Earnings call transcript: TGS NOPEC’s Q3 2025 results reveal strategic shifts

TGS NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA reported substantial growth in its third-quarter earnings for 2025, marked by a 26% increase in revenue from the previous quarter. Despite a challenging market, the company’s financial discipline and strategic investments have positioned it favorably. The stock, however, saw a slight dip of 0.77%, closing at $21.90. According to InvestingPro data, TGS currently has a market capitalization of $3.55 billion and maintains a GREAT financial health score of 3.56 out of 5, suggesting strong fundamentals despite recent price movements.

Key Takeaways

• TGS reported a 26% increase in Q3 revenues, reaching $388 million.
• EBITDA margin stood at a robust 62%.
• The company reduced its CapEx guidance from $135 million to $110 million.
• Multi-client sales were a significant driver, contributing $226 million.
• Stock price fell by 0.77% following the earnings announcement.

Company Performance

TGS NOPEC demonstrated strong performance in Q3 2025, with revenues climbing to $388 million, a 26% increase from Q2. This growth was primarily driven by robust multi-client sales and strategic investments in key projects such as Palma Phase 2 in Brazil and the Megabar Extension in the Gulf of Mexico. The company’s unique business model, which allows flexibility between contract and multi-client projects, continues to be a competitive advantage.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $388 million, up 26% from the previous quarter.
• EBITDA: $242 million, representing a 62% profit margin.
• EBIT: $105 million, with a 27% profit margin.
• Net debt was reduced from $479 million to $432 million.
• Free cash flow: $81 million.
• Dividend declared: $0.155 per share.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, TGS NOPEC has revised its multi-client investment forecast to a range of $425-$475 million, with expectations that 70% of these investments will be acquired using its own capacity. The company anticipates improved utilization of its 3D streamer fleet, although it expects lower OBN acquisition activity compared to 2024.

Executive Commentary

CEO Kristian Johansen highlighted the industry’s insufficient investment levels, stating, "Today’s investment level from the industry is not sufficient in terms of satisfying any demand growth going forward." He emphasized TGS’s flexibility in project management: "We’re the only company in our space that can claim that we have the flexibility at any point of time to switch between contracts and multi-client."

Risks and Challenges

• The need for increased industry investment to meet future demand.
• Potential volatility in oil prices, with a significant impact on exploration activities.
• Market competition and the need for continuous innovation.
• Economic uncertainties in emerging markets, which are crucial for future energy demand.
• Managing cost efficiencies while pursuing strategic investments.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the transfer fees, which were around $25-30 million in Q3. Questions also focused on the oil price threshold needed to boost exploration, with TGS indicating a range of $70-75 per barrel. Analysts expressed interest in how multi-client projects could offset potential weaknesses in the contract market.

The company’s strategic direction and financial prudence in Q3 2025 have set a strong foundation for future growth, despite the slight decline in stock price. Analyst price targets range from $29 to $38, suggesting potential upside. As TGS continues to navigate industry challenges, its focus on cost efficiency and strategic investments remains pivotal. For deeper insights into TGS’s valuation and growth prospects, including exclusive ProTips and comprehensive financial analysis, visit InvestingPro, where you’ll find detailed research reports and expert commentary.

Full transcript - TGS NOPEC Geophysical Company ASA (TGS) Q3 2025:

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Good morning and welcome to TGS Q3 2025 presentation. My name is Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence in TGS. Today’s presentation will be given by CEO Kristian Johansen and CFO Sven Børre Larsen. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the cautionary statement showing on the screen and available in today’s earnings release and presentation. For those of you on the webcast, you can start typing in questions during the presentation and we will address those after management’s concluding remarks. With that, I give the word to you, Kristian.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Thank you, Bård, and welcome everyone. I’ll start with the Q3 highlights. Before I go through the numbers, I just want to say I’m very pleased that we have a solid recovery after a very weak Q2. I want to thank all our employees for pursuing sales opportunities aggressively in a challenging market and at the same time being extremely focused on our cost base, which you will see from the numbers that we have a solid beat on EBITDA and EBIT due to lower cost in the quarter. Starting with the numbers on the top line, we had revenues of $388 million. That compares to $308 million in the second quarter of this year. Sequentially, that’s a 26% increase. As I said, our EBITDA was strong at $242 million. That’s a 62% profit margin, again driven by a very strong cost focus of the organization.

We had a Q3 EBIT of $105 million. It’s the first time in several quarters that we’re over $100 million in EBIT, and that represents a 27% profit margin. We had an order inflow of $436 million, and that takes our total order backlog up to $473 million. At the end of Q3, our cash flow was strong. That means that with a free cash flow of $81 million and $30 million dividend payment, we managed to reduce our net debt from $479 million down to $432 million. This compares to $479 million in Q2 of 2025. We’re maintaining our dividend of $0.155 per share. We have also adjusted our capex guidance down, so that’s been reduced to $110 million versus previously $135 million. Overall, strong numbers and slightly stronger than we expected for Q3, which is after a very disappointing Q2.

On the business update, I’m not going to cover all the projects that we had in the quarter. What you can see here is that Q3 is usually dominated by a strong North Sea season. We have almost half of our assets working in the North Sea during the summer season and into Q3. You see we had two vessels in Brazil, and we’re probably going to keep vessels in Brazil for the time being due to strong interest for data acquisition and even our existing data library. We also have OBN operations, so two OBN operations in the US Gulf. You see we have one vessel in Egypt and one vessel in India during Q3 of 2025. I’ll also cover the business units. Starting with multi-client, we had multi-client sales of $226 million in the quarter. That compares to $277 million in Q3 of 2020.

The difference there is pretty much explained by higher transfer fees in Q3 last year than we had in Q3 this year. Multi-client investments of $86 million this quarter compared to $129 million in the same quarter of last year. That corresponds to a sales-to-investment for the last 12 months of 2.1. That’s similar to what we had last year, but it’s above the historical average of about 1.9. Very pleased about continued strong sales-to-investment of our multi-client data in terms of new awards and key projects that we were executing in Q3. We had Palma Phase 2, offshore Brazil. This is a streamer survey in the equatorial margin area. We had another project in the same area called Megabar Extension Phase 1. It was a pleasure for us and for TGS, Petrobras, and Brazil to see that Petrobras finally got environmental approval to start the drilling in this area.

This is an area where TGS has been acquiring lots of data over the past 12 to 18 months. Extremely excited to see that things are moving on. For those of you who remember the last lease sale in Brazil, you also saw companies such as Chevron and Exxon picking up blocks in that area. This is probably one of the last frontiers and one of the most exciting frontiers in Brazil for sure. Great interest from clients on those surveys that we’ve been carrying out for over the past 18 months. Last but not least, we had a project called Amendment West 1 in the Gulf of Mexico in the quarter. This is an ultra long offset OBN survey over legacy streamer data. This is a TGS-only project with no partners.

If we move on to the historical multi-client performance, just to put the quarter into perspective, this looks at last 12 months sales as light blue and then dark blue is the investment and then the line there, the gray line, is last 12 months sales over investment and you see it’s coming up from about 1.9 in the previous quarter to about 2.1 now. Really where we want to be in terms of profitability of our multi-client business, which historically has been yielding returns of somewhere between 1.9 and 2.0. Our internal goal when we start a new multi-client project is always around 2. Marine data acquisition was a relatively weak quarter as we expected and we guided the market after Q2 that Q3 would be relatively low in terms of activity level. We came in slightly above what we expected.

We had contract revenues for OBN of $87 million versus $127 million last year. Our streamer contract revenues in the quarter were $127 million, and we had total gross revenues of $200 million. You see a strong EBITDA margin of about 36% for our assets in Q3. In terms of new awards and key projects executed during the quarter, we were awarded a streamer contract in the Mediterranean, as you all know, commenced acquisition of that in Q3. We have secured a large streamer contract offshore Indonesia in the quarter. This is scheduled to start in Q4 and has a duration of eight months. It’s a big contract and it’s mostly 3D, but the last month of the eight months is going to be a 4D over some existing production. We’ve also been awarded a streamer acquisition contract in Africa.

This is a Q4 start and it has a duration of about 50 days with some options to extend. We have an OBN contract in the Gulf of Mexico. This is also due to commence in Q4 and it has a duration of four and a half months. A quite large contract for our OBN crew in the Gulf of Mexico. In terms of our new energy solutions business, we had contract revenues of $18 million, up from $16 million in the same quarter of last year. Multi-client revenues of $5 million versus $3 million last year. Total revenues of $23 million, which is up from $19 million in Q3 of 2023, and as with the other business units, a stronger EBITDA margin year on year as compared to Q3 of 2023. We’ve been awarded a UHR 3D contract offshore Norway.

This commenced acquisition in early July and we were acquiring that data going into Q3. We acquired also a CCS contract offshore Norway. We continue our collaboration with Equinor through our subsidiary Predictor, through something called Predictor Data Gateway Solution. This is delivered to Equinor’s Empire Wind project. Happy to see that imaging and technology continues the strong growth with good margins. On the gross imaging revenues were $32 million versus $26 million last year. If you look at the external imaging revenues, they’re about $20 million, so it’s a doubling of revenues compared to last year. You’ve seen that we’ve been on that kind of growth track for quite some time. We have a $20 million this quarter.

We’re going to be slightly short of $80 million for the year, and next year our goal is for imaging to be above $100 million in external revenues with strong EBITDA margins. We continue to take market share in the imaging and technology space. Part of the reason for that is a strong strategic focus on the external market. You know, TGS used to be more focused on the internal market and processing of multi-client projects, but now we made a strategic choice that we’re going to go after the external imaging market and you see the results of that with significant growth and good margins. We see a significant reduction of HPC cost from added scale.

TGS is a big customer of that big cloud compute provider, such as Google, AWS, et cetera, and we see obviously great benefits and synergies from the combination of TGS and PGS in that regard. Again, as I said, we expect continued growth in external imaging revenues and you’ve already seen a substantial margin improvement on the imaging side. With that, I’m going to hand it over to Sven Børre and then I will be back talking about the outlook shortly. Thank you very much.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Thank you, Kristian. Good morning everyone. It’s always a pleasure to report strong financial numbers. Although the revenue numbers are not that strong in a historical perspective, highlighting the upside potential in the longer term, they are quite strong in a relative perspective and relative to where we’ve been, particularly in Q2, of course. More importantly, we have very strong performance on all other parameters, including cost and cash flow parameters. We are very pleased about that. Let me take you quickly through the numbers on the revenue side. We came in at $388 million. That consisted of $217 million of multi-client revenues and $171 million of contract revenues. The multi-client revenues were particularly strong in the quarter, mainly driven by strong sales from the Vintage library. The pre-funding of new projects was actually lower this quarter than we have seen in some of the previous quarters.

Library sales were very strong in the quarter. Going to net operating expenses, I’ll go into more detail on that on a later page here. Let me just mention that the net operating expenses were $147 million versus $221 million in the same quarter of last year, so a significant reduction there. Depreciation and amortization: depreciation at $61 million continues to be reasonably stable around plus minus $60 million as you can see on a quarterly basis. Amortization was quite low in the quarter. The straight-line amortization is stable, whereas the accelerated amortization is quite low in the quarter. That’s partially explained by the lower pre-funding rate as I talked about and also of course explained by the mix of the different types of projects that we have in the portfolio right now.

This gave us an EBIT of $105 million in this quarter, corresponding to an EBIT margin of 27%, slightly ahead of the operating result in the same quarter of last year despite having significantly higher revenues last year. As I promised, I’ll go in more detail through the cost base and how the cost has developed during the quarter and how it is likely to develop going forward. On the chart here on the left-hand side you see Q3, specifically this Q3 compared to the Q3 of 2024. As you can see on the left-hand bar in both those two charts you see the gross operating expenses and you can see it’s at $217 million, significantly down compared to the $289 million we had last year. The decline is particularly visible, obviously, on cost of sales and it has to do with several factors.

First of all, of course, we have gone through, as we have talked about in previous presentations as well, we’ve gone through quite a bit of efficiency projects internally. We have realized a lot of cost synergies, of course, and also after the integration project has been more or less completed, we have continued to look at different efficiency gains and we’ve been quite successful in that. I also have to admit it’s also, of course, partially related to lower activity, particularly on the OBN side where utilization of the crews that we got is a bit lower in this Q3 relative to the Q3 of last year. Finally, there is also some, call it, non-recurring items in the quarter which reduced the cost of sales by a little bit more than $10 million. It’s probably, it’s not genuinely non-recurring items, they are non-recurring in this quarter.

Most of it is reversal of costs that have been expensed previously. Over time, it’s not a non-recurring cost, but in this particular quarter, it is non-recurring. As you can see, if you compare to the same parameters of last year, we are significantly down even when adjusting for the one-off costs we had related to the merger integration process in last year. You see that last year we had $162 million of cost of sales. There were no merger integration costs in that number. On personnel cost, we had $95 million, we had $11 million approximately of merger integration related costs. The underlying cost in that quarter were $84 million, still well above the $69 million we have in this quarter. On other operating costs, we had approximately $5 million or $6 million of merger integration related costs. The underlying cost there was $25 million in the previous quarter.

We are actually a little bit up this quarter compared to last quarter on an underlying basis, and that has to do with compute. We’re using more high performance compute resources now than we did last year, and that obviously has to do with higher imaging activity and more use of AI and machine learning and algorithms that require more high performance computing. That’s a deliberate development. Of course, if you look at the right-hand chart or the right-hand side of the page, you see a chart showing the cost development on a last 12 month basis over time here. As you can see, the last 12 months as of end of Q3 we had $982 million of gross cost. Our guidance remains firm at around $950 million for the year as a whole. You see the trend there.

We have come significantly down and we expect to come further down when we report Q4. In fact, if anything, we expect to be below $950 million and not above. We’re quite happy with the development on the cost side. You can also see the evolution of our guidance through the year on the right-hand side of the chart there with the dark bar where we’re down basically $100 million relative to the original gross cost guidance. We’ve done a lot on the cost side, which is obviously helping us quite a bit in terms of delivering a strong EBITDA in this quarter. Looking at the profit and loss statement, we had $388 million of total revenues consisting of $217 million of multi-client revenues and $171 million of contract revenues.

I talked about cost of sales, personnel cost, and other operating costs, which already gave us an EBITDA of $242 million compared to $280 million in the same quarter of last year. Straight-line amortization was $60.5 million, which is roughly where it has been in previous quarters. As I mentioned, accelerated amortization was quite low this quarter related to the mix of projects we were doing and a lower pre-funding rate. We had a small impairment on one of the multi-client projects that we do. That’s not uncommon, as you can see we had something similar in the same quarter of last year, and depreciation of $61 million, which gave us this operating profit of $105 million. We had financial income of $4.3 million, same level as last year.

We had financial expenses of $19.4 million, which is slightly above last year, which may surprise people because we did refinancing that reduced the interest costs quite significantly in Q4 of last year. However, bear in mind that we took a lot of that interest saving in the PPA. We wrote up the PGS debt in the PPA, which reduced the interest charge in the P&L already ahead of the refinancing. That’s the main explanation for that not so intuitive development, and this gave us a result before taxes of $85 million compared to $97 million in the same quarter. Cash flow, as Kristian alluded to, was quite strong in the quarter. We had cash flow from operations of $242 million in the quarter, almost the same level as the $265 million we had last year.

When you subtract multi-client investment and CapEx and adjust for timing and working capital movements, we had cash flow from investment activities negative by $94 million compared to $59 million in the same quarter of last year. If you then subtract cash flow items related to financing of $97 million, we end up with a net change in cash and cash equivalents of $50 million in this quarter compared to $82.6 million or $83 million in the same quarter of last year. Looking at cash flow in a slightly different way, looking at the evolution of our net debt, you can see that we reduced that quite significantly in this quarter. The cash flow before dividend, which is a key measure that we are looking at internally, was $77 million.

In this quarter we paid the dividend of $30 million, which helped us reduce net debt from $479 million to $432 million at the end of the quarter. This is to be compared with a net debt target of $250 million to $350 million. That’s the range we’re aiming at and we’re getting down there. It takes a little bit longer time than we initially planned for and that has to do with the market development. We’re still firm in our belief that we will get there in due course. Let me also mention that in Q4 you should expect somewhat negative development in net working capital items. It’s a seasonal thing. You shouldn’t expect the cash flow after net working capital adjustments to be as strong in Q4. Balance sheet. Not many significant developments worth mentioning here. The only thing I’m going to mention is the goodwill.

You can see that it’s down by $4 million. That has to do with PPA adjustments that we did. When you do an acquisition, as we did with PGS, you can do PPA adjustments up until 12 months after the acquisition closed. What we have done here is that we have increased our long-term receivables by $4 million and reduced the goodwill by a corresponding number. Apart from that, the balance sheet of course remains very strong and even stronger than it was at the end of Q2, given the net debt development. This allows us to continue to pay a dividend of $0.155 per share, corresponding to NOK 1.56 per share in this quarter. The ex date is one week from now on 30th October and we will pay the dividend to the shareholders on the 13th of November. By that I’ll hand the word back to you, Kristian.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Thank you, Sven. We’re going to touch on the outlook, and I’ll start with a slide that we find very interesting, but it’s a bit challenging to understand. I’ll take you through it very slowly. If you start on the left-hand side, you see the chart there. You see the light gray color shows the current decline curve. That is debated whether it’s 8% as we show here, and these are numbers from IEA, or whether it’s 15%, which is Exxon’s number that they publicly state that the real decline curve is. Anyway, if you use 8%, 8% is then equivalent to losing more than the current production from Brazil and Norway every year for the next 10 years. It’s quite steep, even at 8%.

In order to satisfy demand going forward, the big question is how much do we need to invest and how much does the E&P sector need to invest? If I take you to the right-hand side and you go all the way to 2025, you see that we as an industry, or the E&P industry globally, invest around $600 billion in CapEx. That’s a total CapEx of the entire industry, and that’s been pretty much the average. Right now it’s about $575 billion, but it’s been $600 billion pretty much on average for three or four years. If you take that information, the $600 billion, and you take it back again to the left-hand side, you see that $600 billion is the second blue color from the top. That’s where it’s going to take us in terms of continuing to invest at today’s level, which basically is flat.

It’s a flat demand compared to today. Today’s or the current investments are probably going to satisfy a flat demand development going forward. If you think that demand for oil and gas is going to continue to grow in the future, we need to invest more, and we actually need to invest probably somewhere around $750 billion because that takes us up to the expected demand going forward. It’s a very powerful slide in terms of understanding that today’s investment level is not sufficient to satisfy any growth in demand. I think most of you and most other readers would argue that there will be growth, there will be continued growth in demand. We’ve seen and we’ve been wrong several times; demand has surprised on the upside, and it will continue to do so.

Today’s investment level from the industry is not sufficient in terms of satisfying any demand growth going forward. That is further backed by the second slide we have. Last week I attended something called the Energy Intelligence Forum in London. I think 8 out of the 10 CEOs of the 10 largest oil companies in the world were there. I just included some quotes from four of the CEOs that were there and attended the conference. The first one from Darren Woods said that the oil market oversupply is likely to be short term, with demand from emerging economies set to make meeting global energy demand more challenging in the medium to longer term. Nasser was very clear that we had a decade where people didn’t explore. It’s going to have an impact. If it doesn’t happen, there will be a supply crunch.

Patrick Pouyanné from TotalEnergies said this non-OPEC supply, which today is impacting the market from Brazil, Guyana, and shale oil, will plateau. There is a limit to this growth. Finally, Vicki Hollub from Oxy said that discoveries have gone way down. Investment in exploration has gone way down. It’s not just investment that’s a problem. We just aren’t finding big resources anymore. This very much backs the statement that we had on the first slide that the industry needs to invest more, if you believe in demand growth for oil and gas. I think most of us are now convinced that there will be continued growth in demand for both oil and gas. Going more to the micro level, in terms of streamer contract tenders, it’s down and it’s down for two reasons. Mainly the fact that there’s been quite a few awards recently.

TGS has been awarded a couple of streamer contracts quite recently. Also, on the OBN side, we have announced two contracts recently, but the market is not great. There is nothing that indicates that 2026 is going to be a great year for contract tenders. I have to be honest and state that. Keep in mind that this does not include multi-client, and we have big projects in Brazil. As I said, we have two vessels in Brazil as we speak, probably going to keep those two vessels there for the time being. We see great uptick in activity in Africa in terms of multi-client. The fact that multi-client is not part of this means that this slide gives a very skewed picture in terms of how the market for TGS actually is.

I feel like with the recent increase you’ve seen in our order backlog, which is mainly and very much driven by multi-client pre-funding, we see a future that is far brighter than this slide will indicate on the OBN market development. 2025 will be back to 2023 level in terms of activities or total revenues for this sector or segment, and that is down from 2024. That significant growth trajectory that we saw in three years has stopped and it’s come down slightly. This is partly due to some big projects in Brazil that have been awarded, but they have not been acquired yet. They haven’t started yet. These are big projects that TGS was unsuccessful in winning, and some smaller competitors won big projects in Brazil that again have not yet started. We’ll wish them good luck on that.

In terms of the guidance for 2025, obviously we’re entering the last quarter of the year. Our multi-client investments, we keep our guidance of $425 to $475 million. We’re probably going to be in that kind of mid-range of that investment guidance. We’re going to have approximately 70% of the investment expected to be acquired with our own capacity. In terms of CapEx, as we’ve said a couple of times today, we’re reducing our CapEx guidance from $135 million to $110 million. On the gross operating cost, we again target $950 million for the year. That’s unchanged from the previous quarter. In terms of utilization, we expect improved utilization year on year of our 3D streamer fleet, partly helped by multi-client. We expect lower OBN acquisition activity, which you have seen especially over the past quarter or so.

That will be down compared to 2024, and to give you slightly more flavor on that, we’ll start with the order backlog and inflow. As you see, the order inflow was strong this quarter at above $430 million, and that leads to a backlog of $473 million. Very weak numbers in Q2 this year, but a relatively solid comeback in Q3 where you see quite significant growth in the order inflow with the resulting increase in the total order backlog. On the right-hand side, you see the pie chart and you’re obviously familiar with that, and it gives you some guidance in terms of expected timing of recognizing this backlog as revenues. We also provide you with a summary of our booked positions. Basically, this is where our fleet and OBN crews are booked for the next two quarters.

On the streamer side, you see that we have about 16 months booked for Q4 and you see the composition of contract versus multi-client. As I alluded to, you see more multi-client there than contract. If I look into 2026, that’s probably going to be the case. It’s going to be more than 50% as we can tell today on multi-client because of good pre-funding and a healthy backlog in terms of some of our big multi-client projects, particularly in Brazil. On the OBN schedule, you see that we’re just short of two crews working for Q4 and it’s going to be approximately the same for Q1. It’s pretty much one crew for multi-client and one crew for contract, and it’s close to being fully utilized for one quarter.

In terms of geo markets, we’re going to have contract work for our streamer fleet in Africa and Asia, and then multi-client in Brazil. For the OBN, we’re going to have contract work in the Gulf of Mexico, and we’re also going to have one crew working multi-client in the Gulf of Mexico. We expect total multi-client investments in Q4 of $120 million, and utilization, as I said on the left-hand side, you see pretty much how it’s going to be for the next quarter. Obviously, there is still time to book more capacity for Q1 of 2026. With that, I’m ready to summarize presentations again. Pleased to announce solid performance on financial key figures. We had net debt reduced to $432 million based on our free cash flow of about $80 million and $30 million paid in dividend.

We’ve been very disciplined in terms of cash outflow, meaning that we’re reducing our 2025 capex by $25 million. This has been reduced several times during the year. The latest number now is about $110 million for the full year. Obviously, the short-term market development is sensitive to oil price, but the long-term market outlook, as you’ve seen from this presentation, remains very positive. We’re maintaining a dividend of $0.155 per share. With that, I want to bring Sven up here, and the board is going to take you, take us through some Q&As, and we’ll take it from there. Thank you very much.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Thank you, Kristian. We have a nice audience here in Oslo, so we can start with questions from the audience. Yes, John?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Yeah.

Analyst: May I ask a little bit of detail on Sven Børre on the OPEX? Mention that the gross OPEX is $217 million. Was $217 million in Q3 and if I add the $10 million that you mentioned as non-recurring it would be $227 million. What did you say? Were there any merger costs included in that $227 million? No, no, no.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: The merger cost I talked about were just for the comparable 2024 number.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Right.

Analyst: Going forward, what’s the running quarterly cost base in TGS? Is it $227 million?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: I mean we’ve guided for $950 million annualized.

Analyst: That includes higher OPEX in the first quarter. What’s it running on the quarter base?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Yeah, it’s a bit lower than that, and it will depend a little bit on the activity level. If you take a little bit lower than $950 and divide by 4, you should be at an approximately.

Analyst: It’s not too far away from 227.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: No, should be reasonably representative.

Analyst: A question on multi-client sales in the quarter. Do you want to specify how or give an indication of the transfer fee? Did you book a transfer fee for the Chevron Hess deal in Q3?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: We’re not allowed to be specific on which transfer fees we booked, but I think the market has been pretty right in terms of there were a big transfer fee this quarter, and that was related to one transaction. We probably had two or three. We had transfer fees in every given quarter, but there was one that was particularly large. I think the market has speculated that in total we had transfer fees around $25 million, $30 million. That’s pretty much where it was, right? Right.

Analyst: That means that other late sales were probably not too bad either. I just wonder, the key driver, I assume one of the key drivers in Q3 was the U.S. government. The Gulf of Mexico lease round in December, is that correct? Also, more specifically, did you see all the sales that you expect or most of the late sales that you expect in connection with the December round? Did they come in Q3, and was there a significant impact on that, or will you also see it in Q4?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: There were a couple of drivers and number one, you’re right. I mean our late sales was pretty strong regardless of whether you adjust for transfer fees or not. Our transfer fees were far lower in Q3 this year than they were last year. The transfer fee was very high. I think one driver of the strong late sales in Q3 was a weak late sales in Q2. I think that’s a reminder to the market that when you look at it, particularly late sales, but overall the multi-client performance of TGS, you probably have to look at it in a slightly longer perspective. If you look at the average of Q2 and Q3, you’re more back to normalized level and Q2 was embarrassingly low and Q3 is back where we should be. That was one driver is that Q2 was very low transfer fees. We’ve been discussing that.

The third one, yes, we had impact from the lease sale in the U.S. Gulf that is coming up in Q4. Was that significant? Not really. I mean we’re talking $10 to $20 million rather than $40 to $60 million. Is there more to be sold? Absolutely. We don’t know when that’s going to happen and we don’t know if it’s going to happen. I mean it’s obviously uncertainty around that.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: What we can say to add to that is that in the licensing round in 2023, most of the sales related to that round happen after the round. The dynamic around is a bit uncertain, of course, and we have talked.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: about that multiple times at the licensing round, particularly in the U.S., haven’t really had the same impact as it used to have. Now we do more of the sales beforehand. We have much higher pre-funding of the surveys that we do in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico today than we used to have historically. As Sven Børre Larsen said, we had some of our sales after the round has taken place rather than lining up for the licensing round. It’s probably more evenly distributed now than it used to be. In the past, it was always you shop without pre-funding and then you had a significant kicker before the licensing round, and after that there was nothing.

Analyst: My final question before I give the word to somebody else. You mentioned that it’s too early to really expect a great year for contract streamers in 2026. What do you think it will take? What kind of oil price levels do we need to see to see a great year for streamers in seismic?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: You know, we’ve been doing some internal analysis in that regard and looking at, you know, the dilemma of an oil company today or an energy company today is that they have this dividend obligations, they have buyback obligations, and then they have CapEx. Seismic is obviously part of that discretionary CapEx. With the oil price dropping from $70 and down to $60, although it’s higher today, you obviously put a lot of strain on that kind of dilemma. Are they going to cut the dividend? Probably not. Are they going to cut back on the buybacks? Potentially yes. Total has already announced that. Are they going to start spending more on exploration? If you listen to what they say and if you listen to what they told me last week, they are, but we haven’t seen it yet.

I think with the current oil price we should be a bit cautious expecting that to kick off in 2026. We’re planning for a market that is going to continue to be quite challenging in that regard. Saying that, when we talk about the contract market, it is important to say that we should be using at least 50%, perhaps up to 70% of our fleet on multi-client projects. That’s where I’m probably more optimistic today than I was three months ago in terms of the backlog that we see building up on the multi-client side. We’re not too concerned about utilization of our fleet in 2026. Obviously, if you look at the contract market per se, it’s not great. There is no reason to question that.

Analyst: What oil price is needed to change that?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: We’ve been saying that you probably need somewhere between $70 to $75 to see a significant increase in exploration. Again, back to what I heard from the CEOs last week, and the oil price was $60 at the time. They’re saying that we’ve done a terrible job in terms of exploration and we need to get better and we need to spend more.

Analyst: Thank you. Yes.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Lukas?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Yeah.

You said that multi-client performed better than what you expected in Q3, so I guess you had a view on the transfer phase. What exactly was better than what you expected?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: You know how it is when you get really beaten up like we did in Q2. You set expectations slightly lower for Q3, and I think that was partly what happened. We pretty much knew the range of the transfer fee at the time, and obviously there are always tough discussions, and it goes back and forth in many, many iterations before you end up with a number. That pretty much came in as we expected. I think the market probably estimated that to be bigger or more significant than it was, but we pretty much came in where we thought we would be.

What are your expectations related to the licensing round in Brazil?

Yeah, there was one yesterday with five blocks where we had data in most of those areas. Obviously, we see some opportunities related to that. I think the news of the environmental permit to Petrobras is very good for TGS. I mean, this has been the area where we have invested more than anywhere else in the world over the past 18 months. Obviously, we’ve taken some risk on that environmental assessment, and it’s great to see that had a positive outcome. I think that’s as specific as I can be.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Okay.

Your EBITDA margin on the contract business was nicely up. Is that better price, lower cost?

Yeah, we probably don’t see better pricing. I think that’s fair to say. It’s not significantly down either, but it’s not kind of the right environment to increase pricing, to put it that way. It’s cost control and cost efficiency, and obviously also partially these reversals that I talked about in this particular quarter. That has to be seen over time, where it’s basically mostly related to costs that have been charged previously.

You are cutting your other capex guidance by $25 million.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: What is that?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: No, we’ve been working constantly on our cost base and our cash outflow base, so to speak, during this year. CapEx obviously has been under a lot of scrutiny to try to work that down. At the same time, we need to invest in the business and we need to be maintaining our fleet well and keep it up to the highest standards. We need to replace streamers. We have worked on that streamer replacement program, how we can maintain the current streamers in a better manner and keep them longer or push or spend more time on that replacement program than we initially planned for. That’s essentially what’s doing it. Of course, we are cautious on all other types of CapEx spending for the time being.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: There’s not a lot of peers to TGS in the streamer space, but if you look at the peer or peers, you will see that our CapEx is far higher, and it’s been a reason for that. Of course, there are things we can do in terms of getting that down, and that’s what we’ve done.

If you break down the $110 million between streamers, computing power, vessel maintenance.

Almost half is purely related to streamers.

Analyst: Thank you.

Can I ask, on the capex, what should we expect going to 2026, is it fair to assume the same level?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: We will come back to that when we guide in February, but our ambition is to continue to keep that at a significantly lower level than what we initially guided for this year. Of course.

Did I see an offshore wind contract that you’re going to do in July? What vessel will you use for that? Is Ramform Vanguard still going to be stacked, or do you think you take that out to do that work?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: We haven’t made that decision. We stacked it, and we’re going to stack it and keep it stacked until we see improvements in the market. We have six vessels who can do the job if we need to. That’s something we consider at any point of time, and we’re not ready to make that decision today.

One last technicality about how you allocate your stream of vessels. You talked about at least 50% doing multi-client, then also maybe up to like 17%. If you can help us a little bit into 2026, what’s...

It’s too early. What I mean by saying that is that we have that flexibility, flexibility, and we’re not totally dependent on the contract marketing for our fleet. We should be in a position to use at least 50% to 75% on multi-client. We will guide you on any given, on a rolling basis for two quarters going forward. We’re not going to give you any more clarity than that.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Fine. Perfect.

Thank you.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Okay, we have a couple of questions from the people on the web. Thank you. You mentioned pre-funding was a bit lower. Do you expect pre-funding levels to trend downwards compared to what you have indicated?

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: It’s probably not a trend, but we have had, call it, quite high pre-funding levels over the past quarters, and it’s probably almost naturally high for some periods. I would think that we think it will be at that 80 to 90% level over time, give or take. It may vary from quarter to quarter depending on the mix of the different projects that we’re doing.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: It also has a lot to do with, you know, how much risk do we want to take in terms of if we believe that we’re at the bottom of the cycle and we believe that, you know, these CEOs who talk about the need for more exploration. Is this the time to go out and do some frontier work with lower pre-funding? That’s discussions that we have with the board at any point of time and similar discussions to what all companies have in terms of are they going to invest more in exploration for the long term. We have those discussions and that will obviously have an impact on the pre-funding rate. There’s no indication in the market that it’s harder to get pre-funding than it’s been before. Not at all.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Very good. We have a question from Mick Pickup in Barclays. You talk of enhancement client levels, yet consensus that you supplied has investments down in 2026 versus 2025. This doesn’t seem consistent. Without giving guidance, can you talk directionally about 2026 multi-client investment levels?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Yeah, I’m not going to do that. Of course, the consensus is not. We don’t make consensus, we just collect consensus. If the consensus is lower in 2026 than it is in 2025, it doesn’t necessarily represent what we plan to do. It’s too early for us to say what we’re going to invest for 2026. We’re in that period right now where we’re looking at our investment level. I would be very surprised if it differs significantly from what it does this year. Especially on the downside, I would be very disappointed if we see a much lower number.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Next question comes from Ulia Martin Redlan in Pareto Securities. While order intake was good this quarter, backlog is still at low levels. Based on best expectations, do you assume lower external streamer and OBN revenues in 2026, and will that possibly be offset by higher multi-client investments and revenues?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Yeah, it’s too early to say. What we have been saying today is that we have that flexibility and we can do it if we need to. The beauty of our business model and the beauty about being fully integrated as we are, and we’re the only company in our space that can claim that, is that we have the flexibility at any point of time to switch between contracts and multi-client. There’s been speculations to our prices down in the contract market. How bad is the contract market, etc. If it is bad and if pricing is down, then we just do multi-client. If we can get funding for multi-client projects, and I think we’ve delivered today and we’ve shown you today, and we even showed you in the past four or five quarters that we generate a return of 2x on our multi-client project.

If pricing is low and if we see that we sacrifice too much on our margins by doing some of those contracts, we don’t do that.

Sven Børre Larsen, CFO, TGS: Another point to bear in mind in our multi-client investments in 2025, we still have quite a bit of external investments where we’re using external vessels and external providers. Following the merger, it takes a little bit of time to insource everything. You should probably expect more or less 100% of the capacity that we source to be internal in 2026. Even if you, for the sake of argument, assumed flat multi-client investments, you could see higher utilization of our own assets on multi-client.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: Okay, then we have another question from Stefan Ebion in DNB Carnegie. Do you have any leads to sign more OBN contract work over the winter season on top of the current booked positions that you disclosed today?

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Yeah, I mean the sales cycles in OBN are longer than streamer. We like to say they’re typically five or six months at least. It gives you an indication in terms of when you will see new contracts. We have a number of leads. Some of these leads are related to single contracts and some of the leads are related to what we call capacity agreements, bigger long-term agreements with some of our customers. There are negotiations going on and obviously we’re going to announce that to the market as soon as we have contracts to announce.

Bård Stenberg, Vice President, Industry Relations and Business Intelligence, TGS: We don’t have any further questions from the web. Any last questions from the people here in Oslo? If not, that concludes the Q and A session. I give it over to you, Kristian, for your concluding remark.

Kristian Johansen, CEO, TGS: Thank you very much for your attention today. As I said initially, it was a relief to come back with better numbers than we had in Q2. We were obviously as surprised and disappointed as you were in Q2, and it’s good to see not only that we have a revenue growth of 26% compared to the last quarter, but we see a very strong profitability and all key metrics are very positive compared to previous quarters. I wish you all the best and look forward to see you at our Q4 presentation. Thank you very much.

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