I am Mike Buker, the President and CEO of PHX Energy Services Corp. What do we do? We're in the drilling business. We're an oilfield services company. We're based in Calgary. A little bit unique, our situation. We generate about 75%-80% of our revenue outside of Canada. Most of that comes out of the U.S. The Permian Basin in West Texas is our largest market. Often when people hear the word drilling, they think drilling rigs. We are not a drilling rig contractor. We provide the ability to steer a well from vertical to horizontal. Here's an image here of a typical well profile that we would do for our customers. If you go back in time, 30 or 40 years ago, almost every well drilled that was looking for oil or natural gas in the world was drilled straight down. In the early 1980s, some new technology came into the industry and gave us the ability to build a curve and then to drill as far horizontally as the customer would like us to. The advantage of that is you get a lot more exposure to the zone of interest that the customer owns the rights to. In the Permian Basin, it might be the Wolfcamp or the Spraberry. In Canada, it might be the Montney or the Duvernay. These are layers of rock that hold oil or gas. The more exposure you have to it, the theory is, the more production you're going to get out of that wellbore. We provide the ability to build the curve and then drill as far horizontally as possible. Let me just jump here. The company was founded in 1995. In 2002, we did a reverse takeover, we expanded into the U.S. Up until 2002, we were entirely a Canadian company. Our growth in the U.S. has been entirely organic from 2002 till today. That U.S. market represents between 75% and 80% of overall revenue for the company. We work for 16 of the 20 busiest operators in that market. You can see the companies that we work for there. Performance-wise, we have anywhere from 100 to 115 active jobs going per day across North America. It takes a lot of logistics to keep that much work going. We drilled just under 13 million meters of wellbore in 2025, which would rank us probably second or third, overall, industry-wise. The other companies that we compete with would be the big multinational service companies, Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker. There are a couple of smaller, one private, one public company, that competes in our space as well. Our space. There are two defined tiers to the directional drilling business in North America. There's about 40 total competitors. There's only about six that compete in the Tier 1 space. The Tier 1 space has some specialty requirements that the Tier 2 companies can't compete in. First and foremost is technology. You have to be able to provide a level of technology that our customers see as providing value to them, which means reliability and speed. Everything in our industry today in North America is built on drilling quickly. If you can help the customer drill the next well faster than the last well, and you can do that consistently, you'll win, and you'll gain more work. That's really how we've grown over the past 10 or 15 years. Of course, relationships are important. These last two are interesting. The ability to pass audits via our customers' quality programs. If you look at a company like Exxon, large, multinational, very strict requirements when it comes to quality management and HSE. The Tier 1 companies have, ourselves and the other companies that we compete against in Tier 1, we all have very extensive quality management systems and health and safety programs that are stringently audited by our big multinational customers. The Tier 2 companies typically don't have the ability to get that premium technology or the ability to pass those audits. This is what we provide. This is an image of the equipment that a directional drilling company today, a Tier 1 directional drilling company today, would have to be able to provide. I'll start in the middle. The black portion is what we call a motor. This is essentially just a steel tube with some mechanical properties inside the tube. You pump fluid through the tube, and it produces horsepower and torque. That horsepower and torque is designed to turn the bit, the drill bit, which is at the end, and the drill bit is what grinds up the rock as we drill ahead. Above the motor, we have what we call a Velocity Real-Time System. This is a string of electronics that tells us where we are downhole and then sends that information up to surface. We have the ability to provide torque and horsepower at the bit. We have the Velocity system to tell us where we are. Those two pieces of technology were really the only directional drilling technology that existed in North America up until about seven or eight years ago. Along came this rotary steerable system. This is the newest steering device. It's quicker. You get a smoother wellbore. It all falls into the desire from our customers' perspective that helping them drill the next well faster than the last well. The addition of the rotary steerable system really changed our business as Phoenix, as PHX. We can charge a lot more for it, and it's more profitable than the rest of the base business is, and I'll give you some numbers here in just a second. Just a quick timeline of what led to the development of our technology. Back in 2012, we were essentially a provider that just bought off-the-shelf technology. We were frustrated with the products we were getting from companies like NOV for motor technology and some smaller companies for the Velocity portion. We call that the measurement while drilling portion. We developed our own through some partnerships with some reputable engineering firms. If you jump ahead to 2016, we launched that technology, both the Velocity portion and the motor, which we call Atlas. From that day on, we started to see some incredible results, and our customers grabbed ahold of that, and that was really what led to the big explosive growth that we saw. 2014, 2015, there was a downturn in halfway through 2015. 2016 was another tough year. 2017, things started to turn around. We saw what I would say is probably the fastest growing directional drilling business in the industry for a number of years. Here's what it all boiled down to. I broke down Montney, which is essentially the premium Canadian field, and the Permian, which is the most active drilling area in the U.S. If you look at the stats on pre-launch of the new technology and post, you can see that we've reduced the number of days it takes to drill these wells substantially. 70% in Canada, upwards of 60% in the U.S. When you're working for a company like Exxon or OXY or Conoco or EOG, these are the numbers that mean the most to them is can you do it safely and can you do it reliably and fast? If so, you're going to get more work. That's really what's been the driver for our growth over the last two years. Just a little bit on the numbers. Down here in the bottom, I pulled some stats together on what we charge our customers on a day rate basis to show you what the impact of the new technology and the addition of this rotary steerable tool has done to our fleet. This tool only gets run on about 20%-25% of our total jobs. If we have 100 jobs running on any given day, we only have 20 - 25 of them with that technology in the ground. The rest are the older, just the top two. For us, the day rate difference is substantial. In a conventional setup where we've just got the motor and the MWD in the ground, we're charging about CAD 15,000 a day. We add this tool into the mix, we get about CAD 35,000 a day. As mentioned, that tool runs at a higher margin than the base business does. You can see what's happened to revenue per day over the course of a seven-year period, Canada, U.S., and consolidated. I'll skip over the financials, just get to the good stuff. Return on capital strategy. Back in, as I mentioned, 2014 was a particularly good year in our business. It was the high watermark for a long time. The entire industry was very busy. Lots of active drilling rigs. 2015 was the beginning of a couple of years of a tough downturn stretch. We were a dividend-paying corp up until 2015. We suspended that dividend at that time. We got to 2017, we had some excess cash. We started buying back our own shares. From 2017 up till present day, we've bought back about 28% of outstanding shares. When we got to 2020, we reinstated that suspended dividend. At the time, we were at CAD 0.025 per share per quarter. We've since increased that to CAD 0.20 per share per quarter, CAD 0.80 per share annually. This is all part of our strategy where we've committed to get 70% of excess cash annually back into the hands of shareholders. There are three analysts that follow us. They would have us generating somewhere between CAD 70 million and CAD 80 million of excess cash this year. If we take 70% of that, we're at CAD 56 million. The dividend will eat up about CAD 36 million of that. We've got another, let's call it CAD 20 million left to either go towards our NCIB or pay a special dividend, which is what we did earlier this year. We paid a CAD 0.20 per share special in April. That's the highlights. Is there any questions I can answer? [audio distortion]. The TAM is not every rig, but it would I divide the North American drilling space into Tier 1, Tier 2. Then, of course, there's the directional driller, Tier 1, Tier 2. The Tier 1 space in North America, which would be customers that would be potentially using the rotary steerable tool, would make up about 650 of the 750 active rigs working in North America today. There's about 560 working in the U.S., 190 - 200 working in Canada. That's our total addressable market. Then within that, there's probably 650 rigs that we would consider that at some point in the next five to 10 years are likely to be adopting this new technology. Yeah. It is. There's a sense of pride amongst some of the customers where they don't want the automated portion. They would like to be able to, l et me back up. The whole industry is shifting towards longer and longer horizontal legs. When I started 30 years ago, there was virtually no horizontal wells drilled at all. They were all either vertical or directional, which is just a little bit of angle in the wellbore. That's all changed. Now 98% of the wells drilled in North America are horizontal. The key way back when was, let's drill 500 m or 1,500 ft horizontally, then it was a mile, then it was two miles. Now it's four to five miles. The further you go horizontally, the more likely it is that you're going to have to run that rotary steerable technology. The reason is you're continuously rotating the drill pipe, so there's a friction factor that comes into play. It's safe to say that if you're drilling beyond three and a half miles horizontally, you pretty well have to run this new technology. Our view is the industry's going there, and it's going to be a big driver for usage of that rotary steerable technology in the future. Anything else? Yeah, go ahead. Can you talk about one of the barriers, I think, from Tier 2 to Tier 1 is the, I think your main point, the audit quality that has to compare. Is this a story where the technology becomes commoditized in a sense that like, and you have to therefore compete? I'm just trying to figure out the dynamic with that. Like how hard is it for Tier 2s to sort of climb the technology curve and also among the Tier 1s, what technology is. Let me jump back a little bit, look. The rotary steerable tools that we run are, the motor and the MWD tool are developed in-house. The rotary steerable technology that we run we buy from Schlumberger and Halliburton. Back in 2018, we were the first company to negotiate a contract to buy that technology from Schlumberger. We bought eight tools at the time. Today we have 60, and we have about 50 of the Halliburton version, and we bought our first Halliburton tool about three years ago. In that sense, those two suppliers will sell that technology to most of our tier 1 competitors. They won't sell it to a Tier 2 competitor because they're smart enough to try to protect that market a little bit too. It's not just the rotary steerable tool. The motor technology is proprietary, same with the MWD technology. Now our competitors all have their version of the motor and the MWD. Of course, we think ours is best. What's happening now is there's a device that we call the universal sub, and this is really important. It's a conduit of information that comes from the rotary steerable tool up to surface. There's a whole bunch of information being pulled out of the rotary steerable tool that is very useful to our customer, and we have to get that to surface somehow. That's the next phase in development. We're ahead of our competitors on that technology. The other piece of it is constant improvement to everything you see here. The motors are getting stronger. The key for us is reducing cost over time. We have to find a way to run those pieces of technology at a lower cost over time, which is not easy because our customers, they push hard on the equipment. Drilling is very violent. People probably don't realize, but there's a tremendous amount of shock and vibration and temperature issues down there. We're drilling in areas that we're seeing up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The electronics in the Velocity system have to be able to withstand that, plus the shock and the vibration. Continuous improvement, which is key. The universal sub, which is a really important piece. As the rotary steerable market continues to grow, I think you'll probably see Schlumberger and Halliburton go ahead and try to sell tools to other companies that are trying to move into the tier 1 space. We have by far the largest fleet outside of Schlumberger. We have 115 total tools. The next largest would probably be 75, and then the next one below them would be 50. I think there is some argument that rotary steerable space has a risk of being commoditized. There are other pieces of the, we call this a bottom hole assembly, that I think we're differentiating ourselves enough to stay ahead of the pack. Was there a question over on this side? Yes, sir. Do you see opportunities outside of North America? We do. We currently have an arrangement with a company called NESR, N-E-S-R. They're a NASDAQ-listed, Houston-based oilfield service company. They operate entirely in the Middle East. We are selling the same technology that we run in North America to them, and they're running that technology for Aramco in Saudi. There are other areas in the Middle East that I think that we could exploit. Our niche is high performance, fast. It's not cheap. One of the problems in the worldwide directional drilling space is customers are typically looking for cheap. That's not a market that we compete in. That's not a market we compete in in North America either. We're looking for pockets, and there are a couple in South America. Argentina, maybe Venezuela, Colombia, a little bit in the offshore market, and then the Middle East, where we think that there is areas that we can exploit. What we're looking for is a market where it took 45 days to drill a well 20 years ago, and it still takes 45 days. Those are markets we can help, because that's what's happened in North America. That 45-day well 15 years ago now takes 10 days in North America. We can't take all the credit for that, but we can take a lot of the credit for that. We, as the directional drilling industry, being able to provide better, more reliable equipment in order to reduce those number of days. We're looking at pockets around the world that we can do the same thing. Anything else? All right. Thanks for your time.
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