottleneck there?
Traditionally speaking, it's not a cost or an ROI issue. I think it's a fundamental understanding and an inertial dogma shift of how the measurements have been made. I've used the issue of, for those that are race car fans, whether you're Formula One or NASCAR, and you would go to a race, and you've been going to those for a long time, and you went to Talladega, and you sit in the stands, you're used to seeing 20 cars that are a thousand horsepower and the noise and the race and et cetera. Then somebody shows up with an electric car that's faster, more powerful, but doesn't make any noise. You know, everybody's kind of like, man, I don't, I got to get used to that.
Traditionally, as we come in and we look at whether we're looking at transient mix or we're looking at re-vapor pressure monitoring, digital evaluation, they're like, they almost have like, what do we do with all the data? Like we have so much of it and it's telling us so many different things that we have to work through and pull out, you know, what do you need to focus on? Our teams help them do that and just get used to having that thing at your fingertips. Oftentimes we find inefficiencies that need to be fixed along how they were handling stuff during their value chain. I think it's just a growth pattern. Anytime you bring something disruptive to the market, these things happen on the front end. We are helping the operators work through those.
I don't think it's in terms of them understanding the value or the ROIs. I think it's just an adoption period getting used to saying, hey, I mean, because you got to realize there are a lot of dollars at stake here in terms of what this impact is. They want to ensure that, you know, everything meets the ASTM standardizations, APIs, et cetera, to where there's no additional liabilities. We've crossed those hurdles. Now it's just a proliferation of business and introduction and growth.
Got it. Great. I got a question on the M&A side of things. Given that you guys did the PowerTech deal a few months back, are there other opportunities in the M&A pipeline you guys are evaluating, and what kind of, I guess, end markets or types of acquisitions might you guys be considering?
Yeah, you know, we're definitely, I mean, I said since I've been here, we're consistently always looking for potential opportunities for M&A. I do believe that as now you're starting to see how our strategy is executing, I think our opportunities to execute M&A going forward is improving every day. I think this market lends itself for potential for us to do that. I would say this though, we're more focused on M&A opportunities that move away from the impact of the cycle, which means that we want them to be steady and not cause any volatility to the growth of the business. We're also looking for things that have a data component to them. We don't look to do any M&A activity that would allow us just to get a, what I would call, commodity chemical business. We're not interested in that.
We prefer something that creates value through data and chemistry or data. We have a few things that we look for in terms of, one, does it fit our safety and operational culture? Does it fit our technology profile? Do we feel that the activity would be accretive to our stakeholders as a company in terms of share price and immediately accretive on the financials? Also, is it in alignment with our long-term strategy for improving cash flow and long-term stability of the company? Those are some of the things that we're weighing out there. There's no doubt that from sitting in my role from a strategic landscape, we're constantly looking for the right opportunities for Flotek. We've been very protective of our balance sheet.
I think as we've been, I would consider to be in the fragile transition of a company recovering, growing, and now sending a strong profitability strategic pathway. We're going to continue to be, I would say, protective of our balance sheet. I think that our vantage point on leverage or anything we do for M&A could potentially change as you're pure volatile field services. You don't want to tote any type of leverage. Our ability to withstand that type of leverage, should we do something that gets better, is a bigger piece of it, is built on recurring revenue, high profitability, et cetera, right? Those are the types of things just to give you some insight on where our headspace is in looking for these opportunities. We are engaged in looking at things that we can help inorganically propel Flotek to a plus billion dollar market cap company.
Awesome. Sounds good. Just for the audience out there, if you guys have a couple more questions, we'll try to wrap it up here in the next handful of minutes. We've got a question on the ProFrac side of the business, Ryan. Majority shareholder, largest customer. I know you can't speak explicitly for them, but for those newer to the story, how would you kind of characterize their longer-term engagement ambition? Do they want to remain majority shareholders as best you can tell, or any thoughts there?
You know, I look today, I'll speak a little bit on our partnership with those guys. They've been a fantastic partner for Flotek. I mean, you look at what they've been able to help us leverage and grow and create an economy of scale in our chemistry business as we brought those guys on in 2022. They've been great for an aspect of their, we've now coordinated a lot of strategic approaches about how we go with customer based on sales pursuits. That business is firing on all cylinders, I'd say on the chemistry side, and it's working well. They've been a proving ground for helping us prove use cases for our data analytics segment. We look at the assets we bought for PowerTech. They help in the field deployment, testing, proving a variance units to condition field gas. They're on the forefront of that.
When we look at the advanced CAMAD unit, they've been at the forefront of letting us try these things out, helping us build because that's their wheelhouse of building a big piece of equipment and advanced design that we provide a lot of logic and drive for it. They've been helping us do that. They're big supporters of what we do operationally and provide good, I would say, insight into what the markets are doing. I think the goal there has always been Flotek to grow, and they've been in support of that. I can't really speak honestly, Jeff, on the long-term positioning. I do know that I would, in my conversations with some of the senior leadership there and on some highest level executives, is that they don't mind their size and Flotek coming down as we grow, whether that's through some M&A type activities or whichever.
They're happy with the value that's been created in their investment so far. They've been a great partner for us so far. I think it'll continue to work that way. I can't 100% give any guidance in terms of their position. I do think that the long-term goal for them was to eventually, they made a strong investment in us. They've seen us grow. They've helped us proliferate. I think in time that ownership level will potentially come down. We'll see how the growth of the company looks from there. That's just my general feel. Again, I can't 100% speak on their behalf. They don't have any hold on being of a certain size, right? I just think it comes with the natural growth and evolution of the company.
Understood. Of course. Okay. Thanks. I think we'll wrap up with this last one unless some other last minute ones come in. Last question, with the data points that you guys have on the production side and real-time data and everything, is that an opportunity to organically enter the production chemistry market? Is that a market just at a high level you're interested in?
If you look back at Flotek Industries' history, believe it or not, some of the companies are real consolidated to build Flotek, where you look at Cerner Chemicals, SESSI Chemicals, et cetera. Particularly, our production plant in Oklahoma was built off production chemistry. We have an entire arsenal of production chemistries. I shut that down in 2019, any pursuits on that until we got our core completion chemistry prepared and repaired and growing and proliferating. There is no doubt that the production chemistry business is a $5.5 to $6 billion a year segment. Margins are better than our completion side is, and it is not cyclical. It works off expense.
If we stop drilling wells today, we moved into that area where you look at production chemistry or the produced water side of it, either one, which technically you need to be able to handle both, it would be good for the company. We have a unique and differentiated way to enter that market in that we can make real-time measurements of compositional quality and create chemical treatments based on analytics in real time. I think that if you look at our investor deck, which I'd encourage anyone who hasn't seen to go to our website and check it out, we have a slide in there on the potentials for us in production chemistry. I do believe that it's a unique opportunity for us. However, please keep in mind that our differentiating factor for that is we will be applying a real-time data service to drive the chemical treatment.
It's a synergy between the two businesses. The chemical business will come with a data revenue side to it, and that's what we figured. That's where the value creation is for us, is that the actual measurements in real time from the Verax Analyzer or Expect unit will drive the chemical treatment. That would be our unique approach to potentially entering that market. I do suspect you will start to see that from us. There's capabilities for us to do that organically or inorganically. I think that the opportunity to do it inorganically gives much more rapid adoption and growth in the sector versus trying to grow it organically and spend there. I personally think there's a potentially higher ROI in doing an inorganic approach versus trying to do it slower organically.
Understood. Ryan, is it fair to say in a world where Flotek Industries is in the production chemistry business, there's chemistry and data analytics revenue opportunities within that?
100%. What I would say is we would expect that the data revenue would be almost the first component in the chemical sales, followed based on the measurements that we do.
Got it. Awesome. I think we'll leave it there, give people some time to refresh for the next call at the top of the hour here. Ryan, team, appreciate the time as always, and thanks everyone for joining. Ryan, if you have any closing remarks, I'll put it in your hands. Otherwise, we'll wrap up. Wish everyone a good week.
Hey guys, look, again, I appreciate it. I think that, again, as I'd like to reiterate, I appreciate everyone's time this morning. I think Flotek offers a very unique investment opportunity for the market as we execute on this industrialized pivot and transition to a real-time and innovative data and chemical company. We expect this transition looking at the entire energy infrastructure, which we've seen now create a $20+ billion adjustable market for us. We'll transition to other, I would say, connected adjacent markets in agricultural and other industrial applications. This is the first sitting of nine for us. We've got a lot of growth coming, and we look to continue to deliver exciting results in the coming quarters. Thanks everybody for tuning in.
All right. Thanks, everyone. Have a great week.
Thank you.