Good morning. This is the Chorus Call Conference Operator. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Santorini Drillship Acquisition conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Alessandro Puliti, Saipem CEO. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, and good morning, and welcome to this brief presentation we have organized today to give you more detail on the acquisition of the Santorini drillship that we have announced yesterday evening. I'm here today with Marco Toninelli, COO of Asset Based Services, our General Counsel, Simone Chini, and Paolo Calcagnini, CFO, who is on the line. As you saw, Saipem has exercised yesterday a purchase option agreed with Samsung Heavy Industries, and has acquired the seventh-generation drillship, Santorini, for $230 million to be paid by year-end of 2022. The Santorini was delivered by Samsung Heavy Industries Shipyard to Saipem back in 2021, and it is being operating by Saipem under a lease contract since then. The vessel is operating with Saipem in the Gulf of Mexico, and the acquisition price includes all the equipment and the setup provided upon the delivery of the vessel back in 2021. Santorini is currently working in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for Eni until the third quarter 2023. The acquisition will be completed with the payment of the final consideration to Samsung, which will be funded with available cash. The effective transfer of the vessel ownership to Saipem is expected by year-end. After having recently strengthened the drilling fleet with two new lease jackups, the acquisition of Santorini, a compelling investment, allow us to secure a superior state-of-the-art drillship to profit from the upcycle. The next slide shows the main features of Santorini. It is a latest generation drillship, so-called seventh-generation, featuring the most advanced equipment for safe operations. It is equipped with two seven-cavity Blow Out Preventers, the highest standard for ultra-deepwater drilling. It has the latest available drilling automation on board and is designed for the lowest environmental impact. I won't go into a detailed description of all the technical characteristics of the vessel. The message I want to pass is that it is a cutting-edge asset equipped with the highest standards available as of today. She is positioned at the top end of the drillship market, which is now in an expansion phase. We are positive on the commercial potential of our new vessel. Now let's dive through the investment rationale. The offshore drilling market is tight. Demand exceeds supply. There is limited availability, especially of most technological advanced vessels. We do not see operators ordering new builds and investing at least $100 million with a lead time of at least three years for a drillship of the same generation of Santorini. This dynamic is keeping the market tight with a demand more than offsetting supply. Day rates are on the rise. Independent market research estimates an increase for 7th-generation ultra-deepwater drillships average day rates from around $400,000 per day in 2022, up to over $450,000 per day in 2025. From a commercial point of view, we see plenty of opportunities in the deepwater and ultra-deepwater drilling segments, both in the Gulf of Mexico, where there is a very limited asset availability, and where the Santorini is currently working, and in Africa and in the Mediterranean, which are markets where Saipem has been historically present. As I said, the vessel is already part of our fleet and is currently operating for Eni in the U.S., in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, under the contract covering most of 2023. Finally, most importantly, I want to highlight the double-digit returns we are expecting as we have been able to secure the asset at a very attractive price of $230 million. The expected internal rate of return is over 15%, and pay back period is estimated in around five years. In this, my final slide before handing over to Paolo to close on financials, provides a picture of the fleet engagement after the recent contract worth $800 million announced back in November. That has brought our current backlog to a level of above EUR 1.5 billion, the highest level for drilling on shore, offshore of the last six years. As you can see, the strong market momentum and the limited supply availability are clearly reflected in our vessel engagement. What you see in the chart is based on current contracts, which includes a couple of options for Saipem 10000 and the jackup Pioneer. Those are already bring the utilization of around 80% for the next year and already 60% for 2024. Please note that for this calculation, the new jackup leased, Perro Negro 12 and Perro Negro 13, are considered engaged from the starting date of the leasing, resulting in 100% utilization in 2023 and 2024. The gray shaded area highlights that six leased vessel are present in our fleet, which represent 40% of the total. This number, as I said earlier, confirms our asset light strategy. Now I will hand over to Paolo for the last information on financials. Thanks. Thanks, Alessandro. Good morning, everyone. Just a few words on the guidance. We shared the guidance when we presented the nine months results, and we confirm the guidance for 2022, especially for the net debt figures that I guess it's one of the aspects you may be wondering about. This is possible due to three things. Number one is the positive working capital dynamics, which is mostly due to an accelerated invoicing with clients and the consequent credit collection. The second is the good business and operational dynamics that we have enjoyed in the last quarter of the year. The third is the cash actions that we mentioned and we listed in our business plan that are finally paying off and leaving the company in a position where we can buy the Santorini using the cash available by year-end, confirming the net debt expected position. Before handing over to the Q&A session, please do keep in mind that today's discussion is meant to provide information on Santorini acquisition and not on other either strategic on financial aspects. This is because we will have a strategic update in end of February, where we will give you the full year 2022 and the guidance for 2023. Please do avoid asking questions on aspects other than the Santorini acquisition or drilling offshore perspectives. Thanks for the attention. I'll leave the time for Q&A. Thank you. This is the Chorus Call conference operator. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touchtone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Sasikanth Chilukuru, Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks for taking my question. I had two related ones, please. The first one is regarding the strategy itself. I mean, previously, it has been highlighted that you would be looking to keep it asset light, in the sense you would take the advantage of leasing the vessels and then, actually, utilizing drilling as well. Just wondering what's changed primarily in the, in that, from that thinking and leading to the acquisition of the drillship. The second one is related to the schedule. It seems like you highlighted U.S. Gulf of Mexico, Africa and Mediterranean. I... Looking at these, the schedules that you have provided, some of the ultra-deepwater, harsh environment drillship seems to be available for contract in from 2023- 2024 onwards. I was just wondering, if you can give some commentary on the plan that you're looking at in these regions, which would help utilize this vessel over and beyond the other two or three vessels that will be free. Thanks a lot. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for your questions. The asset light strategy is really confirmed because as you have seen, most of our drilling rigs entry in our fleet, they were based on the asset light strategy, on longer term rental basis. The case of the Santorini is different because we had a very interesting option that could be exercised. As I said before, certainly to buy a new built vessel, other than waiting three years delivery time, for sure, you have to spend at least $800 million. The exercise of the option is for us a really compelling case. On the other end, we have also to remark that at the end of the lease period, it was not possible to extend the lease period for the Santorini. For us to secure this vessel, basically exercise the option was mandatory unless renouncing to the services and to the revenues that are generated by the Santorini drillship. Definitely this is a good case in which the asset light strategy is confirmed, but on an opportunistic basis is accompanied by purchase of vessels, drilling ships when conditions are particularly attractive, both on the side of the price of the vessel to be acquired and on the market of the vessel itself. We are in presence of this particular combination of the two positive things. In terms of schedules of our ultra deepwater activities, basically we have Saipem 12000 that is fully booked even beyond 2024. Saipem 10000 is fully booked in 2023, and there's options for 2024 that we do believe most likely they will be exercised. Santorini at the end of his contract with Eni in the Gulf of Mexico in October 2023, is currently participating two different option bids tenders from several operators. We have no doubt he will be fully utilized beyond his current contract end of 2023 and 2024. That's the our ultra deepwater fleet. Scarabeo 8 that is now working in very deepwater, but nevertheless is working in deepwater activities, has contracts well beyond 2025. Scarabeo 9 again is participating to multiple tenders opportunities. We see it being soon fully booked as well. Situation is the market that we see more bids than participants. This is where we are now. Thank you. Very helpful. The next question is from Guillaume Delaby with Société Générale. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning. I think it is clearly a great investment. As you know, sell side analysts are lazy, so thank you for providing us a five-year payback and the 15% internal rate of return. In order to make our life even easier, we understand that the option price is $230 million, but I guess there was some prior investments or maybe could we have an idea about the total investment for this unit? The $230 million option, but also maybe the cash or the previous investment you made in order to have a rough idea of the total investment in the unit? I thank you. Thank you for your question. Yes, there were some prior investments to get the vessel ready to operate. These basically they were done already end of 2021 when we took the vessel from the shipyard. They've been already paid out by the current contract. Therefore, really for the valuation of the investment of the exercise of the option, the $230 million are exactly the total amount that has to be considered for the valuation of the option. Sorry. No. Maybe a follow-up. If I want to have, sorry to change a little bit the total investment, should I have a look maybe at the 2021 annual report, having a look at how much you spent in offshore drilling CapEx and make an assumption? If you want to consider the entire investment we did since we took over the Santorini on a lease basis, you can add $26 million for the warehouse inventory build up. Okay, that's very clear. EUR 254 million. This is what we spent at the beginning of the contract to, let's say, have the vessel ready for startup with all the inventories of spare parts and so on, and the equipment. That's, that's extremely useful. EUR 256 million investment. Very clear. I turn it over. Thank you very much. The next question is from Massimo Bonisoli with Equita. Please go ahead. And, uh, on the- Good morning, and thank you for for the presentation. Sorry for the background noise. I have two questions. One is regarding obviously Santorini. If you can provide break even day rate level for the for the vessel going forward? I understand clearly the price of the day rates are increasing and quite interesting right now. Just to understand the level of the break even for for these assets now that you own. The second question is on the net financial position guidance. Just to put into perspective, since Algerian court ruled against you, just to understand if you're in your net financial position, you also include some payable for Algeria or they are still included in the in the provision? Probably the key question for 2023. I will provide you information regarding the break even and then for the financial, I will ask Paolo to give more color. Break even day rate is not different from the break even day rate of the other vessels that we have been that were in our fleet. It is very robust. We sure we are pretty confident that we can make the five years payout time we are projecting. On this really we consider a very interesting investment also because the capital that we have to put on the table to acquire the option is very limited compared to the value of a new build of the same kind of vessel. This is what is making us confident that the break-even is not an issue. On the other end, regarding our financial position, what I can say now is that we do not expect any disbursement within 2022 regarding the Algeria situation. I will leave Paolo to give more color on this subject. Thanks, Sandro. That's correct. We are not expecting a cash out from the Algerian, from the Algeria situation by year-end. If I can add an information on break even rates. They depends on the useful life of each vessel. The break even in most scenarios is way below 2022 rates. There is a lot of headroom in maintaining a positive return, even if rates should go down, which by the way is not the market expectation as we speak. In addition, we see clients asking for long-term rentals are at rates that are way higher than the break even. Is structurally negative. Thank you very much. The next question is from Haris Papadopoulos with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Thanks a lot. Two questions on my side. Firstly, I appreciate you mentioned that the net debt guidance is confirmed, partly due to favorable working capital dynamics, I was wondering whether you could elaborate a bit more on this and perhaps how it can impact the 2023 movements. Would credit collections this year potentially mean less cash next year? The second question is not 100% related to this transaction, but it is relevant to your overall liquidity. I was wondering whether you could give us an update with respect to the new RCF. If I remember correctly, this was contingent on the capital raise, which is now completed. Could you please tell us on what state we are in the process? Very last one, actually, with respect to your 2023 bond maturity, given the current state of the high yield market, is it fair to assume, you will repay this with cash on hand, rather than attempt to come to market? Thanks. Okay. Paolo, please provide the answer. Thank you. Yes, sure. So, in relation to your last question, regarding the 2023 bond, yes, we expect to use the cash already available to repay the bond. As we speak, we are also negotiating new credit lines with a pool of banks. As we speak, we are sitting on more than EUR 1.4 billion of available cash, so we are very relaxed about repaying the bond expiring next year. This is not to say that we will not exploit any opportunity that the market may offer, Titan. We also need to be aware that the credit markets have been particularly tight this especially in the third quarter. We will do it if market conditions are such that we are not overpaying for issuing new bonds. Now back to your first question on the cash. I think it's too early to give you a guidance or any indication on 2023, because you may understand that our backlog has been moving positively very recently, it's too early to share what the cash flows will be for next for the next year. The fact that we are doing better by year-end and we can afford buying the Santorini using the cash available does not have an impact, direct impact on 2023. We're not, you know, just window dressing numbers. It's just the explanation I gave you. It's accelerating booking and good operational performance. I think there was a third question that I missed, if you can, please, repeat it again. The other question was on the RCF. If I remember correctly, this was contingent on the capital raise being completed, which is now behind us. I was wondering whether you could tell us what state are we in the negotiations, when should we expect the new line to be announced? Perhaps like, could this be superseded the bonds or should we expect something pari? We expect something pari passu with the other, with the other credit lines, and we expect to close the RCF by year-end. The reason why it took a bit longer, you can understand the capital increase left a few banks with a big stick. Obviously process-wise, it makes the approval of the RCF a bit more time-consuming, rather than if banks were not also shareholders. It's just process complexities, but we are almost there. Okay. Thank you very much. The next question is from James Thompson with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Good morning, gentlemen. The line's a little bit crackly, so apologies if some of these questions are somewhat re-repeated. The first one is, was this the only point in the bareboat charter where you had the option to purchase the vessel? Was it sort of ongoing open option or was there another opportunity perhaps at the end of the two-year charter? Just to try and understand the sort of rationale for taking the decision now versus maybe later as the drilling market evolves. The second question was, or is around just to try to help us understand the kind of the profitability of the vessel, should we say. You know, how kind of accretive is owning it versus the bareboat charter? Can you provide any sort of granularity or dynamics around that? Then obviously this is the highest spec vessel in the fleet now. I mean you know, in terms of the kind of 400k leading edge day rate, I assume that that would be incremental to the 36% EBITDA margins the division reported in 3Q. If you could just provide some color around the kind of dynamics there. Then, you know, just about the decision process, that'd be great. Thank you. So- Okay. To give you, Paolo. as you wish, Sandro. I can take it. Oh, okay. Go ahead, Paolo. Okay. The option for the Santorini expired in December. From a rational standpoint, we waited until the last moment possible to exercise the option, and which we did. In fact, we have options to buy other vessels that now are under lease contracts, and we are waiting or extending the options as much as we can, because you, I mean, you made a very good comment. The longer you wait, the clearer is the market perspective. We always wait until the last second. Where we have the option to wait longer, we are waiting longer. For the Santorini, the option expired in December. We have to decide what to do, basically. Now, in terms of effects of buying Santorini, obviously we will not pay the lease installment anymore, which you can understand is more expensive than the amortization of the vessel, even accounting wise, in addition to the fact that the cash flows become better afterwards because you're not paying the installments anymore. The yield cash on cash also improves over the next five years because the leasing contracts have an implicit cost which we will not face anymore. From a financial standpoint, it was an easy decision. It's never easy, but it was an easy decision because numbers were really strong. In the next five years, the outcome cash on cash is better than it would have been even assuming an extension of the lease contracts, which in any case was not possible at this time. Okay, thanks for that. I mean, just to follow up, we can assume that at kind of leading edge rates, that the margin is gonna be stronger than what you reported in the third quarter of 2022, yeah? It's a fair assumption, yes. Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. It's one vessel out of 15, so it's, I mean, the seventh fleet is not one vessel. Sure. It's a bit more, so yeah. Yeah. No, no, that's very clear. Thank you very much. I will hand over. The last question is from Mark Wilson with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thank you, gents. Just a couple of points from me. You mentioned on the call, the expected cost to build a new vessel these days, a 7th-generation, said it takes three years, but I just missed the price, the expected price on that. If you could just clarify that again. The second point, in terms of the broader market, if current day rates are at EUR 400,000 a day and expected to grow to EUR 450,000, two points around that. I'm just wondering if you could comment on where your day rates sit versus the EUR 400,000. Secondly, why or what is restricting the expected increase to just 12% out to 2025 if the market is as tight as you see? Thank you. Just to provide you clarity, yes, we can confirm that to build a brand new vessel like Santorini will takes at least three years. Certainly you cannot build it for less than $700 million or $800 million. Considering also all the equipment that is present on board the Santorini. For example, just the double seven cavities BOP, Blow Out Preventer, they both value only themselves is $100 million value. Just the two BOPs, this gives you an idea on how opportunistic it has been exercising the option. Second, market price. Clearly, what we presented are not data that are elaborated by us, but are data that are elaborated by specialized company that are analyzing the market. This is what we see. Certainly we see today for 2022, a market that is around 400,000. The forecast are for a market that is picking up. This also depends really on many, many factors, whether you will contract the vessel on a long-term contract or on a very short-term exploratory activity, where certainly you can even ask more than these numbers. If you enter, for example, a long-term development campaign, for sure you cannot be in the very high end of the projected rates. What we presented is a fair expectation also because our expectation of the Santorini rig, that it is also equipped with cranes and opportunity to work on positively on development actions, are more in line with the long-term contract than short, very short-terms, opportunistic day rates, maybe on a well-by-well basis. This is what we do expect. Okay, that's really helpful. Maybe I could just ask one follow-up. Currently, based on your market outlook, how many seventh gen new build vessels do you think are entering the fleet, global fleet in the next few years? That's my last question. Well, we don't see many because I believe the Santorini is one of the latest being built. As I said before, I do not believe that those part of the series of vessels, that they were built on speculation by many shipyards between 2013, 2014, 2015, and then they remained unsold because of the market drop. This Santorini is one of the latest of these venture drilling ships that they were there waiting for a client. I believe that there is no really appetite to invest more to invest in brand new because, say, the cost of investment is very high and delivery time is very long. We don't see that much competition, especially on these specs, because the specs of Santorini are really top-notch, and so, we are, we are pretty confident that on this market segment, there are not that many competitors. Thank you very much. It's very clear. I'll hand it back. This was the final question, and if you have any follow-up, please contact Saipem's investor relations team. Thank you for joining, and now you may disconnect.