Ranger Energy Services Inc (RNGR) 2020 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to the Ranger Energy Second Quarter 2020 Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Darron Anderson, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to Ranger Energy Services Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today is Brandon Blossman, our CFO, who will offer his comments in a moment.

When we last spoke, Ranger was in the midst of materially rightsizing our business to match the needs of the market. As we sit here today, I will consider the results of that effort to have been very successful.

If you recall, at the time of our May 1 earnings call, we had already reduced our headcount by 50%, taken across-the-board pay cut, shut down 2 unutilized operating locations and initiated a number of other cost savings initiatives. Triggering these difficult decisions early provided a tremendous benefit to us for the remainder of Q2.

First of all, it lessens the demand of additional downsizing as the market continued to contract. Our headcount ultimately dropped an additional [10%] by mid-Q2, while only needing to consolidate one additional operational location.

Second, making our internal adjustment quickly allowed us to turn our full attention back to our customers, giving us the best chance to obtain all profitable work with a focus on flawless execution.

And finally, despite the velocity and intensity of this downturn, our management team's extraordinary and efficient efforts allowed us to deliver Q2 results that features both positive EBITDA and positive cash flow alongside near stable sequential segment margins.

In benchmarking this performance against an extremely challenged OFS market, I can't be more proud of the job that our team has done, and I'm truly appreciative of the customers that continue to choose Ranger as a partner.

Both Ranger and our customers have been challenged across the board, as demonstrated by our 62% drop in revenue, but the challenges do vary across basins. We've experienced activity and revenue drops in certain basins greater than 60-plus percent. In these basins, customer activity dropped to almost non-existent for a period of time, while market pricing eroded so badly that Ranger opt to not even participate.

Conversely, in other markets, the reduction in activity was still severe but remain closer to a 50% drop with better pricing discipline.

Regardless of the various basin dynamics, overall, Ranger is benefiting from our operational and financial position upstream, resulting in market share gains during a declining market.

Our Q2 results are truly a reflection of our high-quality operations and disciplined cost management. We maintained positive adjusted EBITDA and cash flow through each month of the quarter. Our 2 largest business lines, High Spec Rigs and Wireline were able to hold segment-level margins at pre-downturn levels, an exceptional achievement.

Brandon will walk you through the details in a moment, but our ability to deliver this type of margin performance, generate cash and pay down debt by 35% in arguably one of the worst quarters that our industry has ever experienced, truly demonstrates the capabilities of the Ranger platform.

While it's far too early to call a recovery underway, our business has come off the trough experience in late May. I will provide some of these details as I now walk you through our segments, specifically starting with High Spec Rigs.

For the quarter, rig hours were down 61% and composite rig rates down 17%. While rig hours are self-explanatory, the change in composite rig rates was predominantly driven by our higher rate for rig completion packages coming to a near end in Q2. While I would not discuss absolute figures, at the trough of our rig activity during Q2, 24-hour completion work dropped to approximately -- to approximately 3% of our total rig activity. As we sit here today, our overall rig activity is up approximately 40% from our trough, with 24 activity returning closer to historical norms of approximately 10% of our active rigs. While these increases read as fairly large, please remember I'm referencing our absolute low activity mark.

The point I am making is, our rigs are measurably going back to work. And barring a macro-driven reversal, the worst is behind us. One other item on the rig side, we continue to pursue our strategy of customer alignment, specifically with IOC. Again, our operational and financial strength is paving the way for these conversations and negotiations to take place. We hope to have more to share in coming quarters on the success of this strategy.

Moving on to our completion services and other. On our last call, I stated that our Mallard Wireline Group ended the month of April with 5 dedicated wireline trucks running. That number further declined and bottomed at 4 in late May.

Dropping from an average of 11 trucks in Q1 to a trough of 4, all due to completion stoppages and not pricing, was a material hit. The only positive metric for Ranger in this data is the Permian frac count dropped to a low of approximately 20 spreads as published by outside sources. This equates to a 20% market share for our Mallard Group. I believe this demonstrates the quality of services we've historically intended to bring to our customers.

Currently, I'm very pleased that our dedicated active truck count is back up to 6 as our work continued or resumed with some of the strongest Permian E&P operators.

Rounding out our completion services and other segment, as would be expected, our smaller other services within this segment also experienced activity and revenue declines. The declines experienced here were comparable to our rig and wireline activity changes.

And finally, our Processing Solutions segment. Given the activities clients experienced by this segment in earlier quarters, the performance of this business had already endured a large portion of its challenges, and therefore, held up relatively better than our other segments. While our reported revenue was down, this was materially driven by lower mobilization and demobilization charges, which produced a smaller margin than our recurring rental revenue, resulting in an increase in gross margin relative to last quarter.

Before I turn it over to Brandon, I want to close with this. The results we produced this quarter was a product of strong operations, a great balance sheet and a culture of prudent and efficient decision-making. These are things that are not created in a single quarter but over time.

So while it was a very tough quarter, Ranger's capabilities were on full display, showing that we've built an organization that can withstand the most difficult markets. Brandon, I will now turn it over to you the details on the numbers.

Thank you, Darron, and good morning to everybody on the phone. Let's go ahead and get started with walk-through of all the second quarter details.

First, the consolidated numbers. Relative to last quarter, Q2's revenues were down 62% or approximately $50 million, moving from $81 million for the quarter to -- for Q1 to $31 million for Q2.

Adjusted EBITDA was down 72% or $8.2 million, moving from $11.4 million to $3.2 million in Q2, while adjusted EBITDA margins moved down from 14% to 10.4%. A quick note on the bridge to adjusted EBITDA here. The as adjusted result does back out $1 million of severance and restructuring charges for the quarter. As Darron noted, we believe that we are done with our resizing efforts and do not expect to incur any further severance costs in the second half of the year.

And now moving down to the segment level and starting with revenue. Quarter-over-quarter, revenues saw a decrease across all segments. Specifically, High Spec Rig revenue was down 67% or 2.3 -- sorry, $23.5 million, moving from $34.9 to $11.4 million in Q2. This is the combined effect of a reduction in period rig hours and a decrease in the composite rig rates.

Revenue hours declined 61% or 37,800 hours moving from 62,400 to 24,600 hours. And as Darron mentioned, composite hourly rig rates declined 17% or $95 an hour from $558 an hour to an average of $463 an hour in Q2.

In the Completion and Other Services segment, revenue was down 59% or $26 million, moving from $43 million to $18 million, with both the Wireline and other non-Wireline services seeing declines. Here, within this segment, Wireline revenues were down 60% sequentially, driven by a 53% decrease in period stage count and a 14% decrease in composite price per stage, while the drop-off in other non-Wireline service lines was largely in line with regional market dynamics.

And finally, at our Processing Solutions segment, revenues here were down 43% or $1.2 million, moving from $2.8 million to $1.6 million, with the majority of that decline driven by the lack of lower-margin mobilization, demobilization revenue.

And now moving to the segment level EBITDA and margin percentages. Overall, segment-level EBITDA, this is before corporate G&A, saw a decrease of 58% or $10.5 million, moving from $18 million to $17.5 million. Again, all segments contributed to this decline.

On the margin front, consolidated segment margins were actually up from 22% to 24%. And now to disaggregate those 2 numbers down into the segment level. High Spec Rigs, adjusted EBITDA was down 66% or $3.3 million, moving from $5 million to $1.7 million, with margins here holding flat at about 14.5%.

Completion and Other Services saw adjusted EBITDA down 60% or $7 million moving from $11.6 million to $4.6 million. And here, margins were down just slightly from 27%, moving down to 26% in Q2.

For Processing Solutions, adjusted EBITDA decreased just 8% from $1.3 million to $1.2 million, while segment margins were materially up from 48% in Q1 to 75% in Q2.

As Darron noted, the margins associated with the service revenue, the primary driver of the decline in revenue, was much lower than the base businesses rental margin. And as such, the revenue decrease here had a materially disproportionately small impact on the absolute segment margin and drove a positive impact on the gross margin as a percentage of revenue line.

Moving on to G&A expense. As adjusted, G&A expense was down 23% year-over-year and down 34% sequentially, moving from $6.5 million to $4.3 million in Q2. This reflecting the impact of our recent rightsizing efforts.

And finally, on the net income line. For Q2, we reported a net loss of $8.9 million, a $11.7 million decline versus Q1's income of $2.8 million. This decrease in net income that was incremental to the adjusted EBITDA decline was driven by Q2's lack of Q1's $2 million gain on the retirement of debt and Q2's severance and restructuring expenses.

Now moving on to cash flow and the balance sheet. During Q2, $16 million of cash flow from operations was offset by less than $1 million of cash CapEx expense, which drove a net sequential decline in our net debt number of $15 million. At the end of Q2, our net debt, and this is inclusive of all our vehicle leases, stood at $28 million, again, down $15 million from Q1 ending $43 million balance.

At the end of our quarter, our term debt balance stood at $22 million, down the usual $2.5 million from Q1's balance. Total CapEx recorded for the quarter was less than $700,000, which breaks down into $200,000 of maintenance CapEx, that is maintenance CapEx across all of our business lines, and $500,000 related to the final payments on 2 wireline trucks ordered at the very beginning of this year, along with payments on a new prototype gas processing unit. We also added $300,000 in noncash lease obligations for the renewal of some of our IT infrastructure.

On the liquidity front, we ended the quarter with $11 million of liquidity, which consisted of $6 million worth of cash and $5 million worth of capacity on our revolver. That is down $11 million for -- from Q1's $22 million of liquidity, which was driven by the reduction in borrowing base as our accounts receivable balances declined through the quarter.

At our release date, our revolver was undrawn, and our availability stood at $10 million with a cash balance of about $1 million.

That's all for me, and I'll shoot it back over to Darron for his concluding comments.

Thank you, Brandon. I'll wrap up with a few brief comments. Ranger and our entire industry has a steep climb ahead of us. But with our business showing signs of improvement and our cost remaining highly contained, we're cautiously optimistic about the future. The increase in activity that we've experienced thus far, combined with the expectation of 1 to 2 additional wireline trucks being deployed over the next month and a handful of well service rigs' scheduled return to work in early August, all point to modest improvements.

We believe our suite of services allow us to participate in the return of delayed well maintenance work as well as the completion of DUC well in an improving commodity price environment. Additionally, the depth of this downturn has placed an unbearable burden on many of our competitors, which has and should continue to translate into further market share gain for Ranger.

Active consolidation. Historically, we have taken a particularly disciplined approach to merger and acquisition opportunities and do not expect that mindset to change. However, we do note the opportunity set today is a multiple of what it was at the beginning of the year. And post downturn, we feel that the likelihood of executing an attractive transaction has materially increased.

While we continue to work through an extraordinary challenging period in our industry, our team has demonstrated that we are up for the challenge, and we are determined to emerge even better and stronger.

Operator, this concludes our remarks, and we'll now open up the call for questions.

(Operator Instructions) And the first question will be from Daniel Burke with Johnson Rice.

Let's see. Darron, I mean, you were -- you made a point to mention not to get too caught up with the measurement of activity, I think, on the well service side, up 40% from your absolute low, but I'll still ask. Was that a single day measure? Are you measuring a single day trough or a weekly trough or a monthly trough? Just trying to measure, actually, what's going on.

No, that's -- no, that's going to be for weekly trough. So we have the daily metrics, and we actually -- I can't tell you exactly, we reached a trough beginning at the 3rd week of May that lasted through about the 1st week of June. And so it's referencing really that 1st week of May, we're at our absolute trough in that comparable to as we sit here today. So I mean, our data shows that across the organization, we hit a 3-week low during that time period.

Okay. All right. That's a really helpful way to contextualize it and help me see the progression. I appreciate that. Then maybe one on the Mallard side, encouraging to see that truck count nudged back much higher. I was just curious, can you speak to any visibility that you have today for further increase as you look into a little later into Q3.

Yes. So we have our information for our customers, and that is subject to change. But my comment was we expect to see 1 to 2 additional load out. So if I'm saying 1 to 2, I probably feel fairly confident about that. So we do have some visibility above where we're sitting here today that we expect to occur here over the next 30 days.

Okay, great. Maybe I missed that little piece. And then maybe just a last one, Darron, for you or for Brandon. Can you just talk about -- you guys are doing a great job in the second quarter of generating free cash flow. And with activity nudging back up here, I would assume that, that does look like it will continue. But talk maybe just a little bit about the comfort you have with your liquidity level at present?

So we would love to have more liquidity. We are comfortable with it as it currently sits and certainly comfortable with it as it interfaces with our near-term forward forecast. Having said that, we will continue to pull levers to ensure that we have even a better cushion as we move forward. And I probably don't want to get into too many details, but we have at least 2 easy opportunities to increase that liquidity profile as we move forward, leveraging: one, some of the assets, some of the properties that we own, some of them turn out to be quite valuable; and then two, I think you'll see us continue to whittle down our light-duty vehicle fleet. It's materially bigger than it needs to be as we look through the next 12 months of activity.

The next question comes from John Daniel with Simmons.

But Darron, a lot of times we talk about consolidation, tend to focus on well services because it's not so fragmented. But when you look at your Wireline business that continues to do fantastic even in a completely crappy Q2, did it make more sense [to spend some] time in terms of consolidation opportunities on Wireline?

John, when we talk about consolidation, we're not specifically talking about rigs. Not that rigs is excluded from the conversation, but we're definitely not talking exclusively a rig. I think we're looking at all services on the production and completion side, wireline being specifically included in that.

So we don't have exposure to the drilling market right now. That market is very, very depressed, but there are opportunities, potentially, to get that market to driving up stock potentially at the back half of '21, '22.

So I think there's nothing that's off the table right now. We're going to be very, very selective. I think we've got a suite of services that we've proven are fairly asset-light, can reduce cash flow, operates with variable cost structures, and we want to stick with that type of structure, right? So Wireline definitely fits that model. We're going to focus on this higher-margin business like we have.

Okay. Fair enough. Well, another one from me is on the labor front. As you guys are trying to put rigs and equipment back to work, can you just speak to the labor issues, if any? It seems like some companies have talked about inability to find people because of the disparity on unemployment benefits. Can you just give us your experience in the last few weeks?

Yes. First, we had to make some very difficult decisions early on in our downside. Again, as our results show, we're recruiting and making those decisions officially, right? But we parted ways with a lot of good team members.

I'm fortunate to say that with the activity increases that we've seen thus far on the wireline and the rig side, we've added back approximately 50 employees. We've not had any issues of getting these employees back. Majority of them are individuals who are with us previously. So right now, we're not in -- any issues there. We don't foresee any issue that relates to ramping back up, seeing that is happening at a modest level.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Darron Anderson for any closing remarks.

I just want to thank everyone for their participation today, and I truly want to thank all of our wonderful team members who have endured a very difficult quarter but have done an outstanding job. And again, I can't be more proud of you. So thank you very much.

And thank you, sir. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.