YPF SA (YPF) 2018 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to Third Quarter 2018 YPF Sociedad Anónima Earnings Conference Call.

My name is Sylvia, and I'll be your operator for today's call.

(Operator Instructions)

I will now turn the call over to Sergio Giorgi.

Mr. Giorgi, you may begin.

All right.

Thank you, Sylvia.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Sergio Giorgi, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development for YPF.

I would like to thank you for joining the YPF Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Webcast.

The presentation will be conducted by Diego Celaá, Head of Investor Relations; and myself.

During the presentation, we will go through the main aspects and events that explain our third quarter results, and finally, we will open up the call for questions.

We will be making forward-looking statements, so I ask you to carefully review the cautionary statement on Slide 2. Also our financial statement figures are stated in Argentine pesos and based on international financing reporting standards.

In addition, certain financial figures have been adjusted to reflect additional information to let you better understand our key financial and operating results.

Diego will present now the financial result for this quarter, but before, I would like to provide just a few element of context.

It was a difficult quarter for Argentina as we continued to see high currency devaluation, high interest rates and the economy starting to soften.

During the quarter, the country agreed with the IMF to increase the total amount of the program from $50 billion to $57 billion and to accelerate its disbursement.

Local oil was traded at an average price of $65 per barrel and our average gas price was $4.76 per million btu.

Total hydrocarbon production dropped 4.3% vis-a-vis the same quarter of 2018, mainly driven by a decrease in NGL production linked to scheduled maintenance stoppage.

However, as we explained during October Investor Day, we faced some gas curtailments too and we will detail these later on.

We continue with our efforts to fight conventional production decline and increase our unconventional production every quarter at the same time that we keep on decreasing well cost, increasing well productivity and preparing to launch new and profitable developments.

Regarding fuel pricing, we continue with our efforts to catch up with import parity and we believe we have done most of the path as you will see later on.

In terms of business development, we would like to highlight the recent acquisition of the failed company Oil Combustibles' assets.

Its main asset is the San Lorenzo terminal, which contains the largest port in the entire Parana River, and over 310,000 cubic meters of storage capacity, which is already physically integrated with YPF.

The acquisition is extremely valuable for us since it will allow reducing the cost of fuel imports, supply more efficiently the North of the country and support a future regional expansion.

In summary, despite the difficult environment, our results were strong and we continue generating enough cash flow to invest in new developments and to cover our debt maturities.

With this, I would like to turn the presentation to Diego, who will present the financial results.

Thanks, Sergio, and good morning, everybody.

Let me start with our third quarter results highlights.

Revenues were up by 83.5% in pesos and EBITDA by 116%, expanding our EBITDA margin up to 30%.

Total hydrocarbon production was 4% below last year.

In line with the first half of the year, in this third quarter, we were free cash flow positive as operating cash flow more than doubled, reaching ARS 32.2 billion and exceeded CapEx for more than ARS 10 billion.

Moving into our main financial figures measured in dollar.

In the third quarter, the dollar currency appreciated by 86% when compared with the same quarter of 2017.

Revenues showed a slight reduction of 1.2% driven by lower prices in dollars from our main products, gasoline and diesel, while exports remained flat due to a combination of higher international prices and lower exported volumes.

In turn, price for natural gas was down in average 3.3% as the former plan gas expired in December 2017 and less volumes are now eligible for the new incentive plan for unconventional new gas.

Regarding operating costs, lifting and refining costs in dollars decreased by 18.6% and 36.2% in absolute terms, respectively.

Royalties, which is the only cost component fully denominated in dollars, were up close to 12% with higher crude oil royalties due to the higher crude oil prices and lower for natural gas.

Crude purchases were down 9.7% in dollars as we processed in our refineries lower levels of crude oil than a year ago, while our crude oil production remained stable.

As a result, adjusted EBITDA was up by 16% in dollars.

Finally, total CapEx for the company amounted to $850 million, almost 8% lower compared to the third quarter of 2017, reduction that is mainly explained by the dilution of some peso items inherent to our CapEx driven by the currency devaluation.

Upstream CapEx in the quarter amounted to $704 million, 2.9% lower than Q3 2017.

Our activity was mainly focused in drilling a workover, which represented a -- 71% of the Upstream CapEx; followed by buildup of facilities, with a 20% share of the total; and exploration and other activities, 9%.

During the quarter, we drilled and put into production a total of 95 new wells, including 19 wells -- 19 shale wells and another 19 wells in tight gas formations.

In Downstream, CapEx was $114 million.

Activity was focused in refining, which represented 50% of the Downstream CapEx; followed by logistics with a 27% share of the total; then marketing, representing 17%; and finally chemicals with a 6%.

Now let's switch back to Argentine pesos to go over in a more -- the more detailed analysis of our quarter.

As we did last quarter, now we're focusing the analysis in adjusted EBITDA of our business segments instead of operating income to provide a better understanding on how each business segment contributes to the cash generation of the company, putting aside the FX impact on depreciation and amortizations, which they are in fact a noncash effect.

Moving on to adjusted EBITDA.

It has come up by 116% compared with the third quarter of 2017.

This was mainly driven by the better operating results obtained in the Upstream business segment, which showed an increase of ARS 19.7 billion vis-a-vis a year ago.

Revenues of this segment increased by 112% mainly as a result of higher crude oil and natural gas prices in pesos, while on the other hand, cash costs of this segment increased by 77%, well below revenue increase as lifting costs and other OpEx were partially diluted by the devaluation.

The Gas & Power segment also showed better operating results of ARS 1.5 billion.

On the one hand, better results were recorded from our subsidiary Metrogas, mainly due to the change in the estimation methodology and determination of purchase price of natural gas to producers and in accordance with the latest policies of the National Secretariat of Energy in this regard.

On the other hand, it is worth highlighting that, from Q1 2017 -- 2018, YPF Luz is not longer consolidating -- consolidated in the business segment results.

And in the third quarter of 2017, this company had contributed with ARS 440 million of EBITDA.

The Downstream segment results show a decrease of almost ARS 2.3 billion.

This is basically explained by higher crude oil and biofuel purchases, which are denominated in dollars, partially offset by increases in gasoline and diesel prices in pesos during the quarter.

However, revenues in this business segment managed to increase by 83%, driven by a solid demand of our main products in the 2 first months of the quarter, coupled with higher prices in pesos, although lower in dollars, for gasoline and diesel as explained before; higher sales of LPG, jet fuel and petrochemical products; and higher exports on higher international prices.

It's worth mentioning that refining costs show an increase of only 18.5% compared to the same quarter 2017, as the currency depreciation played a beneficial role as well.

The cash generation in the third quarter of the year reached a total of ARS 32.2 billion, a 138% increase above the operating cash flow of a year ago.

This increase of ARS 18.7 billion was mainly due to an increase in adjusted EBITDA of ARS 19.8 billion and some working capital variations that were almost offset by each other.

This operating cash flow more than exceeded the ARS 23.4 billion CapEx of the period and contributed with the deleverage process as guided in our recent Investor Day held 2 weeks ago.

Finally, this cash generation, including the dollar-denominated sovereign bonds still held in treasury, results in a strong cash position of ARS 72.4 billion at the end of the third quarter 2018.

As we can see in the chart on the right, we are fully funding our CapEx program with our own cash generation, reaching a total of ARS 24 billion of cumulative free cash flow during the first 9 months of the year.

The previously explained cash position is enough to cover our debt maturities of the year and most of the first half of 2019.

It is important to highlight that, during September, the company made a tender offer to purchase for cash the outstanding amount of the senior notes due in December this year, taking advantage of its strong cash position.

As a result, $476.2 million of the $452.2 million outstanding have been repurchased, raising the total outstanding to only $276 million, being this one of the most important maturities for the balance of the year.

Bear in mind that all this-year maturities have been already prefunded by the $1 billion bond issuance done in December 2017.

Our leverage ratio continued to come down to 1.7x net debt to -- recurring adjusted EBITDA, within our 2x target for the year, while the average life of the debt remains in the 6-year area.

The average interest rate in pesos increased to 36.7%, while the average cost of our debt in dollars remained stable at 7.3%.

With this, I would like to turn the presentation back to Sergio, who will explain our operational results.

Thank you, Diego.

As we have been flagging and as we showed recently in our Investor Day in New York, safety is a core value for YPF.

As our daily work is done in places with flammable liquids, high pressure and confined spaces, we need to be very vigilant and ensure that all the safety measures are taken so that we can produce, treat, transport and sell our products without harming our workers, the environment or the communities.

As you can see in the chart, the current injury frequency rate, an indicator that measures the number of people injured every million hours worked, has been improving substantially in the last few years, proving that the actions that we have been taking over the last years regarding safety measures are paying off.

Despite this figure, recent events have reminded us that it's important to remain extremely vigilant as we are now entering a phase of increased activity, particularly in our Upstream operations.

Let's move now to analysis of the third quarter production.

Total hydrocarbon production dropped 4.3% vis-a-vis the same quarter of 2018 to 529,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

As we mentioned before, this drop was mainly driven by NGL production that decreased 44.6% to a total of 26,900 barrels per day as a consequence of a scheduled maintenance stoppage in our affiliated company Mega and its main client.

Crude oil production in the third quarter remained stable compared to the same quarter a year ago at 227,500 barrels of oil per day while sequentially has increased by 1% compared with second quarter of 2018.

Regarding natural gas, it is worth mentioning that Argentina is gradually shifting from a gas importer to a gas exporter.

The good results obtained by YPF and by other operators developing shale gas resulted in a situation where the gas offer meets more often the gas demand, and therefore, we faced a situation during the third quarter where we have to curtail some gas production, mainly in our conventional fields.

This resulted in a 1% decrease in our natural gas production compared to the same quarter last year, reaching 43.7 million cubic meters per day.

Natural gas production would have been 2% up instead of the minus 1% mentioned before if we hadn't had to curtail gas production.

Indeed, we could have produced approximately 1.3 cubic -- million cubic meters per day of additional gas in the quarter.

This situation will undoubtedly be solved in the medium term and long term, but it poses a challenge for the short term.

We have activated some short-term levers in terms of generating more demand, like exporting gas to Chile where we expect between 1 million to 2 million cubic meters per day exports and installing a small-scale LNG barge in 2019 that will allow us exporting up to 2.5 million cubic meters per day so that we don't have to face this curtailment again.

We are also actively working on medium- and long-term levers like a sizable LNG export terminal and petrochemical projects.

Until then and in order to avoid oversupply, we are redirecting more investment toward our already risked oil production assets, and the optionality for our shale acreage allow us to do so.

When we break down the sources of our production, we can observe that shale production contributed with 21,000 additional BOEs per day in the quarter, while tight production showed a decrease of 10,000 BOEs per day mainly related to a lower production of natural gas liquids as a consequence of the scheduled stoppage in Mega as explained before.

As you can observe, growth is coming from our shale fields, and clearly, most of the decline came from our conventional fields, so we would like to do a deeper analysis of this in our next slide.

In this slide, you can see that our conventional production decreased by 9% vis-a-vis a year ago.

As mentioned in the previous slide, production was affected by a natural gas demand restriction observed during the quarter, which volumes of approximately 1.3 million cubic meters per day or 8,200 barrels of oil equivalent are impacting the natural decline bar in the chart and also by the lower NGLs production due to the scheduled maintenance stoppage in Mega as explained before.

Having said that, we continue with our efforts to actively manage the decline of our conventional fields through primary, secondary, tertiary recovery; and natural gas compression in order to extract the maximum value while remaining always profitable.

While primary recovery is currently the main contributor to improve the recovery factor of our conventional fields, as we detailed during our Investor Day a few weeks ago, we're also working very hard in terms of adjusting secondary and tertiary recovery.

And we have run successful pilots on both, which makes us confident that we will be able to smoothen the decline in the near future.

Moving now to unconventionals.

Net shale production of the quarter reached 57,500 BOE per day, showing an increase of almost 58% compared to a year ago.

If we add to our net shale production the 91,000 BOEs per day of tight gas and liquids, our total unconventional production of 148,000 BOEs per day represents now almost 28% of our total production.

In terms of our activity as shale operator, during the third quarter, we produced 97,400 BOEs per day and we connected a total of 19 new shale horizontal wells.

In relation to costs in our shale operations, the development cost in Loma Campana continues in the good trend, staying during the third quarter of the year in the $11 per BOE area.

And operating expenses continued to improve, staying now at the $6 per BOE area.

As we recently disclosed in our Investor Day, we would like to show again in this slide the progress achieved in Loma Campana during the last 3 years regarding well productivity since we started drilling horizontal wells.

YPF has been gradually increasing the length of our horizontal range, moving from 1,500 meters in 2016 to 2,500 meters in 2018.

This has resulted in an increase in the number of frac stages per well, an increase in production per well and an increase in EUR per well.

The average 2018 EUR per well is now at 900,000 barrels of oil equivalent, which represents a 35% increase versus 2 years ago.

The cumulative wells production is also showing an increase of 40% when compared with values from 2 years ago.

We have also put into production the first 3,200 meters horizontal drilling well with 40 frac stages, a peak production of 1,500 barrels of oil per day and an estimated EUR in the order of magnitude of 1.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

We will be monitoring this well in order to define if this is going to be our new design from now on, but in addition to increasing the length of our laterals, we're also working in a number of different initiatives in order to continue optimizing our operation and reducing our cost, including high-density completion to increasing the number of wells per pad, use of soluble plugs, new well designs, use of spudder rig combined with high-spec rig, increasing the proppant plant efficiency, trans geo navigation, use of data analytics and many others.

Based on all these improvements, we are planning the next development phase for Loma Campana for which we're aligning with our partner.

This slide summarizes the key figures for our Loma Campana second phase of development.

We will drill with 4 to 5 rigs, completing around 300 new wells in the next 5 years.

We expect to reach a plateau of about 120,000 BOE per day by 2023, growing 150% during the next 5 years.

We will invest around $700 million per year in this development.

As we mentioned during Investor Day a couple of weeks ago, in addition to Loma Campana Phase 2, we're also actively working with our partners to launch 2 other shale oil developments before the end of the year in La Amarga Chica, where we're in partnership with Petronas; and in Bandurria Sur, where we're in partnership with Schlumberger.

Moving now to our Downstream business segment.

During the quarter, the volume of crude oil processed in our refineries was 280,000 barrels of oil per day, 4.6% lower than the third quarter of 2017 mainly as a result of scheduled maintenance stoppages in our industrial complexes.

Regarding sales, total volumes were essentially flat as the increase in domestic volume was almost offset by lower export.

Although demand for our main products diesel and gasoline increased, total volumes in the local market only increased 1% as they were negatively affected by a significant reduction in fuel oil demand from power generation plants as there was more availability of natural gas.

Now to provide more detail about fuel demand.

On this slide we can see on the left-hand side how gasoline sales evolved every month compared with the previous 2 years; and on the right-hand side, the same for diesel oil.

Gasoline and diesel demand increased by almost 3% and 9%, respectively, during the quarter.

However, during September, the market started to show some deterioration in response to the contraction of the economy and a slowdown in consumption.

In October, our preliminary figures are showing that sales volumes of both products were up compared to September, following the usual seasonal trend but still below the volumes sold in October last year.

Market share for both products continued to be strong and above 2017 with 55.7% in gasoline and 59.1% in diesel.

Market share for our premium products Infinia gasoline and Infinia diesel were 61.4% and 59.9%, respectively.

However, we are seeing some transfer in demand from premium products to regular products.

As we have been explaining in the last few months, the spike in FX coupled with an increase in international prices that happened in April put an increasing pressure to our Downstream margins as prices for gasoline and diesel were reduced in dollar terms.

As we always do and to avoid a sharp negative effect in our client base and the overall economic activity, we decided to adjust our prices gradually.

And this is what we have been doing and what we will be showing in the next slide.

Local crude oil prices averaged $65 per barrel during the quarter, almost 15% below Brent price as a consequence of negotiation between producer and refiners.

As a consequence, our Downstream EBITDA per refined barrel and without considering the revaluation of inventories decreased to $4.7 in the quarter.

Finally, as we did in our Investor Day, we would like to address one more time what we have been doing in terms of prices and where we are heading.

So the blue line in the graph represent the evolution of the blended price of our fuels in pesos since crude oil prices were liberalized in Argentina 1 year ago.

We use import parity as the main indicator of where we should stand at the minimum.

The green line shows the evolution of the import parity plus the international reference for heating oil, RBOB and domestic biofuels.

Looking at the graph, it is clear that since April we have been below import parity.

And despite the significant price adjustment that we put in place every month, we're not able to fully catch up during the quarter, as peso devaluated and crude prices were at multiyear highs.

However, we have now reached import parity level in most of our fuel products, except for our regular diesel which is still below.

We will continue monitoring the market conditions and make the necessary adjustments.

We do care about protecting demand.

As you can -- you have observed in previous slides, in a difficult economic environment, constant or permanent price adjustments result in demand softening.

Therefore, we haven't increased prices more aggressively because we believe it would have been negative to our business.

This is a competitive market.

Prices will be adjusted based on competitive factors as we have been and we'll continue to be going forward.

In this slide, we would like to address our outlook for the year.

Our production recovery has been challenged by the situation described before of the gas offer meeting the gas demand and you have to curtail some gas production, in addition to the longer maintenance of the Mega plant and its main client.

As a result, we're revising our production target for the year that we were expecting to be around minus 2% for 2017 based on technical factors to between minus 3% to minus 4%.

The final value will depend on the demand of gas during the fourth quarter of the year.

However, beside this reduction, we want to highlight again our ability to continue delivering on financial targets despite this challenging environment.

We are therefore reaffirming again our guidance for 2018 of 10% growth in EBITDA in dollar terms, while net leverage should stand comfortably below the 2x guidance.

The Vaca Muerta acreage that we have been derisking has shown excellent results.

Well productivity has been improving every year, as well as efficiency and costs, so we are well positioned now to launch new profitable developments.

Along these lines, we are working on 3 new FIDs with our partners before the end of the year that will begin to provide higher production by mid-2018, and others will follow later on.

Finally, the combination of higher oil prices and the new developments will allow us to comfortably achieve the target of keeping our reserve replacement ratio above 1.

With that, we would like to address your questions.

Thank you.

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Bruno Montanari from Morgan Stanley.

First question is on refining.

Considering the sharp devaluation of the currency, I think that the ability of YPF sustaining positive margins in the quarter was positive, but of course margins are much lower than in prior years, so can you comment on the trends for refining

(technical difficulty)

Have we seen the trough?

And can we expect a gradual recovery from now on, or should we still expect to muddle through before things get better for this particular metric?

Second is on costs.

We have also seen interest cost dilution form the devaluation of the peso on your lifting costs, so can we expect more of the dilution to come on the E&P business in the coming quarters?

And finally, on gas prices, what is the current price realization versus what was reported in Q3?

And if you can give us a recap on outstanding receivables from different incentive programs and with gas distribution companies, that would be great.

Yes, thank you, Bruno.

So in terms of refining margins, we believe we have seen the worst and we expect to recover the margins moving forward gradually.

And our idea is to stay the margins that we historically have.

Concerning the cost, we have been helped both by improvements and by devaluation.

So we don't see more dilution moving forward next quarter.

And in terms of prices, Diego will answer that.

Bruno, well, regarding gas prices, third quarter, we registered $4.76 per million btu, including there like almost $0.30 coming from the plan gas.

For fourth quarter, we're expecting to see a slight reduction there due to the reduction that we've seen in the prices coming from CAMMESA.

And also, since October, we have the new prices for distribution companies.

So probably price will be slightly below that $4.76, more close to $4.5 per mbtu, including the subsidized coming from the plan gas.

Great.

And then just on the receivables from the programs on the balance sheet, any news there?

No -- the receivables, yes.

We have a -- remember we have the $760 million coming from the plan gas receivables of 2017.

That is already scheduled to start collecting, starting next year in January, in 30 monthly installments in dollars.

Then we have close to $210 million that are coming from the difference of the FX of the period from April to October, the difference that was originated with the distribution companies.

Actually that is not -- we don't have the details when we will start to collect that.

Probably that is going to start happening next year, but the amount, the outstanding amount, there is $210 million.

And finally, we have already in arrears close to $100 million coming from this year plan gas, okay, that we still haven't collected any of the month and we're expecting that to start happening soon.

Our next question comes from Frank McGann from Bank of America.

Just to follow up a little bit on your new guidance for production to be down 3%, 4%.

When you're looking at the fourth quarter, I was just wondering in terms of the Mega project.

If I understand right, the net effect from that was probably 8,200 barrels of oil equivalent per day.

If you could confirm that.

Is that what we would expect the pickup will be in NGLs in the fourth quarter?

And then as you're looking with this -- the conversion to full developments in Phase 2 of Loma Campana, full development in a couple of the other projects, should we start to see a little bit more acceleration sequentially over the next several quarters in output?

And then just an accounting issue.

In terms of depreciation and looking at the depreciation in dollar terms, if I am correct, there's been a little bit of volatility over the last several quarters.

I was -- and I would have thought that would have been more stable in dollar terms given that you have your function of currency as the dollar, but if you could explain exactly what causes that distortion, it would be helpful.

Thank you, Frank.

So in terms of guidance for production related to Mega.

So yes, we had a situation with Mega during this quarter where the maintenance took longer than planned.

And on top of that, the main client of Mega also had problems.

So this resulted in a decrease in NGLs production.

The figure that you say, 8,200, is correct.

We expect to recover some of this but not all of that.

And then in terms of production moving forward, as we said, we're going to launch the new developments.

It would take some time.

And we don't expect to see an increase in production over the short term but, yes, over the medium and long term, for certain.

And finally, in terms of depreciation, what we have seen now is a higher level of reserves coming forward.

So this is affecting -- of course, subject yet to audit, but this is affecting the depreciation.

(technical difficulty)

follow-up.

Does that mean that your -- the reserve assumption that you have now is higher than what it would have been, say, in the second quarter?

I mean what we are, I would say, affirming is our guidance to have the reserve replacement ratio above 1. And we'll be comfortable about that value.

A complement, Frank.

We usually start reviewing the reserves in the third quarter.

That's why, in the second quarter, we didn't have this yet kicking in into the depreciations, okay?

And that's why we start changing the base of amortization this quarter.

Our following question comes from Florencia Mayorga from TPC.

Just a couple of questions.

One, I would like to know what is the impact that you're expecting of the gas leak located at the Bandurria Sur, problems during the first week in -- of November.

And also a follow-up regarding the payment of receivables related to cash distribution companies.

And how much are you expecting to receive from that?

Okay, thank you, Florencia.

So related to Bandurria, what happened is that we have a well-controlled incident during the current operation that ended up with a superficial oil spill around the well location and an oil spray that affected approximate 2.2 hectares of land.

So there was no personnel injured during this incident.

We currently have around 100 persons working around the location.

We already recovered 95% of the oil spill, and we are now recovering the affected soil in order to start remediation.

We are working in full coordination with the authorities that have full access to the location, and the procedure has been implemented.

At the same time, we're conducting a thorough investigation of the causes of this incident in order to put in place, if necessary, additional procedures or enforce training.

And finally, well, this is no material for us in U.S. terms, and we are insured against this type of incident.

Diego?

Florencia, then in your sort of question regarding the receivables coming from distribution companies.

As I mentioned before, we already have $210 million in arrears there.

And the expectation is to start collecting that next year, but we still need the details coming from the government that has already or publicly said that they will be paying that to producers.

Our next question comes from Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James.

At the Investor Day last month, you specified a 5-year budget of between $4 billion and $5 billion per year.

Is that going to be applicable in 2019?

Or should we assume a somewhat lower level of spending given that you've been spending only about $3 billion this current year?

Pavel, yes, indeed, our 5-year plan calls for an investment of between $4 billion to $5 billion per year.

For 2019, we still have to define our budget.

It's not yet finished, but we'll probably be at the low end of that value.

Okay, that's helpful.

As you're thinking about gas exports to Chile, as you mentioned, how much higher would gas pricing be in the export market versus the $4.80 that you're averaging domestically?

Yes, difficult to say now, but we -- let's expect the same values, around $4 or $4.5.

Our next question comes from Santiago Biagini from AR Partners.

I'd like to ask you a couple of questions.

The first one is related to the OpEx in the E&P business.

This quarter, we saw cost dilutions after revaluation and considering that average cash cost per BOE stood almost unchanged year-over-year.

What will be the reason behind this?

I mean peso-denominated cost didn't dilute at all.

Or is it cost in dollar terms that increased year-over-year?

And a second question, if I may, is related to incentive plan for gas production.

Are there any news regarding the projects that the company has already presented and are pending approval?

Should we expect YPF to subscribe any more projects to incentive plan going forward?

Or are -- the projects that the company has already signed are the only ones that we would expect going forward?

Santiago, this is Diego.

Regarding your first questions, on the OpEx on lifting side, if you look those figures in pesos, probably you will not see that dilution or that reduction in the cost, but when you see that into dollars, as it is the right way to see our numbers, you are seeing that lifting cost has been reduced 16.5% over the last quarter in 2017, moving from $12.6 per BOE to the current value of $10.5 per barrel -- per BOE.

So if you look those figures in dollars, you will see that reduction.

And concerning the incentive plan, we have presented 11 projects that have been all of them approved by the province.

4 of them have also been approved by the national government and we expect the remaining 7 to be approved soon.

So there is no changing.

Our following question comes from Gabriel Barra from UBS.

I have 2 question.

The first one is regarding the price policy [through business].

We saw the increase in company market share in gasoline and diesel during this year, so my question is, what could we expect in the next year regarding the market share level?

And do you expect to keep this end market share?

And the second is regarding the lawsuit filed by the Burford group against the government and YPF.

I don't know if there's any update regarding the lawsuit.

Gabriel, so in terms of price policy, whereas we don't officially say what is our price policy, if you look at the chart that we presented you, you can infer it.

So yes, we have increased our market share during this quarter, and the plan for next year is to maintain it around those level, maybe slightly below.

And so this is what I can say in terms of price policy.

In terms of lawsuit, Diego will give you some answers.

Gabriel, yes, in terms of the Petersen case that is sponsored by Burford, there what we -- the current situation is that the -- it's currently suspended because we have presented an appeal to the Supreme Court to decide on whether this is going to continue to be sued in the U.S. or the local -- in local...

(inaudible).

Tribunal, yes it is, yes.

So we are still waiting for that.

We don't have any additional news there.

That's the current situation.

(Operator Instructions) And we have Lilyanna Yang from HSBC.

Regarding your production.

They were a little bit light 9 months year-over-year versus the full year guidance, so can you still catch up on that?

And do you reiterate your guidance on volume growth for the coming few years?

Lilyanna, yes, when we did our 5-year plan, we've already seen this reduction, so we include it in our plan.

Our following question comes from Vinicius Tsubone from HSBC.

Just a quick question from my side.

You mentioned 3 FIDs by year-end.

They should be La Amarga Chica, Bandurria Sur, but what's the third one?

Yes.

Vinicius, yes, so it's Loma Campana Phase 2 that we presented just couple of minutes ago, La Amarga Chica and Bandurria Sur.

These are the three.

We have no further question at this time.

Okay, thank you very much to all.

We'll keep in touch.

Bye.

Have a nice day.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference.

Thank you for participating.

You may now disconnect.