John Gibson
Analyst · Water Tower Research. Please go ahead
Thank you, Nick, and good morning. I just want to thank you for joining our discussion on the 2021 fourth quarter and full year results. 2021 has been another challenging year for many businesses and individuals, supply chain instability became a household term, worries about inflation have had an impact on market. And as we hold this call, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues. Although 2021 was a difficult year here at Flotek, we use the opportunity to strengthen our company both financially and operationally. We’ve also used the time to be laser-focused on our strategic objectives. Those objectives calling us to focus on flawless execution, profitable growth, and strengthening our financial position. In this call, I will highlight the strategic priorities through the lens of what we accomplished in 2021, all of which may not be evident by strictly reviewing the financials. These accomplishments or what put us on the path to transformative deals like the recently announced ProFrac agreement. We believe that the Flotek of 2022 and beyond will be vastly different than the version exiting 2021. And so today, instead of focusing on the past, let me share with you Flotek of the future. Our strategic priorities are built around a core commitment to environmental leadership. In the last few years, the term ESG has gained a tremendous amount of traction. But like many topics in the popular discourse, trending items often have their moment and then they fade away. At Flotek, we believe that the concepts around improved environmental stewardship are inseparable from long-term sustainable growth in the energy industry. In addition to the issue of maintaining a social license to operate, companies already deal with increasing pressure around availability of water, minimizing waste, and maximizing efficiency of operations in the face of tighter cost structures. Our products and services, including our specialty green chemistry solutions, our Verax analyzers and our data analytics help our customers minimize their environmental impact and make timely and efficient operating decisions. This reason, environmental leadership is a key element of our business strategy today and will be in the future. In order to achieve our mission to be the collaborative environmental partner of choice for sustainable chemistry technology and digital analytics solutions, we will continue our focus on flawless execution of our vision. Morris Chang said without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless. Our vision created the opportunities we now possess. Our execution will make us a leader in this field. Flotek will continue to prioritize safety and service quality throughout our organization. I’m extremely proud of the Flotek team for achieving our goal of zero total recordable incidents and zero non-productive time for our customers in 2021, and we will build on this focus in 2022. I will tell you it’s the first time in my career that I have ever achieved a zero TRIR and and no non-productive time. It’s an amazing accomplishment. And just incredible congratulations to the operations team and to all of our employees. Our consistent attention to and performance or safety considerations communicate that Flotek, a company that actively manages risk both for ourselves and our partners. The 2022 and beyond, Flotek will continue to build upon the progress we made in 2021 and reestablishing our relationships with indirect channels to market through energy service companies, a critically important segment of the market. In fact, half of our new energy chemistry customers were service companies in 2021. Certainly, our most exciting win on the sustainable revenue goal is our new contract with ProFrac value that over $2 billion and revenues over the next decade, which will commence on April 1. If you missed our in-depth discussion around our contract with ProFrac, I encourage you to listen to our recorded investor call for March 10. As we build upon this success, we will continue to solidify our partnerships, winning on a daily basis, remaining committed to building trust through reliability and quality of our products and services, impeccable logistics, transparency, and mutual value creation. As we enter 2022, we arrive at a significantly more efficient, streamlined organization, which we have achieved by realigning our entire organization to our vision. We have rebuilt our business development structure and tools to accelerate our revenue growth, and more seamlessly forecast with our supply chain. We have implemented new supply chain management strategies to ensure we have multiple sourcing options, including invasive sourcing, which has lowered our operational into logistics cost. These changes mean that we deliver more effectively to our customers, while significantly improving our margins. The Flotek of 2022 and beyond is a lean operationally efficient organization. Looking to the future, we will maintain our financial discipline by adhering to cost saving initiatives that were begun in 2019. And we were effectively managing our SG&A and our costs, which have improved from 2020 by 11% and 23%, respectively. We also entered 2022 with greater transparency in how we report our margins, which you will see reflected in our 10-K when it’s released. As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. Mike Borton will speak in more detail about some of the changes that you will see moving forward. Finally, our future success as an organization comes down to the right leaders, teams, and structure to drive profitable growth well into the future. We’ve made changes to our cost structure, the way we approach our markets and we’ve also implemented leadership changes that will help us better respond to uncertainty and support operational excellence at top line revenue growth of over 4x for the next three years alone. This underlies the creation of a Chief Operating Officer role. We named Ryan Ezell, our COO in early March. I have no doubt that Ryan and Flotek team will go forward with success. In December, we also named Dr. James Silas as the Interim Head of Data Analytics. James also retains his previous role as Senior Vice President of Research and Innovation. For anyone who has not had the great benefit of knowing James Silas, let me tell you a little bit about him. James joined Flotek eight years ago following 15 years of academic research investigating the physics and chemistry of surfactants and polymers, the personal care products, bioengineering and in our oil industry. Since joining Flotek, James has been critical to our strategy of environmental leadership and the development of ESG green scorecards as well as having our intellectual property strategy. James has a long history with JP3 and his considerable role in the development of our differentiated technologies. Big reason Flotek’s green chemistry stand apart from our competitors is James leadership. Partners technical prudential sales is highly engaged with our customers is an exceptional commercial mind. For these reasons, I appointed him as Interim Head of Data Analytics as he has already added exceptional value in this role, and I expect him to add more as the year progresses. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to James Silas to give you his perspective on the data analytics sector. James?