Neal Lux: No. You’re correct in that we can pay that off at any time. And the balance there ended probably right around $96 million, so just a little bit higher than it was at the beginning of the year.
Dan Pickering: Got you. Okay. Thank you. Then maybe whoever wants to take the question, I have two. I’ll lump them together. One is just you found Variperm, obviously, a great acquisition. Are you thinking about others and what’s the deal environment? And then the second question is more operational. If you saw any trends — consistent trends as you move through Q1? Did things soften during Q1? Did they accelerate during Q1? Just trying to figure out what the kind of trend as we go into Q2 looks like.
Lyle Williams: All right. Let me start with the second part, Dan. We did see an acceleration. I wouldn’t say it was a Formula 1 type acceleration, but it was — activity did pick up as the quarter went on. I think part of that is international. We thought the — in the international side was a little slow to release budgets, which can sometimes happen, that’s not overly unusual. But we did see the international activity pick up as the quarter went on. So I think that gives us a little — gives us good confidence into Q2 and towards the end of the year there as well. On M&A, I think there’s a lot of good opportunities out there. There’s a robust pipeline that we look at with our wide breadth of product lines, I think we have a lot of opportunities.
Variperm was really a home run — the value margin. If we can find another one like that, we’ll be happy. But we’re going to stick to our criteria. We have to have strong industrial logic within our portfolio, and we want to maintain conservative leverage on our balance sheet. And finally, the financial accretion is important and an area we want to stick to. Overall, we have a great plan to generate cash this year to get our balance sheet in a great position, and we want to continue that. But we’ll be opportunistic if there’s a good opportunity out there.
Dan Pickering: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Neal Lux: Thanks, Dan.
Lyle Williams: Thanks, Dan.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Erik Carlson (ph).
Unidentified Participant: Hey, guys. Good morning.
Neal Lux: Good morning, Erik.
Unidentified Participant: Yeah. I was just wondering if you could just touch a little bit more on Variperm. I mean I think we saw TMX (ph) actually officially announced it’s coming online in the past couple of days. And just from their businesses perspective, so is that — is the majority of the revenue kind of in the oil sands market is that during the drilling and completion phase and then that’s kind of just an activity-based business all the way around or is there — once the products are installed in a well, I mean, is there adjustments that need to be done? I’m just trying to get a little bit of a flavor of kind of the rig count versus the well count and that business and kind of what drives revenue going forward.
Lyle Williams: Erik, this is Lyle, I’ll take that a bit. And then, Neal, if you want to — you can chime in. Yes, the Variperm products are primarily used in the drilling and completion of oil sands wells with their sand control products and flow control, mitigating sand incursion and maximizing the benefit of the steam injection into the well. So very good products there. So they do have a pretty good linkage with activity and rig count as a good measure, recognizing that not all rigs in Canada drill in the oil sands. There’s a little bit of nuance to that piece. There is another piece of Variperm’s business and about 15% of their revenue in the first quarter was not in Canada. So they ship products into the U.S. into different markets.
And in this quarter, we had revenue coming out of Latin America and out of the Middle East. So really a global business that matches well with us. And as Neal mentioned, our ability to maximize pull-through there will be a good add for Variperm.
Neal Lux: I think I would add one more piece to that, the activity that they see on the drilling and completion side is not just related to new product — new projects. But generally, the majority of the activity is work on existing projects where you have the steam generation facility in place and then they’re adding wells to that. So we’re not — it’s not relying on new budgets or new money coming in, but really keeping the existing projects going where we think 95% of their activity is going to come from.
Unidentified Participant: Great. That’s helpful. And then just maybe touching on the Middle East a little bit. I mean that’s been an area where — I mean, the business is already ahead of kind of pre-COVID numbers and seen some of the larger peers and as I listen to the H&P call and they have kind of rigs being delivered and I think that there’s kind of additional tenders that they’ll put out there as they focus more on kind of the unconventional gas development. I’m just wondering like from your perspective, when you think about the business in the Middle East on a go-forward basis, like where are the tailwinds for kind of their ambitious gas production build out?
Neal Lux: Yeah. I think in a couple of areas in Saudi. So think about us specifically, the capital equipment side, as you mentioned, H&P, as those — as companies like H&P, who are our customers, they transition rigs or add rigs internationally, they’re going to need to upgrade the equipment on those rigs. So that’s a great opportunity for us on our capital side, especially the drilling equipment. On the gas development side, what’s helpful to us is a lot of the products and solutions that we designed for U.S. unconventional. They’re being applied internationally, whether it’s Argentina or the Middle East, they’re using our equipment there. And so that’s a great opportunity on our stimulation and intervention product line and within our coiled tubing product line as well, we see significant activity there.
Unidentified Participant: Okay. That’s helpful. And then I guess you guys addressed a lot of the kind of the plans on the balance sheet and what you see on a go-forward basis. I noticed obviously a very small amount of it looked like shares were repurchased during the quarter. And then just wondering what you had left on that kind of first smaller authorization.
