Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to Sidoti's May Virtual Investor Conference. I see there's still some folks filtering into our virtual room. I'll give it a little bit of time for that to fill in, and when I do, I'll remind everyone you will have some opportunity to ask questions at the end of the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question at any time, you can type it in. You press that Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Press the Q&A button and then type in your question, and we'll get to absolutely as many as we can, time permitting. And we do expect a few minutes at the end. And with that, pleased to welcome this afternoon NCS Multistage Holdings. NCSM is the ticker. We're joined by CEO Ryan Hummer and CFO Mike Morrison.
With that, let me just turn it right over to Ryan.
All right. Thanks, Steve. Good afternoon. I want to thank Sidoti for inviting us to present today, and also I want to thank everyone who's taken the time to watch this presentation and participate. Before we really jump in, I'll spend a little bit of time talking about who we are as a company and where we're focused. So we are a technology-focused oilfield services and equipment company. With that, we sell directly to oil and natural gas producers. So you can think of the likes of Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Devon, Occidental. In Canada, where we have a big presence, companies like Crescent Point, Whitecap, and Baytex and CNRL, and similar customers like that across North America and around the world. In addition, we compete with household names as well. We'll compete with folks like Schlumberger, Halliburton, NOV, CoreLab, and others.
Within that market, however, we focus on certain areas where we believe we can obtain a leadership position and where we can earn attractive margins. So we focus on innovation and partnering with our customers to bring new solutions to market. Typically, these solutions will save our customers time, save them money, or help them make better, more productive wells. We paired this focus on R&D and innovation with an asset-light business model. We outsource the manufacturing of the vast majority of our components that go into the products that we sell. We perform the quality assurance checks on the components and oversee the assembly of the products to ensure quality and reliability before they're sent out to the field. This enables us to minimize our capital investment requirements. So we don't have big machine shops where we're spending money on CNC machines and lathes to support the business.
It's allowed us to generate meaningful free cash flow through business cycles. I'll now take you quickly through our product lines. I know that there are some folks who probably are really well-tuned to the oil and gas sector here, but also a generalist audience. We'll speak more to the value that our products and services bring than to the technical aspects of them. I'll start here with Fracturing Systems. Fracturing Systems is our largest product line and represents about 65% of our revenue as a company. Through this product and service offering, we help our customers to maximize resource recovery with a more controlled approach to completions. If you look at the image on the screen, what we help our customers do is create a fracture network downhole in their completions that looks more like what you see on the right side of the page.
So trying to create fractures that are more predictable, verifiable, and repeatable than you can get through other techniques. So the last slide provided the concept behind what we call pinpoint completions. But this slide demonstrates how we put it into practice. So we sell the sliding sleeves that you see at the top of the slide. Customers will buy additional sliding sleeves for each new well that they complete using our technology. These sleeves are made up as part of the well's casing, and they stay underground in the well for its entire productive life. So again, if a customer drills another well and wants to utilize our technology, they buy another set of our sliding sleeves. We also provide service at the well site, whereby our personnel utilize the tool that's pictured at the bottom of the slide while they're on location.
They work together with the customer representative and also other service companies who are on site. In this, again, consistent with our capital-light model, when we send our people out to the field, they go in the equivalent of an F-150 truck. So we're not out there with a large fleet of pressure pumping horsepower or a coiled tubing rig or a wireline unit. We're really generating value through the R&D that we've developed and the tools that we bring to the site. We believe that we're the global leader in this product line in fracturing systems with a very extensive track record and differentiated features built into both the sliding sleeves and to our service tools that allow us to operate very efficiently in technically demanding environments. About 25%-30% of the oil and gas wells completed in Canada utilize our technology.
We've successfully taken this technology and expanded out into international and other markets, including offshore. I'll speak really briefly to some of the applications for this technology. The primary application in almost every circumstance is going to be to help the customer inject fluid and proppant into the wellbore to hydraulically fracture or stimulate their wells. But the sleeves have the ability to be opened and closed multiple times during their productive life. So if a customer sees water inflow that they're not expecting or the percentage of oil that they're producing reduces and they're producing more water, we can work with the customer to reenter that well and slide certain sleeves that would shut off that water production and restore the anticipated production profile.
The other thing that we can do as we've been taking this technology from onshore applications historically to offshore applications is just really building more features into our sliding sleeves to accommodate different flow control applications. And we mentioned here solids control. So think about being able to put a sleeve eventually in a screened position, which would eliminate sand or any sort of formation rock from flowing back into the well bore that helps to protect downhole pump equipment and surface equipment. And as we get into more complex applications, we're really building more and more in the way of functionality and features into our Fracturing Systems product line. So I'll turn next to Repeat Precision. This is our second largest product line, and it serves a large addressable market in the United States.
So basically, if a customer is not using sliding sleeves in their wells, if they're not using our Fracturing Systems technology, there's a very high likelihood that they're utilizing products that Repeat Precision can supply. So Repeat Precision has consistently expanded its product offering over time in order to grow its addressable market. The first commercial product for Repeat Precision was a frac plug, a composite frac plug. We've added to that a setting tool and continue to kind of move up that perforating string to supply perforating guns now. We've also recently introduced what we call our Pinpoint Perforating Gun System, which is an internally oriented perforating gun, which is really aligned with where a lot of the market has been going recently, especially in the Permian Basin. There's been growth in the adoption of those internally oriented perforating systems.
In addition, we've got some other product developments underway within Repeat Precision and expect to continue to grow that addressable market. The other thing that's occurred is a lot of our customers in Canada. There's been a lot of consolidation. They operate in multiple different basins and plays within the Western Canadian market. A lot of our customers who historically have utilized Fracturing Systems in certain areas that have moved into new geographies, they complete some of those wells with plug-and-perf technology. We're able to leverage our customer relationships in Canada and really bring this Repeat Precision product line into the Canadian market and ensure that we can offer the customer the type of completion system that they want to choose for the selected application. The next product line for us is Tracer Diagnostics. Tracer Diagnostics is a business that we acquired in 2017.
Through Tracer Diagnostics, we provide customers with reliable and cost-effective information to help them improve their well designs and to optimize their field development over time. The learnings from a relatively low-cost Tracer Diagnostics study can help a customer to create millions of dollars of value as they apply that information across their entire field and across their asset base. I'll turn now to quickly explain sort of how the customers can get value from Tracer Diagnostics studies. We will pump a unique tracer chemical into individual stages in a customer's well. In the image on the right, these are represented by those individual nodes across the wells. Later, when the well is producing, we will collect the samples and analyze them at labs that we have in Calgary and in Tulsa.
So after those samples have been analyzed, we provide the customer with a report that they can use to make operational decisions, either for the well that's just been traced or to apply to future developments. And I think the image here on this slide provides a good representation of the breadth of potential use cases for Tracer Diagnostics. So if you take a look at the wells on the outside of this diagram, the one on the far left or the far right, you can see there are really just two nodes that have been traced on each of those wells. And they're at what we call the toe of the well, so the point in the well that's furthest away from where you started drilling.
For that application, what the customer wants to know when they collect a sample and we provide the report of whether or not that tracer chemical has been detected in the sample, they want to know, is that furthest point that I drilled, is that stage, is that producing? And if it is, then I have, as a customer, I have assurance that entire lateral, my entire well is producing and it's come online as planned. However, if I take those tracer samples and I'm not seeing the chemical signature from our tracers, that would indicate that there's a blockage somewhere within that well. So maybe sand has flowed back in the well and created a blockage so that the oil can't flow.
In that case, the customer will make a decision to go in and clean out that well to make sure that they can restore production and get the maximum value out of that asset. With that, just doing two stages on a well, in many cases, those stages, we can supply the chemical to the customer who can self-deploy it in their operations. So it's a really low-cost way for them to really know whether or not they're getting what they're expecting out of their wells. The higher value application is really more what you see with the middle wells in the diagram. In those, you can see there are a lot more nodes where the customer has decided to trace almost every single stage that they had completed in that well. And you can see also in there the graphic showing that there's flow between those wells.
So after we inject the tracers into the wells, we'll take the samples. And let's just talk about the middle well, for example. When we're taking the sample from that well, we're going to expect to see the chemical signature from every tracer that we pumped into that well. But ideally, we're not seeing the tracers that we pumped into the well in the image, just to the right or just to the left. But in this case, you can see that you're getting flow from all three of those wells would be commingled into the production from the middle well. So from a customer standpoint, what they know is that they connected this downhole fracture network in a way that's less than ideal. And what the customer can do going forward is either change their completion designs within an individual well, or potentially they could change their well spacing.
So if the customer could determine that they can produce just as much oil from this section of the reservoir, this section of the rock, with four wells as opposed to five, they might be able to save the $6 to 8 million that it would cost to drill and complete a well, depending on where they're operating. So again, taking a relatively low-cost and simple diagnostic, but being able to drive a lot of value through the application of that technology. I'll move on to our last product line, which is well construction. The core technology in our well construction portfolio is what we call the AirLock Casing Buoyancy System. In our industry, our customers are drilling ever longer laterals, which helps them to improve their economic returns. Probably five years ago, it was most common to have a lateral length somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 ft.
Now, the most common is probably somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 feet. Certain operators are pushing the boundaries and going to three-mile or four-mile laterals, so 15,000-20,000-foot laterals. With this, it gets increasingly challenging to actually push that steel pipe, which is really what that production casing is. You're pushing steel pipe down vertically, call it two miles, and trying to push it out four miles. In doing so, you encounter a lot of friction along the way. The AirLock system for us, what it does is it helps to reduce the friction that the customer would encounter in pushing that lateral as far as they're intending to take it. In doing so, you can also speed the process of landing that casing string.
So taking a relatively simple technology like the AirLock, it more than pays for itself because the customer has greater assurance that they're going to land that lateral where they want to. And it also saves them time on surface where they're not taking as much time to push that casing to bottom because you're able to slide it out there more effectively. So the graph on the right of this slide breaks down the revenue by product line. So I mentioned earlier about 65% of our revenue from Fracturing Systems, 15% from Repeat, 10% each from Well Construction and Tracer Diagnostics in 2023. But one thing that I really want to highlight here is that in 2023, we worked with over 225 customers across the U.S., Canada, and international markets. So there's very limited concentration within our customer base.
We didn't have any customer that contributed more than 10% of our revenue during the year. That's been the case for the last several years for NCS. NCS has three core business strategies that we're pursuing in order to organically grow the business. Those are provided on this slide. We introduced our strategy in late 2022 and believe that we're really starting to see benefits from these results. The first strategy for us is to build on our leading market positions. I mentioned at the outset that we don't try to participate in every potential service line within oilfield services. We focus on those where we can get a leading market position, where we can deploy our capital light business model and stay true to that, and where we can generate good margins and get paid for the technology and the value that we bring.
The good news is I think we have several areas where we have a leading market position. The first of which, I'd spoken to a bit earlier, is fracturing systems on a global basis. We've got a very extensive track record both in North America and globally. And we are the one that customers turn to when they're looking to develop new and exciting applications to enter new markets or technically demanding applications. Second, our presence in the Canadian completions market generally. I mentioned that we're on 25% to 30% of the wells through our fracturing systems business earlier. And our strong customer relationships there have really helped us to continue to grow in Canada. It used to be the case five, six years ago where the vast majority of the revenue came from fracturing systems.
We didn't get as much revenue pulled through as we could through Tracer Diagnostics or well construction or some of the other product lines. I think over the last two or three years, that's really changed. For almost all the wells where we're supplying the fracturing systems, supplying the sliding sleeves, we're pulling through some other product or service, either something from our well construction portfolio or something on the Tracer Diagnostics side. In addition, I mentioned earlier about the ability to work with customers who may use sliding sleeves in one area but want to use plug-and-perf completions in the other. It's been a great benefit for us to have Repeat Precision and to be able to bring that technology into the Canadian market. The third real leading market position that we have that applies across the globe as well is in Tracer Diagnostics.
We think we're the leading provider in North America and, if not the leading provider, the number two provider globally in that business. One of the nice things about Tracer Diagnostics in general is that as we look to move into international markets with fracturing systems or well construction, a lot of times the customers will have very specific changes that they might require to our products and services, whether it be a specific metallurgy or whatnot, which requires additional testing through our engineering group and our test facility. Tracers, on the other hand, the same chemicals that we're using in the U.S. and in Canada are the tracers that get deployed in Argentina, the Middle East, the North Sea, Australia, the other markets where we participate in Tracer Diagnostics. It's a way for us to quickly enter new international markets.
We can leverage the fixed base that we have through the labs in Calgary and Tulsa and establish a beachhead internationally and generate consistent revenue as we work to pull through some of those other product lines and grow our presence internationally. The first of the kind of core strengths I talked to, though, or leading market positions was in Canada and spoke to the ability to cross-sell there. I think that's evidenced by the Q1 results, which is the chart underneath that image on the left side. In the Q1, Canadian rig count was down 6%, but we grew our revenue in Canada by 3%. That was really by leveraging our fracturing systems and Repeat Precision product lines in the Canadian market. The second strategy is to capitalize on offshore and international opportunities that we've been pursuing and investing in.
So this is a focus for us for a number of reasons, but largely because international and offshore customers tend to buy based on technical characteristics primarily and price as a secondary consideration, which in many cases is the exact opposite of North America, where price is a very big competitor or big contributor to the decision-making process for a customer. So if we get pulled into a project based on our technical capabilities, it's a benefit for us. And there's an ability to build a stickier customer relationship as a result. And finally, because of both of those, we can ensure that we get compensated for the value that we're providing to our customers. In a lot of cases, we're helping them save a tremendous amount of time.
That time results in less money spent because the day rate for a drilling rig or a service spread, if you can cut a day or two off of that, that's big dollars that we can help our customers save. I mentioned that the strategies are starting to pay off. If you look at the chart here, last year in the H1 of the year, we did about $3 million of international revenue. Between the Q1 actual and what we expect in the Q2 , we'll be over $7 million just through the H1 of 2024. So that's more than double where we were for the H1 last year. It's actually more than our full year 2023 international revenue. Historically, from the, call it, 2018 to 2021 period, we had done $10 million to 15 million of international revenue per year.
I think we're on track to be, at least in that zip code this year, with a multi-year path to being able to really make that a bigger part of our business over time. The third strategic component here is to commercialize innovative solutions to complex customer challenges. Mentioned earlier, this is really core to what we do. We obtain and understand the voice of the customer and emerging market needs. And we deliver a solution that brings tangible value to our customers. And we look to do this as quickly as we can. Again, our focus is on getting that voice of the customer, building up the pipeline through our product strategy team, leveraging sales and our field hands and all the contacts that we have across the customer organization to build our R&D pipeline to be able to prioritize and bring new products to market.
The couple of things that we have mentioned here are ones that we're excited about as a company. We've been working with a large international oil company to develop our system and take it while we've been operating offshore in the North Sea. That's been more of a shallow water environment off of platforms. But we're working with the customer to develop our system for deepwater applications. And there's been a lot of good testing that took place last year through a surface trial that we did at a fracturing yard and also a land well where we deployed the system. We installed it late last year and had our completion earlier this year, which was a technical success for NCS, and continue to move forward with the customer on that project. Mentioned earlier, Repeat Precision's pinpoint-oriented perforating gun.
We have field trials that have taken place there. We're working with an influential customer to meet their testing requirements to really advance that product line and grow it. There's a note here about having a record sleeve count well in the U.S. What's really interesting here is us being deployed for an enhanced recovery application. This is something where our technology really lends itself to the application. The customer's using fiber optics in this. With sliding sleeves, you can lay that fiber optic cable in between the ports of the sleeve and ensure that you don't accidentally perforate through or cut that cable so that the customer can get all the information they're looking to acquire in that well.
And then additionally, I'd mentioned a little bit earlier, if you see water breakthrough, so in this water flood application, they want to be able to sweep as much oil as possible but not have water streaking and breaking through from an injector to a producer. In this case, if you saw that water breakthrough, again, we can go in and shut down a couple of those sleeves and make sure that the customer gets the most efficient water flood as possible. So really helping them optimize their activity there. And then finally, it was a relatively small, small as far as a new dollar standpoint, but pretty important for us in entering and breaking into a new market. We had the first application for our Fracturing Systems product line in the SAGD well. SAGD is a thermal process to recover heavy oil in Canada.
So while we've been really strong in working with our customers who are producing kind of traditional light oil, this is really the first entry into that SAGD market with our fracturing systems technology. Looking to build on this with another project late last year or, sorry, late this year and move forward with that. We think it could be a really impactful growth market for us going forward. On this next slide, we had a strong Q1. We exceeded our guidance both at the top line and from an earnings standpoint. But I won't dwell on that here. We discussed the quarter in detail on our recent earnings call. So if you want to hear more about the specifics behind that, I'd encourage you to read the transcript or download the transcript there. Slide 15 here. I'll focus briefly just on the bottom half of the slide.
So we recently revised our revenue guidance for the year. The current guidance midpoint would result in 9% growth on the top line, but an adjusted EBITDA increase of 34%. So within our business, I think we'd say our cost of sales is highly variable. This is due in part to our capital light model. So as activity increases, the activity of our suppliers increases to supply us components. But on the other hand, our SG&A is relatively fixed from an expense standpoint. And that gives us operating leverage to grow EBITDA as we grow the top line. We also expect capital expenditures to be below 2% of sales this year. And as a result, we can generate more than $5 million of free cash flow after deducting the distributions that go to our joint venture partner as they pay out dividends. All right. So slide 16.
So here, I spoke a little bit earlier. International historically has been about 5% of our revenue over the last year, really two years. We expect it to be closer to 10% in 2024 on a full-year basis. In addition, we've got significant exposure to the Canadian market given the strength of our fracturing systems business there. We view this as a positive. And I'll touch on that a bit here in a moment. So just want to take a quick step back and help the audience understand. So what really drives our business? And broadly, it's the number of wells that get drilled and completed in a given year in a given market, with the operating rig count shown here as a proxy for that activity. And we will always look to do better than the underlying market trend.
So we'll look to grow faster than the market through the ability to deploy and gain traction with our new technology developments. As you can see on the left, the U.S. is a pretty highly variable market. Activity in the U.S. has not yet recovered to its 2019 or pre-COVID levels. As we look forward, these charts go through 2023. We expect the U.S. rig count to fall a bit further in 2024 by 5% to 10%. Canada, which is on the top right, has been more stable. Activity has actually increased by over 25% from 2019 levels. We're fortunate to be present and strong in that market.
And while we expect activity in Canada from a rig count standpoint to be roughly flat this year, there are strong fundamental drivers, including a new oil pipeline being built this year called the TMX that just came online a few weeks ago. Also, Canada's first liquefied natural gas facility, which will come online next year. So both of those projects will provide additional support and provide export options for our Canadian customers. Also, it should support commodity pricing. So the other thing that I think is probably evident from the chart, customer activity, wells drilled, wells completed, is obviously going to be influenced by the prevailing commodity prices, both for crude oil and for natural gas. And I think finally here on the bottom, the international market has grown each of the last two years.
We expect the international market, just overall activity, to [audio distortion ] in 2024, but expect for NCS for us to be able to grow our business internationally much faster than that. I think we've covered most of the points on this slide already. I will note that we absorbed some pressure on our gross margins over the course of the last couple of years, which we're working to reverse that. We took some actions last year to consolidate some field facilities. Also within Repeat Precision, we consolidated some manufacturing locations. So we're starting to see benefits there. But I think really the other thing that we did is we offset some of those gross margin pressures by really making sure that we're as efficient as possible on the operating expense side.
So we took a lot of cost out of the business there by various actions during the course of the last year, which play into our ability to really put forward meaningful incremental margins this year. So for slide 19 here, I just want to put NCS in context with a few of our publicly traded peers. So the data here is from Capital IQ. It has a timestamp for late April, which is before any of the companies included in this analysis reported their Q1 results. We kept it to that date for comparability. We do plan to update this once all our peers have reported. For NCS, we're expected to have above median revenue growth and above median EBITDA growth in 2024. In addition, we've got one of the better balance sheets amongst the peer set.
But despite that, we're trading one multiple turn below the next lowest peer and two turns below the median for the peer set. Just if anyone's curious, we've got the tickers for the peers listed in the note at the bottom. And then finally, just want to conclude here. So in short, I think NCS offers a compelling opportunity for investors, whether it be growth or value-oriented. We're delivering EBITDA growth and strong incremental margins. We've got a strong balance sheet and expect to further strengthen that balance sheet through additional free cash flow this year. With our guidance for more than $5 million of free cash flow, that's over a 10% yield to both the equity and the enterprise. And while we have those unique growth characteristics, we're also a value play. We've got a discounted trading multiple relative to the peer set.
As you can also see on this slide, our equity value is below our net working capital, providing a margin of safety for investors. So I'll pause there. I think probably ran a little bit longer than I intended to, Steve. But if there's any time for Q&A, I'm happy to take questions.
We do. We have three questions. Let me try to combine them and get one in. And certainly, if anyone, we don't get the question in, please reach out to me or reach out to Ryan directly. And happy to get your questions answered. But the question is in terms of sustainable growth rates. You obviously have really strong traction now getting customer adoption with some of the newer products. What are you thinking in the medium to long term? And let me just sort of say, what's this company look like in five to 10 years?
Yeah. Five to 10 years is a long time, obviously. But look, I'll take sort of the near term first, which is we're expecting good growth this year. A lot of that is coming from international markets, the North Sea and the Middle East. I think we're still early days in really capitalizing on that opportunity. In the Middle East, this will be a really good growth year for us with Tracer Diagnostics. I think our well construction product line is right behind that. So we'd expect that to help continue the growth forward in future years. In the North Sea, I mentioned three years ago, we really worked just with one customer there. Now we're working with five. And our core customer on the Norwegian side of the North Sea has a development coming up that we expect to participate in for multiple wells going forward.
Our largest customer on the U.K. side of the North Sea, similarly, they've got a project coming up that could be several wells per year. So I think the North Sea propels a lot of that growth if you're thinking about where the runway is from our existing product lines and markets. And then I turn back to that product development effort that we have for deep water. That opens up a brand new market for us that could start to be impactful in three to five years. I talk about us dipping our toe into the heavy oil market, the SAGD market in Canada, with the presence that we have in Canada, the relationships, the sales team, the engineering capacity. There's no reason why that can't be another great growth market for us over that medium term. So I think the prospects are bright.
I hesitate to put a five-year target out there for revenue.
Sure. That's fair.
But certainly feel good about what we're executing on today and how we're setting the stage for continued growth going forward.
Once you demonstrate success on a rig, as you noted in terms of the North Sea, once you've saved them time on wells on one rig, if it's a big enough operator, you're probably going to end up on all the rigs, right? I mean, that's sort of the strategy, right?
For the intended application.
Correct. Right.
Right. Because not every well in the North Sea, for example, includes some sort of stimulation. Some of the wells we do there, folks are pumping proppant. Sometimes they're pumping acid. But for a well to get stimulated in the North Sea, if we can prove that benefit, then we would expect that the operator would see that value and work with us going forward.
Other operators will see the success at some point as well, correct?
Correct.
Fair enough. We did go a little bit over Ryan Hummer. There was a lot to cover. There's a lot you're doing, a lot of developments, a lot of innovation in the industry. NCS Multistage Holdings, the ticker is NCSM. This was CEO Ryan Hummer. If you want any more follow-up, please reach out to me or reach out directly to Ryan. It will connect you. Because I think there's a lot more you wanted to cover. And we just don't have the time, unfortunately, in this format. Thanks so much. I hope, thanks, everyone, for joining us. And I hope you found it as informative as I did. Hope you all have a great remainder of the conference. Thanks, everyone.
You too. Thanks, Steve. Appreciate everyone joining. Appreciate the opportunity from Sidoti.