William Scaff, Co-CEO, Treasurer
Thanks, Jessie and thanks everyone for joining us today. We issued a press release this morning announcing our financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2015. Our financial results for the first quarter are reflection of our disciplined approach towards controlling costs to maximize returns. During the quarter with rapidly declining commodity prices, we will be able to grow our production by 158% year-over-year, while lowering our lease operating expenses in G&A costs per BOE by 15% and 50% respectively. This generated a record 79% EBITDA margin on revenues and for the company and our shareholders during the quarter. We are also focused on lowering our finding and development cost, which our Chief Operating Officer Craig Rasmuson will detail in a moment.
Before I turn the call over to Craig and our CFO Monty Jennings, I would like to state that while we are proud of our 100% plus compounded annual growth rate over the past several years, what is more important to us is remaining good stewards of capital and keeping focused on creating a sustainable platform for the company in all commodity price scenarios.
For those of you on the call that I have had an opportunity to meet in person, you may recall me telling the history about the boom-bust cycles we have experienced over the last 33 years and how we have achieved positive economic results in the past regardless of commodity prices like controlling cost and maintaining a keen eye on expenses.Our Co-CEO Ed Holloway and I personally review each and every invoice no matter how small for our approval. Over the past several months, we have been taking measures to preserve capital and maintain liquidity. This is critical not only to ensure the sustainability of our business model, but also to take advantage of opportunities that might be presented to us during this down cycle.
Some of the measures we have taken include swapping out of non-operated leasehold interest to increase our working interest in our operated assets. This enables us to apply our disciplined cost controls and ultimately result in a higher return on those assets.For example, we recently sold a non-operated working interest to the operator of record rather than commit $54 million to a project, we would more than skeptical could achieve an acceptable rate of return for Synergy and our shareholders.
This decision had a several million dollars of cash to our balance sheet and at the same time, we retained our producing vertical wells on this acreage. In December, we reached out to remaining warrant holders and succeeded in bringing in several million more dollars in cash before year-end with 100% of the warrants exercised. We are also looking at opportunities to monetize some non-core assets.Through these measures and others, we believe we can position Synergy to continue to deliver excellent returns for our shareholders during a difficult period and more importantly set up the company to emerge from this downturn and a stronger position enabling us to take advantage of potentially attractive opportunities.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to our CFO Monty Jennings to take us through the details of the financial results we announced this morning. Monty?
