Seadrill Limited (NYSE:SDRL) Q4 2023 Results Conference Call February 29, 2024 10:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Lydia Mabry - Director of Investor Relations

Simon Johnson - President and Chief Executive Officer

Grant Creed - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Samir Ali - Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer

Marcel Wieggers - Senior Vice President of Operations

Conference Call Participants

Frank Galanti - Stifel

Greg Lewis - BTIG

Fredrik Stene - Clarkson Securities

Hamed Khorsand - BWS Financial

Kurt Hallead - Benchmark

Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Eric, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Seadrill Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Release Call [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the call over to Lydia Mabry, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Lydia Mabry

Thank you, operator. Welcome to Seadrill's fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings call. With me for the call today are Simon Johnson, our President and Chief Executive Officer; Grant Creed, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; Samir Ali, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer; and Marcel Wieggers, Senior Vice President of Operations. Today's call may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainty. Actual results may differ materially. No one should assume these forward-looking statements remain valid later in the quarter or year, and we assume no obligation to update them. Our latest Forms 20-F and 6-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, provide a more detailed discussion of our forward-looking statements and the risk factors affecting our business. During today's call, we may also refer to non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations to the nearest corresponding GAAP measures are in the earnings release filed with the SEC and available on our Web site, seadrill.com/investors. Our use of the term EBITDA corresponds with the term adjusted EBITDA as defined in our earnings release. Now let me turn the call over to Simon.

Simon Johnson

Thank you. Today, I will address our recent accomplishments, near term positioning and future potential. Samir will then discuss our commercial activity and outlook. And Grant will review our financial results and 2024 guidance. Then we will open the call to questions. Seadrill is a leading offshore driller. We consistently execute on our stated strategy, achieving financial and operational results that allow us to deliver industry leading total shareholder returns relative to our offshore floater peers. We were the best performing equity in the peer group in the 2023 calendar year. And we've bought back over $340 million worth of Seadrill shares through our ongoing repurchase program. Throughout the year, we continued our efforts to simplify and strengthen our business. We operated a modern floater focused fleet concentrated primarily in the golden triangle. We achieved minimum efficient scale through our Aquadrill acquisition adding four drillships with near term contracting exposure. We secured leading edge contracts for term work and are announcing two major Brazil awards, representing $1.1 billion in firm revenue at rates our peers would envy, and we followed that with another announcement of a benchmark rate in late January for the US Gulf of Mexico. We have long telegraphed and prepared for headwinds in 2024, first calling attention to them on our second quarter 2023 earnings call. Our trade rivals seem to be recognizing varying degrees of emerging white space supply chain pressures and inflationary capital expenditure and OpEx trends in 2024.