RPC, Inc. (NYSE:RES) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jim Landers: Yes. I’ll just add. The team on Spinnaker has just been a great cultural fit, even operationally and from the finance side. It’s just been one of the smoothest integrations I’ve seen. So, we’ve been — we’re very pleased.

Don Crist: I appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.

Ben Palmer: Great. Thank you.

Jim Landers: Thanks, Don.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] We’ll move next to Alec Scheibelhoffer at Stifel.

Alec Scheibelhoffer: Hi. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for taking my question.

Ben Palmer: Good morning.

Mike Schmit: Good morning.

Alec Scheibelhoffer: Good morning. So, I just wanted to touch on CapEx potentially for next year, if there’s any sense you could provide any guidance on that? I think, previously you had said you expected spending next year to be near the high end of the range provided for this year in the $200 million to $250 million. I was wondering if that’s still the case or if there’s any kind of shift in strategy there?

Mike Schmit: I can take that one. You know, we haven’t finalized all of our budgeting for next year, but kind of what we’re thinking right now is that we’ll probably be in about the same range as what we’re expecting. A lot of that will depend on the demand and what we need to order and when. But, right now, that is probably our best guess that we’ll probably be in the same range possibly to the higher end.

Ben Palmer: And just to maybe point out that this particular year we’ve managed down our CapEx with, you know, part of that being what has occurred in the third quarter. Certainly, with lower activity, we hadn’t had to spend — as won’t have to spend as much of maintenance CapEx and [indiscernible] will be lower and things like that, but we don’t see any ramp in spending to have significant growth. As we indicated, we’re not going to grow our fleet count. We’ll be required to continue to invest in the business. As our older equipment wears out, we’ll need to do refurbishments, we’ll need to replace some equipment. And when it becomes economically justified to spend that money, because the existing equipment is no longer economic or not able to perform adequately or efficiently, we’ll then make the appropriate investments and we’ll continue to transition our fleet and certainly whatever we would buy into, and probably it would be Tier 4 [DGB] (ph) at this point, that will continue.

Again, the transition of our equipment to being even more ESG friendly.

Alec Scheibelhoffer: Great. Great. Thank you for that. And this question might be a little bit more high level, but just out of curiosity, we’ve heard some operators shift to lower quality rock away from Tier 1 acreage, just the service intensity in some of these wells goes up. I was just curious if there’s any kind of read through that could be had on the spot pricing for maybe higher quality versus lower quality assets, if that’s just your standard supply/demand on that side or if there’s any kind of read through we could get on that.

Ben Palmer: Yes. I think, it is standard supply and demand. I think that is an evolving trend. You know, not a lot of anecdotes necessarily to share in that regard, but we’re continuing to see opportunities. The privates especially, we’re seeing that they are permitting and as we discussed earlier they can move pretty quickly and we expect — you know, we expect there will be some tightening of the market. And those particular players that we’re talking about here, they don’t need that specialty fuel and delivery systems. They can’t afford it. It’s not appropriate for their type of operations. So, we too — we are set up to move quickly ourselves, right. Our team, our sales team, our operations team, our procurement and logistics teams are expert at moving quickly and leveraging vendor relationships.