Pason Systems Inc. (PSI) Earnings Call Transcript

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 describe 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. Good morning. My name is Ina, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Pason Systems Inc.'s Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Celine Boston, CFO. You may begin your conference.

Thank you, Ina. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for attending Pason's 2026 Second 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 second quarter. John will then provide his perspectives on industry conditions, our strategic priorities and our outlook before we open the call for questions. I'm pleased to report on Pason's second quarter 2026 results, which reflect improving levels of drilling and completions industry activity, continued execution on our completion efforts and the strength in meaningful operating leverage of our North American drilling segment. Pason generated consolidated revenue of $100.8 million in the second quarter of 2026, a 5% increase from the $96.4 million generated in the second quarter of 2025. Adjusted EBITDA was $35.7 million or 35.4% of revenue, exceeding $31.6 million or 32.7% of revenue in the prior year period. I'll begin by discussing results by segment. Our North American Drilling segment delivered another strong quarter, outperforming industry conditions. As a reminder for listeners in the second quarter of 2025, North American activity levels began falling with geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty introducing headwinds of global commodity prices. Conversely, in the second quarter of 2026, while geopolitical uncertainty remains prevalent, we saw increasing levels of drilling activity through the quarter. On an average basis, industry drilling activity was relatively flat year-over-year. Against this backdrop, Pason generated a record quarterly revenue per industry day of $1,078, a 5% increase from $1,026 in the second quarter of 2025. Revenue for the segment increased 7% to $67.1 million from $62.5 million in the prior year period. Improved product adoption and a greater proportion of Canadian activity, which carries higher average revenue per day than the U.S., both contributed to the increase. Operating expenses in the segment remained largely fixed in nature and declined 3% year-over-year. As a result, segment gross profit increased 14% to $38.6 million compared to $34 million in the second quarter of 2025, highlighting the operating leverage inherent segments. Our international drilling segment continued to navigate a mixed operating environment across the regions that we serve. Revenue in the second quarter was $13.1 million compared to $13.6 million in the second quarter of 2025. Activity remains below prior year levels, particularly in Argentina, where a large customer shift from conventional to unconventional development has reduced active rig count stream and transition period. Operating expenses declined 9% year-over-year to $6 million as we remain disciplined in managing costs in this environment. Gross profit for the segment was $6 million compared to $6.4 million in the prior year quarter. Our Completions segment continued to outperform underlying frac activity levels with the number of active frac spreads in the U.S. declining 4% and revenue growing 3% from $15.3 million to $15.9 million in the current period. The business averaged 31 active jobs during the quarter compared to 33 a year ago, and while active jobs were slightly lower, revenue per IWS increased 11% year-over-year to $5,625, reflecting our continued strategic focus away from lower value ancillary only jobs. Sequentially active jobs have increased from 28 in the first quarter of this year to 31 active jobs this quarter. As expected for our business in its current stage of growth, we continue to invest in our service infrastructure and technology deployment. Operating expenses increased slightly to $8.8 million, while depreciation and amortization increased $7 million, reflecting continued investments in the hardware platform and approximately $2.2 million of amortization expense related to intangible assets acquired through the IWS transaction. I'll remind listeners that this acquisition-related intangible amortization expense is not indicative of ongoing capital requirements for the segment. Gross profit for the segment reflects these investments. Our solar and energy storage segment generated revenue of $4.8 million in the second quarter of 2026, relatively consistent with the level generated in the comparative prior year period. As we've discussed previously, quarterly revenue in this segment is largely driven by the timing of control system deliveries and can fluctuate meaningfully in the quarter. Turning back to consolidated results. Across all segments, we remain disciplined on our approach to costs and our incremental adjusted EBITDA margins of 95% in the second quarter highlight the mostly fixed cost nature of our business and the resulting operating leverage, particularly from our North American Drilling segment. Net income attributable to Pason was $14.1 million or $0.18 a share compared to $12.6 million or $0.16 a share in the second quarter of 2025. The increase reflects higher adjusted EBITDA, partially offset by higher depreciation and amortization associated with our ongoing capital investments. Funds flow from operations totaled $33.5 million in the second quarter, a 27% increase from the level generated in the second quarter of 2025 and reflective of improved results in the North American drilling segment year-over-year. While our cash collection trends remained strong, increasing levels of revenue through the quarter resulted in higher levels of accounts receivable at the end of the quarter, and we absorbed this increase within cash from operating activities of $20.5 million in the quarter. In contrast, cash from operating activities of $20.2 million in the second quarter of 2025 benefited from a declining accounts receivable balance. Net capital expenditures were $17.1 million in the quarter and included investments supporting the continued expansion of our pressure control automation technology within completions as well as ongoing investments in our drilling technology platform. Free cash flow in the quarter was $3.5 million and includes these capital expenditures as well as the increased accounts receivable balance. Our balance sheet remains exceptionally strong. We ended the quarter with $68.3 million of total cash, $107 million of working capital and no interest-bearing debt. We returned $11.5 million to shareholders during the quarter through our regular dividend and share repurchases consisting of $10.1 million in dividends and $1.4 million of share buybacks. In summary, the second quarter demonstrated the strength and operating leverage of our North American drilling segment, record revenue per industry day and improving momentum across our completion segment. I will now turn the call over to Jon for his comments on our outlook.

Thank you, Celine. As Celine noted, our second quarter results demonstrate the continued strength of Pason's competitive position and the operating leverage embedded in our business. Through the quarter, we saw North American industry activity increase. While the quarterly average U.S. land rig count was largely unchanged from the second quarter of 2025, this year, the industry exited at higher levels of activity on an increasing trajectory, whereas in 2025, the industry has decreased through the second quarter in the midst of global trade uncertainty. Our medium-term goal has not changed. We are targeting a doubling of revenue from 2023 levels from our oil and gas well construction activities over a 5 to 7-year horizon. As we have said before, we believe that Pason can grow revenue and earnings in a meaningful way without meeting a step-up in North American land drilling activity. That said, clearly, increasing activity is a strong tailwind for our business. We expect to generate growth over and above industry activity in 5 areas: first, scaling our completions business. Second, increasing adoption and improving price realization of our established drilling products and services. Third, bringing compelling new technologies to the drilling and completions markets with the Mud Analyzer being the most current example. Fourth, expanding our international revenue, particularly as more work shifts towards unconventional drilling and completions and fifth, addressing data management opportunities in adjacent well construction activities. Across our business, customers continue to place increasing emphasis on automation, analytics, artificial intelligence and centralized real-time operating centers. These trends increase the strategic value of consistent, accurate and reliable operational data, an area where Pason has developed a unique competitive position for more than 4 decades. Our business has long been recognized for strong margins and return on capital, and it can be easy to overlook the continued strength of our core drilling-related business while we scale earlier-stage businesses. Lower margin and return profiles at their earlier stage of development in completions and solar and energy storage can obscure the strong margins from our drilling business. As an illustration of this point, our North American Drilling segment gross profit increased by $4.6 million from the second quarter of 2025 on a $4.6 million increase in revenue in the same period. The reality of a rental business model at an earlier stage of development is that capital intensity appears higher as we make capital expenditures in the short term that are expended -- are expected to generate rental revenue and corresponding earnings over a period of several years. Over time, as rental revenue streams continue from prior capital investments, free cash flow conversion is expected to migrate higher as aggregate capital intensity decreases. As we generate additional free cash flow, we look to allocate capital responsibly between shareholder returns and growth-oriented investments. We balanced the discipline and predictability of our regular quarterly dividend, which we are holding at $0.13 per share with the flexibility to invest organically and to repurchase shares, both of which we evaluate through the lens of expected returns on capital. Any M&A opportunities that surface have to compete against the expected returns from reinvesting in our own business or buying back our own shares. Today, the highest expected returns we continue to see come from organic investment in our business. We continue to expect capital expenditures for 2026 to be between $60 million and $70 million. Focusing on generating valuable products and services for customers in areas where we have a unique and distinctive advantage and being disciplined in our costs allows us to outpace underlying North American land drilling activity. Continued outperformance over time leads to strong financial performance through the benefits of compounding over time. We are well positioned to respond as activity continues to increase. The benefits of our leading market share and high operating leverage are the most pronounced when activity is rising. Recent trends in North American drilling and completions activity have been constructive. And we expect the longer-term direction of customer spending and demand for efficiency enhancing technologies to support greater adoption of Pason technologies going forward. Pason is exceptionally well positioned to benefit from those trends, particularly with our leadership in real-time operational data, the growing relevance of automation across both drilling and completions workflows and the operating leverage of our business. We continue to build our business with a focus on ensuring we have the foundation for continued growth and compounding over the medium and longer term. Our focus is on delivering exceptional performance in the areas within our control, extending our service and technology advantages, investing in growth opportunities that are not directly available to shareholders, keeping a strong balance sheet and returning capital to shareholders in a disciplined way. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Aaron MacNeil from TD Cowen.

You guys highlighted that the North American Drilling segment generated $4.6 million of additional revenue and essentially dropped down to the gross margin line. So I'm just hoping you can speak a bit more about the operating leverage embedded in the business. And if you see this quarter is representative of what we should expect in the near term? Or maybe if that was exceptional in your view, if you have sort of a rule of thumb that you think would be helpful for forecasting purposes.

Thanks for the question. So in previous cycles, we would have spoken about the fact that the North American Drilling segment's ability to generate incremental margins of around 75% on an additional $50 million of revenue. And I would say that's a good rule of thumb that you can use as you think about going forward. That segment continues to have very meaningful operating leverage opportunities. As you pointed out, the second quarter was a little bit higher than that. I will point out though that on a consolidated basis you have to keep in mind the revenue mix by segment when you're looking at incremental EBITDA. As you know, we have some earlier stage segments, they have lower margins today than on the drilling side. And so that will impact the consolidated figure in any given quarter. He will also build it up a little bit by segment, but we continue to see the drilling segment being significantly leveraged activity, and that would be consistent with what we've seen in previous cycles.

That's helpful. And then, Jon, I want to better understand the market landscape for IWS today as well as how you're thinking about the future market opportunity. And specifically, like what do you think IWS' current market share is today? And how do you think about sort of the potential total addressable market changing in the future?

Yes. So Aaron, if you look at what we would report for connective jobs in and around 30 jobs or so in a market that's reported in and around the 200 range depending on what you read for industry, that would suggest a market share in and around that kind of 15% overall. We think there's a lot of opportunity for all participants in the market to grow that 15% maybe represents our best information is maybe about half of the opportunity that's currently in the market. So there's a lot of people who aren't using the type of technology yet. So we see just greater adoption of technology benefiting sort of all players in the industry. I don't think it would be 100% of the market for the type of technology we're talking about. There are some simple fracturing operations, which it's a little less applicable or harder to sort of make that translation of value versus cost potentially. But as you look at the landscape and completions, but the market is moving towards a greater proportion of activity being more complex operations, and we stand to benefit from that. So we think there's lots of additional addressable market with where the market is today, and we see the addressable market growing naturally as you go to larger and more complex completions operations.