Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Arun Jayaram: Jeff, clearly, one of the themes this earnings season has been the inflection in Middle East spending in offshore. I was wondering, Jeff, if you could talk about Halliburton’s portfolio and competitive position in both the Middle East and as well as offshore? And how do you think you’re positioned in this cycle versus last?

Jeff Miller: Look, we’re better positioned than we’ve ever been as Halliburton, both from a technology perspective that I described examples of that. But clearly, that’s not all of the technology we’ve got in the market today and from a footprint standpoint. So a lot of that build out was done prior cycles, it’s still there and ready to go. So I feel very good about our geographic footprint, our technology advancement that we’ve made and our team. I mean we’ve just got an exceptionally strong team today internationally. So I feel very confident certainly from that perspective. And when we look at where our business is, offshore is good for us. I think that about 40% of our international business is offshore today. And so that’s a good market for us.

And I think another nuance as we look out into next year, certainly and likely beyond, is the sort of emphasis on development activity as opposed to exploration that maybe we’ve seen in prior cycles. And I think that’s very consistent with where operators are from a capital discipline standpoint and just producing more barrels sooner, which leads us to development. And that is a place where we have leading positions in a number of the service lines that allow that to happen, so meaning drilling fluids, completion tools. And so I think this is going to be a great even better market for Halliburton.

Arun Jayaram: And maybe a follow-up for Eric. Eric, I wanted to get your thoughts on cash conversion in 2023. And just wanted to think about just working capital needs to support the growth this year? And just any broad thoughts on collections, particularly for international — some of your international and NOC customers?

Eric Carre: So I mean, broadly speaking, we’re looking at the cash generation profile in 2023 as being fairly similar to 2022. So quite a bit weighted toward the back half of the year. Looking at things overall, I mean, the big buckets, obviously, we’ll see significantly increased net income driven by growth in our revenue, improvements in our margins. On the CapEx side of things, we finished 2022 on the low end of our range of 5% to 6%. We were at 5%. When I look at ’23, we will be at the higher end of that range, primarily driven by supply chain constraints and extended lead time in our supply chain that we talked about on prior calls. And the third element in terms of working capital, again, our business will continue to grow, so we will continue to see some headwinds in terms of working capital essentially and also the impact of growing internationally, which tends to be more bigger consumers of working capital than when we grow our business in North America.

So the way all of that is going to land is a little north of 20% growth in terms of free cash flow over our 2022 performance.

Operator: Our next question comes from James West with Evercore ISI.

James West: So Jeff, in North America, I want to start there. In North America, your customer base and the majority of the customers really have three options, you can grow, you can shrink, you can go international. Where do you see, in your conversations with the bigger shale operators — and you mentioned earlier, you think there could be a surprise to the upside in North America. How do you think they’re thinking about the North American market, especially given what’s going to be inventory constraints at some point here, whether it’s three years, five years, seven years, we don’t really know but at some point on wells and what they plan to do over the next couple of years?