Earnings Labs

Nabors Industries Ltd. (NBR)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Mar 3, 2015

$98.79

+5.13%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+1.82%

1 Week

-8.01%

1 Month

+11.58%

vs S&P

+13.79%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Nabors Fourth Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Denny Smith. Please go ahead. Dennis A. Smith - Director-Corporate Development & Investor Relations: Thank you for joining Nabors earnings teleconference. Today, we will follow our customary format with Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Tony Petrello; and William Restrepo, our Chief Financial Officer, providing our perspectives on the quarter's and the full year results, along with some insight into the trends we are seeing in our markets and how we expect Nabors to react to these trends. In support of these remarks, we have posted some slides to our website which you can access to follow along with the presentation if you desire. They are accessible in two ways. If you are participating by webcast, they are available as a download within the webcast. Alternatively, you can download the slides from within the Investor Relations section at nabors.com, under the Events Calendar submenu, where you will find them listed as supporting materials under the conference call listing. Instructions for the replay are posted on the website. With us today, in addition to Tony, William, and myself, are Laura Doerre, our General Counsel; and the heads of our various business units. Since much of our commentary today will concern our expectations of the future, they may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risk and uncertainties, as disclosed by Nabors from time to time in its filings with the Securities and Exchange…

William J. Restrepo - Chief Financial Officer

Management

Thank you, Tony, and good afternoon everyone. Before discussing our operational results, I would like to point out that our earnings included several very material items related to the current market conditions as well as other charges pertaining to transaction with C&J Energy Services. These latter charges have been anticipated during our third quarter conference call. Impairments and other charges related to the downturn totaled $1 billion before tax, or $2.73 per share on an after-tax basis. The following are some details on the impairment charges during the quarter. First, we took a $357 million impairment to goodwill principally in our Completion Services segment related to the acquisition in 2010 of Superior Well Services. The balance of the goodwill impairment was in our Ryan Directional Services business. We also impaired intangible assets by $30 million, again principally in Completions. In the U.S. drilling business, we retired 26 mechanical rigs and four jackups, with limited to no prospects of future work. In addition, we impaired the Lower 48 SCR rigs and retired a certain number of yard assets unlikely to return to operations. The total impairments in the U.S. drilling segment totaled approximately $408 million. In Canada, retirements of four rigs plus impairments totaled $34 million. In the International business, rig impairments, mainly offshore, plus yard asset retirements totaled $127 million. Finally, we retired approximately $41 million of equipment in Canrig. Expenses related to the C&J deal, including losses and debt repurchase and transaction costs, totaled $7 million pre-tax, or $0.02 per share after taxes. Also related to the C&J transaction were tax charges of $180 million, or $0.63, associated to the reorganization of certain legal entities in preparation with a combination with C&J. These charges were essentially non-cash. The combined impact of all of these items was a $3.39 reduction…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question is from Jim Wicklund of Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Jim K. Wicklund - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Good afternoon, guys. Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good afternoon. Jim K. Wicklund - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): The issue that seems to be on everybody's mind these days is duration of this down-cycle, everybody's hoping for a 2009 recovery including me. But I don't know, I assume that you guys have done some work. If the rig count drops by the 50%, how long does it have to stay there before we fix the problem? And I'm assuming Enron hit the – I mean, EOG hit the nail on the head the other week when they said the problem is slowing U.S. production growth. How long – we know it's going down, how long do you think we have to stay there? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I think, from our point of view, we are not counting on the V. And we – all the plans we're making is an extended period of rebound. We think by the end of the summer, things should sort themselves out where people are, but we don't see a quick read this year. So, I would say, well into next year, Jim. Jim K. Wicklund - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Okay. And I don't disagree with that. And we've heard reports from Saudi Arabia which has been everybody's, including you guys, best growth market in the last couple of years that especially on the jack-up side that Aramco is getting a little draconian on asking for price reductions even under existing contracts. Are we seeing…

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Mike Urban of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Michael Urban - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. Good afternoon. You – so, clearly, customers are asking for price reductions, and I would certainly have to assume that's not your first choice. And you mentioned some, I guess, enhancements that you can make to existing rigs, some potential alternatives and kind of creative pricing solutions. I guess without showing your hand too much, could you speak to what would some of those might be and your ability to mitigate just pure pricing declines of the magnitude that your customers might be looking for? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. I mean, obviously, the first thing is extension of term for additional work at a lower rate. The second is to add content, meaning additional rigs that they're – sort of pull them away from somebody else, so we add additional margin to our base. The third is additional sets of services. As you know, Nabors has a bunch of other things that we can put on a rig, everything from instrumentation to rock it, to rev it. There's a whole bunch of these assorted services, and we're making a better push to try to capitalize on those commercialization of those things as well. So, it's – that's the kind of thing that we would respond with.

Michael Urban - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Gotcha. And then as it pertains to the CapEx program, clearly you said you can scale that up or presumably down if need be. But you still do have a handful of un-contracted newbuilds even in the kind of scaled-back plans there. Why – at this point, presuming even if we do ultimately go under recovery mode, it's probably at a slower rate of growth and maybe we saw – maybe the U.S. needs to be capitalized for a 300,000 barrel a day, 400,000 barrel a day, maybe even 500,000 barrel a day growth market rather than 1 million barrels a day. That was clearly a strategy that worked last cycle. I think, for clear reasons, that you are replacing legacy rigs at a much greater pace, but I think a lot of those are gone. So just if you could walk us through your thoughts in terms of continuing to essentially build on spec at this point. Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I think at this down-cycle, which I referenced the fact that we're going to be at a build of 17, including 4 that's already been built, and the remaining 5 have – 5 of those have contracts. So, the amount of exposure we have is pretty de minimis, but what it does is it does leave in place our manufacturing capacity and we also believe that there are markets – North America, as you can see from our financials, compared to everybody else out there, North America is not the be all and end all. We think there are opportunities elsewhere. So this keeps our pipeline active. And if the market does turn, we'll be well positioned to rev up. In the last downturn, last time around, we actually shut everything down wholesale; and, therefore, when things did turn, it took quite a while for us to gear up. So, this time around, I think what we're going to do is just be – we're still going to be mindful of the CapEx. We're not going to extend ourselves or get ourselves in trouble. On the other hand, we're going to keep that capacity in place, and as I said, we're committed to some other technology changes that we're working on as well during this downturn. So, that's the thinking right now.

Michael Urban - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

And really, you don't have contracts at this point, but are there some at least specific projects or jobs or customers that you might have in mind for those X rigs whether in the U.S. or internationally? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes, there are.

Michael Urban - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Matt Marietta of Stephens Inc. Please go ahead.

Christopher Denison - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Hey. Good afternoon, guys. This is actually Chris Denison for Matt Marietta. Just want to clarify some of the completion and production assets as they stand today. At 4Q end, it looks like there was 800,000 horsepower in service between 19 crews. Is all 800,000 horsepower and 19 crews, are they still marketed today? Has any of that gone idle at this point? We're just trying to get an idea of what the current pressure pumping fleet looks like and maybe the average age of the fleet, if you could. Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Okay. So, today, we actually have – we're down to 12 crews from 19 crews. And just to give you an idea, there's a couple crews in South Texas. We have four crews in West Texas, the Mid-Con, a couple crew in the Marcellus, one in the Bakken and a couple in Powder River Basin. That's roughly the distribution today. And in terms of – I mean the challenge – this is not an orderly market decline right now. The market's become very competitive as the work declines. There's lot of aggressive pricing going on. For us, the challenge is to maintain utilization that get caught up in extra costs of standby and trying to have things in the marketplace that we can get back good utilization. So, price is important but also utilization and that's a strategy for us to try to blend them together to run operations that are still positive margin. Going back to Jim Wicklund's remark, we're not interested in running stuff at negative margin. So, that's where we stand right now.

Christopher Denison - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Right. Do you have any indication of what the average age of the fleet might be? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Our average age? Well, about half the fleet was post-Superior in terms of capital that we spent. So, that's pretty new since Nabors acquired it. The rest was legacy assets.

Christopher Denison - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay.

Ronnie Witherspoon - Executive Vice President, U.S. Completion Services

Analyst

Yeah, I think that's right. This is Ronnie. I think for the most part, we have right around 250,000 horsepower stack. So, of the active horsepower that we continue with right now, probably 75% of that was purchased right after the acquisition of Superior in the fourth quarter 2010.

Christopher Denison - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, awesome. Great color. And then just a similar question on the well servicing side. 445 U.S. rigs in the fleet at 4Q end, is that the market of fleet that stands today? Have any of those fallen out? And maybe if you could just elaborate – have you seen any bifurcation between horsepower classes or regions? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: I'll let Steve.

Steve Johnson - Executive Vice President, US Production Services

Analyst

Sure. Steve here. No, 445 rigs is still the number that we're marketing. We're operating today about 320 of those rigs. We have not seen a bifurcation between normal production work and workover work. But in this downturn, more production work than we've seen in the past.

Christopher Denison - Stephens, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, awesome. Great color. That'll do it for me guys. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question is from Dan Boyd of BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Daniel J. Boyd - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst

Hi, thanks. Can you help us with a road map for U.S. drilling margins? I mean recognizing Alaska, you have pretty good visibility there, margin is significantly higher than the U.S. And just assuming that the rig count does fall to 50% that you expect, I would also assume your U.S. margins are going to be potentially higher or not come down as much because you have the contracted rigs earning higher margins than whatever is working in the spot market. So, could you just maybe help us over the next few quarters what should we expect from the aggregate U.S. margin level? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: The margin level, as you know, in the first quarter, there are extra costs that come into play. And so I think there is going to be a decline in margin. And I would think over the next first quarter, I would think something around the order of 10% margin decline. Whether that stabilizes or not in the third and fourth quarter, it's going to depend on the vapidity of a bunch of other stuff that's occurring. Where our visibility right now is in the first quarter, I don't see anything more than 10% right now.

Daniel J. Boyd - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay, that's helpful. And then pretty much the same thing internationally. I know a lot of the contracts that you have starting up are higher margin and where you're likely losing rigs is going to be lower margin. So how we should think about the first three quarters? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Right. As I said, for international, I would say it's a little bit the reverse. As we mentioned, our expectation going into this year has been that we still have a sight set on year-over-year increases and I've already mentioned that we see some rigs coming down. So, therefore, the only way that's going to be made up is margin increase and we think that there is going to be some margin expansion. And it's our expectation that margin expansion is going to offset any decline and we're actually going to get some year-over-year increase and that's our strategy right now.

Daniel J. Boyd - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst

Can we hold the 4Q level, operating income level? Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I said, year-over-year increase and I would – there's always a black swan event obviously and we've already took signal that the Mexico – the two Mexico platform rigs which we're expecting to go on earlier this quarter is now pushed to the second quarter. So I think there could be some deterioration, but I think in the neighborhood, it should probably try to – they're trying to hold it in the neighborhood.

Daniel J. Boyd - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst

Okay, thanks. That's all for me.

Operator

Operator

There are no additional questions. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks. Anthony G. Petrello - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, thank you all very much for your participation today and look forward to talking with you again. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.