ChampionX Corporation (NASDAQ:CHX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Sivasankaran Somasundaram: Yes, as you know Alec, that this is a business which is in its infancy and with regulatory changes and our customer’s commitment to continue to reduce particularly methane emissions. So we play primarily today in the methane emissions area. And if you look at today, this business is growing nicely and we got into the space in July of 2021. And if you look at from that point onwards to now, we have today well over 1600 sites, where our continuous monitoring equipment is installed and working. So customer adoption in this continues to improve, so we expect 2023 to be another year of solid growth. And that’s why in the prepared comments, we talked about the continued investments in this area because we believe this market will continue to grow for many years to come.

As there are different types of emission detection technology, the aerial technology, the drone-based technology, the satellite based technology, and then the ground-based continuous monitoring technology. And we offer all of the technologies except the satellite. But we believe the biggest growth opportunity will come in — is more in the continuous monitoring ground-based monitoring technology, because as you can imagine, the rest of the technologies are very episodic. Whereas if you are — if you want to continuously monitor and quantify technologies, you have to make sure that you install continuous monitoring technologies. So we are investing nicely in this, and we will continue to invest in people, talent, organizational capabilities.

So I expect 2023 to see a nice growth in this from everything we can see, today we have the leading position in the upstream oil and gas markets when it comes to continuous monitoring.

Alec Scheibelhoffer: Great. That’s excellent color. I appreciate it. And just one more, if I could squeeze one in. Just, I was wondering if you could have any additional comments on some of the raw material costs for your PCT business and just how we should think about that in 2023 and if, pricing is caught up to a level where you feel comfortable with margins going forward?

Sivasankaran Somasundaram: Yes, as you know Alec that, we have talked about this before, that raw material prices, particularly in 2022, has been really difficult to predict, right? And so the forecast and those have been in 2022 has been somewhat difficult to predict. But what we saw in fourth quarter, we did see some favorability in our raw material. And so going forward, what we have is, we do believe that raw material prices at a minimum stabilized and possibly well may show, our current view is possibly may show some relief. So what we have built into our guidance and our forecast here is the raw material favorability what we saw in Q4, we have built into our forecast and guidance. And I think that we believe is a very reasonable assumption because we have seen stabilization in the raw material prices and so we have built that into our forecast, so that’s what I would say.

Alec Scheibelhoffer: Excellent. Thanks again, and thanks again for taking my question.

Sivasankaran Somasundaram: Sure, Alec.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Saurabh Pant of Bank of America. Please go ahead.