TotalEnergies SE (TTE) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

April 27, 2023 7:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks：

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to TotalEnergies First Quarter 2023 Results Conference Call.

I now hand over to Patrick Pouyanné, CEO; and Jean-Pierre Sbraire, CFO, who will lead you through this call. Sir, please go ahead.

Patrick Pouyanné

Hello, everyone. Good morning or good afternoon, wherever you are. I'm here today together with Jean-Pierre, we’ll give you, I would say, review we have a very good quarter that we had on the first quarter of 2023. I just wanted as an introduction to comment the news, which came this morning around about dawn.

The future of our Canadian assets, as you know, we explained that in September at our CMD, we are planning to organize the spin-off of our Canadian assets. We went through the process and in the meantime, because fundamentally, I think we are very serious about making this spin-off reality.

We attracted some unsolicited offers in the last months. And one of them has materialized, and I think at a value, which is quite attractive, CAD5.5 billion cash plus CAD600 million of additional payments under certain conditions. The value, which is fitting with the expectations of the initial quotation, which were given to us between CAD5 million to CAD6 billion, and of course, it's coming from Suncor, who knows very well one of our two assets. And Suncor will comment a little later in the day, his own view of the deal.

For us, so it's fitting the value. It's a straightforward I would say, way to divest the assets as we are planning to do it straighter away. And from -- so from the company and from the shareholders' point of view, the Board considered that it was this alternative was worth to be considered and approved yesterday to move forward with this transaction.

Of course, the most important part of the discussion beyond this -- comparing both alternatives was about to distribution to shareholders because, as you know, the spin-off was meant in fact, a distribution in kind of some shares of the NewCo. So we more perfectly has that in mind and the guidance that we have decided to give to our shareholders today is that last year, we put a higher guidance on the payout to shareholders of 35% to 40% of cash flow from operations, which were down in 2022, 37%, there because we'll have, I would say, additional proceeds from these sales, the divestment.