Q4 2004 Ocean Rig ASA Earnings Conference Call - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

PER-HERMOD RASMUSSEN, INVESTOR RELATIONS OFFICER, OCEAN RIG ASA: I'm the Investor Relations Officer. With me today I have Geir Aune, our Executive Chairman, and Christian Mowinckel, Interim Managing Director and Senior Vice President Finance. I give the word to you, Geir.

GEIR AUNE, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, OCEAN RIG ASA: Yes, welcome everybody. Could I have the next slide please? Yes. Okay. I'm pleased to announce today that we have established now a situation in this Company where we finally are on a -- in a situation where we have contracts that give a good EBITDA every day. We will now going forward, since we have now established the presence in Norway, in the Barents Sea and we're on good contracts in Angola, we will have close to EBITDA per day of $300,000.

This is a significant improvement over what we have seen before. We have been through a year which had some gaps between contracts, but we are now established, as I've said, in a position where we should see a stable cash flow at a high level, with good margins going forward.

This is, of course, based on good contracts in an improving market. I think we have been able to play this market in a good way. We did not fall into the trap of locking the rates in on contracts earlier for future contracts at a significantly lower level. We saw some of our competitors, having sold their last capacity a year ago on contracts, at levels that is significantly below what we can achieve today.

Can I have the next picture please? Slide number 2. Okay. Let me go through some of the events in the fourth quarter. We had a very good operational performance during the quarter. Leiv Eiriksson had an earning efficiency of 99% and Eirik Raude 31%. That was due to the contract being off hire for approximately 2 months, during mobilization and preparation for the Barents Sea contract. When it was on hire, however, it was 100% earning efficiency.

That means that we have not experienced any loss in revenue due to downtime during the last quarter. And also, year to date we have not had any loss in revenue due to downtime from operational or technical problems. And this is quite good and it's the first time we have seen such a long period of time without any lost revenue.

In the fourth quarter we commenced drilling for BP in Angola, and we are on the second well right now, expected to be completed within a week's time. Leiv Eiriksson will then set on a 2-well contract for Exxon. An approximate day rate is $230,000 a day for those 2 wells, expected to take the rig through mid-May.

Eirik Raude has been in the shipyard during October and November -- most of November, for preparation for the Barents Sea. It has gone through some upgrades to meet the strong winter up in the north. And also, it has been modified in order to meet the very strict environmental requirements for drilling in that area. And we are now -- we have one of the few rigs that are now meeting these very, very strict environmental regulations to drill in the Barents Sea. And as far as we know, there are no other rigs available to drill in the Barents Sea during the next 2 years, other than Eirik Raude.

The Barents Sea has been presented by the industry as a very promising area and also from -- for Norway one of the areas where you can expect to find large discoveries. We started drilling on this contract for 1 well on the Troll field in the beginning of December, and now in mid-January we have started the first well in the Barents Sea. The backlog right now is at $125m, and that also includes mobilization fee and compensation from the shipyard to prepare for this operation.

We did also some financing in the fourth quarter. We took $100m approximately in new bond financing unsecured. And the reason for that was we wanted to be with short-term maturities and give ourselves a better negotiating position with regards to new contracts, and also later refinancing all the total debt in the Company.

Also during the quarter, we gave an exchange offer to exchange Mandatory Convertible Bond into equity and that had a very high success rate. 98% of the outstanding mandatory convertible converted to equity. They would have been automatically converted in August next -- or this year. We wanted, however, to clean up the balance sheet before the year-end, so this was one of the actions to do that.

Also, we have during the fourth quarter launched a new and …