Bristow Group, Inc. (NYSE:VTOL) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 3, 2022 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Redeate Tilahun - IR

Christopher Bradshaw - President, CEO & Director

Jennifer Whalen - SVP & CFO

Conference Call Participants

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Bristow Group Reports Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2023 Results Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Red Tilahun. Please go ahead.

Redeate Tilahun

Thank you, Matti. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Bristow Group's Second Quarter of Fiscal year 2023 Earnings Call. I'm joined on the phone today with our President and Chief Executive Officer; Chris Bradshaw, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Jennifer Whalen, Executive Vice President of Sales and Chief Transformation Officer, Dave Stepanek; Senior Vice President of EMEA and SAR, Alan Corbett; and Senior Vice President of Americas, Samantha Willenbacher.

Before we begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that during the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that are described in more detail on Slide 3 of our investor presentation. You may access our investor presentation on our website. We will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA and free cash flow. A reconciliation of such measures to GAAP is included in the earnings release and our investor presentation.

I will now turn the call over to our President and CEO. Chris?

Christopher Bradshaw

Thank you, Red, and welcome to the call, everyone. As always, I will begin our prepared remarks with a note on safety, which is Bristow's most important core value and our highest operational priority. The company once again achieved very good safety performance in the quarter. We are proud to have many of the most experienced and highly skilled pilots, technicians and support personnel in the industry. We are backed by Bristow's Target Zero Safety culture, robust operating procedures and world-class training programs. I want to thank all of our Bristow team members around the world for their continued dedication to place safety first every day.

Turning to the business outlook. The strengthening fundamentals in the offshore oil and gas market support our view that we are in the early innings of a multiyear growth cycle. We have once again included some slides in our earnings presentation that summarize data from third-party analysts, supporting the outlook for a significant increase in upstream oil and gas spending over the next few years and a tightening market for offshore equipment, including helicopters. Despite the potential risk of an economic recession, we view long-term upstream spending plans as resilient given the global supply challenges and energy security concerns. This constructive outlook for offshore energy activity combined with new contract additions in our government services business and improved activity levels for our fixed wing business in Australia support our view that the underlying fundamentals for Bristow's business are improving significantly. A strong U.S. dollar is unfortunately muting the full impact of these improvements in our calendar year 2023 outlook.