Enerflex Ltd

TSX:EFX

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q1

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the First Quarter 2020 Enerflex Earnings Conference call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference may be recorded. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. Stefan Ali, Director, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

[Stefan Ali, Director of Investor Relations]

[Audio Gap]everyone and thanks for joining us. Here with me virtually are Marc Rossiter, Enerflex' President and Chief Executive Officer; Sanjay Bishnoi, Enerflex' Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Ben Park, Enerflex' Vice President, Corporate Controller. During this call, we'll be providing our financial results for the 3 months ended March 31, 2020, a brief commentary on the performance of our 3 business segments and a summary of our financial position.Today's discussion will include forward-looking statements regarding Enerflex' expectations for future performance and business prospects. Forward-looking information involves risks and uncertainties, and the stated expectations could differ materially from actual results or performance. Please see the advisory comments within our news release, MD&A and other regulatory filings for more information on forward-looking statements and associated risk factors including those related to potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.Approximately 1 hour following the completion of this call, a recording will be available on our website under the Investors section.During this call, unless otherwise stated, we'll be referring to the 3 months ended March 31, 2020, compared to the same period of 2019. We'll proceed on the basis that you've all taken the opportunity to read yesterday's press release.I will now turn the call over to Marc.

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Thanks, Stefan, and good morning, everyone. Before discussing the quarter, I want to first thank Enerflex employees who have worked tirelessly to maintain a high level of operational integrity for both Enerflex and its customers. I'm proud of their resilience, performance and positivity in an otherwise challenging environment. Our quarter is a reflection of their strength.Enerflex' first quarter results reflected the continued execution of high-margin engineered systems projects in our backlog and growing contributions from our asset ownership platform. Like most others in the sector, the COVID-19 pandemic has created much uncertainty in the market. The health and safety of our employees is of paramount importance, and I'm happy to report that we've yet to experience a COVID-19 case among all of our employees who operate across 17 countries.Each of our facilities and assets under contract continue to operate without disruption, and we remain vigilant in our health and safety efforts. We've implemented several business continuity measures to mitigate potential impacts of COVID-19, including social distancing measures to dilute personnel density in our shops and in the field, implemented additional cleaning measures for communal spaces, instituted additional PP&E protocols, requiring certain people to participate in temperature checks and health questionnaires and installed additional hand washing stations. For office employees, we've also implemented work-from-home strategies to minimize physical presence in our offices.Globally, the challenge we're currently seeing is around maintaining unrestricted access to active construction sites, particularly within geographies where governmental restrictions on movement are impacting site access. We have 2 sites in Canada that are still progressing and remain relatively unaffected, but we are more closely monitoring our international BOOM sites that are under construction. Our work site in Argentina was restricted for a few weeks and we are now back on site. Similar access restrictions occurred at one of our Brazilian sites, which has slowed our progress, for which we continue to advance. Most impacted has been a site in the Middle East as a result of restrictions on in-country logistics and trucking. Overall, the 3 previously announced BOOM projects that we anticipated would commence operations through to mid-2020 are now more likely to commence operations in mid- to late 2020, provided there no additional restrictions are imposed.In addition to COVID-19, the sector is also impacted by the severe downturn in oil prices. Typically, our business lags commodity price action and associated impacts at the drill bit by 4 to 6 months. We're still in the early stages of assessing adverse impacts from this downturn.That said, while we had a relatively healthy first quarter, we've seen continued pressure on the Engineered Systems business in North America, where the bid pipeline is not as strong as what we were seeing 2 months ago. Earlier in the year, we were cautiously optimistic that we will see an improvement in bookings as the year progressed, but that sentiment has changed in the lockstep with current macro picture for energy. As a result, we expect Engineered Systems in Canada to be very quiet, while the U.S.A. will also be slow but somewhat better.Ultimately, Engineered Systems is a business that is tied to the CapEx of our customers. So with reductions across the space, we expect this business to be pressured for at least the remainder of this year and until we've seen improving supply and demand picture for oil and gas.For our global asset ownership platform, revenues and utilization were strong during the quarter, and we entered 2020 with the healthy demand indicators for the U.S. and rest of world regions. In the U.S.A., clients' demand signals were tempered as the macro picture deteriorated. Consequently, we anticipated a reduction in that demand and halted capital spending appropriately. This decision prioritize balance sheet strength during a time of great uncertainty. As the macro picture remains uncertain, our teams have been actively engaging with customers to gain visibility on how fleet utilization might change going forward.In the current commodity price environment, rentals will see pressure as oil wells are shut in and associated gas volumes are reduced. The positive is that our rental fleet is mostly fungible and can be directed towards gas play and cost-advantaged shale basins throughout the U.S. and the rest of world regions. Lat Am and MEA have a different set of drivers. In Lat Am, many of our natural gas projects and assets are focused on domestic electricity demand and are not directly correlated to Brent or WTI crude pricing. Similarly, Middle East projects are developed by customers, mostly NOCs and IOCs, specifically to increase the role of natural gas in regional electricity generation.Our clients continue to indicate that our natural gas projects and assets are critical to their overall development plans. The investments we've made in our asset ownership platform are sound and will continue adding stability and predictability to our financial profile. But the current macro picture has driven the industry into uncharted waters, and we would be remiss to speculate as to what the ultimate ramifications to our rental business could be. We will instead focus our efforts on what we can control, taking action to protect returns on our investments, maintain customer relationships, preserve fleet utilization and keep our customers' assets performing as promised, all of which can assist in mitigating pressure to our asset ownership business.Aftermarket service, AMS for short, has performed well for the past several quarters and has been resilient in the early stages of the pandemic. AMS is an OpEx-oriented business and will be most impacted by production shut-ins. If wells are flowing, equipment needs to be serviced to run reliably. We have service personnel in all major basins in North America and all of our operating regions globally. This diversification should provide defensiveness through the remainder of the year. The current operating environment has created challenges in likes of which few industry participants have seen. It will be a difficult year for the Engineered Systems business, and the demand destruction for crude oil has created uncertainties for other Enerflex products and services. We expect 2020's financial performance to be underpinned by our asset ownership in AMS businesses. Both of which may see some pressure for which we anticipate will carry us through this downturn.Our focus is to maintain a defensive balance sheet as we navigate the cycle. We've run several analyses to plan for a broad range of industry activity, and we'll continue to monitor and make cost reduction decisions accordingly. Being proactive in this regard should keep us well positioned to weather this downturn and succeed as the industry recovers.I will now turn things over to Sanjay to review our financial results.

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Thanks, Marc. Fourth quarter revenue of $366 million decreased versus the prior year period due to lower engineered systems revenue on the weaker bookings through 2019 and lower services revenue on decreased activity and part sales. This decrease was partially offset by increased contribution from our growing contract compression fleet. Our U.S. contract compression fleet totals approximately 325,000 horsepower with an 87% utilization rate at March 31, 2020, compared to approximately 310,000 horsepower with an 87% utilization rate at December 31, 2019.Although revenues decreased, gross margins increased over the comparative quarter, driven primarily by high-margin Engineered Systems projects that were booked near the end of 2018. Certain of these projects were completed during the quarter, while change orders have extended the project scope and duration for which others will contribute to revenue. We expect to complete these high-margin projects during the second quarter.Quarterly consolidated gross margins of 26% represent the highest quarterly gross margins in the company's history. But again, as these high-margin projects are completed in 2020, gross margins from our Engineered Systems business will decrease and margin contribution from our other product lines will make up a larger portion of total gross margin.As Marc mentioned, Engineered Systems bookings activity is anticipated to be slow for the remainder of 2020, while the market navigates the impact of COVID-19 and global demand destruction for oil and gas product.Selling, general and administrative expenses decreased over the comparative quarter due to lower compensation costs associated with the share-based compensation, partially offset by unfavorable foreign exchange movements. We remain vigilant in controlling costs across the platform to align with expected activity levels. Cost savings initiatives include a combination of workforce reductions, temporary leaves of absence, unpaid time off, planned shop shutdowns and reduced travel and other discretionary budgets. EBIT increased versus the comparative period as a result of the increased gross margin and lower SG&A costs, while adjusted EBITDA, including the impacts of share-based compensation, was consistent with 2019. Growth of our asset ownership platform continued in the quarter with rental revenues of approximately $54 million, representing a 12% increase over the comparative quarter.During the quarter, $63 million of capital was deployed towards U.S. rental fleet and international BOOM projects at an approximately 60/40 split. As described in our operational update during the quarter, we are committed to 2020 growth capital expenditures of approximately $90 million to fulfill obligations for the completion of 5- and 10-year BOOM contract in our Rest of World segment and for our USA contract compression fleet. With the capital plan being front loaded in the first half of 2020, maintenance CapEx across our platform is estimated to be approximately $15 million for 2020. Exact values for expenditures will depend on foreign exchange rates and final project scope.Working capital in the quarter saw a net increase of $44 million since December 31. We entered 2020 with what appeared to be a robust backdrop for U.S. contract compression and an improving view of the Engineered Systems order book, but we have since slowed our supply chain transactions to align with current market conditions. Inventory levels increased during the quarter due to purchases of major equipment with long lead times, which were ordered in prior period and delivered during the first quarter. The company expects inventories to have peaked in Q1 and will realize these goods into engineered systems projects and new contract compression units as demand for these products return. Notably, these items are nonperishable and fungible across our engineered systems and rental offering, so we can consume them in either business line globally.In addition to inventory, receivables become a more salient topic in this environment. While it's still early days, we have not seen material challenges in our pace of collections and our local finance teams and treasury groups are engaging in weekly updates to ensure that we are staying on top of it. In addition, our assets are spread across a global footprint and across multiple basins, which assist in mitigating counter-party credit risk that can results from customer concentration. While the current environment may stress AR, in the coming months, we do ultimately expect to harvest cash out of AR as the year progresses.As Marc mentioned, the COVID-19 situation has created some operational challenges for in-flight construction projects as a result of government instituted restrictions on movements in and out of countries and/or work sites. The ramifications of these restrictions have resulted in scheduled slippages for the expected start dates of 3 of our previously announced BOOM projects. Which, in our last earnings call, we anticipated would commence operation and began generating revenues in mid-2020. That timing has been pushed out, and we expect the respective BOOM projects to begin generating revenue by mid- to late 2020. The most significant of these 3 BOOM projects is located in the Middle East where government restrictions on access to sites have resulted in transportation delays to and from site. We fully expect that work will continue as expected once these restrictions are relaxed.For other rental assets, namely the U.S. contract compression fleet, we do expect some softness to hit this segment as the year progresses, driven by a reduction in produced oil and gas volume. Prolonged commodity price weakness is likely to reduce demand for Enerflex' products and services. Ultimately, we are watching fleet utilizations closely and working with customers as best we can to find mutually agreeable arrangements to maximize our interest and theirs. The majority of our U.S. rental fleet is located within the Permian Basin, where we have maintained a presence since 2005. We believe in the long-term potential of the Permian and anticipate that it will be a significant part of our operating footprint going forward.Demand for Enerflex' products outside of North America is more constructive than within North America, and we continue to assess opportunities that would be accretive to our asset ownership platform.From a capital allocation perspective, our priorities in 2020 are focused on 2 areas: completing those capital expenditures as required to fulfill obligations related to our organic rental fleet addition; and preserving balance sheet strength to weather the current downturn. The latter of which was reflected in our proactive dividend reduction of 83%. Enerflex' Board will continue to evaluate dividend payment on a quarterly basis based on the availability of cash flow and anticipated market conditions. Yesterday, declaring a $0.02 per share dividend to be paid on July 2, 2020.With respect to liquidity, we exited the quarter at net debt-to-EBITDA of 1.2x, which represents a slight increase from our net debt position of 1x EBITDA at December 31. The $70 million increase in net debt is attributed -- attributable to: First, foreign exchange fluctuations between U.S. dollar and Canadian dollar, where the strengthening U.S. dollar during the quarter contributed to approximately 30% of this increase; and second, previously mentioned expenditures on inventory and CapEx commitments, which, again, are front loaded for the year and will see a significant slowing as the year progresses. With available liquidity of $530 million, our debt position remains healthy and leaves us flexibility to manage the business through the current downturn.This completes the formal component of the webcast. Additional details can be found in our May 7 press release. We will now be happy to take any questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Greg Colman with National Bank Financial.

[Greg R. Colman]

Congrats on a solid looking start to the year. I know it's going to change a little bit, but at least we see some good numbers in Q1. I wanted to start by focusing on the Engineered Systems bookings in that side of the business. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit more detail on the cadence of the bookings that you saw in the quarter. The $155 million was more than we were expecting. It was actually an uptick sequentially. In your prepared remarks, you talked about how you entered the year optimistic, and that's kind of trailed off as we've seen the impact of COVID and demand destruction come through. Was that the sort of thing where those bookings were very much at the beginning of the quarter? And we should probably look for bookings to slow aggressively from that level into Q2 and beyond? Or is that sort of a reasonable level for us to be thinking about in the next couple of quarters, which was, quite frankly, better than we were expecting in Q1?

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Greg, this is Marc Rossiter speaking. Thanks for the question. The first quarter, January, February, was good, and once the COVID situation hit, not surprisingly, there was a real slowdown in purchase orders. And I would say that our pipeline, the quality, the equipment in the pipeline for new orders going forward softened after the COVID pandemic started roughly the middle of March. I think anybody that's looking at the macro in North America would be expecting the rest of the year to be soft on Engineered Systems, and that's what we're preparing for.

[Greg R. Colman]

Got it. That's good color. And you touched on geography there, which is sort of leading to my next part. You gave us nice geographic segmentations for the bookings. I think we saw $100 million in the U.S. and then the balance was split between sort of rest of the world and Canada somewhat evenly. In historic quarters, the bookings location, like the $100 million in the U.S., is where it's manufactured but not necessarily the end market. Is that $100 million definitely a U.S.-focused market there? Or is the component of that actually targeting the rest of the world? Just looking for that color.

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Well, we don't provide that level of detail for competitive purposes. The -- I would say, in the first quarter, we definitely saw a resurgence of North American activity, January, February like I said, after 4 quarters of relatively low bookings in North America. So we're not going to give you details on how much is going to the U.S. and how much is going internationally. But it was sort of a little bit of a reawakening in the North American land market on -- for new orders from the first quarter.

[Greg R. Colman]

Got it. No worries. Okay. And then, Sanjay, you started talking about the working capital there, and it sounds like, reading through your comments, you're pointing to a working capital release beginning in Q2. I'm just wondering, am I reading those tea leaves correctly.

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes. That's -- it's a good question, Greg. I think that's certainly what a lot of the external models, I believe including your model, is predicting, and we've got reason to believe that, that's a good way to think about it and a good way to model it. We haven't seen any real concerns yet in terms of customers that are going to extend payments or be challenged to pay. I mean we continue to watch those very closely. But by and large, yes, we are anticipating through the year to see some monetization of working capital.

[Greg R. Colman]

And just in terms of the magnitude, I know it's a dynamic situation there, and I don't want to hold you to a specific number. However, the current working capital surplus is record high, $360 million. When we look at the company's history, it's sort of been between $120 million to $160 million of working capital surplus. Understanding this is, of course -- which is sort of a delta of $200 million. Understanding, of course, that this is a unique time. Inventory is probably not going to come down that much. But can you give us an idea as to what your target working capital surplus would be over the balance of the year, so we can have some kind of idea of how much of that working capital will be released and can go towards net debt reduction?

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes. It's a tough thing for us to give guidance on, right? A lot of it, especially in this industry setting, is tough to predict. And so I think we're just not comfortable kind of putting out guidance on that number right now. I would say, qualitatively, I think your statement is correct. Like we actually do anticipate that we'll have more luck with the AR/AP side of working capital than we will with inventory. And I think it really is -- we're going to have to see a turnaround in the Engineering Systems order book before I think we have a chance of significantly digging into inventory and monetizing that.

[Greg R. Colman]

Okay. That's good color, Sanjay. And then last one for me before I turn it back just on the rental market and shut-in risk. Can you talk about how that's manifesting now as we're in April here? We've got 2.2 billion cubic feet a day shut in. The EIA is talking about that ramping to 11 billion in the U.S. What kind of returns have you seen in your rental market now? Are you likely to move in line with the U.S. shut-in average? Or is there a reason that your shut-ins might -- your returns might be either higher or lower than the average there based on your size of compression packages and the geographic location?

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Greg, this is Marc. We're going to be very careful to not predict utilizations going forward. It's a dynamic situation. Our fleet is relatively small. And so I would caution against any direct correlations between big picture macro and the impact on our particular fleet. We've got good customers in basins that are challenged to different degrees. And we'll just have to see how it shaped up.

[Greg R. Colman]

That's the really valid part, Marc. Just talking about what we're currently seeing now, can you give us -- not forecasting at all, but can you talk about sort of today we're seeing a low single-digit percentage of U.S. natural gas shut in? Because your fleet is so small, that percentage could be wildly different from what you're seeing to your point. And is it? Or is it at least, at the moment, reasonably close to the macro numbers?

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Greg, you're just going to have to wait for our Q2 numbers to come out on that front. It'll be a little bit too dangerous for us to start giving vague indications of our utilization. I think we have to be quite strict on just saying we don't provide guidance on that, and you'll know when Q2 numbers come out.

[Greg R. Colman]

Understood. I'll give it one more shot, which is some of your peers have talked about sort of a 6% to 10% decline in activity. And I'm just wondering, when you look at your peers' commentary, were you surprised by that commentary or not surprised by it?

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Well, I would say that if we can leave our peers out of it for a moment, when we look at the last couple of big cycles in the rental business, which we looked at very closely before we invested in this business and decided to invest in it as a new business line, specifically in the Lower 48 United States. We saw pretty clearly where the utilizations went in 2015, '16 and again during the mortgage crisis. And if those are the downside cases in the rental thesis, then we were comfortable with that. And I've obviously read the quarterly results of our peers or companies that we admire, and the numbers that they're talking about in their predictions very much look back to '15 and '16 as for examples, but it's very -- we really have to point out that every downturn is different. And the downturn in this situation is different than it was in '15. And so it's difficult to draw a direct conclusion. But what I can tell you and our investors is, we've spent a lot of time stress testing our business with a variety of potential downside cases, and we're comfortable with our investment. We're comfortable with our ability to manage through and to be a strong company on the back end of it.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Keith MacKey with RBC Capital Markets.

[Keith MacKey, Analyst]

Just first question here for you, guys. You talked about your medium-term goals as a 10% EBIT margin with 10% annual growth in recurring revenue. This year, obviously, going to be different. So just what are your targets for managing this year? Are you thinking about the business in terms of free cash flow neutrality? Do you think that's achievable? Or how are you thinking about getting through 2020?

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes. Thanks for the question, Keith. I think you're right, like it's -- the growth metrics, especially are things that I think we really need to put on the shelf for a bit, right? I think just appropriate given the severity of this downturn that we focus on balance sheet strength, and that's really how we're reprioritizing our goal. I would say that free cash flow neutrality, I believe, is absolutely possible. And a lot of that is going to depend on what Greg was asking us about, which is monetizing our working capital. And I think as long as we do a decent job of that, I think we can certainly manage within free cash flow neutrality.

[Keith MacKey, Analyst]

Got it. Makes sense. And last question for me is just in the backlog, just can you give us an idea maybe of the split between projects that are underway versus projects that have yet to be started.

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Sorry, can you repeat that one, Keith?

[Keith MacKey, Analyst]

Yes. So just curious about the backlog, roughly $400 million. Is a lot of that projects that may be halfway through completion or partially through completion versus projects that are in the queue to be delivered and haven't been necessarily started yet?

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes, I think that's a fair statement. I think a big chunk of our backlog is certainly stuff that's in flight.

[Operator]

We have a follow-up question from the line of Greg Colman with National Bank Financial.

[Greg R. Colman]

Sorry, I found more frustrating questions. Just on the CapEx program, just want some clarity here. You call it $90 million growth, $15 million maintenance, front-end weighted. You spent $67 million in Q1. I just want to make sure that I'm not messing this one up. The simple math, there's $38 million to be spent in the rest of the year. Is that probably mostly in Q2? Or is it kind of weighted throughout the rest of the year?

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

It's weighted throughout the year, Greg. I think the X factor here for us is the delays on some of the international BOOM projects. And so we were anticipating that those projects would be online in the first half of 2020. And we're managing access to those sites. We still feel really good about all 3 of those projects but probably coming online second half of 2020 as opposed to first half of 2020. So when that CapEx gets realized is a little bit of a function of what time line we're on, on those projects.

[Greg R. Colman]

Got it. The projects you were mentioning in your earlier comments.

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes.

[Greg R. Colman]

And then lastly for me and related to the CapEx. The $63 million in the quarter was deployed towards rentals. This is getting a little cute here. But can you give us an idea of the cadence during the quarter? Did that get blasted out at the beginning and we saw the full benefit of that capital during the quarter? Or was it at the very end of the quarter, and we didn't see any contribution from the [ UDA ] as those rentals went to the market or sort of evenly weighted? Just trying to get a feel for the, I guess, lift from that capital as it's being deployed in Q1.

[Sanjay Bishnoi, Senior VP & CFO]

Yes. I'm not even sure that I know that to that level of detail, Greg. I think it was pretty flat and pretty ratable across the quarter. And again, I guess I would point to that CapEx spend was, again, split pretty equally Rest of World versus United States rental fleet. And so the Rest of World stuff was definitely just on a schedule. And so I think it really comes down to digging into the U.S. numbers, and just gut feel, they feel pretty -- they felt pretty ratable to me. But honestly, I'd have to dig into detail to really get you an answer.

[Operator]

I'm showing no further questions in queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Rossiter for closing remarks.

[Marc Edward Rossiter, President, CEO & Director]

Since there are no further questions, I'd like to thank you once again for joining on the call. I'd like to point out that on the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, I'd like to thank all those employees who had family members that were part of the allied forces during that time. Just thank you for your service. And all of our employees and clients that have family members that are currently serving in the armed forces. Thank you to them for their service as well. We look forward to giving you our second quarter results in August. Have a good weekend.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.