TGS ASA (TGS) Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TGS Q4 2022 Earnings Release. My name is Kristian Johansen. I'm the CEO of TGS. And with me today, I have our CFO, Sven Borre Larsen. So I'll give you a chance to read the forward-looking statements, before I go to the first slide of the presentation, which are the highlights from Q4. So we had total POC revenues of about $227 million in Q4 that compares to about $120 million in Q4 of 2021. I'm particularly pleased about our late sales that grew from about $136 million -- grew to $136.6 million in Q4 this year or in 2022, that compares to about $53 million in Q4 of 2021. We had early sales of about $31 million as compared to $55 million in Q4 of 2021. And last but not least, Magseis Fairfield was consolidated from October 11 and contributing to about $54 million to revenues after the intercompany eliminations due to working for TGS in that period. The EBITDA based on POC was about $151.4 million and that compares to $84 million in Q4 of 2021. We continue to have a robust balance sheet. We have cash or net cash of about $188.5 million and that's despite being very active in the M&A market during the course of 2022. Strong contract inflow, we have about $283.4 million in Q4 of 2022 and that compared to about $162.8 million in the same quarter of 2021. So it makes me really optimistic about the future and we have a financial guidance for 2023 that I think surprised most of you quite positively. We're increasing our multiclient investments to a level of between USD320 million and USD350 million. In addition to that, we see POC early sales rate above 70%, could probably assume that the 70% is pretty much committed. So you can see that as a minimum funding for our projects for 2023. And then in addition to that, we keep our dividends at about $0.14 per share per quarter for 2023. So again, very pleased about the quarter, obviously a very strong late sales figure, but what probably excites me even more is all the new projects that we've signed over the last couple of months and you saw this morning as well that we announced a couple of new projects for TGS. So if we look at the highlights in more detail, I want to start with Magseis Fairfield. So the acquisition of Magseis, we reached about 75% ownership back in October of 2022, and then we got to the 100% ownership in early January 2023. Magseis will become a separate business unit in TGS responsible for OBN, but also all other acquisition-related activities, meaning that we move our operations department into Magseis and that business unit will now be headed by the EVP, Carel Hooijkaas, who is the former CEO of Magseis. So very pleased to welcome Carel to the team. And also pleased about the integration process that is actually ahead of plan. We have a cost synergy potential that we have increased from the initial range of between USD7 million and USD9 million. And we will see a full run rate of that to be realized towards the end of 2023. And again, just to highlight the transaction rationale that we have talked about in the past that we also -- we see great benefits by owning Magseis in this booming market. So #1, we secure access, of course, of the best-in-class OBN technology. It allows TGS for a strong position in ILX areas where you see significant growth as we speak and that goes with multiclient, proprietary, and 4D. And you've probably seen from some of the recent contract announcements that we had that's TGS is now in the 4D market, we're in the proprietary market for OBN, and we're obviously as stronger than every player in the traditional multiclient space where you see TGS is now capturing also very strong position in ILX areas. We see cost synergies and we see efficiency gains from stronger utilization. In fact, we actually struggled to get capacity because Magseis is pretty much sold out, meaning that this summer we will acquire 2 projects in Norway with a third-party vendor because Magseis don't have capacity to serve TGS internal needs. This will also further enhance our position in OBN processing. It's been a high priority for TGS to develop algorithms and technologies within our processing team to allow for continued growth in OBN. And then last but not least, it will improve our exposure towards energy transition-related industries like offshore wind, CCS, and Deep Sea Minerals. So very excited about the acquisition of Magseis Fairfield. Again, the name will change to TGS. They will be a separate business unit within our acquisition group and very optimistic about the future for both the former Magseis for their employees and obviously for TGS with a stronger product portfolio. So we got a long list of recently announced projects. As I said, we announced another 2 projects this morning, but it's been quite hectic for our business development teams over the past few months, and I'm just extremely pleased about all the hard work they've done and really making sure that TGS stays on top of this industry. So if you start on the Western Hemisphere, we had a new onshore project announced in the Permian. Permian is coming back, although relatively slowly. We don't see a big boom coming up, but we finally see seismic spending starting to increase. So very pleased about that. We get 2 OBN projects in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. The last one was announced this morning. We have a project in Santos, a 3D in Santos, another 3D in Foz do Amazonas in the equatorial margin where we see great growth and future prospects. We have a reprocessing project in Uruguay. We have 2 OBN surveys in Norway planned for the summer. They're both multi-clients and we have a multiclient 2D survey in Bangladesh announced quite recently. So I'll take you quickly through these projects before I hand it over to Sven. First one is 2 projects, 2 OBN surveys that we're doing in Norway this summer. It's Sleipner and Heimdal Terrace and you see how they stack up with our existing data library with Utsira and NOAKA. So Sleipner is about 1,200 square kilometer survey and Heimdal Terrace that we're going to acquire before Sleipner it's about 500 square kilometers. These surveys then increase the contiguous multiclient OBN coverage in the region to almost 4,000 square kilometers and you see how the surveys stack up. And just want to say, I'm really excited about this, because it's -- this is really a new generation of seismic being acquired in a very mature and prospective area of the North Sea. So -- and it also proves the value of OBN. So this area has a lot of traditional 3D seismic, and the fact that our clients and our supporting TGS to go out and acquire OBN on top of that data shows that OBN has an important role to play in mature areas. Norway is a great example. And of course, U.S. Gulf of Mexico is another example. Heimdal Terrace is going to commence in April and then Sleipner will commence in June 2023. Then we have the Santos Sul 3D in offshore Brazil. This covers more than 15,000 square kilometers, both open acreage and recently awarded Permanent Offer Round blocks. It's located in the southwest Santos Basin, and you see that and how it stacks up with other TGS projects where we have a lot of 3D in the area, and we've had great success over the past few years in Brazil. And obviously this just adds to the [ contiguous ] database that you see from the map. We're doing this in partnership with PGS and acquisition here is scheduled to complete in August 2023. Next one is the Foz do Amazonas. This is a Phase II. We acquired the initial project back in 2013. This is an 11,400 square kilometer project. It's in the offshore Brazil equatorial margin, and this is a margin that is really hot. And if you look at Petrobras 5-year plan, you'll see that they have plans of drilling 16 wells in this area and this is really the new salt basin in Brazil where they really try to find ways to replace all the reserves from the salt basin. So very excited about the equatorial margins. We're doing this in the partnership with CGG. And I think this data will definitely be instrumental in enabling data for the future Permanent Offer Rounds. We're going to have our early out PSDM products available in Q4 of 2023. And then we move over to Uruguay. This is a Tannat 3D reprocessing. It's a 25,000 square kilometer offshore in Uruguay. Uruguay is another example of a country that has seen great interest now from majors and independents all over the world, partly due to their -- the closeness to Guyana, Suriname, that whole margin sees a lot of growth as we speak. And obviously, if you look at the conjugate margin, you see areas such as Namibia and South Africa with great exploration success. So there is many reasons why the industry is now looking back to Uruguay and TGS is fortunate to have a current database there, and now we're doing reprocessing about to make sure that we can serve our clients with the latest and greatest technologies also in Uruguay. The final data products will be delivered in Q3 of 2023. Next one is Bangladesh. We're doing a 2D survey in Bangladesh. This is a regional scale 2D survey. This is more of a frontier area where one of the last area is actually in the world where you still see that there is prospectivity, but there is not a lot of data, and we're acquiring this data together with SLB. And really excited about potentially opening up Bangladesh as a new area. Great interest. Obviously, there's a population rich area where they're quite desperate to find oil and gas and make sure that they get independence. This supports future license rounds under the soon to be revised fiscal terms, which are widely accepted by the industry, and we already see great interest from industry and quite excited about that. Acquisition commenced in early January of 2023 on the Bangladesh 2D survey. Then we get the onshore project in the Permian Basin. This was announced late last year and it encompasses about 85 miles -- square miles in the Mitchell County. This is in the Midland Basin. It's a prospective area where you see a lot of production activity as we speak. And obviously an area that has kept up pretty well, despite the fact that onshore spending has been down over the past few years. Quite optimistic about the Permian, where we really think that we have the right position here. We think this survey will be good. We're also looking at other surveys in the area, and it's definitely on the radar screen of our clients and definitely an important area for TGS going forward. Final data here will be available in Q3 of 2023. Then as I said, we have 2 new OBN awards in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and this really shows the -- all the new products that we have and the bigger toolbox that we have compared to what we had about 12 months ago. So with the acquisition of Magseis, we were really pleased to announce the first 4D OBN survey award for TGS. This is a proprietary 4D survey in Walker Ridge in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. We plan to mobilize that in Q3 of 2023, and we're going to work there for about 100 days. Then we announced this morning another sparse node survey award. This is a proprietary survey. It's located in the Gulf of Mexico and allows us to keep the crew there for a long period of time. It's planned to mobilize in Q2, and this has a duration of 100 days as well. We're also pleased to talk about our ESG performance. We usually have a slide where we show all the awards that we've been getting over the years, and I'm really pleased to see that we got 2 new awards in Q4. One is that we won the award for the Best Place to Work in Energy in Houston. And that's obviously an extreme pleasure to see that our people are happy. And with our people happy, I think productivity will increase, and you will see that a happy workforce typically deliver better results. So extremely pleased about the [ all the great ] award that we got in late 2022. And then just as pleased to see that we continue to be a member of the Bloomberg 2023 Gender Equality Index. This is a third year in a row where TGS qualified for that. We're 1 out of only 24 companies in the energy industry who qualified and only 1 out of 2 Norwegian companies who qualified for the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index. So with that, I want to hand it over to Sven Borre, who's going to go through the financials, and then I will come back and talk about the outlook. Thank you very much.

Thank you for that, Kristian. Good morning, everyone, [ who are ] following us online. As always, I will start by going through the revenues. This slide shows the revenues by type, and we start with early sales revenues on the top left hand corner. And note that we now talk about percentage of completion revenues. So we talk about the revenues that are recognized in accordance with the progress on the related projects that we are doing. In Q4 2022, we had $31 million of POC early sales revenues recognized. This is lower than we had in Q4 of 2021. And that's a reflection of the lower underlying multiclient investments that we had in the quarter. Coming back to that, but we recognized some noncash risk share related investments in the quarter that didn't have any associated revenue streams with it. On the late sales side, as Kristian already alluded to, we had really strong late sales in Q4, $137 million which is well above, obviously, the $53 million that we had in Q4 of 2021. And not only is the number strong itself, but we also feel that the quality of the number is rock solid because the -- it's made up by a number of different deals. There is not 1 single deal that sticks out. There is no meaningful transfer fees. There is no individual surveys that contributes by a huge amount, and it's fairly well spread out across the regions. So as I said, not only do we think number itself is strong, but also the quality and the way it's spread out on different regions and different surveys and different customers are -- is quite encouraging. Then looking at proprietary revenues on the bottom left-hand chart is now obviously includes Magseis Fairfield. We consolidated Magseis from 11th of October, so we do not carry the revenues that Magseis had in the beginning of October. The total proprietary revenues were $60 million in the quarter, which is obviously a huge increase compared to what we had in Q4 of 2021 when we didn't have Magseis included in the numbers. If we exclude Magseis, we had roughly $6 million of proprietary revenues related to our imaging business, which means that Magseis accounted for approximately $54 million on a net basis. This means that we had total POC revenues of $27 million in the -- $227 million, sorry, in the quarter, which is a massive improvement over last year when we had $120 million. Then we are looking at POC revenues by business unit, starting with multiclient first and note that in these charts, we have included the proprietary imaging revenue stream of which I said was around $6 million in the multiclient chart. So the $164 million of multiclient revenues include a small portion of proprietary revenues from imaging. The $164 million is, of course a huge improvement over what we had last year, mainly driven obviously by late sales in the multiclient business. Then we are started to report also more numbers on our Digital Energy Solutions business units, which contains among other all our initiatives towards the renewable industry. And as you can see, it's a fairly stable revenue stream, and we show significant growth year-over-year. In the fourth quarter, we had $9 million of revenues related to this, where a significant portion is made up by subscriptions or recurring revenue streams. So we expect to see growth in this number throughout 2023. And then looking at the data acquisition business unit, which is essentially Magseis, which as I said we included from 11th of October. The net contribution from Magseis was $54 million, but if you include the eliminations, it contributed by to gross revenues of about $60 million. Magseis on a standalone basis had approximately $7 million of revenues in the quarter and an EBITDA of close to $15 million. So a fairly decent quarter for Magseis in Q4. Then next slide focusing on operating expenses. On the top left-hand chart, you can see that total operating expenses amounted to $48 million in the quarter. This includes personnel cost and other operating expenses. So not cost of goods sold, which is associated with the proprietary revenues. This is -- the operating expenses is, of course, significantly higher than the run rate that you have seen in previous quarter due to the inclusion of Magseis. And the Q4 run rate or the Q4 number is fairly representative for the run rate that you should expect going forward as well. It will probably be at a level of plus-minus $50 million split -- split by roughly $25 million to $30 million on personnel cost and USD20 million to USD25 million on other operating expenses. Also note that you in Q1 should expect some one-off charges to -- related to the Magseis integration project that we plan to charge to the Q1 accounts. If you look at POC EBITDA, it was very strong in the quarter, $151 million compared to $84 million in Q4 of 2021. And this is obviously a reflection of the strong performance by our multiclient business. Then looking at multiclient investments on the bottom left-hand chart, we had $56 million of multiclient investments recognized in the quarter. Note that this include noncash investments of roughly $20 million to $30 million related to an adjustment we have done to past risk share projects in our acquired -- mostly in our acquired portfolio. And this has to do with -- that we have changed from recognizing some of these project on a net basis to recognize them on a gross basis. So $20 million to $30 million of the $56 million is related to this. You can also see that we have plotted the early sales rate. In this chart, we had 55% in Q4 of 2022 compared to more than 100% in Q4 of 2021. Over time, on an annualized basis, this early sales rate has normally been between -- it varies quite a bit, but it's been between 55% and 95% in most of the years. Then looking at free cash flow, $42 million in the quarter and the full year free cash flow of $142 million, which we are quite pleased about, particularly taking into account that we, we of course, built up quite a bit of receivables due to the strong late sales towards the end of Q4. Then looking at some library statistics or library financials. Note that this is measured on an IFRS basis. So you can see that our amortization in Q4 was $62 million compared to $165 million in Q4 of 2021. The amortization in this quarter consisted of $39 million of straight-line amortization. This is also fairly representative for the level you should expect going forward. It will probably creep up towards above the $40 million mark in the coming quarters, but broadly in line with what we saw in Q4. Accelerated amortization was obviously quite low in the quarter due to the lower recognition of early sales in IFRS, where we didn't complete a whole lot of projects in this quarter, and therefore we had a low accelerated amortization of only $14 million. And then we have some smaller impairments on certain surveys that summed up to $9 million. And that all in all, gave us this total amortization of $62 million in the quarter. If you look at the net book value of our multiclient library, it increased a bit in the quarter, and that despite the low investments and that has mostly to do obviously with the inclusion of one multiclient survey that Magseis -- that we took over from Magseis. So we stood at $592 million in a multiclient library in -- at the end of 2022, it is compared to $688 million -- no, sorry, $705 million at the end of 2021. If you look at the investments and net book value by year of completion on the bottom left-hand chart, you can see that the bars represent the historical investment in each of these vintages, and the diamonds represent or shows you had a book value of each vintage sit currently in our IFRS balance sheet. As you can see from older vintages that have been completed, we are -- the diamonds are at fairly low levels, meaning that our net book value of the library should be seen as a very conservative value. Then looking at revenues by vintage. As you can see -- as I also alluded to earlier, it's fairly well spread out. We had roughly 20% or 21% from older fully written down vintages, but also the vintages of 2018, '19, '20, and '21 and also '22 sold reasonably well. And obviously in IFRS, we have no revenue recognition of projects that are in progress. So 0% there on the WIP balance. Then going through the IFRS income statement. And here, you can see how early sales that we had low early sales of only $22.8 million in the quarter, and that was, of course, related to the fact that we didn't complete a whole lot of progress in the quarter. There was 1 particular project that slipped from -- where deliveries slipped from Q4 into Q1, and that will contribute by roughly $15 million in Q1. So roughly $15 million was moved from Q4 to Q1 on the early sales and measured in accordance with IFRS. All in all, we had $219 million of IFRS revenues in the quarter, which is obviously a massive increase of what we had in the same quarter of 2021, due to the -- to the strong late sales. You can see that cost of goods sold are at $27 million, and this should be seen in context with the proprietary sales. In going forward, we expect this cost of goods sold line to be roughly plus/minus 50% of proprietary sales. You can see we had personnel cost of $29.9 million and other operational costs of $18.5 million. As I said earlier also, this should be seen as fairly representative for the run rate going forward as well. This means that we had an EBITDA of $143.5 million in our IFRS accounts, which is essentially a doubling of what we had in Q4 of 2021. Subtracting amortization and depreciation, we ended up with an operating result of $64.6 million as opposed to a loss of $100.8 million in Q4 of 2021 when we also recognized significant impairments of the multiclient library. Subtracting net financial items, we ended up with a result before tax of $61.8 million compared to a loss of $104.9 million in Q4 of 2021. The tax cost is fairly high in the quarter or the tax rate is fairly high in the quarter. And -- but this has to be seen in context with the tax rate for the full year, which is somewhat lower. So -- but the reason, the main reason for the high tax rate in Q4, and also for the year as a whole is that we have some tax losses carried forward that are denominated in other currencies than U.S. dollars. And when the U.S. dollars appreciate the dollar value of those tax assets are going down, which we need to recognize as a tax cost. All in all, this gave us a net income of $42.1 million compared to a loss of $77 million in Q4 of last year. This corresponds to an EPS of $0.34 in the quarter. Then looking at the IFRS balance sheet. You should note that goodwill obviously have changed in -- quite significantly in 2022, and that is related obviously to the high M&A activity that we have seen throughout the year. Magseis contributed with approximately $56 million of goodwill, whereas the rest of it is related to the other transactions where most of it is associated with predictor. You will also see that we have an increase in other current assets due to the -- obviously, partially due to the inclusion of Magseis, but also due to the fact that we had a lot of late sales towards the end of Q4, which was not collected in the quarter. Then you will see that other current liabilities have gone a little bit up and this is due to the inclusion of the $45 million of interest-bearing debt from Magseis. This is characterized as current liabilities because when we acquired Magseis, we triggered a change of control clause. The banks waived that change of control until 31st of March and therefore it's characterized as short-term debt. But we are in the process now of signing a new loan agreement with the banks. We will sign an RCF of $125 million. We will obviously not draw down fully on that. We expect to draw down only $45 million portion, which means that in the next quarter that debt element should be moved to non-current liabilities. Looking at the cash flow statement, you'll see that -- you will note that the net cash flow from operating activities of $119 million or $120 million is well below the $151 million we recognized of POC EBITDA, which should tell you that we obviously have built up a fairly -- we have a lot of receivables to be collected in Q4. Also you should note that the investments in the multi-client library of -- the cash investments in the multi-client library is fairly high in the quarter. And this -- as you may remember, it was very low in Q3 when we had high booked investments. So this -- these cash investments obviously have to be measured over time and it will jump around a little bit in the individual quarters. And then you will see that we have on the cash flow from financing activities, we have included the repayment of lease liabilities from Magseis. So this is related to the vessel lease of -- leases that Magseis has. All in all, we had a net change in our cash and cash equivalents of 8.7 -- or a reduction of [ $8.7 million ] in the quarter and this is despite the fact that we paid out $50 million for acquiring Magseis shares during the quarter. We will -- we also paid another $55 million in the beginning of January, which you will see in our Q1 accounts. This meant that we had a cash balance -- solid cash balance of $188.5 million towards the end of the year. And then this strong balance sheet that we have allows us to continue to pay our dividend despite the fact that we are increasing our investments massively in 2022. So we continue to pay a dividend of $0.14 per share, which in this quarter corresponds to NOK1.46 per share, Norwegian kroner per share. And the share will go ex-dividend in 1 week and it will be paid on the 2nd of March. By that, I leave the word back to you Kristian.

Thank you, Sven. And excited to come back and talk about the market outlook for 2023. So I think the first slide, I mean there should be no need to show a slide, which says that there are signs of continued recovery in seismic spending after you have a late sales growth of 167%. But the fact is that the global seismic market grew by more than 30% in 2022 from relatively low levels as you can see from the graph on the left-hand side. And it's an interesting comparison to look at how the floater market is expected to develop for the next few years. And if you assume that the correlation between seismic and floaters and keep in mind that the floating market is about -- has about 50% exposure to exploration. So there is a reason for that strong correlation in the past. And if you believe that the correlation will continue for the future and you believe the numbers for the floaters are correct, then obviously we are looking at a very promising seismic market for the next few years and you should all significantly in the meantime. So looking at TGS position today compared to our position back in 2012 or 2013, we're completely different company. And we have, we're well positioned now and have leading positions both in mature and frontier regions. We have an extremely broad product offering. We have the world's by far leading 2D data library, well positioned for a recovery in frontier. We have the largest at least modern 3D data library. If you look at investments over the past 5 years, I think we account for about 40% or close to 40% of the total investments in multi-client over the past 5 years in our industry. So of course, a market leading position in 3D as well. We announced our first 4D contract last week. We announced an OBN contract in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico this morning. We have taken significant steps in terms of improving our imaging reputation and product portfolio there and technical image. We have about 10 million geological data wells, mainly in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, but it's a global portfolio of wells. And then as we mentioned, a leading multi-client library. So it puts us in an extreme good position for the recovery of the market. And again, if you believe in the numbers from ABG here and you believe that the floaters, they're going to continue to grow and see significant growth, double-digit growth over the next 3 years. And you believe the historical correlation with the seismic market is going to continue and we're looking at an extremely bright future for seismic and first and foremost for TGS. And I think that's further strengthened by the next bar chart, which shows the growth in the OBN demand for 2023. So if you look at 2022, this is basically at $800 million market where TGS -- where Magseis or TGS now has a market share of about 35% to 40%. That market is already at around $1 billion or slightly above $1 billion in terms of activity expected for 2023 and this is based on signed contracts as we speak. So extremely well positioned for that growth. You also see a healthy growth in terms of this as a good regional distribution. You see growth pretty much all over the world. You see obviously Northwest Europe being strong. You see Gulf of Mexico probably even stronger than what you see from these numbers with 2-contract announcements by Magseis or TGS over the past week or so. But again, a very healthy growth, a well distribution in terms of geographies and a very strong position for TGS in this market. And it's particularly interesting to listen to BP's earnings call 2 days ago where they said that, "We continue to drive down unit cost. We continue to drive capital productivity in the Wells area. We've deployed new technology. Ocean Bottom Seismic now is being deployed widely across our portfolio, giving a better view of the barrels that remain." And this is obviously a music to our ears and I just think that the timing of TGS entering this market couldn't be better. And we are extremely excited about including Magseis into our TGS family and we think that there are many, many years with great opportunities in the OBN market for TGS to play a key role. If we move on and look at the contract backlog and inflow, this further strengthens my message from the previous 2 slides. You see the acquisition backlog is slightly down in Q4 of 2022, but expected to come up again in Q1 of 2023 because of the new contract announcement of 2 100-day projects in the Gulf of Mexico announced over the past week or so in the acquisition market. TGS backlog has never been better. If you just look at the time scale that we're referring to here, so the last 12 quarters, it's highest backlog we've reported to the market. And then you have the IFRS backlog of contracts that we still not have recognized on top of that. So it means that TGS has a backlog of more than $500 million IFRS as we speak. You can see on the right-hand side, how the early sales are expected to be recognized, according to IFRS, gives you more clarity about the timing recognition of that. And again, if you look at the contract inflow, you saw Q3 was record high, Q4 was not as high as Q3, but it was really good. And as you've seen from my first part of the presentation today, there has been numerous projects announced over the past couple of weeks that makes us again very optimistic about 2023. It gives us really good visibility in terms of our guidance and means that we are optimistic about the year to come. The OBN crew activity plan and I'm pleased to announce this. So this is the first time we're talking about an OBN crew activity plan and that it just looks really good. You'll see all the -- all the dots are basically being colored in terms of contracts that have already been awarded and the crews are basically fully utilized as we speak. The ZXPLR Crew 1, you'll see that we've moved from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico to Latin America. We are working in Guyana now, going to be there for the rest of the year and I think honestly we're going to be there for quite some time after that too. The ZXPLR Crew 2 is working in the US Gulf of Mexico, is working for TGS as we speak. Then it's going to move on to do a couple of proprietary jobs. And then I think that crew is going to stay in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico for many years to come. Z700 is going to Asia and then it's moving back to North Sea after that and then you see we have full utilization of the reservoir monitoring source crews, both crew 1, 2, and 3 are basically fully utilized. We also have some interesting renewable projects working on the greensand project in Denmark, which is the CCS project. So again, can't be much better than this. I think the only problem or concern I have is that we don't get capacity to acquire our own data, which was part of the reason we acquired the company. But it's a good problem to have and just shows that this market is extremely promising and the timing of the acquisition again couldn't be better. So very pleased about that. Licensing round activity. Again, if you just look at and focus on the Atlantic margin and the southern part of the Atlantic margin, you see new countries popping up almost every week in terms of plans for licensing round. I think the list for Africa has never been longer. I think the list for Latin America, where you see countries like Barbados and Trinidad and Uruguay coming back on the map. I mean, this is obviously driven by the great exploration success we've seen in areas such as Guyana, Namibia, Suriname, and you name it. I mean, that drives a lot of exploration activity going forward, having the leading data library in the industry, of course, we capitalize on this and this is a great position to be in. I mean if you look at the map here and you look at all the data we have a TGS, partly from the organic investments we have done, again as I said, we account for almost 40% of the total investments in seismic over the past 5 years. We acquired the Spectrum in 2019, which really start to see the benefits of that in terms of our position in the South Atlantic and then the ION Data Library gave us almost 30% more coverage around the world. So just a really good position to be in. And when I look at this map and look at the different licensing rounds that are coming up either in '23 or '24, I mean, we basically have data everywhere. So it's just really, really a great pleasure to see the activity pick up as it does right now. Moving to Asia-Pacific, Australia, which always has been a relatively important region for TGS, but I think more importantly, if you look at India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, these are areas with really, really high population, really high population growth and some of these countries are importing as much as 80% to 90% of their energy needs with a record high energy prices. So there is a great push now to do more exploration in some of these countries. And again, TGS is well positioned and we also have plans to improve our position going forward. So a very positive slide in terms of predicting future activity both in terms of new investments, but also late sales for TGS in '23 and the years to come after that. So again, the guidance, we talked about this earlier in the presentation, but we are very confident about our multi-client investments and the growth that we see in the market. We're guiding now a range of between 300 and $350 million, that's obviously significantly up from what we invested in 2021 -- or '22. But more importantly, we already have about $200 million -- slightly more than $200 million committed currently. And if you look at the funding of the early sales rate, what has been committed, it makes us extremely confident in terms of guiding an overall early sales rate of above 70% for 2023. So again, as we mentioned earlier in the presentation, most of that has already been secured, so you can look at the 70% more like a minimum number in terms of what the funding is going to be in 2023. Dividend, as Sven discussed, is going to be $14 per share despite the fact that we increased our investment significantly. So we keep our dividend unchanged. And then we will come back and provide further detail on the financial outlook at the Capital Markets Day on 7th of March in 2023. And if we move to that, we're going to have a keynote speaker. His name is Dr. Scott Tinker. He is a Professor at the University of Texas. He is probably one of the world's most renowned speakers in the area of energy and environment and the dual challenge that we're faced with today. So I really encourage you to come and listened to Scott Tinker and obviously listening to the executives of TGS, who is going to go through market outlook. We're going to talk about the financial outlook, of course, status of the Magseis integration, some of the strategic priorities going forward. And of course, it gives you a chance to meet the executives of TGS and potentially get a drink as well when we finish the session around 4:00 PM on 7th of March 2023. So with that, I just want to summarize the presentation. Again, a significant market improvement, best Q4 late sales since 2014, continuous improvement in order inflow, very strong backlog of about $451 million on POC, but about $100 million higher if you account for the IFRS. Robust balance sheet, we have a cash balance of about $189 million, that's after significant M&A activity, that was at the end of the year. After that, we paid out another about $50 million related to the M&A transaction of Magseis. But as you can expect, the cash flow is also really good in terms of inflow. So our cash balance today is about $200 million despite the fact that we paid out another $50 million. Low interest-bearing debt and a strong work -- working capital position from end of year sales, which again means that Q1 cash flow as always will get really strong. Industry-leading OBN position, healthy backlog, one new project announced this morning, one announced last week. Promising pipeline and lack of supply, that market is definitely getting very tight as we speak. And as I said, TGS really has problems to get access to that capacity, which was the main reason why we acquired the company in the first place, but again a great problem to have. MC investments are now back to pre-COVID levels. We expect a range of $320 million to $350 million and feel very good about that guidance, feel that we have already secured more than $200 million at record high prefunding in that regard. So high visibility and high pre-funding levels. Great quarter. And thank you very much for your attention and we'll open up for your questions. Thank you.

Yes. So the system will allow you to post questions online. We have already got some questions, so I will start reading them up. First question is from [ Chigwe Brulam ]. What level of ship rate increases have you assumed when calculating your investment guidance?

Yes, I mean a lot of this has already been secured and we have some long-term agreements with -- we have one long-term contract with PXG that we entered into a couple of years ago and we have another one that we're working on right now that is soon to be released with a different vendor. And I think we're pretty good and have a good history of working long term with our partners. In that regard, I think on the streamer side, we're probably up 10-ish percent year-on-year from 2022. On the OBN side, it's obviously more because that market is getting really tight and -- but obviously we have also the pleasure of using Magseis for some of our internal projects. So overall, we see definitely some inflation, but not nearly as much as some people would expect.

Next question is from Mick Pickup at Barclays. Can you tell us what data you will be producing for Magseis performance to help us model? Yes, we can. As of now, the only project that TGS's multi-client business has scheduled with Magseis is the ongoing Amendment II project. And as you can see, there was elimination there of roughly $6 million in Q4 and we expect the elimination mostly in Q1, but perhaps a little bit in Q4 to be total of around $20 million. And then there is a question from John Olaisen at ABG. With Magseis capacity almost sold out, are you considering increasing the OBN capacity and could you elaborate on what is needed in order to increase capacity in terms of CapEx, timing, et cetera? Could you comment on OBN contract pricing/day rate development, please?

Yes, I can't be too specific on that. But as I said, I mean, that market is getting really tight. I mean the good thing about a tighter market is that you have the ability to raise prices. And I think there is a desperate need in that industry to raise prices because it have been too long -- too low for a long period of time, I mean nobody is making money historic in that business. I think for us, first of all, we need to make sure that we continue to tighten the market, we need to continue to see longer-term contracts, we need to see that when we put a crew somewhere in the world, we need to keep it there for long periods of time rather than traveling back and forth and transiting. So in that regard, I think that's going to be a key priority going forward is to really close the gaps that we've seen historically in Magseis portfolio. I think the market is really helping us to do that. In that regard, I feel very confident. But we need to see higher margins, of course. We need to see higher pricing overall. So I think that's going to be the key priority. If it gets so tight that we're not in a position to fulfill our multi-client plans, we need to have a plan B for that. But again, first of all, the focus for TGS now is to increase the profitability, really making that a money-making business and, of course, all the pieces should be in place to do that. So I think that's probably as far as I want to go in terms of talking about pricing and our plans going forward.

Then there is a question from Jorgen Lande at Danske. You expressed that getting access to OBN capacity is under pressure. And if market demand is increasing further, you could potentially be limited on your multi-client investment plans. Have this realization triggered any new perspectives on new vessel capacity from your side?

Yes, we probably see -- as I said on the streamer side, we feel like we are pretty well equipped in terms of capacity going forward. We are constantly working with our vendors to make sure that we can fulfill our investment plans. So not too concerned about that. I think on the OBN side, again I refer to what I say -- I said at the previous question, we are constantly working with how do we, number one, make Magseis a profitable business. And then number 2, how we're going to play this market going forward in terms of capacity and it's all a game between capacity utilization and prices, of course.