Sitio Royalties Corp (STR) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Hello, and welcome everyone to the Sitio Royalties, Fourth quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Becky and I'll be your operator today.

(Operator Instructions) I will now hand over to your host, Alyssa Stevens, Vice President of Investor Relations to begin. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator. Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2024 conference call. By now it is our hope that you have been through our materials. You can find our recent news release and some supplemental slides on our website under the investor relations section. I'm joined this morning by our CEO Christopher Conoscenti and our CFO, Carrie Osicka. After our brief prepared remarks, Chris, Carrie and other members of our leadership team will be available to take your questions.

Before we start, I would like to remind you that our discussion today may contain forward-looking statements and non-gap measures. Please refer to our earnings release, investor presentation, and publicly filed documents for additional information regarding such forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. I will now turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks Alyssa and welcome everyone. I want to publicly welcome Alyssa Stevens to the Sitio team. She joined us earlier this year as our new VP of investor relations. Many of you may have met her already, but she is a great addition to Sitio.

This has allowed Ross Long to take on additional leadership responsibilities on our finance team. But let's get started. We will divide today's call into three segments. First, I'll review our 2024 highlights and how we strengthen the business through accretive acquisitions and active management of our minerals. Second, Harry will summarize our recent financial results in our 2025 outlook. Lastly, we will review our key priorities for the year.

2024 was a strong year of execution for Sitio, and we have a solid list of accomplishments. I'll hit the highlights. First, we delivered against our full year projections. We had a record fourth quarter production of about 41,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, a 14% year over year increase, and averaged over 39,000 barrels of oil equivalent for the year pro forma for the DJ Basin acquisition.

We exceeded the high end of full year guidance even after raising guidance twice during the year. Our expenses and taxes fell within or slightly below our guidance range.

Our solid results were due to the exceptional work of the entire team at Sitio. The quality of our land positions in the most prolific US basins, strong activity and well performance from our industry leading operators, a creative acquisition, and our differentiated asset management capabilities.

Second, we continue to develop innovative efficiencies. This is one of our core competencies that differentiates us from our peers. Throughout 2024, we refined our proprietary custom built asset management applications which allow us to process and analyze significantly more data per person.

We can now automatically process more than 99% of the revenue check data we receive from our operators, reducing approximately $21 million rows of data. Down to 100,000 records for our staff to review annually.

Taking this a step further, we use AI models to interpret contracts that enable us to identify revenue payment discrepancies producing a dashboard for further analysis by our team. In 2024, we captured $19 million of missing revenue payments, offsetting over 2/3 of our cash G&A.

We have invested in our future both in terms of highly skilled people across the company and new technologies. Our relatively small investments in asset management systems will be returned many times over, and we expect meaningful reductions in cash G&A costs per BOE as we continue to scale our minerals position.

Next, we closed 16 high value acquisitions throughout the year. These were immediately accretive to discretionary cash flow per share and represented some of the highest return investments in our history. It was a standout year for consolidation of high return, small and medium sized deals. Sitio has demonstrated its ability to negotiate deals outside of normal broad auction processes.

Our practices are repeatable and the deals we've executed are impactful in the aggregate. It was a healthy year of deal flow for us with acquisitions totaling more than $350 million including fourth quarter deals of approximately $140 million.

The fourth quarter deals added 3,300 net royalty acres to our portfolio, primarily in the Delaware Basin. Number 4, we are committed to a strong balance sheet and our capital structure is solid. In December, our borrowing base was increased to $925 million an increase of $75 million.

Year over year our annual interest expense on a per BOE basis was down over 17% as we refinanced higher cost notes in late 2023. Our balanced capital structure, high quality assets, and robust coverage ratios helped ensure financial flexibility, ample liquidity, and access to future capital at attractive rates.

Our senior notes continue to trade well above par, and we are one of two minerals companies currently accessing the public debt markets, which advantages are cost of capital. Lastly, we prioritize capital returns to shareholders and deliver value on a per share basis. In 2024, we returned $330 million to owners, or over 70% of our discretionary cash flow.

Since becoming public in mid 2022, our cumulative return of capital to shareholders is nearly $850 million including dividends and share buybacks. This represents nearly 30% of our current market capitalization. At current commodity prices, we expect that number to exceed $1 billion in 2025. This was a great year for us. We had a winning combination of execution.

Efficiency gains and acquisition activity that allowed us to maintain our strong balance sheet and return capital to shareholders. Importantly, our results underscore the repeatability of our business model. With that, I'll turn it over to Kerry to summarize our recent financial results and 2025 outlook.

Thanks, Chris. For the fourth quarter, our results beat consensus estimates for production, adjusted EBADA, and discretionary cash flow. Adjusted EBITDA was $141.2 million which was 4% higher than the prior quarter and reflected strong production and lower than expected cash G&A.

Production was up 6% quarter over quarter, averaging nearly 41,000 BOE per day. We had a 9% increase in net turn in line wells in the quarter, which was driven by increased operator, drilling, and completion activity. We closed on approximately $140 million of acquisitions late in the quarter.

We are committed to returning capital to shareholders through cash dividends and opportunistic share repurchases. Our board declared 1/4 quarter cash dividend of $0.41 per share. Payable on March 28th and during the fourth quarter, we repurchased 643,000 shares for $12.9 million equating to $0.08 per share in repurchases.

Importantly, this represents a total return of capital of $0.49 per share. At year end, we had about $80 million remaining under our $200 million repurchase authorization. Turning now to the balance sheet, we have $1.1 billion of debt outstanding with $437.2 million of availability under our revolving credit facility at year end 2024. Our borrowing base was increased by $75 million to $925 million and despite our $140 million of cash acquisitions in the fourth quarter, liquidity only decreased by $15 million.

As we look to 2025, we expect activity levels to remain consistent with last year and have good visibility via 45 net line of site wells and commentary from operators and their activity levels. We expect our oil production at the midpoint will be 18,500 barrels per day, and total production will be just under 40,000 BOE per day at the midpoint. This represents a 3% increase over reported full year 2024 production.

As a reminder, we do not forecast acquisitions in our published guidance. However, history shows that we consistently create value through blocking and tackling with high return acquisitions and our pipeline remains strong. Please reference our materials for additional details. I'll hand it back to Chris.

Thanks, Carrie Before taking your questions, let me quickly discuss how we define and measure success at Sitio Number one on the list is healthy deal flow. We have a proven team with relationships and technical experience across all the major US basins.

We maintain strong relationships with large mineral owners and smaller mineral aggregators. Today we continue to see consistent field flow and attractive opportunities that meet our criteria for risk adjusted returns. The continued market interest in M&A activity in the mineral space is increasingly drawing the attention of long-term mineral owners, some who have held their minerals for more than 20 years and now appear more open to selling.

Many have been holding for yield, but are recognizing that basin maturity along with development activity levels suggests favorable timing for a sale. We are very selective, and the deals we consider must clear a high bar. In 2024, we evaluated more than 160 transactions and ultimately executed it on just 10% of those.

From a net royalty acre standpoint, we acquired just 4% of what we screened. As a result, our 2024 deals had a weighted average unlevered IRR of more than 15% and next 12 month cash flow yield exceeding 25%, well above our underwrite thresholds. We will remain disciplined in our underwriting assumptions and will continue to look for the right deals to create value.

Second is growth per share. We are focused on adding value on a per share basis. Our 4th quarter production was up 14% year over year, while our share count dropped 3%. Since becoming public, we have increased production for debt adjusted share by more than 50%, representing a 20% compound annual growth rate.

We will continue to use free cash flow to maintain our balance sheet and return meaningful cash to shareholders. Third on the list is efficiency as measured by cash G&A per BOE, EBITA margins, and capturing missing revenue.

We are in the early innings of realizing the full potential of our proprietary automation tools and applications that underpin our asset management system. Automation increases the value add of our professionals and maximizes the value of our assets. With this platform in place, we're positioned to seamlessly tack on additional assets supporting our margins and cost effective growth in the future.

Over the last 3 years, we've been very selective in how we have grown our business. Today we have scale that can be leveraged to the advantage of our owners. Recent investments in people and new technologies will create sustainable efficiencies in the years ahead.

In closing, Sitio is in a strong and advantaged position today in the minerals industry. Consolidation will continue, and minerals assets will continue to migrate to bigger and more efficient companies like us. We will continue to employ our proprietary practices to prudently manage our assets, maintain financial strength, and create long-term value for our shareholders. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Neil Dingman from Truist Securities. Neil, your line is not open. Please go ahead.

Morning guys. It was my first question is, could you talk about your various marketed deals and just wondering how those compares been a lot of market deals out there, how that compares to the first number of deals that y'all are able to complete.

Hi, good morning, Neil. It's Chris, great to hear from you. just a couple of comments on the M&A environment. You noted that the deals we evaluated and the deals we did, so it was a robust year from deal flow standpoint. The important thing to highlight really is the consistency of how we're delivering on the acquisition program.

So you look at just the last couple of years, quarter in quarter out, we continue to make these small and medium sized acquisitions. Our capital and our job here really is to allocate this capital most efficiently. Our capital is flowing to the highest rate of return opportunities, so. As you can tell by the statistics that we mentioned in the call, we looked at hundreds of thousands of net royalty acres during the year and acquired only 20,000.

Throughout the entire year, that's because those are the highest rate of return opportunities and we talk about IRRs around here because that is our North Star in terms of what guides us on all of our investment decisions. It's hard for people on the outside of the company to wrap their heads around it because they don't have all the data we have.

So perhaps it helps to share some more information around where that shows up in in the company so. It manifests itself in a couple of ways. One is that when you look at the high cash flow yield on the deals we did this year, as I mentioned in the call, cash flow yield over 25% on the next 12 months for the deals we did in 2025. The other place that shows up is in production for debt adjusted share, since the time we've been public since June of 2022.

Our production for dead share has grown by a compounded annual growth rate of about 20%. So, when we look at the 2024 program, two of the deals we did out of the 16 were actual auction processes. The remaining 14 were based on the relationships we have, and it's relationships with the mineral owners and then it's supported by relationships we have with the operators who occasionally share some information with us on line of site activity which helps underpin our underwriting so. Great job on the team this year at Sitio.

I'm really proud of what everybody accomplished here on the acquisition program, and you know the more important thing for us looking forward is 2025 was every bit as promising. The opportunity in front of us is enormous, not just the sort of the art of the possible, but the actual tangible pipeline in front of us is large. So we're working our way through it and we'll continue to allocate capital towards the highest rate of return opportunities.

And that leads me just a second just most operations and they'll have plans that I'm just wondering what activity is look like for May of the year versus what you all were expecting. Thanks.

I'm sorry, I had trouble hearing the question you.

I'm just wondering, most operators have their plans out, and I'm just wanting to touch base on sort of expectations whether it's in the perm, DJ, you name it, where your minerals are, is activity about as you were expecting, sort of start out the year and the way that it looks for the remainder of the year.

Yeah, good question. Yeah, so we've been watching our operator announcements closely, and that does inform how we look at our guidance for 2025. The good news is the bulk of our guidance, almost all of it is underpinned by the spud and permits, so. Activity that's already commenced by the operators, so we don't have to believe a lot about what they're going to do with remaining inventory on our footprints.

So in most of the cases they've already spent some capital dollars to initiate some kind of activity on our minerals, so. The guidance you see from us which shows about a 3% growth year over year at the midpoint of our guidance is informed by not only the operator comments they're making, but also by the actions they're taken on spotting new wells and permitting new wells.

And if you think about how it relates to our acquisition program, we don't guide, or include in our guidance any contribution from acquisitions. So any, anything we do with our acquisition program in 2025 will be over and above that organic growth rate. Hope that addresses your question, Neil. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question is from Derek Whitfield from Texas Capital. Your line is not open, please go ahead.

Thanks and good morning all and congrats on a strong year-end closing update. I said, for my first question, I wanted to build on Neil's question on guidance as outlined, your 2025 guidance implies maintenance level activity versus Q4 while your line of sight activity implies growth. How would you frame your production trajectory and were there any outside contributions from missing revenue or M&A that led to a stronger than expected Q4?

Yeah, thanks. So the missing revenue effort we have is really to collect payments that we are already owed and we already show in our revenue line. So that doesn't result in incremental revenue, that doesn't result in incremental cash recovered that we are owed and oftentimes requires some extraordinary effort to recover.

When we think about we think about the 2025 production, we do see contribution from primarily the Permian, some from the DJ Basin as well. A lot of the activity we've done in recent years in the DJ Basin has been skewed more towards line-of-sight development.

So when we think about longer term and more duration, it really is the remain is where the activity will largely come from. And if you look at our footprint there, if you just exclude New Mexico, we have a lighter footprint.

GAAP has some statistics that we can share with you on our on our percentage coverage. Now we talked about the entire Permian Basin, we cover about 36% of the entire Permian Basin, but then when you narrow it down to where our asset concentration is within that. That can cover for us.

Yeah, so we have our acreage coverage. More percentage in the part of the Delaware Basin up to around 56% and around 16% in New Mexico, and it's the total basin coverage around 36%.

Terrific. And then maybe leaning in on your commentary on the robust skill flow for 2025, your M&A focus in recent quarters has been, as you noted on the Permian and DJ.

The first kind of part of this question is does the more constructive natural gas backdrop change the size of the opportunities that your teams are focused, and then more broadly in thinking about the value of your differentiated AI-driven asset management system, does that system change how you think about buying diversified packages where the market opportunity could be greater for the machine you've built?

Thanks. So I think the market opportunities for the investments we've made and people and systems really lends itself to scale. I don't think it's any particular advantage for greater geographic diversification. It really is just an advantage of scale. So the investments we've made will pay off significantly as we continue to scale this business. It's really remarkable how we can just layer in more ones and zeros into our system that we've built that's almost infinitely scalable.

When I think about the natural gas backup, I got this question over email from a shareholder as well. It's pretty favorable when you look at. The gas and macro, so global gas demands, and then you have domestic gas demand from increased power generation needs for the electrification of everything and then the obvious buzzword lately is data centers and that's not a near term that's probably several years away, but it's a great macro tailwind for perpetual assets like ours so.

We look at our portfolio, we don't look at ourselves as white on natural gas because we do have quite a bit of natural gas exposure in the Permian and to a lesser extent in the DJ Basin just given the relative size of those footprints. Jarrett has some statistics that you might find interesting on the trends in natural gas in the Permian but not a lot of people are talking about, but it's a reality, so I'll. Turn over Jarret.

Derek, one thing that we've been looking at recently is trends in percent oil across the permian over time. So we run these numbers internally. You also can find them at the short-term energy outlook at the EBITDA . If you go back to around 2021, the Permian was around 63% oil, and today it's around 60% oil. So you're seeing nearly 1% year, a year of oil percentage dropping in the Permian, and it's more pronounced in the Midland Basin.

So that's something that we're looking at that not a lot of people are seeing and with us having around half of our revenue from the Delaware Basin, which has less of this effect compared to the. That's good for us, but we obviously have exposure to the Midland basin, so we're looking at that not only from an asset management perspective, but also how we think about our guidance.

So that's why this year you'll see a little bit less of the oil percentage for the year, and that's underpinned by the line of site wells. As well as what we're seeing on the PDP base that we already have, and I think your other question you mentioned, I'll just kind of jump in here on the on AI and how it affects acquisitions.

Our acquisition underwriting is not explicitly exposed to the tools that we built that could utilize AI, but the great news about that is, and probably one of the funnest parts of our business is once we acquire something we're able to go back. And recover revenue and barrels and dollars that the previous owners who were not actively managing it missed.

So the asset management tools that we have are a really great way to improve the management of the acquisitions that we bring in house. That's something that for every single acquisition that we do that we enjoy working on.

And Derek, one other comment I'll make just on the natural gas pricing part of your question. Yeah, we're really encouraged to see the midstream companies really staying ahead of, the propensity for the permian to see wider basis differentials, so we're thrilled to see Black com and warrior projects underway and expect to see more announcements like that as the strength that just walked through continue to manifest themselves into reality.

That's helpful. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Our next question is from Jared Gro from Stevens. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning guys, and thanks for taking my question. The first one is another one in regards to natural gas. Some of the Appalachia operators have provided guidance for increased gas production in the basin, whether it be this year over the next few years. Can you provide any color as if you've looked at the mineral deals in Appalachia or would you see the deal flow in that basin?

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for the question. We used to own some assets in Appalachia. The particular assets that we owned were relatively mature compared to the rest of our portfolio, and we had a pretty unique opportunity to make a high rate of return acquisition. So again, in our position as capital allocators, we decided to part with those assets and use those proceeds to fund the DJ and acquisition we did. They closed on April 4th of 2024.

So we've been in Appalachia before. We think the world of the region as a geologic province, we're very fortunate as a country to have that resource and it's an enormous resource in place. There's very healthy operators in the region.

As a mineral owner, there's a unique set of challenges for owning minerals in Appalachia. And a lot of it centers around the land situation. I can turn the call over to Britton James from our EVP of land to describe some of those.

Yeah, Chris, that we have from the landslide and trying to guide and share information publicly is that oftentimes the way that the operators in space and put their joining plans in place make it challenging for us to see what is going to happen in future development.

Perfect. Thank you for the color. And then my second one is, could you give us some thoughts on strategic priorities for free cash flow allocation 2025, particularly regarding debt reduction, dividends, buybacks, and investments and growth opportunities.

Thank you.

Sure, yeah, the first and foremost priority is returning capital to our shareholders. This is a really powerful business model that's capable of returning a lot of capital to shareholders. In fact, we've returned over $840 million to shareholders through dividends and buybacks just in the short time we've been managing this company.

And I would expect this year with the commodity price environment we're in today for that number to exceed $1 billion. So far we've returned approximately 30% of our market cap to our shareholders in a very short period of time.

So it's a really powerful business model to be able to return that much capital to shareholders. That said, there's also Very remarkable opportunity to reinvest as I mentioned, these acquisition opportunities that are in front of us present really compelling rate of return opportunities for reinvestment.

So we do look to use the retained capital for two purposes. One is to reinvest in high rate of return and free of acquisitions and then also maintaining our very strong balance sheet. It's important to note that our cost of capital has turned out to be an advantage for us and as we look at.

I look at the bond market and the investors there are speaking with the price action. You look at the yield on our existing bonds and it's close to 6%. And that's a really compelling cost of capital relative to where we were in not too long ago when our existing notes back in 2022 yielded in excess of 10%. So remarkable improvement in our cost of capital.

We have. A tremendous amount of liquidity over $400 million of liquidity. Our cash interest expense is down 17% year over year, so the maintenance of a really strong balance sheet is very important for us, and reinvesting in high rate of return acquisitions is also important.

Thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our next question is from Tim Resman from Key Banc. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Good morning folks, and thanks for taking my questions. First one was the housekeeping one. I was curious if you could provide some color behind the cash G&A increase. It looks like it's up about 25% year over year. I don't know if that's just Alyssa doing a good job with contract negotiations or if there's something more there. Any color would be helpful. Thanks.

I think you've seen a couple things. One is we've made investments in people and systems that will allow us to scale a lot larger than where we are right now. The percentage that you mentioned is a large percentage, but when we look at the absolute dollar increase year over year. You're talking about a $6million or $7 million dollar increase on a $4 billion dollar enterprise.

So I think you're talking about law of small numbers, another interesting factoid is that our cash GNA for the entire year is effectively paid for by the first three weeks of royalty revenue for the year. So it's a remarkably scalable business from a G&A standpoint, and with the investments we've made we're very optimistic about the future.

Okay, that makes sense. As my follow up, you've been pretty successful playing small ball with the non-marketed deals, and what's been interesting is you've had a willingness to go into kind of the DJ Basin recognizing the strong economics there when you have permitted wells.

There's a large operator, there's been discussions about potential mineral sale in that area, with chatter around a billion dollars, so. Can you provide any comments on that news or your willingness to go that big for the right deal.

I think it's less about, how big the deal is and more about how big the returns are. So risk returns have to compensate us for outlaying the capital. So we look at large acquisitions all the time in our existing basements and other basins, but the risk adjusted returns have just been better on the deals we've executed on. So that's how we've done it.

The small deals that we've done in the DJ in particular have been heavily skewed towards existing production and flood wells and then permits that are within the caps that have been approved. So it's, from our standpoint, a proper risk adjusted return. And then the Permian program looks a lot like what you've seen from us in in prior years with a good balance of existing production, by the site well and years and years of remaining inventory, a lot more duration than we see anywhere else.

Right, okay, thanks. If I could just sneak a follow up and just to, kind of close the loop on the acquisitions in the fourth quarter, your oil skew went down a bit. Can you just, it seemed like that was from those acquisitions is that's what what's driving that lower oil skew. You talked about the maturation of the Midland, but is that acquisition kind of the big driver of that?

Yeah, that was that was definitely a component of it, but I think the important thing to note is that even without the acquisitions we would've been, we would have been right around the midpoint of the guidance on oil. So it's not like the oil volumes aren't coming through without acquisitions. We're exceeding on oil for the full year from our guidance, but we're exceeding by a wider margin on the natural gas for the dynamics that Jarrett walked through.

Okay, thanks for the comments.

Thank you. Our next question is from Noel Parks and Tower Brothers Investment. The line is not open, please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Just a couple, I apologize you touched on this already, but, with the deal environment, if we did have ahead of us, a period of sustained higher prices even for oil or gas, say capital is persists and, demand is good on the macro level and we wind up sort of steadily at the higher end of recent trading ranges. Is that helpful or more or more hurtful, as far as been asking and, getting people to, agreement on deals.

It's a really good question because we've looked at this phenomenon of the interplay between commodity price environment or movement and acquisition activity and sort of the GAAP between the bid and the ask on acquisitions.

What we found is that the least constructive environment for us is a rapidly declining price environment. That's where we find that sellers tend to hold on to price expectations from just recent history.

Stable prices are adequate for us to transact in and rising price environments are adequate as well. So I'd say the only one unfavorable is a rapidly declining price environment. But as you mentioned, for what we've seen for quite a period now, it's been a healthy stable environment, maybe trending upward on natural gas more than more than oil but supportive for M&A activity.

Great, thanks. And Well, again, something that we've seen more on the on the gas side, it's been such a good environment, seasonally this year for that gas, and, as we put those, the gas operators reporting year over year numbers, it, looks like, much better comps compared to, the tough winter last year. So, we definitely have seen also alongside capital discipline.

This greater willingness to use curtailments as a way to address volatility, especially download volatility, building ducts, and so forth, and, do you sort of see just your diversification by Nathan and by operator being the best defense against, even increased lumpiness when operators react to what they see, in the in the price environment as it shifts.

Yeah, we do the diversification of the strength for a lot of reasons, but if you just look at our revenue for 2024, about 84% of it was oil. So with operators with that economic signal, there's almost not a gas price at which they would shut in their oil wells.

So, we're really not exposed to the types of geographic regions where Operators would shut in production because of just the gas prices, clearly, we would like gas prices to be, stable and healthy for operators to produce, but we're really not exposed to that kind of environment.

Great, thanks a lot. Like you.

Thank you. This concludes our Q&A session and consequently today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.