Civitas Resources, Inc. (NYSE:CIVI) Q3 2023 Results Conference Call November 8, 2023 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

John Wren - Director, IR

Chris Doyle - CEO

Marianella Foschi - CFO

Hodge Walker - COO

Conference Call Participants

Neal Dingmann - Truist Securities

Leo Mariani - Roth MKM

Nicholas Pope - Seaport Research

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Bhavish, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Civitas Resources' Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the call over to John Wren, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin your conference.

John Wren

Thanks, operator, and good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm joined today by our CEO, Chris Doyle; CFO, Marianella Foschi; and COO, Hodge Walker.

I hope you've reviewed our earnings release, 10-Q and slide deck, all of which are available on our website. We will make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our projections. Please read our full disclosures regarding forward-looking statements in our 10-Q and other SEC filings.

We may also refer to certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations to certain non-GAAP metrics can be found in yesterday's release and our SEC filings.

After Chris's brief prepared remarks, we'll all be available to take your questions. As always, please limit your time to one question and one follow-up as this allows us to get to more of your questions this morning.

Now I'll turn the call over to Chris.

Chris Doyle

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. The team once again delivered strong results this quarter and our new Permian and legacy DJ businesses are performing well against our expectations. Our results continue to prove that an E&P company with high-quality assets can return significant cash to shareholders while building scale through disciplined accretive transactions. Our recently announced Vencer acquisition, which should close as expected in January, further strengthens our ability to generate free cash and return it to shareholders. This deal is part of several recent steps to transform our company, adding high-quality scale and further diversifying our portfolio. Simply put, we're more competitive and more durable enterprise today.

We recently celebrated our 2-year anniversary, which gave us an opportunity to reflect on what we've accomplished as a company and what we've delivered for our shareholders. In 2022, we paid $6.29 per share in dividends. In 2023, that number will grow to $7.60, add an additional $320 million of buybacks that have already been completed and we will return nearly $1 billion to shareholders in 2023 alone. That's 15% of our current market cap in 1 year. Our strong shareholder return program will continue to grow in 2024. At strip, we expect the dividend will increase roughly 10% furthering our track record of delivering 1 of the most reliable and significant dividends in our industry.