Nine Energy Service, Inc. (NYSE:NINE) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Waqar Syed: Okay. And then, Ann, on the coiled tubing business line, you had a view that with the dissolvable plugs making on inroads, there will be an impact on the demand for coiled tubing units. Are you seeing that? Or are you seeing that demand has stayed relatively strong despite the penetration of the dissolvable plugs?

Ann Fox: Well, as you know, we have a small fleet. We also think we have a very expert team out there. So we’ve really been able to deploy them both in the Permian, South Texas. As you know, East Texas has been hit pretty hard with the rig count decline. So we have not seen our own business be impacted. We do know that as our operators move into laterals that extend beyond three miles, it becomes enormously challenging and extremely risky to drill plugs out. So these are, of course, wheels and equipment that we’re looking at. We want to be able to answer that call. But we do think that’s going to be a huge driver for dissolvable plugs coming forward. So we’re very excited about the dissolvable plug market. We also do like the size of our coil business. So we’re not intending to make any kind of M&A or massive organic growth in that service line. But to answer your question, we do believe over time that coiled tubing market will be less than what it is today in the U.S.

Waqar Syed: Okay. And then just the last question. Have your conversations with your customers changed over the last couple of weeks with the strength that we’ve seen in commodity prices and some elevation of concerns regarding economic recession in the U.S.?

Ann Fox: Yes, I wish I could tell you that we’ve had a long enough duration with these strong commodity prices to have conversations around moving some of that pricing pressure that we saw in the right direction. That for us has not been the case. And I think we need to see this commodity price environment continue to stabilize as it has and maybe even move up, and then obviously, those conversations will start again. So we do believe that we’re going to find the bottom in the rig count this quarter, and we are very cautiously optimistic about the market activity moving up. So I think that pricing — those pricing conversations will come with activity. They tend to lag a bit Waqar because, as you know, we’re spot. So typically, you’ll see rigs come back on and pricing will then lag activity. So that’s what we expect. But to answer your question very specifically, we are not having conversations with customers right now about moving price up.

Waqar Syed: Okay. And just last question. In my coverage universe of North America leveraged companies, I think Nine stood out in terms of the exposure to the gas-heavy basins, Haynesville and Eagle Ford. As you mentioned, yet your revenues have held up a lot better than a lot of the peers. What would you attribute that to? Is it mostly just the international piece? Or is there something else as well there?

Ann Fox: Yes. So I mean, it’s a great question. The international certainly helps. And again, as I said, it was pretty sizable this quarter. So that was extremely helpful. I do think that we’ve been able to hold market share in our basins with our technology, but we’ve also had our management teams do a spectacular job of moving assets and people around, which I did caution the market that’s easier said than done. And oftentimes, as we head into these downturns, people will say, “Oh, no problem. I’ll just move all my stuff out of the gas markets and roll into the black crude markets”. And that’s kind of the easy answer, but oftentimes, we’ve seen that be very challenging. We’ve actually been quite effective at that. And so I think you’ve seen a little bit of resilience in some of these service lines around the very nimble approach that the team has taken to moving both heavy hard assets as well as our human assets into other locations.