Earnings Labs

Transocean Ltd. (RIG)

Q1 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, May 7, 2015

$6.84

+0.66%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Transocean Q1 2015 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time I would like to turn the conference over to Thad Vayda. Please go ahead, sir. R. Thaddeus Vayda - Vice President-Investor Relations & Communications: Thank you, Alicia. Good day, and welcome to Transocean's first quarter 2015 earnings conference call. A copy of the press release covering our financial results along with supporting statements and schedules including reconciliations and disclosures regarding non-GAAP financial measures are posted on the company's web site at deepwater.com. Joining me on this morning's call are Jeremy Thigpen, President and Chief Executive Officer; Esa Ikäheimonen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Terry Bonno, Senior Vice President, Marketing. During the course of this call, participants may make certain forward-looking statements regarding various matters related to our business and company that are not historical facts. Such statements are based upon the current expectations and certain assumptions of management and are therefore, subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information regarding our forward-looking statements including the risks and uncertainties that could impact our future results. Also please note that the company undertakes no duty to update or revise forward-looking statements. Finally, to give more people an opportunity to participate in this call, please limit your questions to one initial question and one follow-up. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Jeremy Thigpen. Jeremy? Jeremy D. Thigpen - President & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, Thad, and a warm welcome to our employees, customers, investors and analyst who may be participating on today's call. Before we discuss the quarter's results, I'd like to take a moment to thank the Board…

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

Thanks, Esa, and good day to everyone. The market continues to be very challenging. The low commodity price environment, corresponding reduction in customer budgets, and overcapacity in the global floater and jackup fleet are negatively impacting utilization and pricing in every market around the world. There's currently very little visible 2015 demand, and over the last quarter only a few fixtures have been executed in all asset classes. Since our last call we added firm term on the Sedco Express, Transocean Prospect and Galaxy II and are in discussions to conclude more contracts shortly. Our backlog as of April 16 was $19.9 billion, which provides a foundation to help us weather the storm until commodity prices are at levels that better support our customers' offshore programs and demand for our rigs. In the near to medium term we expect ultra-deepwater day rates and utilization to remain under pressure. Customers are keenly focused on cost-cutting efforts and are searching for opportunities to further reduce their 2015 and 2016 spending. As we mentioned in February, we continue to advance discussions with multiple customers to capitalize on incremental term and maximize the utilization of particularly our higher-specification rigs. We expect these mutually beneficial arrangements will deliver more efficient performance at an optimized cost to our customers. Overall, our entire fleet continues to deliver top-tier drilling performance but the revenue efficiency of our higher-specification units has been particularly strong. We congratulate our operations teams for their first class efforts in affording us the opportunity to showcase their successes. Two notable examples are the Transocean Spitsbergen and the Deepwater Invictus. The Spitsbergen beat the drilling curve on the last well by over 25% for Statoil in Norway. And the Invictus is delivering newbuild, best-in-class for initial well drilled for days per thousand foot by a…

Operator

Operator

We'll go to Ian McPherson of Simmons. Ian Macpherson - Simmons & Co. International: Hi. Thank you. I think first of all, we all need to recalibrate our revenue efficiency modeling. Good quarter there, but I was curious if there's anything in the way of early termination settlements reflected in your contract drilling revenues in Q1. If not, will we see those in your revenues going forward?

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

Hello. Good morning, Ian. How are you? Ian Macpherson - Simmons & Co. International: Hi, Terry.

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

In the first quarter we didn't have the early termination fee that is due on the – you're talking about the Sedco Energy. We're still working with the customer to conclude that and we should have that announced shortly, but I would just remind you that we are again in discussions with our customers where we have a larger fleet to be able to do some blending and extending and put together some very interesting packages in order to capitalize on additional terms. So I would say that there might be an opportunity where we can capitalize on bits and pieces of the type of backlog that we have remaining available to us. Ian Macpherson - Simmons & Co. International: Okay. Thanks. And as a follow-up question, Esa, that's an awfully large reduction to your O&M guidance and I wonder if you could provide some context or framework in terms of what that – what incremental level of stackings or scrappings might be implied from that so we can adjust our revenues in tandem with your cost guidance? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, thanks, Ian. Good question. That would take a while to go through that in too much details and it's not part of our disclosure but I'll do some bridging in terms of what generates the $600 million to $700 million or close to 15% reduction in guidance. And you're right, the number one item has to do with the volume of our business. So we are now expecting less rigs than we did three or four months ago to get re-contracted this year. It's by no means the only driver here and not necessarily even the dominant one. Second big item here as part of that bridging is, that we've worked…

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from J.B. Lowe of Cowen & Company. J.B. Lowe - Cowen & Co. LLC: Good morning, everyone. Jeremy, congratulations. Welcome aboard. It's going to be fun. Jeremy D. Thigpen - President & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks, J.B. I appreciate it. J.B. Lowe - Cowen & Co. LLC: No problem. My first question is a general question about your overall fleet size. As you guys are paring down your fleet with stacking and retirements, how do you view what your fleet is going to look like on the other end? How are you going to build it back up to what you see it being? And what's the breakdown between floaters and jackups that you're seeing?

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

Good morning, J.B. How are you doing? J.B. Lowe - Cowen & Co. LLC: I'm well. Thanks, Terry.

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

We're going through the process of high-grading our fleet and certainly when we see opportunities, for instance on the deepwater and mid-water asset classes of our fleet, our asset strategy originally was to remove these from our fleet, however method that was available to us at the time. But we're going to continue to do that and high-grade and obviously I would let Jeremy talk about his plans of being able to put us in a position of new opportunities. But on the other side I think you're going to see certainly our high grading fleet continuing and we will be able to capitalize and when the market does turn on the optionality of certainly our fifth-generation fleet too, that are currently idle at the moment, but we certainly expect that we will be able to have that fleet all put back to work. Jeremy D. Thigpen - President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes. J.B. to elaborate on that, we've seen in land and we've certainly seen in offshore now that newer more efficient technology wins the day and those are the types of rigs that get the contracts, get the better day rates, and so we have been moving towards that over the last couple of years, and you'll see that continue. One of the good things about a market like this is that it helps to expedite that process by retiring some of the older technology that's no longer in demand, and so I think you'll see over time that you'll see much a more technologically advanced and more efficient fleet going forward. J.B. Lowe - Cowen & Co. LLC: All right. Thanks for that. Just as a quick follow-up I know this is kind of a moving target but given the biddable demand you're seeing in 2016 on the floater side, what do think the actual rig count demand would look like to be in 2016 given the drop off we've seen? I think that around 270 floaters active right now or contracted right now. Where do you think that could kind of shake out next year?

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

I think that if you look at the projections and you look at all the various research that is going on, the numbers that we are seeing or talking about today, and it's hard to make that projection. Right? Because it's a moving target and the customers can continue to slide it to the right, but we can see somewhere in the range of between 220 and 230, and that's certainly we're optimistic in those numbers. But if all the demand came out that we currently see, or that we know that our customers have on their books then that kind of would be the range that you would think they could do but it's going to again depend on how well they are in their cost-cutting efforts and certainly their confidence in the commodity price. Jeremy D. Thigpen - President & Chief Executive Officer: One thing I'd add to that is, we're hopeful but were not preparing for an uptick in the market. We're kind of preparing for this lower for longer and while we certainly hope to see contracts surface and opportunities surface next year, we're preparing for some pretty challenging times in front of us. So upgrading the fleet, right-sizing the fleet, right-sizing the organization to support what we think is going to be lower activity.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Jud Bailey of Wells Fargo.

Judson E. Bailey - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Thanks. Good morning. You mentioned, Esa, optimizing your stacking costs on your DP rigs. Could you maybe go into a little more detail on, I guess, number one, what you've been able to do to optimize the cost and give you as a frame of reference on where you're able to get those costs down to for a stacked DP asset? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. I can give you a range, that's the best I can give because not all rigs are similar. The low-end of that range is probably somewhere around $50,000, a bit more than that right now and at that the higher end of that range might be as high as $85,000, $90,000 a day. So you can figure out an average somewhere in between. It's an area where we've made considerable progress in the recent past, and the numbers keep coming down, and we keep finding better ways of sort of lukewarm stacking the rig, if that's the right way of describing what we're trying to achieve. And on a really good day those numbers are reasonably manageable. But it is still considerable burn, of course, and a big area and a big issue for the entire industry in the near- term. And we've put a lot of effort into that and we will continue optimizing and, on a rig by rig basis, do absolutely everything we can to keep it as low as possible.

Judson E. Bailey - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

Okay. Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: What is also important, and I kind of referred to that already, is the ability to bring the rig down from operations through a period of idleness to a stacking condition as quickly as possible because that does reduce the burn very considerably.

Judson E. Bailey - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Management

When you get it down to that, let's say, $50,000, or in that low range, the ability to bring – or an expense required to bring the rig back into service do feel like you're able to do that in a relatively short and cost-efficient manner or is it going to require more time and expenditure when you get the cost down to those levels? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: It depends on a couple of things, one is the length of the period during which the rig is stacked. The longer it is, the more likely it is that the reactivation is actually going to be a relatively costly exercise. But this, generally speaking, is another area of optimization for us and we are anticipating and we are trying to find the most fit for purpose solutions for every rig that we've got stacked in preparation for the market to recover. So there's several elements, one is accelerating the downgrading of the status of the rig to a stacked condition. Two is keeping the cost as low as possible and then anticipating and preparing for the reactivation and do it as cost efficiently as anyone ever can. But that varies a lot, the last piece varies a lot.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to David Smith of Heikkinen Energy Advisors.

David C. Smith - Heikkinen Energy Advisors

Management

Thank you. Congratulations on the very strong revenue numbers. I was hoping you could remind us about the components of the fleet segment revenue that maybe aren't apparent in the fleet status reported day rates. I think there might be some bonus revenue, maybe how things like demobilization fees would flow through? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: I think actually the breakdown of our revenue on a dollars per day per rig class is available on our website so that's the best source of that information in addition to our 10-Q which provides some transparency on that. So I don't really have those numbers in front of me here and I'm not sure whether any of my colleagues do. so it's a little bit difficult for us to respond to that.

David C. Smith - Heikkinen Energy Advisors

Management

Sure. Okay. I guess also I was wondering, the follow-up, if there was any interest from your side and/or the client side regarding potentially deferring the delivery of any of the five contracted drill ships under construction?

Terry B. Bonno - Senior Vice President-Marketing

Management

Some of our – and the ones that are contracted, I assume that's what you're talking about, some of our customers have expressed some interest in and we're looking at what does that mean for us? How could that possibly play out? So there are conversations ongoing but there has been nothing that's been executed to date.

Operator

Operator

We'll go next to Vivek Pal of Jefferies.

Vivek Pal - Jefferies LLC

Management

Yeah, good morning, guys. Could you please talk a little bit about your cash burn for 2015 after the first quarter, which was, I think, little ahead of expectations? The Street I believe has you burning about $750 million in cash this year on top of the $1 billion in debt maturity. Earlier you had mentioned that you're going to use cash on hand to fund this. Has that changed? And next year is going to be a little more challenging? If you can elaborate on your strategy and how to kind of meet your debt maturities and funding of the cash burn? Is a possibility of a secure debt or any monetizing of your contracts? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: It's Esa Ikäheimonen here. I'm just writing the questions down so that I can cover them all. Okay. So the current situation is that, obviously, there's some element of lacking visibility as to where the market is headed so we're monitoring that very closely. Our starting point is really strong for 2015 and I would expect that actually the analysts will probably update their liquidity forecast and cash flow forecast for this year based on our strong quarter as well as our guidance, so that's an element of the starting point, so there might be a change that we will see shortly. That's up to them, of course, and hopefully that will be in line with our thinking as much as possible. Right now we've got close to $3 billion of cash and our cash generation, cash conversion is obviously improving all the time so our cash generation throughout 2015 is expected to be quite good. We don't have massive amounts of capital obligations in 2015 and you're right that we've got $900 million…

Vivek Pal - Jefferies LLC

Management

That was very insightful. A quick question: you mentioned $3 billion in cash? You a $2.7 billion so in the 45 days since the end of the first quarter you have added another $300 million or was it was just rounding from $2.7 billion to $3 billion? Esa Ikäheimonen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: It was rounding from the cash position today to $3 billion, so as I said, we're converting cash pretty effectively as we speak and therefore, we've seen a little improvement since the end of the quarter. Not quite $300 million, I should mention.

Operator

Operator

This does conclude our Q&A portion for today. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Vayda for any additional or closing comments. R. Thaddeus Vayda - Vice President-Investor Relations & Communications: Thanks very much for your participation today. We're available for any follow-up questions you might have for the balance of the afternoon. We look forward to chatting with you again when we report our second quarter results. Have a good day.