Solaris Oilfield Infrastructure, Inc. (NYSE:SOI) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Kyle Ramachandran: We’ve got multi-basin customers that are using the new technologies across multiple basins.

Stephen Gengaro : Okay. That makes sense. And then just one final one. You mentioned kind of what you saw was — it feels like stability in price for the, I guess, maybe it’s the wrong word, but sort of standard sand silo system. Is that — I imagine that’s just based on conversations with customers and what you’re seeing or just kind of a back of that, we’ve also started to hear that maybe there’s a little bit of a pickup in 4Q just as some of their consumable costs have come down. What are you guys seeing from that perspective? You usually have a good insight into activity changes before some of the others do.

William Zartler: Well, I think that’s right. I mean I do think you’re going to see it. It feels like if we look at the profile of the second quarter are kind of low was May. June picked up a hair. I think July feels sort of in that same level, and we’ll see how the rest of the quarter shapes up. I think it’s trending flat to slightly down with some talk of momentum. It’s really too early to completely predict the fourth quarter. But we do see, in general, especially if commodity prices remain where they are, that there’s a bit of optimism and maybe some early spending for their ’24 program and getting ahead of the game, especially when it comes to locking in some lower cost operations. In terms of our costs and the way we tend to work with our customers, we’re less volatile on pricing than most other services.

We tend to not to raise them overly in the good times but not give them up too much in the downtime. So that pricing level with us is relatively muted compared to other aspects of the industry.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Sean Mitchell of Daniel Energy Partners.

Sean Mitchell : Can you guys hear me?

William Zartler: Perfectly, Sean.

Sean Mitchell : I kind of want to hit on this last question that was asked a little bit more if you can. Just we’ve heard several anecdotes not leading into the quarter, but also on some of the calls recently about a frac activity slowdown in Q3, but then accelerates in Q4. Just want to see if there’s any additional color you can provide on that? And then number two, maybe just from what you have left to deliver in terms of systems or capital spend, any bottlenecks on the supply chain side that may be coming up?

William Zartler: I’ll answer your second question first. No, we have planned for the capital program all year, and we spread it out a bit, and we had it originally a little more flat and loaded, but we have spread out the build through the second half of the year. So that’s on track. Our utilization isn’t where we’d like it to be on the new technology because we have had — as we launched this very quickly, we’ve had some generations, the early ones that are in refurbishment, we’ve identified key issues with them and things that we can improve. And so we’ve got notionally 8 to 10 in refurbishment with low capital refurbishment, but I think as our customers see it evolve, the versions that are running today and coming off the line and are refurbished are different than the ones a year ago that they’re much improved.