ProPetro Holding Corp. (NYSE:PUMP) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So you can imagine if you have average a fleet that earlier in the year was pumping 19 hours a day is now pumping 22 hours a day that kind of plays in my answer with that earlier question about efficiencies creating budget exhaustion in a way because that might have been unforeseen for our customer in terms of how they plan to execute on their acreage. So lots of interesting stuff going on in that arena all of which we’re heavily participating in and continuing to try and push the envelope from an efficiency standpoint and while at the same time make sure that we’re paid for doing so.

David Schorlemer: Yes, Arun, this is David. Just to interject at one point. I mean, the way we’re looking at this today is that we have 13, 14, 15 mobile plants and when you think about the things that kind of go on at a plant the level of scrutiny of activities the efficiencies that you’re looking for that’s how we’re doing this internally and applying various techniques like lean manufacturing and other principles to help us improve our efficiencies bringing industrialized equipment to the application like our electric fleets is certainly one of those areas, but it’s a comprehensive approach and it’s something that we’ll continue to look at which we think we can enhance going forward. Part of our first leg of the stool in our strategy is optimizing our business and we’re continuing to work on that.

Arun Jayaram: Thanks, gents.

Operator: Our next question comes from Scott Gruber from Citi. Scott, you may proceed.

Scott Gruber: Thank you. Good morning.

Sam Sledge: Good morning, Scott.

Scott Gruber: I just want to understand a bit better how the lease expense will impact per fleet profitability. I think the lease expense will be about $12 million per fleet per year. I’m just not sure what to subtract the $12 from. Should we subtract that $12 million from the $28 million in annualized EBITDA that you posted in 3Q? Or is the starting point higher on these fleets given the fuel savings that they can create for customers?

David Schorlemer: Yes, Scott, good question. I think when we’re looking at it, we’re looking at it across the entire fleet in the business. It’s a capital cost for this particular asset deployment, but it’s really something that we’re utilizing to facilitate the acceleration of the transition of our fleet. So, you got the number right, in terms of lease expense is going to be $10 million to $12 million per year. That will be in cost of services. But overall, that will impair our margin in total at the company, but we still believe we’ll be in well into the mid 20s to upper 20s in terms of EBITDA per fleet for the company.

Scott Gruber: Got you. I appreciate that. And then you mentioned that CapEx should be down next year, following the big investment in the Tier 4 upgrades this year. How should we think about base maintenance per fleet? And do you anticipate any additional investment, whether it’s in more DGB or eFrac next year?

David Schorlemer: Yes. So as we mentioned, in our current CapEx in 2022 was $365 million. That number is going to be a little over $300 million this year. We do believe that we’ll see a similar cadence in decline next year. We’re still working on that capital budget in our 2024 budgeting process. I think right now, we’re guiding to $5 million to $7 million maintenance CapEx per fleet. I think as we continue to blend in the industrialized equipment like this electric equipment, that will begin to decrease that number as we go, as well as impacting OpEx in our estimates, approximately 30% to 40%, and that’s excluding the lease expense. But just to give you a sense of the cadence and when you look at our recent CapEx cadence, we’ve been in the $100 million or even over $100 million from an incurred CapEx perspective over the last several quarters, that number got down to 59%.