Magnolia Oil & Gas Corporation (NYSE:MGY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Chris Stavros: Yes. As Brian said, the share repurchase authorization that’s approved by the Board really is related only to the Class A shares that trade on the market. Remember, a private equity owner owns some small amount of A shares and some larger amount of Class B shares, and so the share repurchase program, the 8.9 million shares of the authorization is not related to the Bs. Putting my director hat on, I mean, look, that it’s not my — from my point of view, this is not an issue. If we want to authorize or try to get the Board to authorize additional shares for repurchase to the Board and they’ll do that. I fully anticipate that. I don’t see why they wouldn’t. I mean this has been part of the investment proposition for Magnolia from the beginning.

And as I said, and I really try to double down on this, we’re trying to create this dividend per share payout capacity enhancement. And so by continually repurchasing our shares that, we think are at a good value we just enhance that capability over time.

Tim Rezvan: Okay. Thanks. Just wanted to make sure that that would be part of the medium long-term plan it sounds like it is?

Chris Stavros: Yeah that will be.

Tim Rezvan: Okay. Great. Great. And then on the acquisitions front a big number in 4Q, $78 million. So kind of two questions related to that. First, was there a production that came with those acquisitions? And then secondly, as you look forward kind of what €“ you’re sitting on a lot of cash here. How big could that be opportunistically? Would you go $200 million, $300 million, $400 million for the right opportunities this year? Just trying to understand kind of what your appetite is or how big you could get on that front? Thanks.

Chris Stavros: Yeah. Sure. I mean, the $78 million in the quarter or the $90 million for the year, I mean, frankly, I don’t view that as a large number. It’s just larger than maybe some things that we’ve done fairly recently. And so anything of any size is probably going to stand out. We did all this and we sort of walked you through and we ended with $700 million or thereabouts of cash. And so having a little bit more cash right now probably not such a terrible thing, especially given some of the uncertainty around the economy at least we’re getting a little bit more interest and offsetting almost all of the cash interest expense. Having said that, we’re not Bank of America, the goal of the money is to find a better use for it and it generates stronger returns and helps the business over time.

So we’ll continue to execute on our €“ on the model with a moderate growth that we talk about and frankly we’ve over-shopped that. And we’ll continue to repurchase shares and continue to pay a safe and growing dividend. As you know, we have this sizable private equity owner, continue to accommodate their sales process over time. I can’t say €“ I can say, if but I can’t say when that will happen, but we’ll be very supportive through our own purchases around that to help them. The M&A, as I said this included a mix of acreage and working interest in minerals could we go larger, if we found the right opportunity, yeah sure we could do that. We don’t need €“ the business doesn’t need a lot of money to sort of continue to run well and do what we need to do execution-wise.