Weatherford International plc (NASDAQ:WFRD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Arunava Mitra: Yes. Thanks for the question. This is a question which has been asked pretty frequently in the recent past. And my common answer has been, I don’t know what I was thinking, I should have been here a year ago. So this has been — the excitement in the team is palpable. This does not look anywhere close to being a company, which had an existential crisis 3 years ago. This is a company which is on a platform to drive growth and continued margin expansion. So — and although there was — there is still a little bit of negative imperative out there in terms of when you Google Weatherford, if you dig deeper and understand what this management team has been able to accomplish over the last 2.5 years, it’s extraordinary.

And of course, Girish has been able to put together a super management team, communication vertically, horizontally is very transparent. And some of the grassroot levels based on what I’ve seen in the last 30 days, there is alignment in the strategic direction of the company. So I’m very excited. We don’t do segment EBITDA margin disclosures. So as Girish highlighted earlier, the 100 — the at least 100 basis points expansion compared to 2022, we do see an upside bias to it, but we’ll be able to give you guys more color as the quarters progress in 2023.

Girishchandra Saligram: Yes. And Doug, look, if I could just add to that. We are very committed to transparency, but we also need to make sure that we give you things that are constructive and helpful versus giving you more information that will just lead to more questions. Our job is to manage all of this together. And we always give you the full details on our retroactive base of exactly what happened in each segment, so to get a bit of a better sense around the company. Look, given our size and scale, we still have a situation where individual product lines in a single country do have an effect, and we’ve got to manage that at a holistic level.

Unidentified Analyst: Fair point. And Girish, I don’t say this on calls very often, but nice quarter.

Operator: . Our next question comes from Gregg Brody of Bank of America.

Gregg Brody: Congrats on a great quarter. I don’t say that very often either. Just — you mentioned the capital allocation priorities. You’re focused on recalibrating the debt structure. Can you just give us a little bit more color how you’re thinking about that? And what is the right debt number today?

Girishchandra Saligram: Yes. So Gregg, I’ll take that. Arun and I have just started to have a lot of discussions as he’s coming up to speed on that. Look, we have not explicitly laid out a leverage target or a specific debt number. But look, our priority has been to, first and foremost, take out the high cost of debt stuff or the stuff that we still have left. We took out another $20 million of that. We paid it down in January, we called it in December. So we’re left at $105 million. The call premium on that goes away in December. So we’ll continue to look at the economics on that. But I think suffice to say, look, that won’t be an issue on the longer term. We will get that taken care of. And look, what we started doing on an opportunistic basis in the fourth quarter, as we saw our bonds dipped below par a little bit just given the market volatility, we went in and got some of — we were able to buy back some of those bonds.