Start Time: 09:00 January 1, 0000 9:32 AM ET

Ovintiv Inc. (NYSE:OVV)
Q3 2024 Results Conference Call
November 08, 2024, 09:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Brendan McCracken - President and CEO
Corey Code - EVP and CFO
Greg Givens - EVP and COO
Jason Verhaest - IR

Conference Call Participants

Gabe Daoud - TD Cowen
Neal Dingmann - Truist Securities
Neil Mehta - Goldman Sachs
Doug Leggate - Wolfe Research
Kalei Akamine - Bank of America
Arun Jayaram - JPMorgan
Geoff Jay - Daniel Energy Partners

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Ovintiv's 2024 Third Quarter Results Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that this conference call may not be recorded or rebroadcast without the expressed consent of Ovintiv.

I would now like to turn the conference call over to Jason Verhaest from Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Verhaest.

Jason Verhaest

Thanks, Joanna, and welcome, everyone to our third quarter conference call. This call is being webcast, and the slides are available on our website at ovintiv.com. Please take note of the advisory regarding forward-looking statements at the beginning of our slides and our disclosure documents filed on EDGAR and SEDAR. Following the prepared remarks, we will be available to take your questions.

I'll now turn the call over to our President, Brendan McCracken.

Brendan McCracken

Thanks, Jason. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We announced another strong quarter yesterday, and we remain very pleased with our operational and financial execution across the business. We delivered net earnings of $507 million or $1.92 per share and cash flow of $978 million or $3.70 per share, beating consensus estimates. The cash flow beat was driven by both production and cost outperformance as we exceeded the top end of our production guidance ranges on all products and came in below the bottom end of guidance range on combined TMP and LOE.

We generated free cash flow of $440 million, which was higher than the second quarter despite lower oil prices. We're excited about what we're doing to make sure that our operational excellence transfers all the way through to financial performance. With the extra production and lower costs we've delivered this year, we're on track to generate an incremental $200 million more free cash flow.

We returned 60% of our second quarter free cash flow to our shareholders via our base dividend and our third quarter share buyback. Importantly, we continued to make progress on debt reduction during the quarter, repaying $210 million for total debt at the end of Q3 at $5.88 billion.