Archrock, Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 23 Feb 2021

[Operator:]

Good morning, welcome to Archrock Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Megan Repine, Vice President of Investor Relations at Archrock. I will now turn the call over to Ms. Repine, you may begin.

[Megan Repine:]

Thank you, Michelle. Hello everyone and thanks for joining us on today's call. With me today are Brad Childers, President and Chief Executive Officer of Archrock and Doug Aron, Chief Financial Officer of Archrock. Yesterday, Archrock released its financial and operating results for the fourth quarter of 2020 as well as annual guidance for 2021. If you have not received a copy, you can find the information on the company's website at www.archrock.com.

[Brad Childers:]

Thank you, Megan and good morning everyone. I'm happy to be with you today to close out the discussion on our financial results for 2020, a year that brought unforeseeable and even unthinkable challenges to our industry and the global economy. While I'm excited to turn the page to 2021, I'm also proud of and grateful to and want to take a moment to thank our dedicated employees who adapted quickly to help us navigate the rapidly changing environment and delivered excellent fourth quarter and full year results. On our first quarter 2020 conference call, I detailed our objectives and action plan for the downturn including significant cost savings and capital reduction initiatives. We reacted quickly to protect the value of our natural gas compression franchise, maximize our near-term performance, and position the business to emerge even stronger from this downturn. As our 2020 results show, we delivered on these objectives. We maintained a strong capital and cost discipline. As the market deteriorated in the spring, we sharply reduced new equipment capital and optimized our maintenance and other capital investments. We reduced our total capital by $245 million in 2020 to $140 million. In addition, we reduced our run rate SG&A by 12% even as we continued to invest incremental SG&A into our technology upgrading project. We enhanced our financial flexibility. We paid down debt of $155 million during 2020 resulting in an exit leverage ratio of 4.16 times, which is essentially flat from 2019. We have no near-term debt maturities and with our successful senior notes offering during the fourth quarter, we extended $300 million of bond maturities by four years to 2028, and we did this at a record low financing cost to the company, a strong signal of the market's confidence in Archrock.

[Doug Aron:]

Thank you, Brad and good morning. Let's look at a summary of our fourth quarter and full year results and then cover our financial outlook.

[Operator:]

Our first question comes from the line of Daniel Burke. Sir, your line is now open.

[Daniel Burke:]

Yes, hey, good morning guys.

[Brad Childers:]

Good morning.

[Daniel Burke:]

Let's see, I had a question on contract ops margin in 2021. A little bit of a step down year-over-year, not a surprise, but would you expect the contract ops margin to sort of mirror I think the general progression you described for this year. Will it be lower in the first half of the year and then begin to recover or should we think of that as more of a steady state margin?

[Brad Childers:]

Well, first of all, looking back -- Daniel, it's Brad, looking back at 2020, I'll just remind you that we had a couple of factors that gave us a boost in that gross margin percent that we don't expect to repeat in 2021. One of them is we had a pretty substantial amount of horsepower move on to standby in the year and that has an immediate -- not a long-term, but an immediate gross margin benefit that we got in 2021 that we're not going to have -- that we got in 2020, but we're not going to have in 2021. On the good news on that point however is that all that horsepower has gone to work. That's really a strong indication that the market's recovering and looking better for 2021 as our standby horsepower has returned to more normalized levels and that should allow more new horsepower to go back out. And then we also had some one-time tax benefit in that gross margin. So when we think about the gross margin year-over-year, we think it is close to flattish, but we are encountering a few incremental headwinds in gross margin and that includes higher lube oil prices, which is just a consequence of higher oil prices as well as additional new activity in an up market as we put more things to work, it pressures our gross margin overall as we make units ready and get them started again. So that's what's really I think the geography on the gross margin look year-over-year.

[Daniel Burke:]

Okay, I appreciate that color Brad. Let's see, really two questions that are related because they both sort of speak to sort of the fleet refreshment. Can you talk about maybe the scale of some of the customer fleet acquisition opportunities that you might encounter as the year goes on. And then maybe give a broader perspective on what -- asset sales, I mean is the experience of 2020 likely to repeat in 2021? I know there's limited visibility in a way, but maybe there is a base case you could share since it does have a bearing on the guidance range for the year?

[Brad Childers:]

Sure, let me try to take both of those and then Doug is going to -- ask Doug to top me up on anything I missed, but on the customer acquisition front, we have found that customers have moved to focusing on their own balance sheets and capital discipline and free cash flow in a way that could be very constructive for our business. We're excited about that and so, the opportunities that we're talking about are multiple sizes. We're not going to quantify or give specifics, but just opportunities that we wanted to be prepared to be able to move and act if we can capture them. I've had this discussion in the past with everyone and those transactions can be hard to capture, but right now we see some momentum and we want to position Archrock to be able to take advantage of them if they materialize. I'm pretty excited and hopefully we'll get to announce one at some point. On the fleet improvement initiative, look, this is an important long-term strategic move for Archrock. As we think about the compression added and the focus we have on large horsepower, on midstream gathering, and just in the best plays that the U.S. Lower 48 has to offer, we're going to continue doing that when the market permits. That's not our capital allocation today. Capital allocation today is very much focused on free cash flow, reducing debt, returning capital to shareholders, and being very disciplined on our investment in this part of the investment cycle. But the other side of that fleet improvement includes looking at pockets of less strategic horsepower based upon the horsepower itself, it's market location or other factors. And the benefits to that program are really significant. Number one, it really does help us to standardize our fleet and drive improvement in our financial performance as we get a much better logistics and supply chain efficiency behind a more standardized fleet. Second, it accelerates EBITDA. It brings it into a more current period. It doesn't just generate gains, it's that gain as a proxy for that acceleration of earnings and EBITDA, which we're excited to see and it brings in additional cash to repay debt at a time when that's one of our focuses. So we can't quantify if 2021 is going to look like 2020 because these are transactions and we have to work hard to get them, but you should expect to see us focus on it for those reasons just as hard in 2021 as we did in 2020.

[Doug Aron:]

And Daniel, this is Doug, what I would say is in Brad's prepared remarks, he talks about one that we closed already here in 2021 and to further illustrate just really how meaningful that is to us, the average age of the equipment we sold in that transaction that he mentioned of 40,000 horsepower and 300 compressors was 25 years old and so the fact that we were able to sell that for what it amounted to about right at $6 million gain on sale of assets reflects that there is still usefulness. There are probably some smaller companies out there that can operate that horsepower frankly more efficiently than we can and allows us to focus our existing team on the more standardized larger fleet that we've described. So, really a win-win. Those are a little difficult to forecast. We are hopeful there are a couple of more similarly-sized transactions out there this year. Those are hard to bank on. I know if you'd asked sort of that as it relates to potentially to our guidance for the year and we've given perhaps a little bit of a wider range on EBITDA than we typically would. That higher or highest end of the guidance range might include another similarly-sized transaction this year whereas the midpoint of our guidance for this year really assumes that our horsepower stays flat to last year. And so, I know you guys are trying to sort of do the impossible which is to peg where you think we're going to be, but hopefully that helps frame that the ends of the spectrum.

[Daniel Burke:]

Yes, that's all helpful comments guys. I'll leave it there. Thank you.

[Brad Childers:]

Thanks, Daniel.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from the line of Tom Curran. Your line is now open.

[Thomas Curran:]

Good morning.

[Brad Childers:]

Good morning.

[Thomas Curran:]

Brad, has any segment of the customer base started or signaled preparations to expand their budgeted activity in order to capitalize on these sustained stronger than anticipated commodity prices and if so, would you just expound on who in terms of customer type, not specific names, and where with regards to basins you've detected such a response?

[Brad Childers:]

Yes, I would love to give you a very bullish response to that question, but in all honesty, what we are experiencing right now in the market is continued restraint in the unleashing of further capital budget increases as people are focusing on free cash flow and looking to see how well this market recovers. So what we find with our customer is very optimistic discussions about future plans if the market continues to show the signs that it's giving us currently and at the right levels and the customer, there are projects pending that they want to get on with, but I would still say that the timing looks to us like it's more in the back half of this year than in the first half of this year. So while the discussions are optimistic, the timing yet has -- is still showing some restraint in our customers' activities.

[Thomas Curran:]

Got it. That's consistent with what we've heard from many others. Turning to the technology modernization project, would you update us on where you're at with some of the implementation of some of that program's other initiatives such as the ERP system migration and remote monitoring and then just thematically, what's the next secular phase of technology evolution, is it a step up in automation? Is it some aspect of digitization? Just looking beyond Telematics, what seems like is going to come next for the future of compression?

[Brad Childers:]

Sure, make a note as I think. I want to make sure I answer both parts of your question. So number one on the good news front. On the Telematics side, our roll out is going well and we're going to complete the installation of the remaining parts of our fleet that don't have full telemetry within 2021. That's our target and that's going well. Where we have installed it, the really good news for us, it's exciting to see us change our method of operating to take advantage and leverage that increased visibility as to what's going on, on the units, on an instantaneous basis as well as to use that information to drive better a coordination of response with our customers for their benefit and for the benefit of up time and certainly for cost management. So as we roll that out, we expect to continue to get the benefits of that. On the ERP, the team is working hard. We are going to spend 2021 preparing our systems for that and as you can probably imagine, you got to pick at least a quarter end if not a year-end for the flip of a switch on the ERP system and so we're targeting having that switch move at the end of this year and we have an adequate time and really a good time to prepare for that and to continue to prepare for that. So that's going well. And then the only other point I'm going to make on the roll out currently is that behind both of those and in between both of those, the ERP and field systems is going to come much better logistics management through our investment in our supply chain capabilities with much more information flow and more timely and instantaneous information around inventory, amounts and locations and needs. So those are some of the exciting thing is that we're going to get from the project as we move forward. I think that the next immediate phase of once it's fully implemented and we've practiced operationalizing and have fully operationalized the benefits of that communication system and information flow is to look at data and have data tell us more on a preventative and predictive basis where we need to focus our time and attention so that we can get ahead of not waiting for it to happen but seeing it before it happens and taking preventative and predictive actions or actions based on a predictive and preventative approach. I think that's really the next phase. Automation will be like a yet out there stage. I think that's a ways off. There are some inherent safety issues around how much automation is going to go into managing compression equipment, but that's the optimistic view I have right now about how well we're going to be able to operationalize the benefits of this investment.

[Thomas Curran:]

Great overview. Thanks for taking my questions.

[Brad Childers:]

Yes, thank you.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from the line of Selman Akyol. Your line is now open.

[Brad Childers:]

Michelle, we were having a hard time hearing you on our end.

[Operator:]

Your next question comes from the line of Selman Akyol. Your line is now open.

[Selman Akyol:]

Got it, thank you. Good morning.

[Brad Childers:]

Good morning.

[Selman Akyol:]

Thank you. I had a difficult time hearing. So let me ask you just two quick questions. So when you talk about potentially picking up some assets from your customers and I understand up to the $50 million, but how do you think about the earnings on that investment? How should we be thinking about it?

[Brad Childers:]

On the -- you're talking about the high-end of the CapEx range?

[Selman Akyol:]

Well, you guys talked about putting an ATM in place in order to purchase some compression from customers and so if we see that, I'm just wondering how we should be thinking about that?

[Brad Childers:]

Yes. So look, I think the answer there is we still don't have one to announce and until we do, the specifics will be a little tougher to enumerate, but generally speaking, the way we think about new -- when we think about building a new unit, as an example, we've been targeting something in that mid-teens return certainly at least 13% depending on the length of the contract you could get and so similarly, our view is that obviously, the cost of equity is higher than the cost of debt and at the same time we've had a pretty firm commitment that most will remember we had intended to have our leverage under 4 times by the end of 2020. COVID certainly got in the way of that and so our point is that if we can go out and allocate equity at a mid-teens return with a term contract with a high quality customer and owning their equipment, we think there is value in doing that while also being able to continue to delever. And so I think that will be the way that we'll look at these contracts and hopefully we'll have something to report with a customer that is interested also because keeping in mind that because of our scale and our expertise in compression, generally we're able to operate that equipment at a lower operating cost than they can and so what might look like a mid-teens return to us will look like something lower to them because we're offsetting a higher operating cost.

[Selman Akyol:]

Got you. And then, let me just ask one other question there. Is there a reason why they would particularly come to you or is there chances they would go to several different compression players and get bids from everybody?

[Brad Childers:]

It's a competitive market and competitive work on projects like this too, but what we find is that customers with which we have a material amount of business, so significant strategic relationship, which tends to be the bulk of our top 10 customers, will want to work with us because that's their sort of provider of choice already and in fairness, a few of our competitors probably get the same benefit from their customer deck.

[Selman Akyol:]

Very good. And then, just last one for me. As you get your Telematics fully rolled out, should we see that show up in cost savings as well?

[Brad Childers:]

Yes, you're already seeing it and the truth is, it will show up in cost savings and efficiencies. We're experiencing some of that and it's starting with the implementation of the expanded Telematics even in the back half of 2020. The question is going to be how well we can capture that and continued profit growth, which we've demonstrated for several years in a row now and how much that we show with our customers in pricing to gain more growth with our customers in the market, but it's absolutely going to come through in continued improvement in our cost base and its impacted profitability constructively already. We expect more of that.

[Selman Akyol:]

Very good. Thank you, Brad.

[Brad Childers:]

Yes, thanks.

[Operator:]

There are no more questions. Now, I'd like to turn the call back over to Ms. Childers for final remarks.

[Brad Childers:]

Great. Thank you, operator. Thank you everyone for participating in our Q4 review today. As our results demonstrate, we continue to take the right steps to differentiate Archrock and to deliver value to our customers and our shareholders. Our future is bright and look forward to updating you on our progress again next quarter. Thank you.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.