Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript July 28, 2023

Exxon Mobil Corporation beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $4.14, expectations were $2.05.

Operator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to this Exxon Mobil Corporation Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Mrs. Jennifer Driscoll. Please go ahead, ma’am.

Jennifer Driscoll: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Exxon Mobil’s second quarter 2023 earnings call. I’m Jennifer Driscoll, Vice President, Investor Relations. I’m joined by Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO; and Kathy Mikells, Senior Vice President and CFO. Our slides, script and earnings release are available in the Investors section of our website. In a moment, Darren will provide opening comments. Then we’ll take your questions. In conjunction with our recent announcement to acquire Denbury and related materials in this presentation, we’ve included additional information on Slide 2. During the presentation, we’ll make forward-looking comments. These are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please read our cautionary statement on Slide 3.

You may find more information on the risks and uncertainties that apply to any forward-looking statements in our SEC filings on our website. Please note, that we have supplemental information at the end of our slides. Now, let me turn it over to Darren.

Darren Woods: Good morning. Thanks for joining us today. I’m pleased to be conducting our earnings call from our Houston campus. As of July 1st, our corporate headquarters is now located at the campus, alongside the senior managers of our businesses and centralized organizations. This is the first time in the company’s history that the senior leadership team of the corporation is located on one site and represents a critical step in continuing the transformation of our business enabling us to improve collaboration and alignment and further leverage synergies across our integrated businesses. The ongoing efforts to structurally improve our company and drive sustained, industry-leading performance was clearly demonstrated in our second-quarter results.

We delivered earnings of almost $8 billion, two times higher than what we earned in the second quarter of 2018, under comparable industry commodity prices. That doubling of earnings reflects our work in the intervening years to reshape our portfolio of businesses, invest in advantaged projects, and drive a higher level of efficiency and effectiveness in everything we do. With these results, I would like to take a moment to recognize our people. Starting with all those that made the move to Houston. I’m sure you know moves like this are not easy and that many personal sacrifices are made. I’m very thankful for all who did this. Their willingness to disrupt their lives for the benefit of our company is a testament to the dedication of our people whose commitment and hard work underpin all the improvements we are making.

I hope our shareholders take comfort in this one, small example of our people’s commitment to the company and have confidence in their resolve to further strengthen our position as an industry leader in all that we do. Our achievements this quarter also demonstrate the progress we’re making in solving the “and” equation: meeting the world’s needs for energy and essential products and reducing emissions, both our own and others’. In the Permian, we set another production record and remain on track for an overall growth in production of 10% this year. As I said last quarter, our growth won’t be linear as we execute our development plans that balance and optimize capital efficiency, resource recovery, and production rates. Our priority will remain on driving value, not volumes.

In Guyana, we achieved a record quarterly gross production rate of 380,000 barrels per day. Our team in Guyana continues to deliver excellent operating, environmental and safety results, while optimizing and growing production. In fact, we see the potential to increase the combined gross capacity of these two FPSOs to above 400,000 barrels a day with further debottlenecking, which is nearly a 20% increase above the investment basis and a testament to the ingenuity of our people. In the Gulf Coast, we continue to profitably grow our business. In the second quarter we achieved mechanical completion of the Baytown chemical expansion. The project grows volume and improves mix with 750,000 tonnes per annum of additional performance chemical products.

The Baytown expansion is the final Product Solutions component of the Growing the Gulf initiative announced in 2017. If you recall, the initiative committed to investments of $20 billion over ten years to capitalize on the US’s advantaged resources, economic growth, and strong regional support for our businesses and the jobs we create. 11 of the 13 projects are up and running. The Baytown expansion, after product qualifications, should begin contributing by the fourth quarter. And Golden Pass, the last of our Growing the Gulf projects, should have its first train up at the back end of 2024. The Growing the Gulf initiative is another example of executing our strategy, investing in advantaged, high-value growth, and delivering on our commitments.

Improving the earnings power of our businesses also requires divestments. In the second quarter we completed the divestment of the Billings refinery. Including this sale, cash proceeds from divestments of non-strategic assets have totaled roughly $2 billion year-to-date. In advancing our efforts to better leverage corporate scale and integration, we established three new centralized organizations in the quarter. Consolidating activities previously embedded in each of our businesses: Global Business Solutions, ExxonMobil Supply Chain, and Global Trading. They’re all off to a good start and have clear lines of sight to improve performance and lower cost. Our Low Carbon Solutions business continues to make progress in building an advantaged, low cost, high-return business in capturing, transporting, and storing carbon.

We announced a CO2 offtake agreement with Nucor, one of North America’s largest steel producers. And we signed an agreement to acquire Denbury, which will provide ExxonMobil with the largest owned and operated network of CO2 pipelines in the United States. Combining Denbury’s assets and experience with our capabilities will significantly accelerate and expand our ability to profitably help customers reduce their emissions and allow ExxonMobil to play an even greater role in a thoughtful energy transition. It significantly enhances our competitive position and offers a compelling customer proposition to economically reduce emissions in hard-to-decarbonize heavy industries which, today, have limited practical options. Of Denbury’s 1,300 miles of CO2 pipeline, roughly 70% are in the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, one of the largest US markets for CO2 reduction and home to some of ExxonMobil’s largest integrated refining and chemical sites and nine of their 10 strategically-located CO2 storage sites are also in this region.

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We believe the transaction synergies will drive strong growth and returns. A cost-efficient transportation and storage system accelerates CCS deployment for both ExxonMobil and our third-party customers. It supports multiple low-carbon value chains, including CCS, hydrogen, ammonia, and biofuels. Ultimately, we see an opportunity to create a CCS business with the capacity to reduce emissions across the Gulf Coast by up to 100 million tons per year. This transaction will help us do that at a lower cost and faster pace. In fact, we see the potential for a third of the opportunity being actionable in the near term. Which takes us to our customers. Our latest offtake agreement extends our CCS customer base beyond industrial gas and fertilizers into steel.

This project will tie into the same CO2 transportation and storage infrastructure we’ll use to serve CF Industries, located just 10 miles from Nucor. Focusing our efforts and investments in areas with concentrated sources of emissions allows us to capture the benefits of scale, reduce our spend per ton of CO2 captured and improves returns. Our work with Nucor supports Louisiana’s goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and it increases the total amount of CO2 we’ve agreed to transport and store for customers to 5 million metric tons per year, equivalent to replacing 2 million cars with EVs, roughly the same number of electric vehicles on the road in the United States today. With the planned Denbury acquisition, the potential reduction could be up to 20 times that.

As demonstrated by these new developments, we’re continuing to make significant progress in our plans to lead industry in helping society reduce emissions. A major component of our improved earnings is the structural cost savings that we’ve achieved, currently at $8.3 billion. We remain on track to reach our target of $9 billion in savings by the end of this year. As we develop plans for future years, we’re committed to finding additional savings. Cash flow from operations totaled $9.4 billion in the quarter, or $13 billion excluding the change in working capital. Our year-to-date production of 3.7 million oil-equivalent barrels per day is on track with the full-year guidance we shared last year as part of our Capex investments totaled $12.5 billion year-to-date, also in line with our full-year guidance.

And, consistent with our capital allocation philosophy, we continue to share our success with shareholders, distributing $8 billion in cash during the quarter, including $4.3 billion in share repurchases and $3.7 billion in dividends. Before we go to Q&A, I’ll leave you with a few key takeaways from the quarter. First, our work to structurally improve earnings power is paying off, demonstrated this quarter as we doubled earnings versus a comparable price environment in the second quarter of 2018. Our reorganizations, aggressive investments in advantaged projects, and significant reductions in cost are driving value and improving our competitive position. We’ve made great progress and have a clear line of sight to much more. In the back half of this year alone, we expect to bring on two advantaged projects: Baytown Performance Chemicals and the Payara FPSO in Guyana, further growing our capacity to generate industry-leading earnings.

The company’s ongoing business transformation is giving the organization a better view of end-to-end value creation and focusing us on the highest value opportunities. Today, we are better positioned than ever to realize the value of our scale and the synergies from improving the integration of our businesses. For the first time in our history, we have a corporate technology, projects, trading, supply chain, and business solutions organization allowing us to apply the best solutions and talent to our biggest opportunities. And, importantly, we are developing the most talented people in the industry, providing unrivaled opportunities to meet some of society’s greatest challenges. Their work is delivering exceptional results, driving industry-leading returns on investments, and growth in earnings and cash flow.

This, in turn, allows us to distribute cash to shareholders through share repurchases and a sustained, competitive, and growing dividend while maintaining investments in industry advantaged projects including investments in our Low Carbon Solutions business. By leveraging the advantages developed in our traditional businesses, we are laying the foundation for a world-scale, competitively-advantaged, low carbon business with industry-leading returns. The planned acquisition of Denbury is a step in that direction, improving our decarbonization proposition for customers, while generating attractive returns. In summary, we’re pleased with the quarter, the progress it represents and the improved earnings power of the company. We’re confident that we have the right strategy with the right leadership and best people to effectively execute it, delivering sustained growth in shareholder value.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Jennifer.

Jennifer Driscoll: We’ll now begin our Q&A session. Please note, that we continue to request that analyst as a single question as a courtesy to the other analyst. However, please remain on the line in case you need any clarifying questions. Now with that, operator, please open the line for our first question.

Operator: Thank you, Mrs. Driscoll. The question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically. [Operator Instructions] And we’ll go first to Doug Leggate with Bank of America.

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Q&A Session

Doug Leggate: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Darren, I wonder if I could pick up on the cost saving target. And I guess my question is, post Denbury, and given that we’re already halfway through 2023. Where does that $9 billion cost saving target go through the end of the plan period through 2027?

Darren Woods: It goes up, Doug, in short. I think as you know, and we’ve been talking about the reorganizations that we’ve been executing over the years with some of them just recently executed, puts us in a position to really capture a lot of efficiencies across the whole of the enterprise this year as we develop our corporate plans. Obviously, one of the objectives of these new organizations is to take stock of what they’ve got in their portfolio and identify the opportunities to further capture the benefits of scale and the synergies that exist between the integrated business and what for the first time represents an opportunity to actually manage processes across these integrated businesses. So I think we’ve got an opportunity set to drive that cost reduction even further as we head out further in the planned horizon.

And my expectation is, when we come back at the end of the year after we’ve developed the plans, reviewed them with the board and then share them with all of you, we’ll provide some perspective on what that opportunity looks like going forward.

Doug Leggate: Would you care to offer an order of magnitude, Darren?

Kathy Mikells: Doug, I tell you to go back to the Investor Day materials from March of 2022. We had some bridges in it where we kind of laid out earnings and how much structural cost savings we’re driving, earnings improvement relative to volume and mix. And I think if you just look at the size of those bars, you’ll get a rough order of magnitude.

Doug Leggate: And then going forward, but I’ll leave it there. Thanks.

Darren Woods: You bet. Thank you, Doug.

Operator: We’ll go next to Neil Mehta with Goldman Sachs.

Neil Mehta: Good morning. Darren, you’ve been clear that you think that there’s value to be had potentially in M&A in both low carbon and the Permian and Denbury really well into the former of those two. I’d be curious on your perspective on whether on the M&A markets right now and how are you thinking about approaching opportunistic value creation to that?

Darren Woods: Yes. Good morning, Neil. I would say that our perspective on that whole space. And I know it’s one that’s of great interest and we’ve talked about, it seems like for a number of successive quarters, hasn’t really changed quite frankly. I think what we are holding ourselves to and evaluating opportunities in that space is the ability to create unique value, unique shareholder value. And so, the opportunities have to be bigger than what ExxonMobil or any potential acquisition could do independent of one another. So I think you’ve heard us say that one plus one has to equal three here. And that’s what we are — how we’re thinking about that space. Obviously, from the very beginning, back in 2018 when we started talking about better leveraging our key competitive advantages, one of the drives to do that is to open up value opportunities that basically others can’t achieve.

And as I’ve made — try to make clear in this quarter’s prepared remarks and in previous quarters, we’re making great progress on better leveraging those competitive advantages, bringing them to bear on the business, delivering bottom line results. The more we do that, the more we advance our technology portfolio, the bigger the opportunity to identify unique value opportunities with other companies. And so, we’re continuing to look for that, but we’re not going to compromise our expectation of generating returns and growing value for the shareholders. So I think Kathy said many times in the past, we’re pretty picky acquires. I don’t see us change in that position.

Neil Mehta: Thanks, Darren.

Darren Woods: You bet, Neil.

Operator: We’ll go next to Devin McDermott with Morgan Stanley.

Devin McDermott: Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking my question.

Darren Woods: Good morning.