Viper Energy Partners LP (NASDAQ:VNOM) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kaes Van’t Hof: Yes, I think that’s a good — a fair statement. I think we’ve probably seen peak activity in the Permian. Now, we — we did make a lot of comments on service cost reductions on the Diamondback side. I would say part of that is attributable to other basins’ equipment opening up. But we kind of said that this is a year where publics kind of stay flat and Diamondback and Viper benefit from that activity wise, majors increase, and we don’t own a lot of minerals under majors and privates in general are slowing down to either preserve inventory or sell the company. So this does put us in advantage with the Diamondback piece, particularly with us allocating so much upstream capital to areas where we have mineral interest, particularly Central Martin County.

Operator: Our next question will come from Leo Mariani of ROTH MKM.

Leo Mariani: I was hoping you provide a little bit more color around this kind of additional $41 million of acquisitions that you guys did kind of apart from the $75 million drop down, was that just kind of a bunch of little stuff? In the aggregate, obviously, you commented that it’s kind of hard to get deals these days given the overpricing in the markets. So maybe just some color around the recent $41 million of activity.

Austen Gilfillian: Yes, Leo, that was mainly a result of what we call — kind of call our ground game acquisitions. So we’re constantly out there talking to smaller mineral owners. We’ve seen a lot of competition on more than marketed deals like Kaes mentioned, on the middle market side. But on the smaller deals, kind of the nuts and bolts, picking up little pieces here and there. We’ve had a couple of more deals here. So we’ve been focused on areas where we like the rock, whether Diamondback is the operator or it’s an active operator in the area. The are mainly Pioneer, Exxon and Martin County. So still rock that we feel really good about and have a lot of confidence in what that forward outlook looks like. But certainly differentiated subset of deals than — than the deals where we’ve seen so much competition.

Leo Mariani: All right. That’s helpful. And then obviously, in your prepared comments, you talked about how you guys are comfortable sort of deemphasizing the variable dividend for the foreseeable future, it sounds like and doing kind of more buyback just based on where you see the disconnect sort of on the value here. I guess just curious if you guys kind of look at this, do you guys kind of take into consideration kind of relative yield of your securities, say, versus alternatives in the market? I know a lot of people look at either the 10-year treasury yield or even the 2-year these days with the inversion. Do you guys kind of pay any sort of attention to kind of where you’re trading kind of relative to that on a yield basis when you make these decisions?

Kaes Van’t Hof: I wouldn’t say it impacts us on a yield basis, certainly from a cost of capital perspective, we do a lot of work on looking at where rates are and where our debt is and what our — cost of our debt is, cost of equity. At the end of the day, the value of the equity is the present value of the future cash flows of the business. And we think that is fundamentally undervalued for a security that is as we said, the highest form of security in the oil field, right? Mineral interest, if an operator loses a lease for whatever reason, they have to re-lease from the mineral owner. If other zones become economic, like some of the deeper zones in the Midland Basin are being discussed today, operators have to come to someone like Viper to pay a bonus and re-lease those mineral interests. So I would say it’s part of the calculus. It doesn’t drive the final decision. Really, the final decision is net present value based at a reasonable discount rate.