Girish Saligram
Analyst · Capital One Securities. Please state your question
Thanks, Andrew. I would like to start with the commercial successes that we had during the quarter, that not only provide us additional backlog visibility for the coming years, but also exemplify the mission criticality of our products and services. Despite the obvious challenges, we saw very significant wins across all of our reported segments, and in all of our regions, showcasing the power of the one Exterran philosophy, the continued commercial intensity of our regional teams and the value of the integrated business model we have. As we highlighted on our fourth quarter call, we won a project for a fully integrated gas processing facility in the Middle East at a value in excess of $300 million along with a five-year operations and maintenance services agreement. Well, this project is a strategic win in its own right. We’re also excited by the potential for future expansions that this customer envisions. We are off to a strong start on execution, despite the challenging environment. Our engineering teams are leveraging technology tools, and setting the standard for virtual workplace collaboration to ensure that the initial design phase is robust and on track. We have also continued to drive strong interaction with our customer, key vendors and partners through remote video and collaboration technologies. While supply chain’s logistical routes and ports begin to fully reopen, our teams are ensuring that we are progressing on this and other projects to the maximum extent possible. We expect this project to materially contribute to revenue and margins, starting in the second half of this year and through the beginning of 2022 with ongoing contributions complemented by the AMS services after commissioning, In ECO, we had an important success in Latin America, where we signed an eight-year extension with one of our key customers worth approximately $150 million. We have been operating essential gas compression infrastructure in the region over several decades. And this win is a great demonstration of our strong customer relationships, the resiliency of the ECO renewal paradigm and our operational excellence in critical midstream infrastructure. Lastly, in AMS, we continue to develop traction on a global basis, spearheaded by our team in the Asia Pacific region. While we are seeing a delay on the more transactional services due to logistical challenges posed by COVID-19, we were awarded a significant long-term win in the Asia Pacific region in Q1. We won a five-year contract for maintenance services with an IOC that builds on the services we already provide to them. This is a great example again of the stickiness of our customer relationships, as well as a demonstration of the ongoing value we provide to our customers through operational excellence. The overall contract is worth close to $25 million, which is a significant long-term commitment in this segment. While we do see the current situation having a significant negative impact on demand in the short to mid-term, these successes give us a strong backlog to execute while we continue to develop longer-term projects. As Andrew mentioned, we are engaging in constructive and collaborative dialogue with many customers globally to help them navigate the current environment. While it may be natural to assume that that’s a euphemism for giving discounts, our strong contracts and long-term relationships truly allow us to center discussions on value creation, where both parties can benefit. As we have highlighted previously, our equal backlog provides stability of revenue and cash flows over the long-term. This view is built on a foundation of strong contracts that protect us to commodity cycles. At the same time, we have always believed in the adage that we succeed when our customers are successful. As a result, while there may not be a contractual basis, we are making a conscious decision to support customers and ensure that we grow our mutual longer-term benefit. Thought it would be helpful to give you a couple of examples of how we are collaborating with customers today to provide some perspective on what this means. We have an ECO customer where we operate multiple gas cranes, due to production cuts, the customer is looking to reduce OpEx and asking how we can help. Rather than a simplistic price reduction, what we are working with them on is a solution that has three potential elements. One, adding a pre-treatment solution that will save them millions annually. Second, changing the scope of services that would allow some cost reduction. And third, given the characteristics of the field and extension of the contract beyond its current period at today’s rates. The net result could be a scenario where the customer does save money on OpEx in totality, and we preserve our margin rates, while locking in a longer-term, thereby improving return on capital. As another example, we have a customer with a project that is mostly complete on our end, but is facing significant delays on the on-site work and may need to be delayed by up to two years. We are working on an arrangement with the customer to provide options for storage, preservation and ancillary services. While this might delay some of our final billing milestones, and might cause a short-term change to the revenue and margin due to change in scope, it provides incremental sources for revenue and a stronger longer-term cash flow. In all of the cases where we are going through these types of discussions, we are following these key principles. First, ensuring the credit worthiness and long-term stability of the customer to be very confident in their continued viability and success. Second, optimizing the balance between EBITDA and cash for Exterran. Third, being fair and principled in our negotiations. And finally, number four, recognizing and leveraging the strategic relationships we have, and especially where they can lead to future success for both Exterran and our customer. Lastly, I’d like to go through our view of global demand and activity, recognizing that it is a very fluid environment. The North American market is one where demand signals have significantly dampened over the past couple of months. Given the pressures on producers, we are not expecting to see any significant demand in this region over the next 6 months to 9 months. While we continue to be a strong believer in the US shale story and the importance of gas in the energy value chain, we think the industry will need time to stabilize and consolidate before launching new projects. Further, the days of incremental processing capacity of 2 BCF to 3 BCF per year may not recur for some time. And we are therefore working to establish new applications where we can bring our expertise to bear. Through our strategic growth plan process, we are analyzing the broad trends of signals and determining opportunities that fit in well with our existing capability set. In the meantime, our strong international backlog allows us to leverage our expertise in the US to work on those projects and we are maintaining critical operating capacity in engineering, manufacturing and sourcing through the cycle. Our global capability with common processes and tools allows us to execute more effectively and seamlessly despite the disruptions from COVID-19. In Latin America, the effects of the current environment have been particularly hard on the currencies in several countries. We have explained in prior calls, how we manage this and while there is a top line impact and risk, our margins are protected. Argentina especially continues to be an important country for us as they navigate the potential default. The ramifications of that will be significant in terms of both capital controls, as well as the oil and gas policy, which will have a significant bearing on the development of Vaca Muerta. The Middle East continues to be the region of the highest activity, and we are seeing new project tenders and inquiries through this period. We remain enthusiastic about our prospects in this region and look forward to building on our prior successes. Well, there may be a delay due to the production cuts and current environment on actual project awards, the level of activity is encouraging. Finally in Asia Pacific, we are seeing a rebound of activity levels from the first quarter in a couple of countries but don’t see a material shift on new projects from the slow pace of the last couple of years. Our focus on AMS in this region has been paying off. And we are also positioned well for new product orders building on the successes of 2019. To wrap up, clearly the world is very different today relative to our last call. While our business is not immune to the global impact of either the pandemic or the commodity price shocks. We believe we remain well positioned in the long-term. Our leverage to natural gas and strong contracted backlog gives us greater visibility and resiliency into our future compared to many. With that, I will now turn it over to Dave.