Holli Ladhani
Analyst · RBC. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Chris. Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us today. The second quarter of 2020 was one of the most challenging periods we've ever been through as a company and as an industry. Although our industry is used to the cycles, the past few months have presented their own unique challenges. First and foremost, as an essential service, we've been focused on keeping our people safe, while continuing to support our customers' critical operations. I'd like to thank our employees for their continued dedication and incredible hard work over the last few months and our thoughts are with all of those affected directly or indirectly by COVID-19. While our second quarter financial results were clearly challenged, we did have continued success in our cash generation efforts, and our cost management strategy is certainly delivering results. In a moment, Nick will review the quarter's financial results in more detail, but first I'd like to touch on a few macro points, provide you with some updates on the specific actions we've taken to meet the challenges of today's market and then review our positioning looking forward. Although crude prices have since recovered off the trough levels seen in April and May, the impact on our second quarter results was significant. Gas basins held in better than oil basins, but there was really nowhere to hide during the second quarter. We experienced activity reductions across the board over the course of the second quarter with total U.S. rig count down 55%, horizontal completions declining more than 60%, and the number of active frac fleets declining approximately 70%. It's always challenging to manage cost downward as fast as activity can drop particularly when the pace of the decline is as steep as it was in the second quarter. That said, the speed and immediate impact of our cost management decisions can clearly be seen in our second quarter results, and we anticipate seeing further benefits from this in the back half of the year. The core of our strategy continues to center on providing premier solutions to our customers, protecting our strong balance sheet and liquidity, and emerging on the other side of this downturn in a position to capitalize on the significant opportunities we expect will be available. Doing so has required very difficult and far-reaching decisions to right size the business for the activity environment we find ourselves in today. We began to aggressively manage cost downward in mid-March, and this continued throughout the second quarter. To that point, I'd like to follow up on some of the key cost management initiatives from our first quarter call and update you on our latest actions and targets. First, we achieved our previously targeted SG&A savings ahead of schedule and have increased our target. Now, expecting our third quarter 2020 annualized run rate to be down 40% to 45% relative to our 2019 fourth quarter run rate and down approximately 50% relative to our 2019 total SG&A. While particularly challenging, our employee head count has been reduced by approximately 60% relative to the peak in the first quarter. We've implemented furlough programs and reduced base pay by at least 10% nearly across the board, with further reductions beyond that for executive management and our Board of Directors. We've terminated dozens of leases for facilities and housing units as we consolidate our operations. We've renegotiated payment terms across a number of our lease charge and facilities and we've simplified our operational structure. We've negotiated discounts and adjusted pricing terms with a number of our vendors to help manage through this challenging time. And finally, with normal course asset sales outpacing CapEx, we effectively reduced our net CapEx to zero during the second quarter, and we're confident we'll come in well under our net CapEx target of $20 million for the year. While revenue declined 67% during the quarter generally in line with activity levels, we were able to hold decremental margins to approximately 21% at both the gross margins and adjusted EBITDA margin levels, significantly outperforming our historical decremental target, which reinforces the variable nature of our cost structure and the team's execution to get cost out quickly. The significant amount of political and economic uncertainty remains underpinned by the effects of COVID-19, but we're cautiously optimistic that activity levels bottom delayed during the second quarter. We've seen modest frac crew additions in recent weeks, as well as customers re-evaluating their shut-in production, and we're getting more visibility into workflows for the coming months. That said, potential Q4 seasonality, and the ongoing uncertainty regarding the COVID-19 pandemic will likely result in a slow and steady, long-term recovery that's more muted in the near-term rather than a deep V-shaped recovery. As we look forward, I think it's important to consider what will be different about the recovery in this cycle for Select. A handful of areas in particular stand out. Capital availability, the competitive landscape, asset availability, structural changes to our business, and our healthy balance sheet. When you combine the challenging broader economic conditions with the general recent track record of oil and gas industry returns, we anticipate that both debt and equity capital availability, whether the private or public markets will be more limited for our industry going forward as compared to the last downturn. This will require the industry to solve many of its own challenges out of free cash flow, resulting from increased efficiency, consolidation and improved capital discipline. We believe we will see the shale upstream landscape continue to consolidate into fewer, larger, well capitalized and more disciplined organizations with many smaller players being consolidated or exiting the market. These surviving operators will be keenly focused on driving toward a more efficient and sustainable shale development model. Ultimately, this will impact our own competitive landscape to the detriment of narrower, more commoditized service providers. Our competitive landscape has been changing for a while now. And even prior to the current downturn, we've had many competitors struggling to keep up with the operational efficiencies, the scale and the technical expertise that's necessary to excel in this environment. Select has not only the financial means, but the people, experience, and expertise to continue to extend the gap between ourselves and our competition in the quarters ahead. We remain very focused on continuing to advance our strategies around data, technology, and water lifecycle sustainability that we believe are particularly important to these key customers. The water solutions space is unique when compared to many other OFS sub-sectors. Partly driven by the consolidation efforts we undertook back in 2017 with the Rockwater merger, unlike other sectors, there are very few large players we compete with and even fewer with the balance sheet and capital availability that will be necessary to support the major operators in the recovery ahead. While our equipment is underutilized today, our space was not overbuild during the last upturn in the same manner of many other OFS sub-sectors. This positions us very well to continue to capture and grow our market share across the service line and generate returns on the capital we've deployed. In addition to the cost reduction efforts I outlined earlier, we've taken the opportunity to rethink how we're organized, and how we execute our operations. Based on that review, in addition to reducing meaningful variable costs, we've implemented a number of structural changes to our organization. We streamlined our operations, significantly reducing the number of operating yards and simplified our reporting structure. Additionally, we've removed the layers across the various business lines with a particular focus on further integrating our water and chemicals operations to provide more comprehensive solutions to our customers. If the water sourcing supply chain continues to become more complex and opportunities for produced water reuse continue to grow, the interplay of the relationship between water quality and the chemistry behind the frac fluid system continues to garner increased focus from our customers, particularly the larger operators with clear ESG ambition. Though these efforts have taken a bit of a pause during the current market downturn, but we believe these trends will continue in the recovery. The comprehensive nature of our existing customer relationships, service capabilities and technical expertise across both water and chemicals allow us to more effectively grow our business, further differentiate our market leading position, and advance our strategy to be the full solutions provider. Finally, our balance sheet affords us a significant amount of flexibility to pursue new solutions for our customers, while maintaining a focus on free cash flow generation. Our intention is to maintain a business model that allows us to limit our maintenance capital to one-third or less of EBITDA through the cycles. We've seen the benefits of this recently, as we've shown a significant amount of flexibility to control our capital spending during the downturn, without detrimentally impacting our capabilities or our ability to support our customers in a future recovery. We'll continue to pursue opportunities to grow organically, and we will evaluate investments in technology and accretive acquisitions that support our long-term strategy. That said we'll be disciplined in our approach to growth and acquisitions, just as we've been in the past. We recognize we still have tough days ahead of us, but we also know that the future will belong to those companies who are the most efficient; the best capitalized, and act the fastest to transform their businesses to match the market. With that, I'll hand it over to Nick to walk through our second quarter financial performance in more detail.