Valeura Energy Inc.

Valeura Energy Inc.

11.09
EUR
+0.34
(+3.16%)
0.51EPS
12.47P/E
681.89MMarket Cap
Nov 11Next Earn

Q1 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptMay 14, 2026

Robin Martin

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us for Valeura's 2026—I almost said '25—2026 AGM.

My name is Robin Martin, SVP Communications and Investor Relations. Just a few housekeeping items before we get going.

No fire drills scheduled for today, if we hear an alarm, it's the real deal. If we need to evacuate, that'll be through the back of the room, up the stairs, out the front door, and we'll follow the instructions from the Petroleum Club thereafter.

Today's event is being broadcast and recorded, and we'll make that available online later today or tomorrow. Running order for the day: In a moment, I'm going to hand over to Dr.

Tim Marchant, our Chairman, who will take us through the formal AGM. Thereafter, Tim will hand over to Dr.

Sean Guest, our CEO, to do a business update. At the end, we'll take a Q&A session.

We can do that live with those of you in the room, and for those who are listening online, you can either type your questions through email or type them through the MS Teams system. With that, over to you, Tim.

Tim Marchant

4:00 on the dot. I appreciate the support.

Good afternoon, everybody. It is 4:00, and I will ask that this meeting come to order.

My name is Tim Marchant, and I am the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Valeura Energy. I will act as the Chair for today's meeting.

On behalf of Valeura, I'd like to welcome you all to today's meeting, and I'd also like to welcome the shareholders and others listening on our live audio broadcast. Before we proceed with the formal business of the meeting, I'd like to introduce the directors and the management of Valeura who are present today, and I would ask that each stand momentarily if I remember to call their names.

First are directors: Tim Chapman, Anna Green, Russell Hiscock, Lena Lee, Sean Guest, also our CEO, as you well know. From the management team, we have Yasin En-Nmer, our CFO; we have Greg Golosky, I remembered this year, our COO; Kelvin Tang, our EVP, Corporate, General Counsel, and Corporate Secretary; Robin Martin, who's already introduced himself to you; and James Boyd, who's our Chief Information Officer.

Hey, James. We're also joined today by our outgoing director, Jim McFarland, and our founding CEO, and our new director nominee, Joe Tomkiewicz.

You can get to know Joe after the formal proceedings. Before proceeding with the business of the meeting, I would like to inform the attendees of the meeting that the board decided to extend the cutoff for proxies in respect to this meeting by an additional 24 hours from the original deadline, and all proxies received prior to 4:00 p.m., May 13th, yesterday, have been accepted.

For this meeting, Kelvin Tang will act as the Secretary, and I appoint the representatives of Computershare Trust Company of Canada to act as the scrutineers. Thank you.

The notice calling this meeting, the form of proxy, and the mailing request form were sent to all those that requested printed copies of the information circular. These were mailed to all registered shareholders on April 17th, 2026.

The declaration of mailing is available for inspection by any shareholder, and I would ask the Secretary to file a copy with the minutes. I've been advised by the scrutineers that the quorum has been met for this meeting.

The scrutineers' report is available for inspection by any shareholder, and I would ask that the Secretary file a copy of this also with the minutes. With that said, I declare that meeting is regularly called and properly constituted for the transaction of business.

As Robin said earlier, for convenience, we've divided this meeting into two parts. The first part will deal with the formal business of the meeting and is the most exciting.

The second part will consist of a presentation by Sean Guest, our President and CEO, on the operations of Valeura, and will be followed, as Robin said, by questions from registered shareholders and proxyholders. To facilitate the timely completion of the formal business, arrangements have been made with certain shareholders to move and second the resolutions to be considered.

Votes will be conducted by way of ballot. If you are a registered shareholder and have not received or submitted a form of proxy, or you are a proxyholder and you've not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers, and a ballot will be provided for you.

Thank you. The first item of business is the presentation of the 2025 audited financial statements of Valeura and the auditor's report therein.

The financial statements are available on SEDAR+ and have been sent to those shareholders who have requested copies. The next item of business is the appointment of the auditors.

May I please have a motion for such business?

Kelvin Tang

Mr. Chair, I move that Deloitte & Touche LLP Singapore be appointed as auditor of Valeura to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting or until their successor are appointed, at such remuneration as might be determined by the board.

Tim Marchant

Is there a seconder?

Robin Martin

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Tim Marchant

Any discussion? As previously stated, the approval of the auditors of the Corporation will be voted by way of ballot.

If you have not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers. I'm advised by the scrutineers that the motion has been carried by the necessary majority.

Accordingly, I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the election of the directors.

Valeura has nominated eight directors for election and did not receive any nominations from shareholders in accordance with our bylaws. Accordingly, I will now receive the Corporation's director nominations.

Robin Martin

Mr. Chair, I nominate the following for election as directors of Valeura: William Sean Guest, Timothy R.

Marchant, Russell J. Hiscock, Timothy M.

Chapman, Lena Lee, Anna Green, Chalermchai Mahagitsiri, and Joseph A. Tomkiewicz.

Tim Marchant

May I now have a motion for this business?

Kelvin Tang

Mr. Chair, I move that the Corporation's director nominees be elected as directors of Valeura to hold office until the close of the next annual meeting or until their successors are elected or appointed.

Tim Marchant

Is there a seconder?

Stuart Jeffery

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Tim Marchant

In accordance with Valeura's majority voting policy, the directors will be elected individually by way of ballot. For a nominee to be elected as a director, he or she must receive a majority of the votes cast in favor of his or her election.

If you have not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers. I am advised by the scrutineers that each director nominee has received greater than 50% of the votes cast in favor of his or her election, as required by our majority voting policy.

Accordingly, I declare the motion carried and that each nominee has been elected a director. The next item of business is the approval of all unallocated options under the stock option plan of Valeura.

May I please have a motion for such business?

Kelvin Tang

Mr. Chair, I move that the resolution on page 13 of the annual information circular be approved.

Tim Marchant

Is there a seconder?

Robin Martin

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Tim Marchant

Any discussion? As stated previously, the approval of all unallocated options under the stock option plan of the Corporation will be voted on by way of ballot.

If you have not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers. I'm advised by the scrutineers that the motion has been carried by the necessary majority.

Accordingly, I declare the motion carried. The next item of business is the approval of all unallocated performance share units and restricted share units under the performance and restricted share unit plan of Valeura.

May I please have a motion?

Kelvin Tang

Mr. Chair, I move that the resolution on page 14 and 15 of the information circular be approved.

Tim Marchant

Is there a seconder?

Robin Martin

Mr. Chair, I second the motion.

Tim Marchant

Any discussion? As stated previously, the approval of all unallocated performance share units and restricted share units under the performance and restricted share unit plan of the Corporation will be voted on by way of ballot.

If you've not received a ballot, please identify yourself to the scrutineers. I'm advised by the scrutineers that the motion has been carried by the necessary majority.

Accordingly, I declare the motion carried. That now concludes the formal business of the meeting.

I declare the formal part of the meeting terminated, and thank you all for attending. Now that the formalities have been completed, Sean Guest, our President and CEO, will give an update on Valeura's operations.

If you have any questions at the end of the presentation, for those of you who are in the room, we ask that you raise your hand, wait to be acknowledged and to be handed a microphone, and then begin your question by identifying yourself and indicating whether you're a registered shareholder or a proxyholder. Those of you listening online, you can submit typed questions through the Q&A feature on Teams or by email.

Thank you. Sean, over to you.

Sean Guest

Thank you very much, Tim. Thank you all for coming here today and being with us.

Now, when I look back about a year ago, we were together here in this building and doing our AGM, and at that time, we had just gone through an oil price shock. We'd seen prices drop by over 15%, and we were looking at oil in kind of the low $60s at that point in time.

Here we are a year later, and actually we're dealing with an oil price shock again, but this way going the other direction. In many ways, it kind of supports our business model because we've designed this company to deliver really good returns at $65 and to also then give everyone really good exposure to the upside that exists.

Robin, if you can jump forward a couple of slides. Looking at the last year, just glancing back over at some of the key points, is we're currently just over $1 billion US.

A year ago, we were just over $600. Part of that is due to the increase in oil price, but actually, a lot of that increase we saw, the increase in share price, all occurred prior to the Iran war and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Another area we knew we had to focus on a company was reserves when we took over the assets in Mubadala. It was a challenge that shareholders saw.

We had yet another year of, in this case, almost 200% reserve replacement, which has taken us up to about 58 million barrels of reserves, and that's approaching just under eight years reserve life index, more than double what we had when we took over these assets. The other key point really being as well is that with that high reserve replacement ratio, is that we've produced pretty well all of the oil that we bought a few years ago, and yet we still have double the reserves.

That's what you can get here in Thailand. It's just another year of success in that direction.

It was exactly a year ago we took FID on what was the biggest project that the company had ever undertaken, the new central processing platform and redevelopment of the Wassana field. We're now here a year later, that project is on schedule and on budget, and in fact, we do expect to come in under budget on that, and we're even seeing if we can deliver that early, but the project is going extremely well at this point in time.

On new business, we farmed in to the G1/G3 blocks with the NOC, PTTEP. When we looked at the map a year ago on the right-hand side, we had tiny little yellow areas that were just our field.

Now we're holding some of the biggest acreage positions in the Gulf of Thailand next to some of the biggest producing assets as well as our assets. That's a very important deal that we've managed to get through, and I'll talk a bit more about that on the end.

Then on the farm-out side, we actually have operations going on in Turkey now. Many of you here in this room even have been involved in the company since those days in Turkey where we've held those assets, managed to protect them, and now we've had a farm-in and we have some operations ongoing.

Obviously, for us, that's blue-sky upside, but if that works over there, that has huge potential. Then the last point is the oil price.

As we said, we have no debt, we are unhedged, you won't see in our Q1 or our Q financials any hedging losses, we are fully exposed to that oil price. It's been an extremely good year, and we're very pleased at the growth we've managed to deliver.

Next slide, Robin. This is a couple of other points actually on where we're at.

The bottom right slide there, a number of awards we've had. At the end of last year, we were actually awarded Globe and Mail's number one growing company in Canada.

That's across all industries, and that's based on three years increase in your revenue. The other point is with that increase in share price, we have built up the cash position.

Right now, just at the end of Q1, we're just over a quarter-billion dollars cash in the bank. Next slide.

I just want to reiterate again to all shareholders and that, what is the strategy of the company? Our strategy is based on growth.

We're looking to really use the capital we have, use our assets, our relationships to build a company and return value to people through share price growth. That's what we've been able to do in the past three years, and that's what we intend to do going forward.

Now the key pillars of that are really looking at the asset base we have is looking at that as a foundation of cash flow. We've been able to do that.

We can see we're extending the life of these assets, we're getting good cash flow from them, especially in the current environment. Operational excellence: Greg's background, my background, Shell, Woodside, we bring that type of professional approach to the assets.

It's very important to us that we run these things as top-quality assets, and it's actually bought us a lot in relationships as well, the respect that we've got in Thailand by making sometimes a hard decision to shut in a field if we're concerned about the asset, but to correct it and then bring it back online. That's worked very well.

Then the inorganic growth: Of course, we did the G1/G3 deal last year, but we continue to look for more deals in that area, and that's why we've actually have the cash position that we currently have, is to be able to do that deal with the cash and debt access and still do deals of very significant scale. Next slide.

Just putting in a couple of slides on Q1 where we released the results this morning. Some of these were released earlier, but you can see the revenue for the first quarter was actually quite low.

What we had was as we sell packages of oil from our tankers, in March, the buyers were able to actually push that just out into April. We had no oil sales in March, which you'll know was of course a time of high prices.

Right? Now, a lot of that inventory was then sold in the first few days of April, and we've got back now to having very good sales looking in April.

If you look at our revenue that we had of $92 million for the first quarter, we had almost the same revenue, we're just over $90 million, for April alone. Then you can start to look at, well, what does that mean from a cash flow point of view?

You can quite simply work it out in your head. The opex we had on April is 1/3, the SG&A is approximately 1/3, the royalties and that stay the same, and we have very low tax exposure because of those tax losses we have.

You can see where that's going to leave you on an adjusted free cash flow at the end. The cash flow from operations can be very strong for April, and let's see what's going to happen in May.

We're still getting strong sales and we're seeing strong prices. It's really bringing a boost of cash flow into the company.

Next slide? Yeah.

Then just again we commented that we have very good cash. Now we are down a bit from where we were year-end last year.

We expected that to be the case, not just that we had the lower revenues in this quarter, but also this was a quarter where we're investing heavily in building the Wassana platform, and in addition, we went out and bought one of the FSOs we had, we knew that this was an investing quarter. If you look at that inventory and the amount of inventory that was sold in the first few days after the end of April, that would add about an extra, I think after royalties, with another $60 million in cash added in.

Yeah? Next slide.

As we kind of then look forward to the year and how have things performed so far, what are we thinking about in guidance? Production, we are right on where we expect to be, right?

Opex, we're still within our guidance on opex. If oil prices stay really high for a lot of the year, well, we would see our opex creep up a bit because we use a lot of diesel, and obviously that's costing more in this environment.

Obviously recognize if oil prices stay high, the revenue side of the equation is extremely high. We feel very well situated in those two areas going forward.

Now capex: All of the projects we've talked about, our drilling, the Wassana platform are all running on budget, but we are increasing the capex because with the higher price and that, we've been able to get a very good rig contract and we're planning to bring that rig in and start drilling earlier. We expect about two months earlier than planned, you've got extra drilling.

As we've talked about as well, we're going to do an expansion on the Nong Yao A facility to allow us to put in four more well slots and then go and drill in those well slots, you can just increase the production from that platform going forward. All in all, guidance looking good for the year.

Next slide. The two things I just wanted to talk about from an asset point of view is one, the Wassana redevelopment, which is going extremely well.

Now, as I said, we took this decision about 12 months ago when oil was at $65, and we were looking at this decision as well, how does this project look even running it down to $60 or even lower? The economics on the project are very good.

Obviously, now, as we look at where oil price is and look forward a bit, the economics on this look even better. As I said, I expect we're going to come in on or even under budget on this.

We did announce recently that we just signed a three-year rig contract, which is one of the first things that'll do is the drilling on Nong Yao and then on this project. Our timing on that was extremely good.

We went out for tender at the end of last year when you were looking at that low oil price environment, and the bids that we got coming in were really almost at a level that we saw back in COVID times, and therefore we've locked in the pricing for three years for a full three-year contract. We have the drilling portfolio, we have the projects that can underpin that, and the price is low that it really increases the economics of all our projects.

Next slide. We announced last year, too, we did the farm-in with the NOC, PTTEP, pretty well in ground-floor terms across their exploration blocks.

We have 40%, they have 60% in the blocks. Now, this is just the one block we're most excited in, and we'll come out with more details on this as we progress here.

To give you an idea of scale as we sit here in Calgary, the size of this block on the right-hand side over there is pretty well the distance from Calgary to Edmonton, a pretty good size. What you see on the right-hand side or to the east are some of the biggest gas fields in Thailand.

The Bongkot field doing about 800 million a day, and we're right up against that. There are discoveries already there, in that central area in green, this has already been converted over to a production area, and we expect to come forward with an FID on two gas platforms this year.

Kind of watch this space, that work is maturing and looking very good. The economics on the project are good.

The other area for us that's very exciting here is up in the very north, that's our Nong Yao facility, and the map in the left side down below shows our Nong Yao field and where the platform is. We already have a whole portfolio of drillable prospects from our platform in this block, and we've identified a suite of exploration opportunities that extend up towards the north.

We've acquired a lot of new seismic here, it's coming to the workstation—but I think in Q1 next year, the plan with PTTEP is we'll go in and drill a couple of oil wells here to allow that whole area to be converted to an oil production area that'll then form tiebacks into our own Nong Yao facility. This is a very exciting exploration block where exploration is going to convert to cash flow extremely quickly.

Thanks, Robin. Just looking at cash flow, what are we doing with our cash flow or capital allocation policy?

The first one is the reinvestment into our assets, and this we've talked about a lot. We intend to keep the assets we bought originally at about 20,000 to 25,000 barrels a day.

We have the capital to do that. You can see our cash flow is fully funding a whole new platform and redevelopment of Wassana.

It's also sufficient to do the platforms that are coming from PTTEP. We have the cash flow from this to fully fund those.

Next, we are very focused on the M&A. The deal last year was a farm-in, it was fairly small, but we do see the big deals out there and we are actively involved in some processes.

I think I pointed out in our last call, oil price volatility is challenging. It'll likely make a few deals go slower, but corporate deals, it doesn't slow down at all, right?

You still have that ability to move forward. That's where the growth is coming in.

Finally, then, returns: We have had a share buyback policy in place, but what we have emphasized to people is we're not looking to really reduce the share count, we're looking to manage it. We're buying out dilutive instruments, we're doing some share buybacks, but just really to keep the share count at where we've had it or a little bit below.

We will need to look at as well this year, with this boost in cash flow that we're currently getting and having over a quarter of a million dollars in the bank already—we've said that's sufficient to look at significant deal size—if we get through the latter half of the year and those deals are not there, then we'll likely have to sit down with the board and look at what we're going to do with that excess cash as to how we might return it. Next slide.

Finally, just touching on some of the ESG aspects: I think the one thing we're very proud of is taking over these assets, in the first two years of production, we were able to reduce the emissions intensity by 30%. In other words, to point out to people, the same oil is being produced, but with 30% less emissions.

Key to us as well is the projects that we took on reduce opex on that. A lot of it is about using less diesel, right?

With doing that, you're reducing emissions, but you're reducing your opex as well. That's gone extremely well.

Very well HSE stats, too. We have not had a lost-time incident for coming up now on three years.

Things are going very well there. No spills, we're all offshore.

The team runs the shop very professionally, and we work under a lot of ISO regulations. I do like to continually emphasize to people when I look at Thailand and our operations there, we have 200 staff in the office and offshore about 500 full-time and in two shifts, and we have about five expats in country.

You have quality team of Thai people over there who are running these assets extremely well. Last slide.

Really, things have gone extremely well for us since we've moved into Thailand. When I look at what we've done in Thailand, it's really you couldn't draw out a better country entry, and we've built up the asset there in the asset base that it can go forward.

It's sustainable. It's running itself.

It's a strong business unit delivering that cash flow. We still have more growth.

There are other assets we're looking for there in Thailand, but the country entry into Thailand has gone very well. Where we as an executive have been focused now much more and are going forward is, where are we going to repeat this now?

What's the next country that we're going to move into to do this? It's going to be another exciting year as I see coming up: good cash flow, looking for growth.

Thanks very much.

Robin Martin

Thanks, Sean. We'll move into a Q&A session now.

We're, as I mentioned, able to take questions from the room. If you'd like to ask a question, raise your hand.

Thomas will bring you a microphone.

Stuart Jeffery

Hi, I'm Jeffery Sain. I have unregistered shares.

Any more details on the testing in Turkey, when we might expect results from that?

Sean Guest

Jeffery, it's a good question. We do get it quite a bit.

We're a little disappointed at the time it's tend to take to really set this up, but in our discussions with TransAtlantic, who are operating that testing out there, they're really looking at getting this testing set up that it can be low-cost, and what they're trying to achieve is a test that we're not going to test the well for a week or a month or two months. They want to see the ability to have this test set up and run for a long time.

They have got all the equipment out there, but they've just had some issues on power that I understand they're solving at this point in time, hopefully we'll get back to testing. Disappointingly, since we talked about this a few months ago, we actually have no new data I can talk about on that.

Where we're really looking at now in those assets, it's about setting it up for the next two-year phase for the blocks, fulfilling the commitments, getting the testing ongoing, protecting the rights we have there to allow this work to then progress forward.

Stuart Jeffery

Are they testing a vertical well, or have they drilled horizontally?

Sean Guest

No, this is going back into the original wells that we drilled several years ago, and there was a new frac stimulation and test in the one well, and that's actually what they're working on now is a different zone than we tested before, but it is all vertical. There's no expectation of getting a really high flow rate.

What you're looking for is sustainability and then getting the tech cost low that you can show you can keep this thing on and then model it up to a horizontal.

Stuart Jeffery

Thanks.

Robin Martin

We'll take another question from the room, and just a reminder to the online audience that you can use the Q&A feature in Teams if there's anything you'd like to ask, or email us with that address you see on the screen.

Keith McDonald

Keith McDonald, a shareholder. Sean, any more visibility on the government approval in the farm-in and the signing?

Sean Guest

Your point to there is G1 and G3. Those were done, submitted to the government, and then you had a new election within Thailand, everything has actually slowed down, right, while they went through an election.

They now have had the election, the cabinet's been appointed, you have an energy minister. It's our understanding that that now has moved forward to his desk.

There's a few other things going on in energy right now, I can say that the cabinet's quite focused on. Whether it's next week, next month, next quarter, we're not sure, but we have ways to move forward with PTTEP, and we are working with them every week.

Our team is working with them on working these projects together.

Robin Martin

We've had a couple of online questions as well, Sean. First one: "With your additional drilling in Q4 that wasn't originally planned, as well as more well slots at Nong Yao, when do you expect we'll see production increases?"

Sean Guest

Where we're drilling through to the end of August, and then we're going to stop for probably a few months and then come back and start drilling, you will see the production fall off during that time period. It's then once we get the drilling back on, then you're going to get those new wells come on.

We haven't really said we're going to be at the upper end of production, because if you're drilling development wells right at the end of Q4, you don't get a lot of contribution for that year. Where we see we're going to get the production coming on is actually in '27.

That's the focus, just to increase it then.

Robin Martin

Thanks for that. One more here: "Your April realized price was $110, which looks like a small premium to Dubai.

With all the talk out there about the difference between physical and paper prices in oil, why wasn't the premium higher, and what should we expect going forward?"

Sean Guest

A lot of this has to do with actually how we tender for our oil. We'll decide we're going to do spot cargoes, and now we would go now for maybe tenders in June.

That sort of time period. June or July even, right?

You're a few months late. The bidding that was done in February was likely for April pricing.

Right? The premiums that we were getting in the bidding were related to the low oil price.

What we're seeing now is the premiums we're getting on a number of the fields are much higher. In fact, if prices were to fall tomorrow to $80, we would still be getting that higher premium.

It's that fact there's a couple of months delay that comes in there from when we actually go to tender the oil to when it's actually sold and you get the revenue.

Robin Martin

Thanks for that. We have no further questions online.

Anything else from the room? With that, over to you to wrap up, Sean.

Sean Guest

Again, thank you very much for coming. Again, we've been on a very good run delivering value to shareholders, and we see ways to continue this as we move forward over the next year or two.

Thank you to our team, the executive here in the room, to the board, to our whole team in Thailand who've been working extremely hard, and to all of you as shareholders. We look forward to continuing to work together.

Thank you.