CSI Compressco LP (NASDAQ:CCLP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Selman Akyol: Got it. From those comments, I presume your customer list is dwindling, but you’re growing within each one of those customers. Is that a fair assessment as well?

John Jackson: That’s a fair assessment to some degree, but it’s also an assessment that we debate internally. We have — for example, I was talking to our Head of Sales this week. We have a new customer that’s come in and asked for some additional — some equipment that do you have some available? Or could you build some for us? And so this is the part of the decision-making you have to work your way through. Do we want to continue to feed our existing customers and take care of them, or do we want to add a new customer? Given our limited supply of capital and in fact we’re basically sold out of our existing recent fleet, these are the balances we have to have to go through of where we want to allocate our capital. So, we would like to add new customers, but at the same time, new customer may want such of the 2,500 horsepower unit, and those are $3.2 million, $3.3 million each.

So it’s $30 million, $35 million in capital. It’s — for us, when you’re looking at $50 million to $60 million of discretionary cash flow, that’s a big chunk of your discretionary capital you’re going to spend in the coming years. So these are the things that you kind of have to debate and decide where you’re going to allocate your capital, existing customers, new customers and what people want? The thing is a lot of people are going through their budget process right now, and not all our customers have been ready to commit for 2025 capital. But we expect by the time we get on our year-end earnings call, we will have had a lot of these customers have their budget for 2024, therefore, they need to plan for 2025 as they drill in ’24, and they’re going to start wanting to commit capital because of the lead times and all these other issues we’ve talked about as far as being able to get a unit on site, people know they need to commit 12, 15, 18 months in advance.

So I think as we get through this budget cycle, we’re going to have a lot more demand than we’re even seeing today. And that’s why we’re trying to talk to our customers to be very proactive, get in front of them and say, look, we need to know sooner rather than later because we may not be able to do much for you other than find units as they come off term and move them to you. So it’s a lot of commentary there, but it’s quite the delicate balancing act. So it’s — we could grow a new customer base. We can grow our existing customer base and, but trying to find that balance is tricky.

Selman Akyol: Got it. And then just the last one for me. You mentioned you’re already beginning to talk with lenders and look at some of the refinancing. I guess can you just talk about any generalities that you’re seeing in terms of pricing, anything that we should be thinking about as I presume you’ll address those notes next year?

Jonathan Byers: Yes, that’s the plan to address them next year. In terms of pricing, we’ve seen a pretty wide range. And with our first lien being at 7.5%, pricing on that is pretty good. So our expectation is overall, our interest — our kind of that could go up one to two.

Operator: And the next question comes from Gregg Brody with Bank of America.

Gregg Brody: Just a follow-up on financing. Clearly, funding with your cash flow would make sense for funding some of this growth. Are you — are there other avenues that you’re contemplating? Is there any financing out there that’s starting to look attractive to maybe fund some of these new build to have contracts on them?