Good morning. My name is Joelle, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Pason Systems Inc. first quarter 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star two. Thank you. The contents of today's call are protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of Pason Systems Inc. Please note, the advisory is located at the end of the press release issued by Pason Systems yesterday, which described forward-looking information. Certain information about the company that is discussed on today's call may constitute forward-looking information. Additional information about Pason Systems, including the risk factors relevant to the company, can be found in its Annual Information Form. Thank you. Celine Boston, CFO, you may begin your conference. Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending Pason's 2024 first quarter conference call. I'm joined on today's call by Jon Faber, our President and CEO. I'll start today's call with an overview of our financial performance in the first quarter. Jon will then provide a brief perspective on the outlook for the industry and for Pason, and we'll then take questions. I'm very pleased to report on Pason's first quarter 2024 results, which incorporate results from newly acquired Intelligent Wellhead Systems and also demonstrates our continued ability to outperform industry drilling activity. Pason generated CAD 104.8 million in revenue in the first quarter, a 7% improvement from the CAD 98.2 million generated in the first quarter of 2023, despite a 15% reduction in North American industry drilling activity in that same period. I'll start with an overview of segment performance for the quarter. Against a challenging industry activity backdrop, Pason's North American drilling business unit generated Revenue per Industry Day of CAD 1,000, which represents a new quarterly record for the company and an 8% increase from the level seen in the first quarter of 2023. With the 15% decline seen in industry activity, mostly driven by the U.S. market, the North American drilling segment generated revenue of CAD 73.6 million for the first quarter, which was only 8% lower than the first quarter of 2023. The segment's cost base remains mostly fixed in nature and saw slightly higher repair costs year-over-year, resulting in segment gross profit of CAD 44.4 million in the first quarter of 2024, compared to CAD 52.6 million in the first quarter of 2023. Our international drilling segment generated CAD 14.6 million in quarterly revenue, which represents a 6% decline from the first quarter of 2023, primarily resulting from the devaluation seen in the Argentine peso and the resulting impact on translation to the company's Canadian dollar reporting currency. The devaluation had a similar impact on operating expenses and the segment's gross profit in the first quarter of 2024 of CAD 7.8 million, or 53% of revenue, compared to CAD 8.4 million or 54% of revenue in the 2023 comparative period. On January 1, 2024, Pason closed its acquisition of all remaining and outstanding shares of Intelligent Wellhead Systems, or IWS, which is a completions technology business. The IWS acquisition was funded with CAD 88.2 million in cash on hand, of which CAD 77.8 million was paid at close and CAD 10.5 million was paid early in the first quarter. Pason previously accounted for its non-controlling investment in IWS as an equity investment, and starting in January 1, 2024, IWS's financial results are consolidated within the Pason group and reported in a newly formed completion segment. With the move from equity accounting to acquisition of control and associated consolidation, Pason recorded a CAD 50.8 million non-cash gain on the revaluation of its previously held equity interest. This gain was reported through other income on the company's financial statements for the three months ended March 31, 2024 and has not been incorporated within the company's adjusted EBITDA calculation. With the addition of the completion segment, we now report two operational metrics for users of our financial statements to assess operating performance of IWS. The first is IWS Active Jobs and represents the average number of jobs per day that IWS is generating revenue on through the rental of its technology offering to customers during a reporting period. This measure will provide a sense of IWS's market penetration. The second is Revenue per IWS Day, and this measure represents the total revenue generated by IWS over all IWS Active Days during the reporting period, with IWS Active Days calculated using IWS Active Jobs. This measure will provide a sense of IWS's pricing and product adoption. In the first quarter of 2024, Pason's completion segment had 28 active jobs and a Revenue per IWS Day of $5,026. This resulted in quarterly revenue of CAD 12.8 million. Revenue per IWS Day will fluctuate depending on the mix of jobs and the type of IWS technology used by customers going forward. Gross profit for the segment of CAD 1.2 million represents operating expense investments made for the rapid growth IWS has seen, along with CAD 4.4 million in depreciation and amortization expense associated with the property and equipment and intangible assets acquired on January 1, 2024. Energy Toolbase, which is reported within our solar and energy storage segment, generated CAD 3.7 million in quarterly revenue, an increase of 31% from the 2023 comparative period, with increased control system sales year-over-year. Segment gross profit for the quarter was CAD 0.2 million, compared to a loss of CAD 66,000 in the first quarter of 2023. Sequentially, Pason's results benefited from strong industry activity in Canada through its winter drilling season and the addition of IWS financial results, while U.S. rig counts fell slightly quarter- over- quarter. Both revenue and Adjusted EBITDA improved from the fourth quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024, while a sequential comparison of margins reflects the addition of IWS revenue at lower margin levels, given its earlier stage. Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter was CAD 42.5 million, or 40.5% of revenue, compared to CAD 52.4 million, or 53.4% of revenue. Adjusted EBITDA margin in the first quarter was impacted by lower industry activity levels in the North American drilling segment over our mostly fixed cost base, along with the addition of lower margin revenue from IWS, given its current stage of maturity and growth. We will continue to manage our fixed cost structure towards our expectation of upcoming activity levels and with the acquisition of IWS in the first quarter. Further, we will make the necessary investments in our cost base to deliver on further revenue growth and create opportunities for long-term free cash flow generation. As we've seen many times in Pason's history, growth in industry activity levels in the company's North American drilling segment would highlight the significant operating leverage within the business. Net income attributable to Pason for the three months ended March 31st, 2024, was CAD 69.5 million, or CAD 0.87 per share, an increase from CAD 35.8 million or CAD 0.44 per share generated in the first quarter of 2023, for which the increase is primarily from the previously mentioned CAD 50.8 million accounting revaluation gain on the IWS acquisition. Our balance sheet remains strong and, coupled with our free cash flow generation, allows us to make growth-related investments while returning meaningful levels of cash to shareholders. Net capital expenditures in the first quarter of 2024 totaled CAD 19.3 million, which included CAD 4.8 million of carry forward CapEx from 2023, and also the addition of capital expenditures for IWS's business as we make investments to support their growth trajectory. Resulting free cash flow in the first quarter of 2024 was CAD 11.7 million, compared to CAD 34.7 million in the first quarter of 2023. With this free cash flow and cash on hand, we returned CAD 13.6 million to shareholders through our quarterly dividend and share repurchase program. We also repaid CAD 13.3 million in outstanding debt acquired through the IWS acquisition and ended the year with total cash, including short-term investments, of CAD 74.2 million and no interest-bearing debt. In summary, we are very well- positioned for growth with our established position within drilling and our growing position in completions in solar and energy storage. I will now turn the call over to Jon for his comments on our outlook. Thank you, Celine. Our financial results for the first quarter of 2024 highlight the strength of our competitive position in our drilling-related segments, as well as the significant opportunities for growth that Pason has in the drilling market, the completions market, and the solar and energy storage market. Consolidated revenue in the quarter was 7% higher than the prior year period, despite North American land drilling activity being down 15% over the same period. While Pason would benefit from growing North American land drilling activity, our ability to deliver meaningful growth and strong financial results is not dependent on higher activity levels. There are three important ways in which we look to grow, even in an environment where we anticipate North American land drilling activity to remain near current levels for much of 2024, before slowly increasing later this year and into 2025. First, we look to outpace underlying industry activity through growth in North American Revenue per Industry Day. Second, we are growing our international revenue. Third, we are generating increasing revenue from high-growth markets, including technology offerings in the completions market and in the energy and solar and energy storage market. I'll speak to each in turn, beginning with North American drilling. Our North American drilling segment displayed the strength of its competitive position by achieving Revenue per Industry Day of $1,000 in the quarter. This marks a notable milestone in Pason's history. Revenue per Industry Day has increased at a compound annual growth rate of 8.4% over the five-year period since the first quarter of 2019, largely as a result of strong product adoption and improved price realization. We anticipate that growing demand for high-quality data, driven by customers deploying a wider range of data-driven technologies, will result in continued growth and adoption of our core product offerings, most notably in the area of data delivery products. Our new Mud Analyzer, which provides customers with continuous real-time readings of critical drilling mud parameters, has experienced very positive early market response. The list price of $1,000 per day for the Mud Analyzer compares very favorably to Pason's overall Revenue per Industry Day, and with growing adoption of the Mud Analyzer as it rolls out more broadly into the market, it has the potential to make a meaningful impact on this important metric. We have also seen accelerating traction among our automation products, most notably the Drilling Advisory System and Toolface Control. Our second important area of growth is international markets. Our international drilling segment continues to post strong results, generating $14.6 million in the first quarter. Market dynamics and geopolitical conditions and their impact on near-term activity vary across our international markets b ut across the markets, we see continued favorable trends of growing technology adoption and a greater use of drilling data in planning and operations. The third growth area I mentioned earlier was our investments in higher growth markets, namely completions technology and solar and energy storage. Obviously, North American completions activity is directly correlated with land drilling activity. That said, the use of data in technology and completions significantly lags its usage in drilling. As a result, we see strong growth over the short to medium term as companies more fully utilize data-driven technologies to further drive efficiencies in their completions. IWS generated $12.8 million in revenue in the first quarter, representing an all-time high for the business on the strength of $5,026 in Revenue per IWS Day. The most significant impact on IWS's growth in the short to medium term is likely to be the increased use of technology within the completions market. We also expect further gains in product adoption. We are also bringing together the unique expertise and experience of Pason and IWS to develop a compelling data aggregation and data delivery offering for the completions market. In order to access the full benefits of data-driven technologies, the completions market will need access to reliable, consistent, high-quality data, and we believe that Pason's long history of providing drilling data to customers gives us a unique ability to meet this need in completions. In the solar and energy storage market, government regulations have motivated deployment of a larger number of energy storage assets. As customers look to optimize the performance of those assets, Energy Toolbase has seen a large increase in its pipeline of sales opportunities for energy management control systems. ETB posted revenue of $3.7 million in the first quarter, with the 31% year-over-year growth driven primarily by the sales of additional control systems. Quarterly revenue for ETB will fluctuate as a result of timing of control system deliveries. We're also continually increasing the functionality of our leading economic modeling and proposal generation software tool to address the requirements of additional end markets. Our priorities with respect to capital allocation remain focused on pursuing attractive growth opportunities while returning meaningful capital to shareholders. We continue to expect capital spending of between CAD 75 million and CAD 80 million in 2024, including approximately CAD 5 million in anticipated 2023 capital expenditures, which were impacted by the timing of deliveries. We will continue to pursue disciplined returns over time through our regular dividend, which we are maintaining at CAD 0.13 per share. We maintain flexibility in our approach to shareholder returns by evaluating share repurchases in the context of attractive organic capital investments to generate additional free cash flow. We evaluate our capital program with a focus on increasing revenue, generating free cash flow, and creating value for shareholders over time, rather than simply in response to prevailing near-term industry conditions. Our balance sheet remains strong. As of March 31st, we had CAD 74 million in total cash, including short-term investments, and positive working capital of CAD 119.6 million. The strength of our business allows us to make the required investments to secure our position as the leading provider of drilling and completions data and technologies, to pursue additional sources of revenue outside of oil and gas drilling, and to return meaningful capital to shareholders. We would now be happy to ta ke any questions. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request, and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from Keith Mackey with RBC Capital. Your line is now open. Oh, hi, good morning. Just wanted to start out with a question about your presence in the Permian. Jon, can you just kinda run through maybe your exposure there, whether it's a percentage of the whole company or whatever you can? Certainly, we're hearing more and more about longer laterals in the Permian, more data usage, and some drillers have even talked about robotics this reporting cycle. So can you just kinda run through some of the main themes you're seeing in, you know, on the leading edge of technology and where Pason is positioned to play there? Yeah, sure. Happy to, Keith. Thanks for the question. So the Permian is clearly where a lot of the activity is happening in U.S. land. O ver the last, you know, certainly the 10 years since I've been here, but probably more meaningfully over the last five or six years, we've really grown our presence in the Permian. I think historically, that was an area where we might have been underrepresented. Today, our share there would be very similar to our share in any other basin, if you look at the drilling-related market. So it's a very important part of our North American business in the drilling segment. It's also a very significant portion of the opportunity and the revenue on the IWS side, similar to what we see on the drilling side. To your point, people are trying to do a lot in the Permian to increase efficiencies. On the drilling side, they're clearly using more data to look to drive more automation technologies. Completions is a little further behind. I think historically, completions has probably focused a little bit more on horsepower, logistics, and chemistry, and the usage of technology and data is a little bit more recent. That is accelerating quite quickly. G iven the volume of activity in the Permian, it's an area where there's a lot of focus on some of the deployment of these technologies and a bunch of trials happening in that area. Okay, appreciate that. Just maybe on IWS. Can you give us a bit more context around, and it probably has to do with some of the things you just talked about, Jon, but can you give us a bit more context around, you know, I'm sure customers, the feedback is good, but can you give us a bit more specifics about, you know, the use case for customers, what they find they like about it, and generally the retention rate on the equipment? Yes. So the value proposition, particularly from the automation technologies that IWS would be principally offering today, is twofold. There's clearly a very significant safety element. The ability to keep human beings out of the red zone on a frac site is quite significant in terms of safety impact and the ability to monitor what's happening in the red zone to avoid potential incidents is very important. So that's part of it. The other side, of course, is the efficiency side, where people are trying to increase the amount of time spent fracing and reducing non-productive time. S o your ability to ensure that the right valves are opened and closed at the right times, and rapidly in sequence when these changes need to happen, measuring pressure, pressures to know when to make those changes, that's all very important for driving efficiency. So from the automation perspective, Keith, it's as much about safety and about efficiency. The usage of data in a more aggregated form is much earlier stage in completions, and that's where we see an opportunity really to do what Pason has done for a long time in drilling, in completions a nd the usage of that type of technology is nearly nonexistent today because it's very, very early days in terms of being able to provide that type of service to that industry. Okay, appreciate it. Thanks very much. Yeah. Thanks, Keith. Your next question comes from Aaron MacNeil with TD Cowen. Your line is now open. Hey, morning. Thanks for taking my questions. Hi, Aaron. Morning, Jon. You mentioned you highlighted the CAGR on the Revenue per Industry Day in North America. You pointed to the Mud Analyzer and automation systems as a source of near-term growth. That's all noted. I guess I'm looking a little beyond that, and maybe I'm front-running the Investor Day here, but can you give us a sense of what, like, a new product roadmap could look like on the drilling side? Y ou know, are there any new functionalities you're developing or, you know, problems that your clients are asking you to solve? But I guess what I'm getting at is, like, in your president's message, you talk about outperformance relative to the rig count. Like, do you see this as a short and maybe medium-term phenomenon, or do you have enough in the pipeline that you think it's a longer-term phenomenon as well? Yeah, good question. Thanks, Aaron. I guess I would just go back and say that that growth rate of Revenue per Industry Day over and above industry activity extends over 15 years, so that doesn't really feel like a short-term phenomenon to me. I think the question that you're asking is, do we think it can go forward at roughly the same rate? T he short answer is yes. It's a combination of a few things. One, of course, is that there is an effect of pricing every year when you think about the fact that prices generally move up in most industries through inflationary types of pressures. But the bigger contribution is people are trying to do more with data and technology. A s they're trying to do that, it's, it's not just about mud analyzers. There's lots of adoption we're seeing in other ways of people accessing data to be used by more users, whether those users are humans or machines. S o the Mud Analyzer is an excellent example of an opportunity to create a very new and rich data set to further allow people to do things in automation and analytics. But when we think about kind of new product and new product roadmap, it's probably less about product names, and it's more about can we deliver more data that is valuable to people making decisions in real time from more places to more users? S o it's not always about a new product name, it's more about are we delivering more product or more data to people to make decisions. Got it. Similar question. You know, you also referenced international growth. Is that gonna be a function of market share capture, higher product adoption? Like, you know, assuming you're behind in, in either of those buckets, internationally relative to North America. I guess, again, just wondering where you see the, the lowest hanging fruit. Like, is it, you know, further product adoption? Is it market share capture, et cetera? So internationally, it would be much more around product adoption, particularly around more usage of data for purposes beyond just kind of real-time monitoring and instrumentation effectively. So there are certainly reasonably large parts of the international business, which would be lower day rates because it's taking a much smaller subset of the types of equipment and technology that we would use a nd it's really the adoption of further technologies that moves the distribution of day rates to more of a normal distribution than a left-skewed distribution. Got it. Okay, thanks. I'll turn it back. Yeah. Thanks, Aaron. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star followed by the one. Your next question comes from John Gibson with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now- Good morning, all. Can you hear me? We can hear you fine, John. Okay. I think, yeah, you're kind of cut off, but you're still here, so. Hey, John. Okay, cool. First on IWS, how should we think about the cadence of module additions this year based on your CapEx? Is it kind of a straight line? T hen also, are the systems currently being built already accounted for, or is there an element of sales that needs to happen prior to adding them on rack fleets across the U.S.? Yeah, it's never linear, John, right? You don't know exactly which customers you're gonna get where a nd part of the challenge when you're working with very large customers is that they sometimes want to scale to additional fleets quickly, and so you have to have equipment available for them to do that. So when you talk about the equipment being earmarked, would it all be directly earmarked to a specific date and a specific job? Not all of it today, but certainly we have line of sight to where we need to have that equipment available to be able to respond as operators scale their programs. S o when you talk about the sales effort, you know, the sales team is doing a wonderful job on the IWS side of adding new customers. You know, one of the things that, so just to kind of fill you in on a dynamic around IWS, they're a little bit more exposed than Pason itself would be to slowdowns as a result of M&A activity that's happened in the U.S. or as a result of depressed natural gas prices. So they would see some slowdown of activity, not because equipment's moving somewhere else, but the equipment is just sort of slowing down for a period of time. So the easiest sales, frankly, are when things get busy again, where you're already have the relationship and have already done lots of work with the crews. S o as we talk about activity picking up later into this year and into 2025, there's a bunch of what you could almost think of as very low-hanging fruit growth opportunities just from the reactivation of a bunch of equipment. So their ability to grow revenue, I mean, it's a, it's a record quarter for IWS this quarter, but that sort of masks the fact that they've also had to backfill some slowdown of activity in some parts of their business. It would be somewhat similar to the drilling business, where, you know, U.S. market share for Pason, when we reported it, looked flat for a period of time, at the same time that the industry was moving more meaningfully to the Permian, where we had less representation, as I referenced earlier in my remarks to Keith. S o you had a lot of regional share growth to make up for the shifting of the industry. Similarly, IWS has had a lot of growth to make up for some slowdowns in some areas where they're a little bit more exposed, just given their size and customer base today. John, maybe just on your first part of that question, the cadence of the CapEx, we've you know, guided roughly towards CAD 25 million of CapEx for the completions business this year. I think you can expect that to happen steadily throughout the course of the year, and that's really a function more so of manufacturing capacity in every given month than anything else. Okay. Appreciate that. Second, the revenue per day number in IWS is higher than what I was expecting. I guess, first, is this sustainable? S econd, if we compare or extrapolate it to day rates on the drilling side, I know it's probably not perfect apples to apples, but would this imply the addressable market is likely larger on the, on the pumping side? I think if you look at addressable market, it's likely larger on the completion side. There's a lot of work to go get that, right? So I don't want to suggest that you can say without a lot of effort and some time it's gonna take to achieve realization of revenue from that. But I think the market opportunity, as you're saying, John, is probably as significant or larger. To your question around, it's sustainable, yeah, it's sustainable if this is all that we did. Now, as we roll out with new customers and as we get into deploying some more of these technologies, much more on the data aggregation and data delivery side, I think what you'll start to see is a little bit more variability in that metric than you see in Revenue per Industry Day on the drilling side, based on customer mix and product mix, through the revenue opportunities you have. So as you work with some new customers, they may take a subset of the equipment, and then they start to use more of the technologies over time. So it's sustainable if we just kept working with the same customers in the same ways, but we're gonna be, of course, rolling out new technologies. We're gonna be looking to work with new customers, and that will introduce a level of variability. Okay, great. I really appreciate the responses. I'll turn back. Thanks, John. Your next question comes from Cole Pereira with Stifel. Your line is now... Cole. Cole. Hi, good morning, all. So acknowledging we're just through the first quarter here, but pretty solid results out of IWS thus far. You'd previously guided to CAD 20 million-CAD 25 million of revenue growth in 2024. You know, are you still comfortable with that? Could you see that maybe getting revised higher a nd how should we think about growth in that business beyond 2024? Yeah, so I, I would say short answer is we're still comfortable with that sort of a, a projection. I would say that it's always subject to the industry conditions, and as I just said to John, they're probably a little bit more exposed to some of the dynamics around natural gas price and some of the M&A activity we've seen. S o what that will ultimately mean will be a question of the timing, probably more so than the deliverability of those revenue growth opportunities. There's always a risk of upside revision to those numbers when we look at the types of customers that we're working with and their ambitions to deploy technology across a broader number of suites, or fleets rather. S o I think today, my best estimate or my best guidance is, is in that same sort of range that you've kind of referenced, and it's always a little bit hard to know exactly the timing and exactly when, some inflation around some customers' activity will start to, to deliver. Going through 2025, we continue to see very much that same trajectory. Obviously, some of our comments around drilling activity picking up through later 2024 and into 2025. Some of that is based on an improvement on the natural gas side. To my earlier comment about some natural gas folks slowing down, repicking up, I think that would probably accelerate the growth of the IWS business a little bit more than what you would see in, a 2024, where if that's how the activity played out. Okay, got it. Thanks. C an you just remind us how much of that business is operating in Canada right now? J ust to reiterate kind of your earlier comments, you there's no real competitors out there of scale for this business. Is that fair? There are competitors of scale in this business. There's a few other people who do things now. Our understanding is IWS is probably about half of the business for people who use this type of technology, and the other half is shared by a few folks. So it's not as though IWS is the only player, but they're clearly the leading player in the industry. It's essentially all in the U.S. today. They do occasionally pick up a job here or there on the Canadian side from more word of mouth and awareness. We haven't really put a lot of commercial business development efforts into the Canadian market or other international markets where we think it applies, just given the pace of growth and the amount of opportunities we have in the U.S. land right now. Got it. T hen, Celine, you know, there's a bit of a uptick sequentially in R&D and G&A, understandably. How should we kinda think about those two figures on a quarterly basis going forward? Yeah. So I would say the primary reason for the uptake quarter-over-quarter would be as a result of the incorporation of IWS's financial results. As G&A, you can think about that one mostly as fixed going forward. R&D, also primarily fixed, but R&D, I'll remind you, is a strategic choice, right? A s we talk about making investments in the data aggregation offering on the completion side of things, you know, that's a strategic choice as it relates to potentially making incremental investments in R&D. Got it. Perfect. That's all for me. Thanks. I'll turn it back. Okay. Thanks, Cole. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, should you have a question, please press star followed by the one. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Jon for closing remarks. Terrific. Thanks so much. Thanks for taking the time to join us this morning. We do appreciate your continued interest and support, and we're pleased to be able to start sharing more information about IWS. As a reminder, we are hosting an Investor Day at our Calgary office on May 30th. If you would like to attend and you haven't had a chance to register, please do so on the Investors section of our website or by emailing investorrelations@pason.com, a nd if we don't have a chance to connect before then, we'll look forward to seeing you then o r you can reach out to Celine or myself if you have any further questions. Thanks so much, and have a great day. This concludes the conference. Thank you, everyone. You may now disconnect.