Borr Drilling Limited (NYSE:BORR) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Bruno Morand: Yeah. Indeed, Fredrik, we have had — I mean let me start by saying that those two rigs in particular are quite special in terms of their capabilities. And that, in nature make them quite attractive in the market. We have two sister units currently operating and doing a fantastic job for their respective customers and that has kind of set the reputation, particularly in Southeast Asia, where the sister rigs are. And we do see increasing number of opportunities. A lot of these opportunities are, in fact, already targeting the second half of next year. We have had, including a couple of customers visiting the rigs. I think it’s premature to say that they will be contracted overnight, but we do have a high level of confidence that it won’t take too long to have them out there. So we are quite optimistic in a combination of a strong market and very, very premium assets.

Patrick Schorn: Okay. Thank you, Bruno. Then when it comes to the finance, you were asking whether the financing is on rigs. And at the moment, we have financing on these rigs, as you know. But bringing them forward and having them delivered in ’24 and our desire to refinance as fast as we can, you obviously start to get into a situation where this would be just become part of the refinance in which we would, in actual effect, pay the shipyard right out. So I would say that is a more logic scenario to follow and you — as you rightfully mentioned, I’d love to lay out the plan exactly for the refinance, but you understand that, that at the moment is not something that can happen. We will talk about that after we have that in place.

But I think the key thing is on these two particular rigs, we are having opportunities. We can improve our earnings by bringing it out early. The market doesn’t need to be any stronger than what we see today. And from a financing perspective, it fits very well with our refinance program that we are fully preparing for. So I think that is how it fits together. And as we have mentioned several times, sold out at the moment, we’d love to have our hands on those type of rigs because even though you might say that many of our customers have gone through a cycle of increasing demand, we still see a lot of demand for capable rigs, but particularly when it comes to lump sum turnkey type of jobs, anything related with offline capabilities and high efficiency, there is absolutely a place for it.

So that is why we are keen and that’s why we are somewhat pushing it. You mentioned earlier that we are indeed talking for a while with the shipyards. And I think that you have to see that from two angles. On one side, it needs to be very clear that these shipyards have a lot of work on their plate at the moment with normal shipbuilding activities, which basically means that anything that any rig contractor is trying to do is coming over and above the normal workload, very hard to find actual shipyard capacity. So this is for us actually trying to complete our last two rigs. You can imagine if you would extrapolate that to any new build scenario, what this is going to do in time for the delivery time, but also what this is going to do for the delivery price.

So I think it kind of under — strives more again how strong the market is at this moment. And that’s why we’d rather get our rigs out and are able to generate earnings with them. So that is the reasoning behind it, and I hope that we touched on most of the points that you were asking about.