Investor conferences. My name is Scott Powell, President and Chief Executive Officer of Skyline Corporate Communications Group, LLC. On behalf of OTC Markets and Skyline Corporate Communications Group, we are very pleased that you have joined us for today's Small Cap Growth Conference. The next presentation is from Valeura Energy. Please note that you may submit questions for the presenter at any time. You may also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings by clicking Book a Meeting. At this point, I am very pleased to welcome Mr. Robin Martin, Senior Vice President of Communications and Investor Relations for Valeura Energy. The company trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the ticker symbol VLERF, and on the TSX under the ticker symbol VLE. Welcome back, Robin. You may begin. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for that introduction, and thanks to everyone online for tuning in to learn a little bit more about Valeura Energy. I'll speak today to a batch of slides from our corporate update presentation, which is available in its entirety on our corporate website, just using a selection of them for today's presentation in the interest of time. I'll draw your attention before I begin to our disclaimers and advisories slide, asking that you take a look, in particular, at the cautionary language around forward-looking information that I might use in this presentation. What I thought I would do today is I'll give you just a bit of an overview on Valeura Energy for those who are new to the business, and also touch on some of the higher-profile projects that we're working on right now. Looking at 2025's performance, I think gives you a pretty good snapshot of what the company is all about. As Scott has mentioned, we are TSX listed and also quoted on the OTCQX. We're a Canadian company with our headquarters in Singapore, and all of our operations in the offshore Gulf of Thailand. We produce 22,000 barrels of oil per day, approximately. That comes from reserves of nearly 60 million barrels at the end of 2025. That follows a few years of very good reserves replacement success. We've replaced approximately double the production that we had in each of the last three years, averages out to 192% for 2025. Very good progress, and very pleased to have done that three years in a row. Just for context, the company has recently traded at market cap of about $1.1 billion at its peak. The number on the screen shows you that we are $842. In fact, that's a bit light. We're closer to the $900 million US market cap as of today. Major things we've accomplished in 2025, we took a final investment decision on a major field redevelopment at our Wassana field. I'll go into that in a little more detail. We've also signed a very large-scale farm-in with PTTEP, which is Thailand's national oil company. We are farming out legacy assets that we have in Turkey. I won't speak a lot about Turkey today. The focus for our business really is on Thailand, but we'll disclose more on Turkey in due course. The other thing that I would note is Valeura presents one of the very few opportunities among publicly traded companies for investors to get exposure to high Asian oil prices. There's a lot that's been said over the current energy crisis and disruption to supply that Asia stands to bear the brunt of higher prices when it comes to accessing oil supplies. As a producer, with all of our production coming from Southeast Asia, that obviously has a positive impact on our cash flow. Just jumping into a little bit more capital markets detail. What I'm showing here is a share price shown in Canadian dollars, as our primary listing is on the TSX, going back to the beginning of 2022. The reason for that date is that's really when we began our strategic transition to go from being a small gas producer in Turkey to building this portfolio of oil-producing assets in Thailand. You can see the three major transactions that we've taken along the way. What I'd like you to take away and observe from this chart is certainly the market has liked the transactions that we've done. They've been very accretive. However, most of the share price growth that we've seen over the last few years has been from demonstrating that we're able to execute on this portfolio to grow, to add cash flow. Just a few more capital markets details, as you can see on the left-hand side of the screen. We trade with very good liquidity. We're trading about 1 million shares a day. That's based on a 30-day average, meaning there's around $8 million or $9 million worth of stock traded hands every day. That creates an opportunity that, as a new entrant, you can build a material position in this company on the open market. Case in point for that is our second-largest shareholder there, Thoresen Thai, who hold 15% of the company, all of which was purchased on the open market. Baillie Gifford has had a longer history with the company, large, blue-chip, U.K.-based investor, very supportive of the story. They hold 17% of the company. I like presenting this slide a lot because it's one that hasn't changed over the last few years, so I can memorize it. Just to touch on the sort of strategic pillars of the company, we're a growth company. Our ethos is to deliver value through growth. There are three pillars to that. The one on the left, maximize cash flow from organic portfolio. That's maybe more words than it needs to be to say organic growth is a part of what we do. It is organic growth in the way of growing the longevity of cash flows, giving our assets more life, and creating more and more years to generate the strong cash flow that we're demonstrating. Right-hand side, inorganic growth. Obviously, we have grown through the mergers and acquisitions market, and I expect you'll continue to see us growing through the mergers and acquisitions market. I'll go into a little more detail on what makes that compelling in just a moment. Equally important to how we intend to grow the company is how we operate the company. Operational excellence, for that reason, occupies the same sort of stature within our corporate strategy as everything else. We operate with world-class standards. We have a relentless focus on operational efficiency, health, safety, and environment, and with this, have built ourselves a very strong reputation in Thailand. Touching on our assets in a little more detail. Offshore Gulf of Thailand is what we're looking at here. Just to describe the basin in general, the entire area of the Gulf of Thailand is relatively consistent when it comes to sea conditions and water depth. We're looking at water depths of 45m- 75 m throughout the entire basin. That's relatively shallow water. That's important because that means we can do all of our drilling with jackup drilling. I would also mention the geologic conditions across the basin are also relatively consistent. There's a lot of predictability and repeatability to the types of facilities that we can use for exploiting oil and gas resources in the basin. The four producing fields we have are the ones that are identified here in gold typeface. Looking at the two in the north, Manora and Jasmine, I would describe these as being on the more mature end of the oil and gas spectrum. They both continue to surprise to the upside. The Jasmine field is a very good example of what's possible in the Gulf of Thailand. This is a field that was developed in 2005 with an expectation of recovering a sum total of seven million barrels. When we look at September or possibly October of this year, we expect to be producing our 100 millionth barrel from this field. Let that sink in. A field that was developed with the expectation of recovering a total of seven million barrels is now staring down its 100 millionth barrel. I'll add, we have more reserves now than that original seven million barrels at the beginning. Moreover, there's also exploration opportunities on this block, and there's a potential exploration well that we could be drilling later this year. Same story on a slightly smaller scale for the Manora field. More mature, smaller at about 2,000 barrels per day. However, this as well is a field that keeps unveiling new opportunities to bake in more efficiency. Things like purchasing the floating storage and offloading vessel, which is an investment that we expect pays for itself within two years, as well as ongoing ability to add to the life of the asset through infield drilling and some potential exploration that we're looking at doing later this year there as well. The two fields to the south, Nong Yao and Wassana, are at the other end of the spectrum. They are in an initial growth phase. The Nong Yao field, our largest and most profitable field, had its third facility installed in 2024 and allowed that to expand. We are also investing into this field with enhancing one of the facilities to add some additional well slots so that we can do more drilling without having to first wait for existing wells to reach the end of their productive life. The Wassana field, too, this was the first acquisition that we did in Thailand that gave us our 100% operated interest here. We very quickly realized opportunities to develop more oil resources than were ever going to be done with the existing infrastructure, and for that reason, we've moved into a large-scale redevelopment. I'm going to touch more on that in just a moment. The two assets in the middle that you see, G1/65 and G3/65, are the subject of a large-scale farm-in that we're doing with PTT EP, the national oil company. Lots of infrastructure-led opportunities defined by six or eight focus areas that we see on these blocks, which will lead themselves to a final investment decision in the first instance on a gas development we're expecting at about the third quarter of this year, with much more to come thereafter. I mentioned the Wassana field, and just to get into slightly more detail on Wassana. The image that you're seeing in the bottom right of the slide is a photograph of a new central processing platform that we're building for the Wassana field. Importantly, this photograph is from the Thai Nippon Steel yard in Thailand, literally about an hour's drive away from our Bangkok office. That's an important dynamic in itself because what I find is a lot of people are surprised to learn that Thailand has an active oil and gas production industry, and even more surprised to learn that all of the support services for our industry, the Schlumbergers, the Halliburtons, other contractors, are there and resident in Thailand as well. It's not just that. We also have world-class fabrication yards like this who can produce this sort of equipment that we would get from anywhere else in the best yards of the world, and it's being done right there in Thailand. That's important because it helps to manage costs, and with that, you can see some of the economics that we're able to generate. When we took FID on this project in May of 2025, we stress-tested our economics at a low oil price scenario of $60 per barrel. Even at that low price mark, you still see generating a 40% internal rate of return, a project that would pay back within 18 months, and the ability to reduce OpEx of the overall portfolio. We expect this facility, once it's in operation, will have adjusted OpEx of between $12 to $16 per barrel. That should support and reduce what is already, I think, a very respectable OpEx of about $26, which is what we've been averaging for the last couple of years. Importantly, having a large facility like this on the Wassana field gives us the ability to keep growing as well in the same manner as we've seen on Nong Yao, as we've seen on Jasmine, and as we're seeing on Manora. We're building this facility with additional risers so that we can tie in additional satellite accumulations that we've identified both to the north and to the south of the existing field. Speaking of infrastructure-led development and growth, our farm-in with PTTEP is what's in focus here. You can see on this map the sheer size of the two blocks that we are gaining an interest in. 40% working interest is what we will earn. There's a final administrative step for the government to approve this transaction for that transfer of interest to happen, which we anticipate in the fairly near term. In the meantime, I'll just touch on what these blocks are really all about. On this map, I've shown the existing oil and gas producing fields within Thailand as well. What you can immediately see is offsetting these fields are very large gas and also oil fields. That's important because it creates the opportunity that new gas developments can be tied into that existing infrastructure, reducing costs and also reducing the timeline to bring first production on. Zooming into one of these blocks, the G3 block, you can see three focus areas identified on this block alone of what I expect are going to be several focus areas. I'll touch on the Bussabong gas development area, the area sort of in the middle of the map that's got the green box around it. That green box is 3D seismic that has existed for some time already. Using that, PTTEP drilled some wells in early 2025, made some gas discoveries. Thereafter, Valeura entered this by way of farm-in, and we've been in discussion on gas development thereafter. The box also defines a production area, which has been reserved with the government as part of this block, and I expect we're taking a final investment decision on an initial gas development here in the third quarter of this year, as I've mentioned earlier. That initial gas development is likely to focus on two gas platforms. What I would note is the black circles that you're seeing on this map are each a potential gas platform. There's 24 of them to fully develop this field. You can start to build a sense for the scale of opportunity that we're looking at. That's just one of the many focus areas on one of these two blocks. Another aspect to this transaction of Valeura entering these blocks, and why I think PTTEP was happy to invite Valeura in as a participant here, is that we're bringing expertise and also access to infrastructure related to potential oil developments on these blocks. In the northern part, you can see this darker shaded block called G1/48. That's in fact our Nong Yao field. What we believe is the Nong Yao field is in fact part of a larger oil trend that extends northward through this G3 block, and in fact, on beyond that to an adjacent block to the north. We can identify some prospects on 2D seismic. However, we recognize that we'd like to have 3D seismic in order to fully image this and fully decide where we want to be spending our exploration dollars. For that reason, we've acquired seismic in 2025. I expect data from that acquisition will be hitting our workstations within about the next month or so, and that will start to shape an exploration program for oil exploration, some of which could potentially be tied back to the Nong Yao facilities that we own and operate. I mentioned reserves earlier as one of the sources of pride for this company. Just to put that into context, at the end of 2022, we had about 29 million barrels in 2P reserves. Now, since then, and up to the end of last year, we've already produced 24 million barrels. Over that same period, we also added 53 million barrels, meaning we find ourselves at the end of 2025 with 58 million barrels of reserves, and therefore have added to the cash flow and the longevity of our assets. That's shown with the Gantt chart at the bottom right of the slide, which shows you fields like Manora and Jasmine, originally expected to reach the end of their economic life in 2026, have now all been extended out such that the earliest end of field life that we see is 2031 for our assets. In the instance of Wassana, that extends out into the 2040s. I would also add, this is before ever having added an additional barrel. If we were to stop adding barrels now, we've got economic life of our portfolio out into the 2030s or 2040s. That's important for us. Adding those future years of additional cash flow is key and is why we built the portfolio the way that we have. It is a highly cash generative portfolio. You can see numbers from 2025 shown here. In 2025, we saw an average realized oil price of just over $70 per barrel, and on those numbers generated nearly $600 million in oil revenue. Taking off that royalties, which are well-defined and highly predictable in the Thailand fiscal regimes. Taking off that adjusted OpEx, $26 per barrel. Very respectable offshore OpEx, as I've mentioned. Very modest G&A, very modest tax payments, which ties to an advantaged tax position that we have carrying a bunch of tax losses from historic acquisitions. We've generated adjusted cash flow under that low oil price environment of nearly $250 million. Obviously, we're not in a $70 oil price environment anymore. We're in more like $100 as a benchmark, and more than that when it comes to our realization. I expect our cash flow generation is going to be very strong in the near term. As a result, we've built a very strong balance sheet. We have zero debt, and at the end of the first quarter of this year, we have $262 million in cash on our balance sheet. That's usually the point at which people ask me, what are you going to do with all that money? Again, another slide that hasn't changed very much, if at all, in the last few years is our priorities for how we allocate spending cash. Number one, and it shouldn't come as any surprise, tying directly to our strategy is CapEx into organic investment. This is investing back into our producing assets in order to maintain production in a target band of 20,000-25,000 barrels per day through to the mid-2030s. There's also a measured amount of exploration spending in there and ongoing appraisal in order to add additional reserves and create that next batch of development drilling opportunities. We need to be investing into our portfolio, the reward is we're adding years and years of cash flow in that 20,000- 25,000 barrel a day range. Number two, value accretive M&A. We've grown this portfolio through M&A, and I expect you'll continue to see us growing this portfolio through M&A. It is a very attractive regional market that's characterized by a reduced number of operators over the years. If we look over several years, we see more exits than we do entrances. That creates an opportunity for an upstart operator like ourselves to take on these assets, find more efficient ways to run them, and push their life further and further out into the future. At the same time, we see a relatively shallow buyer pool. There are companies that are interested in acquiring positions in Southeast Asia. There are fewer companies that have the operating credentials to be credible in doing that. We have built a very strong reputation. I think that's evidenced by the relationships that we've built by way of partnership with the likes of PTTEP and hopefully others as we move forward. Shareholder returns is an allocation discussion that we have quite regularly. Frankly, every time the board meets, we discuss shareholder returns and debate whether it is the right time to be doing more returns for shareholders directly. To this point, we've put in place a normal course issuer bid, so a buyback program that allows us to buy back up to 10% of our public float. We've been relatively modest at our use of that. We're essentially using that buyback program to offset the impact of natural dilution. From the same budget, using that money to effectively pay out stock options as they're exercised and things like restricted share units in order to prevent dilution of existing shareholders. We've not gotten aggressive by way of things like a dividend or dramatically reducing the share count. The reason for that is, after debating this, we feel shareholders are best served by us keeping this in the bank as cash in order to maximize our ability to transact. You should take that as a read-through to say there are exciting things that we're looking at on the M&A front. I also want to touch just briefly on sustainability. Since the last time I presented to the OTCQX Virtual Conference, we've published a new batch of sustainability data. Our 2025 sustainability report is in the form of essentially pages on our website, easy-to-consume data, which you can access with that QR code shown on the screen. I'll just touch on a few of the highlights and things that we're quite proud of. We have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 30% in the time that we've been operating in the Gulf of Thailand. That takes the form of being thoughtful about how we use fuel, modernizing facilities in order to deal with waste gas streams and turn them into electricity, for example, and a whole suite of other things tied to the efficiency of how we operate. In the reporting period, we've also had no lost time injuries, we've had no oil spills, and we focus very seriously on our integrity management systems in order to keep operating in a world-class fashion, and that entails doing ISO certification across the business. By way of conclusion, let me just say the business works. We are generating strong cash flow. That's what we set up to do. That's what we are very proud to say we're doing. As a result, you see the strength of our balance sheet, $262 million in cash on the balance sheet and no debt creates an optimal position for us to be able to transact on the way that we want to move forward. The investments we do are always strategic, and what I mean is we don't take decisions like investing into the Wassana redevelopment lightly, but with the sorts of economics that we can generate, again, even generating a 40% internal rate of return and 18-month payback at stress oil prices of $60 per barrel, I think underscores the quality of the investments that we have within our portfolio. At the same time, we see partnerships as a strategic element to what we're doing as well, entering into our strategic farm-in with PTTEP is a good testament to that. There are also opportunities within our portfolio to capitalize on the current macro environment. I've already mentioned our decision to expand the Nong Yao facility by adding additional well slots there. Beyond that, we've also brought on a rig on a three-year contract. The reason for that is the huge inventory of drilling opportunity that we've seen, and importantly, bringing that rig in in 2026 so that we've actually increased the number of months that we'll be drilling in 2026 to capitalize on this environment. With that, as I mentioned in the beginning, we are uniquely levered to high oil prices, and Valeura presents one of the very few opportunities you can find to have access to very strong Asian oil and gas prices. That said, we remain disciplined in how we invest. It's never growth for growth's sake. It's never growth for bragging rights. It's growth as a way to add value for shareholders. With that, I am going to jump to a final slide here that just gives you my contact information in case anyone would like to follow up after the fact. In the meantime, just bear with me a moment. I'm just going to browse through the Q&A that's been submitted through the webcast system here. First question, Valeura has locked in the Enterprise rig through the end of 2029. That's correct, three-year drilling contract. How does that three-year charter change the pace at which you can exercise production acceleration projects? First of all, I would say we've locked in this rig at very favorable rates. The rig contractor published those rates as $84,000 per day, which is effectively the same sort of low rates that we saw during COVID when there was virtually no activity in the industry. What that does is reduce our cost of drilling. Approximately 70% of our CapEx, 75% of our CapEx comes from drilling. Having a favorable drilling rate means that everything that we're doing is being done more cost effectively. How does it accelerate what we can do? Under our original plan for 2026, we had a break of drilling. We were going to be drilling for about eight to nine months of the year. With this new rig coming in, it's now looking like it'll be a full 12 months of drilling for the year. There's more that we're looking at adding to the drilling schedule and we'll see a full 12 months of drilling. Next question. Bear with me a second here. Questions on the Bussabong development, specifically the question is, what's the size in dollars of the final investment decision on the Bussabong development? I can't answer that question yet. A couple of things to happen here. As I've mentioned, there is a final administrative step for us to have government approval before we are transferred our 40% working interest in these blocks. When we do that, I expect we will announce to the market some more details on our estimates for resources on these blocks, as well as potential or generic development costs at least. The next step then would be in Q3, once we've taken FID on a development here, that's when we'll have those details to be able to share. Please bear with me on that. Sorry, reading questions here to find the next one for you. From an investor's perspective, what single milestone over the next 12 months do you think has the greatest potential to re-rate the stock? That's an excellent question, and I do see some exciting things in the portfolio. I've talked about the Bussabong FID. I think that's a very interesting one. I think installing our Wassana CPP, which is planned for around the end of the year with first production planned in Q2, I think that's a big one, and seeing the production growth thereafter. I have to say, any company that tells you transformative mergers and acquisitions are part of their strategy, the answer would have to be transformative mergers and acquisitions. Obviously, nothing that we can promise on that front. It always takes two to tango. Given the magnitude of some of the things that we're looking at and the justification to keep the cash in the bank instead of pay it out to shareholders as direct returns, should all be taken as a read-through that there are exciting things that we're looking at. Next question. VLE has a track record of meeting or beating operational timelines. Where do you see the next positive surprise coming from in the portfolio? Thank you for that. We try to be realistic with our timelines. I'm pleased to hear that the market is happy with what we've managed to deliver there. What I would say, next positive surprise, we don't have a huge exploration budget, but the exploration that we're doing is being done for purpose. It's being done because there are prospects and opportunities that we can't deny that we want to be pursuing. Certainly success on the exploration front can change the character of an asset very well. The priorities when it comes to exploration, there's really three areas that we're looking at. One is an exploration well on the Jasmine block that could change the course of the future for that block. One on the Manora field or near the Manora field. That could change what Manora looks like. There's already developed resource, small developed resource on the Manora block. With additional discoveries there, those could be tied in and developed together. There's also exploration and appraisal work to be done on the Wassana block in order to amass that resource that I mentioned earlier, both to the north and to the south of the field. These are all exciting things that we could see materialize in the next little while. One more question as I think we're nearing the end of our time here. Let me just scan through. Which projects do you believe have the greatest potential to increase free cash flow per share?" I think what we'll see is once we've installed the Wassana central processing platform at the beginning of the year and started drilling, we'll see first oil in the second quarter of next year is our plan. Into the second half of 2027, I expect that we'll see Wassana's production rates go up to about 10,000 barrels per day. To put that in context, we're currently a little below 3,000 barrels per day. It will be in itself a significant increase in cash flow, and as I mentioned earlier, a significant increase in cash flow that also comes with relatively low OpEx compared to the rest of the portfolio. We're at time, so I'm going to leave it there. Thank you for your attention. My contact details are shown on screen. Please feel free to reach out anytime or use the OTCQX virtual system to schedule a one-on-one with me. Happy to take any follow-up thereafter. Thank you so much.
Loading workspace