Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Boart Longyear full year 2022 results webcast. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Today, we are in the Zoom webinar, which means attendees are in view only mode. Unfortunately, we cannot turn your cameras and mic on. To interact with the panelists, please use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. There, you can ask questions, and one of the panelists will do their best to answer your question. Chat has been disabled, but you may receive announcement from the panelists throughout the webinar. I would now like to introduce the host of today's event, Tony Shaffer, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Shaffer, you may begin. Good morning to those of you in Australia, and good evening to those in North America. Welcome to our full year 2022 results webcast. We released our press release, annual financial report, and the results presentation earlier today. The documents are available on our website. With me today is our CEO, Jeff Olsen, and our CFO, Miguel Desdin, who will be leaving us. Following our prepared remarks, we'll take your questions. Jenny Fuss, our new CFO, is also with us to observe our webcast process. Move to slide 2, please. Please refer to our forward-looking language for today's presentation, which is also included in our press release. I'd now like to turn the call over to Jeff. Thanks, Tony. Welcome to our full year results webcast. I'm excited to discuss our performance and highlight our achievements for 2022. For those who may be with us for the first time, I want to briefly introduce our company. Next slide, please. Boart Longyear is a unique organization in the mining services sector, encompassing the world's largest specialized drilling and services providers, industry-leading products, business, and a cutting-edge mining technology platform. We really have three businesses that we talk about on these calls. We have peers within each segment, yet no group can service customers across the mining value chain like Boart Longyear can. Across our 130+ years of history, we've developed numerous disruptive technologies, improving the efficiency of the mining industry. We have a global reputation as the industry leader for innovation. Operating on five continents, we have a global footprint with almost 6,000 employees worldwide and work across various commodities. Next slide, please. We'll talk a little bit about our 2022 results here at a high level. We had a strong 2022, benefited from our work during the last few years to strengthen our balance sheet and improve our cost structure. As we'll discuss today, when operating a truly global business, there are many key elements within your control. However, there are economic realities such as inflation, foreign exchange rates, or supply chain challenges that are outside of our control. We work diligently to navigate and mitigate global impacts where possible. That said, our results are supported by a robust macroeconomic environment, driving long-term demand for metals and mining. This demand is being fueled by electrification in the green economy, which will require significantly more metals, such as copper and nickel. All indications point to a strong future for metals. For 2022, we delivered revenue in excess of $1 billion, which is the first time since 2013. We're also proud to have achieved our first net profit in 10 years. Adjusted EBITDA increased 7% to almost $125 million. Drilling services had an outstanding year as they benefited from increasing demand for our diverse drilling products. Price and volume gains led to both top and bottom-line expansion. Products saw good revenue growth, yet faced significant inflationary and foreign exchange pressures that negatively impacted EBITDA. Earlier this week, we marked a significant milestone as a leader in orebody sciences with the launch of Veracio. This new division combines science and digital technologies in a single integrated platform, helping mining companies get more value from their orebody data faster while mitigating the environmental impacts of their decisions. Powered by our award-winning technology platform, Veracio is well-positioned to support the growing global need for critical minerals by championing an approach to orebody science based on speed and sustainability. All told, it was a strong year, and we're well-placed for growth in 2023. Let's talk a little bit about the macroeconomic environment. Next slide, please. The macroeconomic environment is driving metals demanded as the foundation for Boart Longyear's future growth. Electrification is a key component of the energy transition underlying metals demand. Copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel are critical to electric vehicles and power generation. I would say particularly copper. We are very active in the copper space. In 2022, drilling services generated about 30% of its revenue from copper and nickel-related drilling, which is an increase over prior years. Exploration investment by mining houses has struggled to keep up with the surging demand for green metals. This comes on the heels of almost a decade of underinvestment, creating a current environment that is much more of a supply problem than a demand issue. Late in 2022, as US inflation appeared to be easing, China removed their zero COVID policy, which fueled expectations for higher metals demand. As a result, commodity prices surged, with gold hitting around the 1,950 range and copper exceeding $4. S&P reported that exploration budgets increased 16% in 2022 to $13 billion. Gold was the top exploration target, as it usually is, with budgets hitting a 10-year high. Copper budgets increased 21% over 2021, even more than gold. I think that's a nine-year high. Let's move to the next slide. Turning to our performance for the year. Despite our challenging start on safety, the second half of 2022 saw improved performance, and we benefited from our renewed focus on critical risk management and doubled down on EHS fundamentals, such as our eight Golden Rules of Safety. Many of our safety incidents came from new employees, and we saw an increase in hand injuries. We've been vigilant about safety, especially with the ramp up as we come to the ramp up in 2023 and are optimistic that our processes and systems and efforts will bear fruit and good results in 2023. Revenue increased 13% over 2021 to just over $1 billion, driven by price and volume expansion in drilling services and products. Drilling services saw a robust customer demand, particularly in Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. The economic environment in the middle of 2022 resulted in a financial pullback in the junior space. Any rig availability we had was generally assumed by other customers. Products saw a muted revenue growth for the year, driven by exploration as well as infrastructure tooling. As I said earlier, revenue was negatively impacted by unfavorable exchange rates. Adjusted EBITDA increased 7%, driven primarily by volume and price gains by drilling services. Adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted by products. Really, that was driven by raw materials inflation, of course, mainly steel, supply chain disruptions, and unfavorable exchange rates. We delivered net profit after tax of $12 million as we benefited from lower financing costs and G&A expenses. Lastly, we invested $60 million of capital back into the business to position ourselves for long-term growth. This included new drill rigs and Veracio research and developments. Let's go on to the next slide. I want to focus a bit more on the performance of drilling services and products. One of the benefits of Boart Longyear structure is that drilling services has access to both our products portfolio and our Veracio technologies. Our financial reporting consolidates the group inter-segment sales, and we started providing additional detail, you know, financial data before elimination, allowing investors to better understand the true scale of each of our business units. Drilling services saw a strong revenue growth in 2022 and even stronger EBITDA increases for the year. Client demand was robust as we worked through numerous customers on 2023 drilling programs. Surface coring, RC/rotary, and underground coring accounted for the majority of drilling services revenue and almost 90% of the drilling services revenue came from what we define as major mining companies. Drilling services EBITDA for the period benefited from price and volume increases. Products delivered 6% revenue growth, yet EBITDA declined. Several things I would note. From a revenue perspective, 2021 was a difficult comparative year because as the industry rebounded from COVID and supply concerns mounted, many tooling companies made aggressive purchases, fearing limited inventory at the end of 2021. For 2022, EBITDA was mostly impacted by input cost inflation. We talked a little bit earlier about steel, but also freight and supply chain, particularly on and component parts. As well, as I mentioned earlier, on unfavorable exchange rates. For clarity, products and Veracio are combined for the reporting purposes. For 2022, Veracio's EBITDA was negatively impacted by professional fees and litigation, which masks the product's performance. Beginning next year, we will be disclosing Veracio's performance separate from products. Next slide, please. We are thrilled to launch Veracio, which fuses science and technology and offers mining clients a range of solutions that improve, automate, and digitally transform their orebody sciences. Veracio leverages artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to accelerate real-time decision-making and significantly lower the cost of mineral exploration and improve decision-making. As part of the launch, we also announced the appointment of JT Clark as Veracio's CEO. He is a well-recognized leader in mining tech with a track record of operational success. Mike Ravella, who is in many ways the closest thing we have to a founder, an innovative mind behind Veracio's predecessor, Geological Data Services, has been named Chief Innovation Officer. Prior to Veracio, JT was a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he led the global mining practice, built Phosa, which is the firm's AI solution for mineral processing. We're delighted that TruScan, an important part of the Veracio portfolio, was named Mining Innovation of the Year by Mines and Money in December. As part of the award, TruScan was recognized for its groundbreaking capabilities. Boart Longyear has a rich history of innovation in the mining world, and Veracio has inherited the same. To assist miners by setting a new bar for productivity and efficiency while improving environmental stewardship. Let's go on to the next slide. Beginning in 2021, Boart Longyear established a formal ESG program, and in 2022, we appointed a dedicated ESG manager to lead our sustainability efforts. While our formal program is relatively new, the organization's history of innovation is based on ESG principles. Veracio's technology is a great example because it helps mining companies improve their environmental stewardship. Employee training is a cornerstone of our ESG program. During 2022, our employees completed 63,000 training modules, which included EHS, ESG, and compliance training. We've been committed to expanding the diversity of our workforce for a number of years, and have established a goal called 15 by 25. We want to expand our global workforce to include 15% women by the end of 2025. At the end of 2022, women represented 11% of our workforce, up from 9.8% at the end of the previous year. We finalized a baseline project during 2022 to measure Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions at our 6 manufacturing plants. This complex undertaking is a critical component of our ESG commitment. We have also initiated a baselining project to measure Scope 1 and 2 emissions within drilling services. Lastly, Boart Longyear Canada recently won the Safe Day Every Day Gold Award for the third year in a row. The award is presented by Canada's mining industry collective, and is a testament to our dedication to making it safe, making it personal, and making it home. That wraps up my section before I turn the call over to Miguel to discuss our financial performance. I wanna offer a heartfelt goodbye as he leaves us. Much of the performance we're discussing today was made possible by our recapitalization in 2021, and Miguel was absolutely critical to the success of that strategic initiative, and we're very, very grateful for the impact he's had on Boart Longyear. He has been working with our incoming CFO, Jenny Fuss, who is on the call today to ensure a smooth transition. Miguel, thank you for everything, and I'll turn the call over to you. Thank you for those kind words, Jeff. Strong customer demand last year helped us achieve strong consolidated revenue growth, while adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted by several factors, which I will discuss. We'll take a more granular look at revenue, adjusted EBITDA and liquidity in the next few slides. Next slide, please. Revenue for the year increased 13% to just over $1 billion. There was a negative foreign exchange impact of 5%, mainly from movements in the Canadian and Australian dollars. Pricing gains at drilling services and products, as well as volume increases from drilling services propelled revenue growth. Next slide, please. Similar to revenue, adjusted EBITDA benefited $73 million from drilling services and products pricing, and $20 million from volume gains within drilling services. Inflation had a negative impact of $68 million. Drilling services saw consumable and labor inflation, while products was impacted by raw material and manufacturing cost inflation. We also saw some inflation in SG&A. The negative FX impact of $10 million mainly came from Canadian and Australian exchange rates. Productivity improvements at drilling services drove the $5 million positive impact in the other category. Next slide, please. Finally, a look at liquidity. We spent much of 2022 proactively managing working capital as well as inventory. We've seen improvements, but there's more work to do. For the year, we generated $81 million of cash from operating activities. We saw $17 million in positive working capital, paid $28 million for interest and taxes, and spent $60 million on capital expenditures, net of $6 million of asset sales. At the end of the year, we had a cash balance of $35 million and $5 million available on our ABL. This resulted in available liquidity of $40 million. That concludes my remarks. I'll turn the call back over to Jeff. Thanks, Miguel. To summarize 2022, industry fundamentals remained strong with the mining sector well-positioned given the strong long-term demand for green energy and electrification. Our revenue growth was robust, and we're working to proactively manage inflationary pressures. Next slide, please. I'm very enthusiastic for 2022 and think we have a clear opportunity for disciplined growth. Because we self-fund capital spending, we're extremely deliberate about the growth projects we select. We expect our growth will be supported by strong economic fundamentals that are driving long-term demand for metals and mining. This demand is being fueled by electrification of the green economy and will require significantly more metals such as copper and nickel. I think as you see, as we're drilling more for copper in 2022, I expect that trend may continue in 2023. For drilling services, we'll continue to grow our fleet similar to 2022 and focus on both the gold and the copper space, which is our sweet spot. With products, our focus will be on our select markets where we think we can have meaningful impact as well as strengthening EBITDA. Lastly, with Veracio, we're focused on building scale, revolutionizing the mining industry and setting a new bar for productivity, efficiency, and improved environmental stewardship. On to the next slide, please. In wrapping up, I want to leave you with what makes Boart Longyear stand out from an investment perspective. Our unique combination of best in class businesses is a competitive advantage, allowing us to provide customers with distinct products and services offered under one roof. We offer a revenue mix that encompasses both commodity and geographic diversity. Veracio is revolutionizing the industry and upending the legacy logging and assaying processes. Our right-sized balance sheet has positioned us to take advantage of robust growth and opportunity and continue our push for improved profitability. That concludes the prepared remarks. Before we move to Q&A, I want to welcome our incoming CFO, Jenny Fuss. She has a strong global manufacturing background, and I look forward to working with her. Jenny, would you like to say a few words? Thanks, Jeff. In my three weeks with Boart Longyear, I have been very impressed with what I have seen and the many colleagues I have already met. I'm looking forward to advancing our financial management and working with our shareholders. Thanks, Jenny. We'll now open it up for questions. Hi, this is Gary here. I just want to repeat the question, the instructions to interact with the panelists. Please use the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. There you can ask questions and one of the panelists will do their best to answer your question. Jeff, I think there is one question for you from the audience. What are your expectations of Veracio and why is the division a separate entity? Listen, Veracio is very exciting for me. I think the opportunities for Veracio going forward and the value that Boart Longyear and Veracio will create are tremendous. The this market is new. We are changing the way things are being done. That requires us to introduce into the market new ways of doing work, and our customers are recognizing the benefits of those new ways as we speak. So we're gaining traction pretty quickly. I think that the future of Veracio is very, very bright. There's an awful lot of opportunity out there for Boart Longyear and for Veracio to create quite a stir in the marketplace and also to create that value we know is there. Thank you, Jeff. We have another question from the audience. Can you give us more color on the inflationary headwind that you're experiencing? Maybe Jeff or Jenny. Yeah. More color on... I'm sorry, I missed the question. More color on? The inflationary headwinds. Oh. you're experiencing. Sure. you know, we were hit by significant inflationary pressures. drilling services is a bigger part of our business, and yet frankly, inflationary pressures hit our products business much more. you know, in some cases we have operational hedges for costs in drilling services. for example, a key component of making tooling is gonna be steel. The other side of it is if we're gonna make rigs, it's component parts. All of those had significant inflationary pressures. Those are significant for the products business. I think a lot of them have started to mitigate towards the end of 2022. we see them less as an impact in 2023. Certainly, you know, the, you know, those issues are not gone. It's really those issues that are biggest for our business. I wouldn't discount either, particularly the first half of 2022's freight and distribution costs. They were pretty wild. You know, if you look at what it cost to get a container from China to the U.S. in the first half of 2022 versus the fourth quarter of 2022, tremendously different. Maybe not quite back to pre-COVID levels, but certainly back in a much more reasonable range. Yeah, those inflationary pressures are really around those base commodities like steel and which impacted not only our raw materials but our component parts and also freight and distribution costs. Thank you, Jeff. I have one question from Ben. You mentioned that rigs will pick up by the majors in Q4 from juniors who pull back. Does this represent better pricing? S&P are also quite bearish on juniors. Ed thinks major spend in 2023 will be flat. What are you seeing versus this? I think let's just target the first question first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy to take that one, Gary. Listen, we did generally replace business that would stop during the year from juniors with other business. A lot of times that was with the major miners. The major miners continued to spend throughout the year. One of the things I would point out is that, you know, some regions have more junior activity than others. I think spend with the majors will increase in 2023, but junior spending needs to come back. I think there's a lot of pent-up demand for that. I think there's certainly a lot of juniors that are probably waiting for capital markets to improve so that they can raise some money. I would caution that it takes a few months after juniors raise money for it to turn into drilling contracts. Having said that, you know, I'm still fairly optimistic about 2023. Thank you, Jeff. Okay, I think, is there any more questions from the audience? If there's no more questions, I'd just like to finish off by saying I think this is a good year. You know, we had what was really historic disruptions, global disruptions, particularly in supply chain, which impacted inflation and distribution and logistics. That certainly impacted our business. Our top line was quite strong. If you look at the results of the drilling services business, also very strong and significant flow through to the bottom line. You know, I think it's a good result for 2022. Many of those impacts of 2022 look like they're mitigating for 2023, and we think that's an important part of what we look at going forward. I'm quite optimistic about where the business will go. Certainly, there will be different speeds of recovery in different regions of the world. I would look for some strong results in the US and Latin America that might be a little bit more copper-focused and maybe even more major-focused. Certainly, I think there's a strong possibilities for 2023. I'm looking forward to getting on this call and talking about this at midyear and seeing how that went. I'm quite optimistic about it. With that, I think we'll end the call. Thank you, Jeff, and thank you everyone for attending.
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