US Silica Holdings Inc (SLCA) 2016 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Greetings and welcome to the US Silica third-quarter 2016 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Michael Lawson, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications for US Silica. Thank you, you may begin.

Thanks.

Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for US Silica's third-quarter 2016 earnings conference call. With me on the call today are Bryan Shinn, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Don Merril, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to remind all participants that our comments today will include forward-looking statements which are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. For a complete discussion of these risks and uncertainties, I encourage you to read the company's press release and our documents on file with the SEC.

Additionally, we may refer to the non-GAAP measures of adjusted EBITDA and segment contribution margin during this call. Please refer to yesterday's press release or our public filings for a full reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income and the definition of segment contribution margin.

Finally, during today's question and answer session, we would ask that you limit your questions to one plus a follow-up to ensure that all who wish to ask a question may do so. And with that, I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Bryan Shinn. Brian?

Thanks, Mike, and good morning everyone. I'll begin today's call by reviewing our third-quarter results followed by an update on the progress we have made integrating our two new acquisitions, Sandbox Logistics and NBR Sands.

I will conclude my prepared remarks with the market outlook for both of our operating segments. Don Merril will then provide additional color on our financial performance during the quarter before we open up the call for your questions.

For the total (technical difficulty) of the company, third-quarter revenue of $137.7 million improved 18% sequentially due in part to higher sales volumes in our oil and gas segment and a partial quarter of top line contributions from my new operations. Sales volumes in oil and gas for the quarter of $1.6 million tons increased 21% sequentially compared to the 14 % improvement in the average US rig count during the quarter.

We sold more tons in-basin during the quarter as we began to see some of the mid-and smaller sized customers who rely heavily on a logistics network coming back into the market. We sold 65% of our tons in-basin during the quarter with our largest local sales occurring in the Permian, Mid-Con and the Northeast. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of $8.3 million increased 54% sequentially.

Our industrial and specialty product segments had another strong quarter with contribution margins of $21.6 million an 8% improvement on a year-over-year basis. ISP once again established a record high on contribution margin per ton basis of $24.64 per ton, up 25% compared with the third quarter of last year.

While it doesn't get as much attention as our oil and gas segment our industrial business generates consistent cash flows that cover fixed costs in a downturn and provides a strong platform for growth going forward. The performance of our oil and gas business, excluding our recent acquisitions, largely mirrored the previous quarter. We continue to experience unfavorable mix issues and some pricing pressure throughout most of the quarter, which was partially offset by improvement in fixed cost leverage from higher volumes.

Contribution margin in oil and gas was a negative $1.9 million, but better sequentially and aided in part by our acquisitions and higher pricing in the last month of the quarter, as supply and demand tightened. I'm pleased to report that many of those price increases are holding into Q4.

On the cost side, we continued to make substantial progress driving expenses out across the entire supply chain. We delivered over $50 million in cost savings on a year-over-year basis through headcount reductions, plant debottlenecking, maintenance improvements, and logistic savings. Our mines are doing a great job of staying nimble and remaining flexible to keep pace with market moves while at the same time driving per ton costs lower.

As a result, in September we saw our lowest cost on a dollar per ton basis in the last for years. On the logistics front we remain focused on adding transload capacity that is near the drilling and completion activity, requires no volume commitments for capital and is unit train capable to help increase sales, decrease trans load costs per ton, and meet shipments as demand ramps up.

We opened up two new unit train transloads during the quarter and currently 18 of our 49 transloads are unit train capable. We shipped a record 61 unit trains during the quarter, including the largest sand unit train ever, a 156 care train shipped from Ottawa, Illinois to a Halliburton transload in Texas. We have also renegotiated several contracts with third party transload operators to eliminate minimum volume requirements and shortfall penalties and have made meaningful progress to date as evidenced by the fact that across our network, we now have 30% more storage at 40% lower fixed costs.

Now let me provide you with an update on integration of our two new acquisitions, both of which have been performing well in the short time that we have owned them. I'll start with NBR, which we are calling our Tyler facility. We have successfully integrated Tyler into our operations and logistics network. We have ramped up volumes and are in a current run rate of about one million tons per year and expect to end the year at a run rate of about 1.6 million tons.

Last week we shipped our first product out of Tyler by rail to the Permian. Tyler with it's low production costs and logistical advantages, is one of the most competitive mines in our portfolio today and another reason why we're so excited about regional sands.

We are also very excited about the prospect for Sandbox, which has seen a significant uptick in interest from customers since we acquired them and as a result we are working on several new proposals and customer trials. We have also been busy integrating Sandbox's proprietary solutions into our logistics network and merging their sales processes with our oil and gas business.

Our strategy with Sandbox is to offer a low-cost highly efficient solution for last mile sand delivery which helps customers meet the demands of high sand intensity completions, while eliminating truck detention costs and supporting compliance with new OSHA regulations. We will also offer a ground to ground solution, where we manage all aspects of sand logistics from the mine to the well head, and while we do plan to move a lot of US Silica sand through Sandbox we also expect to support our customers as they store sand from competitors.

As discussed on our last earnings call, Sandbox today enjoys a market share of about 10 % of the sand being pumped in the US. In the next few months, we plan to increase our capacity from 24 crews to 40 to 45 crews by investing about $25 million to build additional boxes, chassis and conveyors, as well as adding staff and leasing support equipment.

Based on the current high level of customer interest we expect to add additional crews during the next 12 to 18 months. I'm very excited about both of these accretive and highly complementary acquisitions and the meaningful opportunities that they are expected to provide for growth and long-term value creation for our shareholders. We continue to seek other attractive M&A opportunities and we have a very robust pipeline in both oil and gas and industrials.

Finally, I would like to provide some commentary around our market outlook for both operating segments for the remainder of the year. As you know, our industrial business is seasonal and volumes in pricing for ISP typically decline from the third quarter to the fourth quarter due to weather and customers taking facilities offline for maintenance.

Regardless, I think we will continue to say year-over-year bottom line growth in ISP, as higher-margin products make up an even larger portion of our total ISP contribution margin. In oil and gas I believe that our markets likely bottomed in the third quarter and that we're in the early stages of a recovery. We have seen some stability in WTI pricing driving subsequent growth and horizontal rig count. Completion activity is picking up and our proprietary models indicate a 16% increase in working frac crews over the last 60 days.

Our open order book is the highest it has been since February 2015 and we are now hearing from numerous customers that their frac crews are booked through the end of the year. If the strong October start continues through the quarter, we expect an increased sales volume and pricing will result in an improvement in our Q4 profitability. I firmly believe that US Silica is uniquely positioned for the recovery in oil and gas. We have the best balance sheet in the space. We sit on the low end of the cost curve and have the widest raw sand product offering of anyone in our industry.

We have built a high velocity logistics network with a wide footprint and tremendous flexibility to maximize our value to customers. With the addition of Sandbox, we can now offer our customers the ground to ground logistic solutions to solve their last mile logistics challenges.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Don Merril. Don.

Thanks, Bryan, and good morning everyone.

I'll begin by commenting on our two operating segments, oil and gas, and industrial and specialty products. Revenue for the oil and gas segment for the third quarter of 2016 of $86.8 million improved 34% sequentially compared with the second quarter of 2016, while revenue for the ISP segment of $51 million declined 2% when compared with the previous quarter.

Contribution margin from oil and gas in the quarter was a loss of $1.9 million, compared with a loss of $6 million in the second quarter of 2016. On a per ton basis, contribution margin for oil and gas was negative $1.17, compared with a loss of $4.50 for the second quarter of 2016.

As previously discussed, the impacts of our cost improvement projects, the positive impact of higher volumes of fixed cost leverage, and margins generated by the integration of NBR and Sandbox were largely responsible for the improvement in contribution margin per ton in the quarter. Contribution margin for our industrial and specialty products segment was $21.6 million dollars, virtually flat on a sequential basis when compared with the second quarter of 2016, but an 8% improvement on a year-over-year basis.

Contribution margin per ton for the ISP business of $24.64 improved 4% sequentially from the second quarter of 2016 and 25% over the same period last year. As Bryan noted, the sequential increase in ISP contribution margin per ton, was driven largely by a combination of increased higher-margin product sales and lower operating costs.

Turning now to total company results, selling, general and administrative expenses for the third quarter of $18.5 million were up compared with the $14.6 million for the second quarter of 2016. The sequential increase in SG&A expense is largely due to acquisition related costs incurred for NBR and Sandbox.

Depreciation, depletion and amortization expense in the third quarter was $17.2 million compared with $15.2 million in the second quarter of 2016. The increase in DD&A was mainly driven by additional expenses related to the NBR and Sandbox acquired assets. Continuing to move down the income statement, interest expense for the quarter was $6.7 million, virtually flat when compared with interest expense for the second quarter of 2016.

From a tax perspective we recognize an income tax benefit of $12.2 million in Q3 of the current year. $2.1 million of this benefit is a discrete item which relates to the early adoption of the recently issued accounting standards update simplifying employee share-based payment accounting. Excluding the aforementioned discrete tax benefit, the effective tax rate for the nine months ended September 30, 2016 was 44%.

Turning now to the balance sheet, cash and cash equivalents as of September 30, 2016, totaled $264.1 million compared with $454.2 million at the end of the previous quarter. We used $176.4 million of this cash to complete the acquisitions of NBR and Sandbox.

As of September 30, 2016, our working capital was $331.2 million, and we have $46 million available under our revolving credit facility. As of September 30, 2016, our total debt was $506.6 million, compared with $490 million on June 30, 2016. The increase was due to additional debt assumed in connection with our acquisitions.

During the third quarter, we incurred capital expenditures of $9.4 million dollars largely associated with the company's investments in various expansion, maintenance and cost improvement projects. We are updating our guidance for capital spending for the remainder of the year and now anticipate that our capital expenditures for the full-year 2016, will range between $42 million and $47 million, which includes approximately $14 million of spending associated with our two acquisitions.

We remain steadfast in our efforts to reduce our cost structure, spending capital prudently and identifying the best uses of our cash to maximize financial returns. We have utilized our strong balance sheet to acquire powerful and profitable companies that will help us grow our business, improve our competitive stance in the marketplace, and ultimately make our customers more successful. Our actions are centered on ensuring that we remain in the best position financially for long-term success in a cyclical energy market.

With that I will turn the call back over to Bryan.

Thanks, Don. Operator, please open up the lines for questions.

(Operator Instructions)

Michael LaMotte with Guggenheim.

Thanks, good morning guys. Bryan, maybe I could start off with the fourth quarter outlook because there's so many moving pieces on the volume side. Can you perhaps put some more bookends around it in terms of what the market is doing on an apples to apples basis? I can do the math on the Tyler expansion and perhaps the timing of fleet expansion at Sandbox, are we going to see any impact of that in the fourth quarter?

Sure, Michael. As we think about Q4 obviously it starts with October, October is off to a very strong start. We're seeing volumes up significantly and it looks like we're holding and in some cases expanding the price gains that we got in oil and gas in the back half of Q3. Just some data points that we look at to help us sort out which way things are going in the oil and gas side. We've seen about a 16% increase in frac crews in the fields in the last 60 days. I think most folks know that we have proprietary model that we use to track that and it's been a pretty good predictor of demand in the past.

We think that sand demand from an industry standard point has now moved up to a run rate that exceeds 30 million tons a year and we would expect that in the coming quarters to continue to expand. But I guess probably the most direct indication of how Q4 looks is open orders. The open order bank is the best that we've seen in 18 months. I can look at a few things beyond that but one of the things that I would look at is what sort of visibility are our customers giving us to orders and so in the downturn for example, sometimes we would only have a week or two weeks notice before we would get an order from customers. We are actually back now to seeing in many cases 60 to 90 day outlooks from many of our customers. That does a couple of things. It certainly helps our planning but it also gives me confidence that our customers have better visibility to demand.

So, all in all, it feels like a pretty strong quarter ahead. I believe that Sandbox will also grow to kind of the second part of your question, we have some additional crews that get deployed, strong pipeline of sales requests there. All in all, it feels like oil and gas should be in for a pretty strong quarter in Q4. Obviously, on the other side of our business, ISP, we always have a decline in the fourth quarter. Many of our customers take seasonal outages for maintenance and other reasons. I feel like with a full quarter of both Sandbox and NBR, a positive outlook for both volume and price in oil and gas, all that together should make for a pretty good fourth quarter.

That's helpful, thank you and if I could drill down on a follow-up on the Tyler facility with the rail spur now up and running, what impact is that going to have on your idol car utilization? How much of an increase are we going to see in terms of that potential uplift? (multiple speakers)

So, I think that when every thing gets fully ramped up at Tyler, we could expect to use 300 or 400 cars out of the fleet. We have been doing a pretty good job of whittling down the cars in storage. If you look at kind of how that has moved over the last several months here, we've had about 400 cars out of storage in Q3. So as demand picked up in Q3, we got 400 out.

Demand is strong enough in October that we have already taken another 270 cars out of storage. That should put us below 2,000 in storage. As we pull all of those out then you put the Tyler usage on top of that, we should be down to about 1,600 cars or so in storage when all those things come to play. If you look at how that compares to where we have been just a couple of quarters ago we had about 2,600 cars in storage. I think we have line of sight to getting down to the 1,600 range and then obviously as demand picks up hopefully into 2017, we should be able to whittle that number lower.

That's great. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Michael.

Connor Lynagh with Morgan Stanley.

Thanks guys, good morning. Could you sort of help us understand the magnitude of price increases that we are talking about both in terms of what's happened thus far and what we might expect over the coming months here?

If you just sort of wind the clock back a bit, I would say that pricing has been pretty tough during the down turn and we have had to make a lot of concessions to keep volume moving through the system. We really started to see the first sort of green shoots in early Q3, but in a much bigger way coming in September and then October. So what I expect is that the market is going to continue to tighten over the next few quarters. What we're seeing is as predicted, as things start to come back, the sort of local supply and demand imbalances. You have heard us talk before that the pricing discussion at the end of the day is not really a national discussion, it is a very sort of local discussion. That tightening is definitely going to help us. If you look at the delivery cost curve into the basins, you can get a sense of pricing and how it is going to come back. I think initially, it's going to be relatively modest. What we are seeing is $1.00 here, $2.00 there. It feels like the kind of thing that could, if demand continues on the strong track that it is on today it could start to ramp up in a meaningful way.

That makes sense. I know you guys do a good job tracking some of those smaller mines in the industry, so could you talk about maybe what you're seeing in terms of mines coming back to work or further idling since you last updated that?

We haven't seen a lot come back on. Obviously, a couple of our public competitors have announced mine sites that they have brought back online. It feels like a few million tons that perhaps have come back. We still see substantial capacity offline today. The interesting thing is, that the capacity that is offline today, if that comes back, it's going to come back at a much higher delivered cost. So, in addition to the local supply and demand imbalances that we're starting to see, if some of those sort of higher cost mine sites come back into the mix, that's going to be a tailwind for pricing as well.

Got it, thanks a lot.

Thanks, Connor.

Marc Bianchi with Cowen and Company

Thank you. Turning back to the railcars for a sec, can you remind us what the obligation is for railcars coming into the fleet over the next periods, next year, two years, and what kind of flexibility you have to work that obligation down?

We have obligations for about 2,500 cars to come into the fleet over the next few years. We are working very closely, Marc, with our railcar leasing and construction companies. I would say we are having very constructive discussions with those entities. I feel like we are going to end up with a positive resolution to that in a way that we will take cars when we need them, and work with our partners in a way that benefits them as well. So, I think there's a good resolution here.

But I also believe that if we continue to see the demand increase, if it follows the trend that we have seen in October here and some of the trends that we are hearing out in the industry, we will whittle away the cars in storage pretty quickly. Just doing some calculations the other day and sort of a good rule of thumb for folks to use is that it takes about 1,000 railcars to support 1.4 million tons a year shipped by rail. And so, said more directly, if our volume goes up, real volumes go up 1.4 million tons, then we need another 1,000 railcars, right? And that assumes some things around how much is unit training, the manifests and all that, but I think that's a pretty good view for where we are anyway and probably others in the industry are similarly positioned. So as you can see as our volumes ramp up, the railcars could be used relatively quickly as well.

Great. Thanks for that Bryan. Maybe turning over to Sandbox, kind of a two-part question first. Can you say how much the business contributed during the third quarter and how are you thinking about the competitive positioning there. We've heard from some of your peers that they have got their own last mile solution, looks very similar to Sandbox. How are you able to protect against that, and thoughts around the competitor positioning in light of what has been said?

Marc, as I think about Sandbox and how it performed in Q3, obviously we only owned it during the quarter for a few weeks but, I was really pleased with the results there and quite honestly the whole Sandbox integration and how it's going has exceeded my expectations. We don't have specifics for you today on the numbers for Sandbox but relative to Sandbox versus other competitor data in the space, it's really a different animal in my mind. I think Sandbox is unique for a couple of reasons. First, we have us a proven technology.

If you look at what this company has done, we currently move about 10% of the sand that is pumped [down hole] in the industry. We have 10 customer contracts associated with that. We served more than 1,100 wells over the last few quarters and we are a real business not sort of an idea. We have more than 300 employees at Sandbox, we have six field locations to support our equipment. So we are a proven technology and trusted by customers. I think that is one key thing about Sandbox. The second is that we have an extensive IP portfolio and I think some of our would-be competitors look past that but we have 73 patents that we filed, 20 for which have been issued and 49 are pending. We have extremely broad coverage here. It covers containers, actuators, literally the process itself of taking a container of sand to the well site and using it the way it's being used in this application, it's covered by a process patent, right. So, at the end of the day that anybody wants to enter the space is going to have to work around our IP and as a result I think they'll be much less efficient and much higher cost than us.

Quite honestly, we have seen folks try to do that, we believe that many of them are violating our IP and we are going to defend vigorously. That's the second key point about Sandbox. Third is that even if competition finds a way to come in and get around our IP, we're scaling quickly. We have strong customer pipeline. This is now part of you US Silica's best in class logistics network, we have the capital to expand and we are doing that. Perhaps most importantly, we have the confidence of the industry and the confidence of the customers. The fact that we're already pumping 10% of the sand or moving 10% of the sand that is being pumped, 1,000 plus wells served, I believe that Sandbox is going end up as a clear choice for last-mile sand delivery. We are going to substantially replace the other solutions that are out there today including pneumatic trucks.

Very good, thanks.

Scott Gruber with Citigroup.

Good morning.

Good morning, Scott.

Bryan, in the past you have discussed in-basin pricing and moving simultaneously or possibly ahead of mine date pricing, the price increases that you are realizing now, what is the trend across those two sales points?

It's really an astute question, Scott. I think you recognize as we do that the pricing really comes first locally in many ways. We kind of battle if you will, battle in quotes, on price is fought at kind of a sub regional level. As you might expect a lot of the initial price increases that we are seeing, are in that, in that kind of area. I also note, I said in my prepared remarks that we moved about 65% of our volumes in Q3 through our transloads network. That is a big change from where we have been over the last couple quarters.

The interesting thing is that we are seeing some of the small and medium-sized service companies add crews back and those are the folks that typically depend on our logistics network the most. But even the bigger service companies as they are growing, as the market rebounds, even those folks don't have enough transloading capacity to deal with all the sand so they are starting to use our network more as well. I think all that is a positive for pricing and ultimately for the margins that we realize.

Would you agree that incremental gains from here will be more weighted towards in-basin versus mine gate for at least the near term?

That is probably the way it plays out. It is difficult to predict but that's the way it's been in the past. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be true in this up cycle as well.

Just quickly you may have mentioned this during your prepared remarks. What was the timing around taking the Sandbox through count to 40 or 45?

We are in the process now of building the equipment. I would expect that over the next couple of quarters we will see those crews become available. The first crews will be available in the fourth quarter, and then ramping up over the next couple of quarters.

Great, thank you.

Thanks Scott.

Blake Hutchinson with Howard Weil.

Good morning.

Good morning, Blake.

Bryan, I guess, thanks for the reset on NBR and the volume growth there. I was hoping as we exit the year here that maybe you could reset for us as we look at the system between the added Ottawa acreage and potential expansion there, under utilization of the system maybe at large and maybe pulling some from mines not listed at API, what would you call your exit rate kind of practical oil and gas capacity as we look at it today?

I would expect that we will be at about 12.5 million tons of usable oil and gas capacity. As you were sort of implying in your question, in the past, when things have gotten really hot, we found a way to squeeze out a bit more from some of our industrial mines. I think 12.5 is probably the number to use.

Okay. Just referring to some of your commentary in your preamble you talked about unfavorable mix. I guess when you look at that -- some -- you know on the margin some addition from NBR and your commentary around in-basin delivery, what specifically was working against you on the mix side?

On the mix side, there is really several different pieces of mix. There's customer mix, there's basin, et cetera. What we were stung with a little bit in the quarter was more on the customer side. Some of our customers -- we didn't lose customers but some of them moved some work around and timing of that hurt us in the quarter. So things that got moved out of the third quarter into the fourth quarter was the biggest piece of that.

It's a volume commentary rather than necessarily something that showed up in ASP or something like that?

That's right.

Okay. That's all I had. I will turn it back. Thank you.

Thanks, Blake.

Jim Wicklund with Credit Suisse.

Good morning, guys, actually Chad on for Jim. I wanted to dig a little bit more on the increase from 20 to 40 crews in Sandbox. What do you expect the market share impact to be? Can we expect market share to double to 20% with that increase in crews or how should we be thinking about that?

We have to think about the crews themselves. A crew typically pumps a certain amount of sand, right, so you do the math and you say, you pick a number and say, a typical crew might do 200,000 of sand, just to pick a number, then if we add 20 crews, you do the math on how much that is, that is 4 million tons of sand that we additionally moved. It depends on where the demand goes in terms of the share, right. You have to do the calculation on that. I tend to think about it more in terms of the amount of volume of sand that we can move through there and that will sort of equate whatever share it equates to depending on how fast the market is moving. With that said, I expect that given the kind of pipeline of opportunities we have and the demand there that we may be back looking to add additional crews assuming that we get the success that we expect with the next 20 or so that we are going to [add].

Thank you. That is very helpful. One more follow-up there. What do you expect the incremental CapEx to be to take if from 20 to 40 crews?

We said that we were going to invest about $24 million or $25 million. That's a pretty good estimate for that.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Robin Shoemaker with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Wanted to clarify one point you have talked about. Are you anticipating in terms of your railcars on order, a kind of a settlement such as others have announced here or are you just going to kind of work with them and to manage the number of cars you need coming out as your current lease is expiring and so forth?

What we've seen, Robin, is that our railcar partners have been very interested in continuing to work with US Silica. I think we will find out a business arrangement that works for everyone. We are currently continuing to discuss that and obviously if the market changes here, particularly if it turns out that it looks like we may need actually cars sooner rather than later, depending on how fast things ramp up that obviously makes it an easier discussion as well.

Right. Okay. On the Sandbox volumes, are those volumes reflected in your total sales volumes which would ultimately include a significant amount of third party sand? How is that being reported with regard to what we see quarterly as your sand sales volume?

That's a really good question, Robin. I'm glad you asked it. There's been some confusion around this whole notion of our sand versus sand someone else's sand, what gets moved in Sandbox. Let me just start and say to begin with certainly we expect to move a lot of our own sand with the Sandboxes but we will move other people's sand as well. And so when I think about what's included in there, for example, in Q3, there's no third-party sand included there in the volumes. Certainly, it is in the revenue. The revenue we get from providing the work of the a Sandbox crew is in there but we do not count the sand that we move that was not ours.

Okay. Good. And then on the selling price of sand, which presumably the last-mile selling price would be higher. I guess that is reflected in your revenue so it would influence your average selling price per ton?

That's correct.

Okay. Understood.

Thanks, Robin.

Kurt Hallead, RBC Capital Markets.

Hello, good morning.

Good morning, Kurt.

Getting a number of questions again from investors about there being a potential oversupply of sand in the marketplace. If I recall when we had you on the road not too long ago you guys indicated there's different [shreddia] of sand supply at different cost levels. I was wondering if you might kind of help -- if you might want to run through that real quick and just give us an idea of what kind of capacity is out there and at what varying price points that might come back in?

Sure, that's a great question, Kurt. I tend to look at it in terms of two kinds of capacity. There is a sort of max capacity that you could ever find out there if you swept everything out of the corners and raided industrial mines that maybe don't have the right kind of quality, things like that. Those numbers are probably around 100 million ton mark. You will see estimates out there anywhere from sort of 90 to 120 [tons]. We believe it's somewhere around 100 million/105 million tons. Then you kind of come back to and say what's the practical capacity that has any sort of reasonable costs and any sort of reasonable quality. I would look at that more as a sort of 70 million ton number.

If you think about today, what's offline, we think there is 20 million to 25 million tons offline. It kind of brings it back to something like 45 million or 50 million tons in my opinion. That is a sort of realistic capacity out there today. And that is most of what I would call sort of the low to beginning of the medium cost capacity. The low cost capacity is probably 35 million to 40 million tons, something like that. Maybe a little bit less depending on how you want to define low. It feels like one of these things that it is a bit of an inexact science because at the end of the day all these numbers I'm talking about are on low cost, those are at the mine gate. As you and I both know, the real battle is fought out in the basins.

The better question to ask is what is that cost curve look like on a delivered basis. That is substantially more complicated. We would have a pretty detailed model on that. I guess what I can say is that the curve ramps up much more quickly in terms of costs on a delivered basis. Said more plainly, there's far fewer amount of tons in that low cost bucket and the good news for US Silica is that almost all of our production is in that low cost side of the curve.

All right. That is very helpful. Can I maybe connect the dots here, you referenced in that low-cost tonnage is 30 million to 35 million tons and obviously if you get into the delivered cost basis, maybe it's even lower than that. Tie that back to the comment you made that you think that the current run rate for the industry right now is in excess of 30 million tons on an annualized basis. Are we at a point here where we could potentially see a more meaningful move in pricing?

It feels to me like we are getting close to that tipping point and it's obviously different by basins. I think -- it is one of the things we want to talk about in a bit more detail on our investor day coming up in December here in Houston. This notion of what is that deliver cost curve look like and what are the increments as you start to move up that curve. I do feel like we're getting to -- once you get beyond 30 million tons you are starting to get to a steeper part of the curve than we have been on. That should lead to some more meaningful price increases over the next couple of quarters. Certainly, that's what we're looking for.

I just had one follow-up on the Sandbox market share. I'm not quite sure how to think about the market share dynamic in terms of Sandbox. My understanding is that it is effectively an open source process. It's not just your sand. It could be anybody's sand. Can you help us understand more the market dynamics, the market share dynamics or the competitive framework?

Yes, I like your term sort of open source. At the end of the day, our customers are the service companies today. So if we are talking to service company X, we want to help them be more efficient and help them grow their share. At the end of the day, they'll buy sand from whoever they have contracts with and whoever they want to buy it from. Obviously some of those contracts and purchases would be us but even today where we think we have 20% or 21% of the market, that means there's 80% of the share out there that is not US Silica. So, I'd expect that will move through these boxes. Sometimes it is our sand, sometimes it's competitors sand and it really doesn't matter to us.

I like the market share number just because it helps me, quite frankly, keep track of the progress that we are making. When we first started looking at this acquisition many months ago, I wasn't sure how big it really was. Quite honestly I was shocked when I learned that they were actually handling, already handling 10% of the sand moving through the industry. It gave me a warm and comforting feeling that these folks knew what they were doing and was a kind of company was going to be a great fit with US Silica.

When you say share, it is 10% of the total industry volume that is going through a sandbox?

Correct. Just to put numbers on it, if you say today the total industry volume is 30 million tons, if we have 10% share that means we are flowing through the Sandbox system $3 million tons a year.

That's great. Thanks so much, Bryan.

Brandon Dobell with William Blair.

Thanks, guys. [Moving] to Sandbox for a second. Given the location differences, maybe the Tyler and the Voca mines, is there a strategy there to use a Sandbox offering to try and control the origin destination strategy a little bit more? Maybe use that as a lever to try and direct volumes to where you think you've got the best fixed cost absorption or where you think you have got the best opportunity for share growth at some point?

That's a really interesting question and I think the way we look at it is the Sandbox solution is a great fit with regional sand mines. It is almost sort of a match made in heaven, if you will. Just to your question around the Tyler mine site, what I found interesting as I was digging back through our proprietary frac crew model, and I looked at where the crew growth had come from in the last 60 days. The number two area was East Texas and Louisiana, right, so sort of a Haynesville area. That set this up extremely well for both the growth out of Tyler as well as using Sandbox in those areas.

One of the other things that is interesting, we had this as a potential synergy and it looks like it's probably going to be better than we thought. There is potential for us to use these containers internally as well in a number of ways. We think there is some pretty good cost savings there also. That's kind of a plus one that we have not really talked much about but in addition to growing the traditional Sandbox business we are creatively looking for other uses for the containers that can bring even more value to us.

Does this push for Sandbox, does it change how you think about the economics or the asset turns or maybe where to deploy capital in terms of the rest of the logistics network? Maybe it means you have got to have fewer railcars because these were a substitute or fewer terminals in the basin because these were a substitute? Or am I stretching it to far?

No. You're already two steps ahead. You have graduated to the Ph.D. class in this already. (laughter).

I've been shooting so hard for that. I appreciate that.

At the end of the day I think Sandbox is going to fundamentally change the way we and the industry move sand. It is going change the notion of transloading. I think about our Sandboxes as mini transloads on wheels. We can do a lot of things with those. And it's why it's so important that this is just kind of integrated into our oil and gas business. We don't think of this as a bolt-on that sits out there by itself. It is a critical part of our oil and gas business. It has been integrated into our sales processes, and just kind of the way we think about oil and gas and you're right on track, Brandon.

Thanks a lot.

Chase Mulvehill with Wolfe Research.

Hey, good morning.

Good morning, Chase.

I am going to stick on Sandbox for just a minute. Now that you guys own Sandbox, do you have more E&Ps asking to buy sand directly from you?

I don't know that we would have more. We have had those kind of inquiries in the past. I think we have been pretty clear that our customer base is the service companies. That's what we view as the primary consumers of this. What we have seen is that -- we've seen E&P's specify the Sandbox System and pull that back through the service company. Certainly, our sales teams are out there talking to energy companies but the tone of the conversation is, you should pull this through your service company because we think those are the best partners for us to work with in general.

Is Sandbox tied to more large or smaller service companies?

It is a mix. It is all the way up and down the line. What I believe is that we have probably had, if you were doing some kind of an average, it's probably more of the smaller to medium-sized service companies. I think what we're seeing now, as US Silica has gotten involved more interests with some of the larger sand companies because I feel like they have more confidence in the sustainability of the business, being able to plug into US Silica Sand network.

You know you just sort of imagine the kind of powerful value proposition to have been able to go to customers and what looks like a potentially a quickly rising market and say we cannot only supply you the sandbox, but we can supply the sand. You don't have to look too far back into the past to think about the days where sand was in short supply and being able to package that together and make that offering, I think is really a powerful one. To say we can deliver the sand all the way to the well head and essentially do everything and you, mister service company don't have to touch it.

Last one and then I will get back in. Sorry if somebody already asked this. Could you give us kind of the underlining contribution margin per ton and the price per ton for the oil and gas frac sand business, excluding Sandbox?

Yes. I would say that the base business -- and look these lines are getting a little blurry as we integrate these new two acquisitions, but I would say the base business was about the same as it was in Q2.

That's both on pricing and contribution margin per time?

Well, no, I would say that we have faced some headwinds on pricing throughout the quarter. As Bryan stated, we saw that trend turnaround late in the third quarter. So net-net price was down a little bit and we had some headwinds as we discussed earlier as well around mix that was mostly offset by operational, by fixed cost leverage and operational savings.

So pricing per ton down 5 ish% and contribution margin per ton flattish? Is that a good kind of modeling assumption?

I don't know if the price was down that far, but I would say the contribution per ton is flattish. Yes. On the basin.

That's helpful. Thank you.

That does conclude our question-and-answer session. At this time I will turn it back over to Mr. Bryan Shinn for closing remarks.

Thank you. I would like to close to call with a few key thoughts. First I want to reiterate that I am really pleased with the progress on our two recent acquisitions. As we heard a lot of the questions today were around Tyler and Sandbox. I couldn't be more pleased on how both of those are going. I'm confident that they're both going to add substantial value for both our investors and our customers over time. The second point is that we remain keenly focused on three key areas and this really has not changed much as we've gone through 2016. These are the things that I think provide a really clear path to success for our company. So those are cash, customers, and consolidation. We didn't talk about M&A today but certainly we have a robust M&A pipeline and I think we have more opportunities there.

Lastly, I want to thank all my colleagues at US Silica for their outstanding efforts in meeting the tremendous challenges and opportunities that our company has faced so far in 2016. I also want to thank our investors for their interest and support. I look forward to meeting and speaking with many of our investors at our upcoming investor day which will be held December 1, in Houston. Thanks to everyone for dialing in and have a great day.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.