Plexus Holdings (LSE:POS) — Investor Presentation

0:01 Good afternoon and welcome to the PLEXUS HOLDINGS PLC investor presentation. Throughout this quarter presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and they can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. And I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Craig Henry. Good afternoon to you, sir.

0:31 Hi. Good afternoon, Elizabeth Alessandro. Thank you. Thank you very much. Right. Thank you, Alessandro, and and thanks for the opportunity to to present to everybody today. This is gonna be a fairly brief presentation. We have just successfully completed a fundraise, and this is really an opportunity to run through the key points of our investor presentation for those that we haven't already presented to as part of that fundraise. So it's really just an update on where we are, our company strategy. There won't be any financial information presented in this presentation because our interims are due out in the next few days.

1:17 And if this demand, we'll follow-up in this forum once those interims have been published as well. So right, a little bit about about PLEXUS. First of all, PLEXUS is a wellhead technology company. We're based in Aberdeen, founded over forty years ago, and PLEXUS has always been an innovator in wellhead technology and wellhead design. We've often been at the forefront of of new technology in in wellheads and have often superseded current industry standards.

2:02 And and and forty years, we've become very, very well known as a company who were at the forefront of wellhead technology, so much so that two of the biggest oilfield service companies, Technip and SLB, have both licensed our technology over the years, and we can continue to serve both customers our customers, the blue chip oil and gas major energy companies such as Shell, BP, Exxon, Total and many others around the world. And so we continue to engage with the blue chip oil companies as well as

2:51 growing relationships with some of the international global service companies such as SLB and TechnipFMC. A very quick introduction to myself. I became CEO of PLEXUS in July of last year. Took over from Benven Bilderbeak, who was our CEO and founder of the company, upon his retirement. But I'm certainly not new to the business. I myself joined the company over twenty five years ago. I'm an engineer by background. So in those twenty five years, I've been really very much engaged in product development as well as growing into the management and now the Executive Board side of the company.

3:39 A bit more about the background of PLEXUS and, in particular, some of the key events which get us to where we are today. So PLEXUS was founded in Aberdeen in the 1980s. One of the first key patents and bits of wellhead technology development that PLEXUS succeeded in was the exact wellhead system, first patented in 1990. And that there were then a number of mergers and acquisitions as part of the growth of PLEXUS In the mid-90s, PLEXUS merged with Ingram Cactus, a Houston based wellhead company, in order to be able to have access to a larger manufacturing capability.

4:26 And then in 1996, Cooper Cameron, who then became Cameron and now SLB, that company acquired Ingram Cactus. And so in 'ninety six, 'ninety seven, Plexus restarted with all of the old technology having been sold to the company that is now SLB and restarted. And that's when I also joined the company, and we set about inventing a new wellhead technology that we called POS Grip and HG Seals, and that became an industry leader, especially for high pressure, high temperature exploration drilling. And the demand and the direction of PLEXUS from 2000 to 2015 was very much focused on the upper end of high pressure, high temperature offshore gas exploration drilling.

5:26 In 2005, we floated the company on the A market. And from 2005 to 2015, our revenues grew from something like GBP 3,000,000 to GBP 28,000,000 per annum based purely on renting wellheads for jackup exploration drilling in the HPHT market. The next part of the company and part of the story about where we are today is that in 2015, there was a massive collapse in energy demand worldwide. The oil price collapsed from all time highs to back down to very low levels.

6:15 And consequently, high pressure, high temperature offshore exploration drilling for gas pretty much stopped overnight. And given that at that time, we were 90% invested in that niche of the market, pretty much all of our revenue dried up overnight. So Plexus had to do a lot to in order to survive and to protect the core of IP that we have. So in 2018, Plexus sold half of the company and licensed jackup drilling applications of POS Grip technology to TechnipFMC and and basically restarted with with with with the production wellhead elements of POS Group and also then set about trying to find out what we could do, which would bring a more diverse field of earnings to PLEXUS.

7:16 We've been through some very difficult years, in particular, downturn of COVID didn't help. That was exactly at the point where we needed to start some growth, but things were obviously very difficult for companies that were in decline. But we've through a great support of our founders and other directors, we survived those difficult years and have now really started to emerge very strongly into new markets and with new partners. The new partners I referred to are is Schlumberger SLB, who we have two key license exchanges with. We have licensed to SLB the production wellhead applications of our POSScript technology, which again is one of our core technologies.

8:07 And we have licensed back from them the exact wellhead offshore rental wellhead as we are now getting back into that business. But more of that later in this presentation. And, yeah, to just finish up this timeline slide. So as of July 24, I took over as CEO and together with Mike Park, my CFO, we have really looked at focusing our strategy on short term growth. And that's what the recent fundraise was to help with, and we'll show you in this presentation how that develops.

8:48 I've I've already talked quite a bit about technology and intellectual property, but but PLEXUS is is is very much an IP based company. In fact, we call ourselves a wellhead technology company rather than a wellhead manufacturing company in that we don't invest heavily in manufacturing ourselves. Most of our manufacturing is subcontracted out to others. But we rely on proprietary wellhead designs and a huge array of products, which stem from our various patented

9:31 and other technology that we've developed over the years. The legacy that we have of forty years in the business is also very key to our continued success, especially in this age, as I'll come on to in the presentation, of decommissioning and plug and abandonment. You can imagine that thirty, forty years ago, record keeping in the days before the Internet and before digital storage, a lot of the records are sorely lacking, but we still have some information and a great deal of knowledge in being able to help operators safely get back into some of the wells that were drilled up to forty years ago. And that, together with our current suite of products and IP, makes for a very compelling case in the decommissioning and the plug and abandonment market, which is coming to the fore in the North Sea at the moment.

10:30 The other key part of this is our proprietary internal systems. We have a very diverse and fast reacting business. We've always been a small lean company. We've never relied on some of the big software packages like SAP or Oracle, which means we have our own proprietary technology and we can be very quick in responding to changing needs of single exploration wells and single plug in abandonment wells, which is why large partners like SLB and even TFMC agree that we are the small project specialists and we can do things on timelines that larger companies just cannot manage.

11:31 So, on to our growth plan, which is really the core of this presentation. As I said, PLEXUS has got forty years worth of of of experience, of intellectual property, and of products, which means that we have potentially a great range of different directions that we can go in to seek to grow our company and deliver value for shareholders. But what we've decided to do and what is really necessary at the current time is to focus only on those parts of the business which can deliver us short term or immediate term revenue rather than some of the medium and longer term type of projects, which are still very attractive, and we're still working on those. But we have become very focused

12:20 trying to pick up work that is on a one, two or three month turnaround rather than an eighteen or twenty four month lead time, which some of the bigger projects in this industry are. So we have

12:39 put a lot of energy over the last two years into our exact wellhead business, which is the core of our short term strategy to deliver growth in revenue. I need to explain a little bit about what a wellhead is and then a bit more about why this system is unique and the market that leads us to. So technically, a wellhead is the device at the top of an oil and gas or indeed a carbon capture or hydrogen storage well. A well consists of a large number of concentric tubes, which go down into the earth, and those need to be managed and sealed in a wellhead system

13:30 at the top of the bore. So a wellhead system is designed to manage the safety and integrity of each of the long casing strings of each of the long pipes, which goes down into the well. And it's also the connection point for the blowout preventer during the drilling of wells and for the decommissioning of wells, which are the two ends of the well life, which are our key markets. So conventional wellheads, of which there are 500 manufacturing companies between China and India alone and many other large international manufacturing companies who will make who will supply conventional wellheads, which are spool type wellheads, which are pretty much exact matches to the API industry standard, which specifies what a wellhead looks like. But the problem with using a conventional commodity product wellhead is is that when they're used in a in a jackup drilling environment offshore, there are some large safety and cost saving measures, which make it very difficult to proceed safely because most drilling doesn't happen offshore on jackup rigs. But when it does, conventional wellheads are not suited to that.

14:59 So in 1990, PLEXUS invented the first adjustable wellhead. Adjustable means a wellhead which can accommodate the installation of all of these casing strings without moving the blowout preventer, which sits on top of it, because the problem with conventional wellheads is that for each and every casing string, that blowout preventer needs to be moved off the well in order to terminate the casing and create a seal to lock that casing string in place. And in the jackup rig, those BOP lifts for each casing string can be very dangerous because blowouts can happen at the point when the BOP is off the well. But also, they cost a lot of money in terms of time.

15:47 The current day rates for jackup rigs are up to $200,000 a day, and a typical BOP lift on an offshore exploration or indeed an offshore plug and abandonment well can take twenty four hours. So we've got the potential of saving $200,000 per BOP lift and that mounts up. And so if you can provide an adjustable wellhead in offshore checkup work, then you've got a mechanism to dramatically improve safety and also create some large cost savings. So, that's what jackup that's what wellheads are and why we have a particularly unique type of wellhead, which lends itself to offshore jackup work.

16:45 This particular system is the system that PLEXUS invented in the '90s, was sold ultimately sold to Cameron SLB, and then as part of a license swap, SLB agreed to license this technology back to PLEXUS in 2022, 2023 at the same time as we licensed them our production applications of our POS Grip technology. So they've given us something that they couldn't really execute or work with because it requires that small company focus of being able to do small projects and go well to well. And we've licensed to them something that we couldn't really cope with, which is chasing large, you know, $50,102 $100,000,000 projects of massive developments where you're competing against huge numbers of other wellhead manufacturers. So we're both very happy with the deal. Both continue to support each other.

17:48 But the key for us is that we have a wellhead product back in our fleet, which gives us access to what is now a very fast developing market for not only offshore exploration drilling, but also for plug and abandonment work and indeed for a predrilling of carbon capture and hydrogen storage wells, which is on the rise in the North Sea. And certainly, what happens in the North Sea tends to follow elsewhere in the world as well. So, all right, a little bit more about the rental which helps to explain why we've decided that this is our current focus in order to bring us a quick turnaround on revenue in the short term, while we continue to incubate the value in the medium and long term aspects of our IP and technology.

18:54 Jackup rigs are offshore rigs, which can move from location to location. And so by their nature, all of the equipment that works on the jackup rig needs to be temporary. Normally, wellheads are sold, but jackups need a reusable and therefore a rental wellhead in order to do their work because the whole rig needs to move around from well to well. And so in the North Sea, there's now a huge demand for decommissioning work and for providing equipment to plug and abandon individual wells. There's very little offshore exploration work going on in the North Sea, but in other parts of the world, such as The Middle East and the Gulf Of Mexico, there are still there is still demand for offshore exploration work.

19:51 And so since 2022, when we got this license for this product back, we've worked very hard to modernize the design to make sure that it is suitable for crop the of work which jackup rigs are doing. We have a product which exactly the same product, which can be used for decommissioning work and for offshore pre drilling work and for any offshore oil and gas exploration work. The real key difference to what we've done in modernizing this exact wellhead system to our previous venture into rental wellheads when we grew the company very strongly from 2005 to 2015 is that previously, we had a very large, expensive POS Group wellhead, which was fantastic for that high pressure, high temperature offshore gas exploration market, but was really much too big and too difficult to handle for the majority of other work.

21:04 So what we have now is the system which does handle the majority of other work. We can with this system, we have the specification to meet 95% of the cases that we see for offshore gas exploration drilling. It's only the very top end of high pressure, high temperature that we need special equipment for. So, we have a system which is kind of half the size, half the price of previous competing systems, and therefore much more suited to quick turnaround plug and abandonment wells, as well as offshore exploration wells. So we dipped our toe into this market starting about a year ago. We finished the development of this ExactE X system.

21:53 We built four of these systems for our inventory, really to test the market and to make sure that what we had was in demand and viable. And pretty much since these systems have been available, they've been 100% utilized between offshore decommissioning work and being prepared for exploration drilling. And so, nine months ago, we initiated the manufacture of another four sets. So just this week, we are taking delivery of our next four sets of this equipment, also which have a strong demand in decommissioning and other work in the North Sea and other areas.

22:39 And we have the short term future of this business is in doubling this inventory yet again. So part of our successful fundraise, where we've just completed the raise of GBP 3,500,000. The majority of that is going into CapEx to continue to expand our fleet of rental wellheads. So we're moving from eight to 16 systems, which will be available in the next nine to twelve months, and we continue to see a very strong demand for renting this equipment both at home in the North Sea and internationally. As I said, I'm not going to get too much into financials because that comes in the broker's note and that will come more with our interims in the next few days. But return on investment on this rental inventory is very good.

23:42 Pricing is really dictated by the amount that it saves the customer. If we're saving 100,400 thousand $600,000 per well, then we can charge more than the competitors and still be the lowest cost overall. And also, the return on investment, therefore, is typically less than twelve months. And so

24:19 the cash flow and the profitability of this business is very good. It very quickly becomes a self sustaining business where we can continue to manufacture inventory as we see the demand coming.

24:37 So yes, just to conclude, our short term business is to continue to grow the rental inventory fleet and be able to pick up work on a very short turnaround basis. We do continue to look out for what we would now term medium term business, which is production wellheads, which take twelve to eighteen months to manufacture and other specialized project work.

25:14 We've recently completed a real headline grabbing project for PLEXUS. We initially announced this way back in 2023, which was initially a £4,000,000 project, I recall. And this project has quickly evolved into a larger and larger scope of supply and also a longer period of rental and returns, and ultimately delivered us over £9,000,000 worth of revenue. The key to this project was a large intervention wellhead system, which was primarily based on our Python POS script subsea system.

26:05 And the advantages to the operator who requested this highly specialized work to be performed were absolutely huge. It was a the customer was a major oil and gas international operator. At the moment, details of the project remain confidential. So unfortunately, we go into too much detail of exactly who it was or what the project was. But the customer is extremely pleased with our performance, both the performance of PLEXUS and the performance of the technology on this project. The cost savings to the operator were absolutely huge. We estimate that the total commitment to this project was something like GBP 200,000,000.

26:58 And we saved them a very, very large percentage of that, which they would have had to incur if it weren't for the very specialized way that our technology was able to solve their problem. So, this is very high margin work. This is a fantastic demonstration of PLEXUS engineering capability and the capability of our technology. But we do have to recognize that this is long term work. If you just look at the project time line there, we initially discussed this with the customer back in May 22. It took nearly a year to finalize what it is that we were going to do and have the order placed, then took another year for us to complete the manufacture of the equipment and get it ready for operations, and then pretty much almost another year until the project was complete. So we definitely are chasing after this type of project.

27:56 With the successful completion of this project, we believe that there will be a strong demand for this type of work, again, by the same operator and also by their partner companies who have similar issues around the world where there will be demand for this type of application of our technology. But it's not something that we can rely on for revenue next month or next quarter, really because of the long term timeline of this type of project. So this is something that we are continuing to pursue. It is something that we'll continue to deliver fantastic value in the medium term shareholders, but it's not something that we can forecast for this or even for next financial year because of the very large time lines associated with these type of projects. But the good news is that it will result in further work.

28:58 It's already resulted in one small project, which was publicized in our year end report. And it continues to show that there's huge potential value in our technology and in the type of projects that we can track over the next few years. Looking longer term, we still have a huge amount of IP in our portfolio. We will, as time goes on, look to enhance the value of that IP by field trials and by showing such as that £9,000,000 project the type of demand or the type of work that our IP can can generate.

29:55 And so there is the potential for for looking to to future license deals. The the the license deal that we completed recently in 2023 was licensing of certain applications of our POSScript technology to SLB for surface production wellhead applications. They're now up and running and selling our technology within their products. And we believe that the time will come when other applications of the same IP, such as for trees and valves, such as all subsea applications of the technology, will start to become ready for exploitation either by ourselves in developing products around that technology or through licensing.

30:47 But again, it's a slow moving industry. It's long term business, And so we'll continue to work hard on incubating the value of the technology until the time is right to potentially place that technology with others under licensing. So finally, just a quick note on our successful fundraising, which was completed last week. So we set about raising £3,500,000 The majority of that £3,000,000 is designated for CapEx to manufacture another eight sets of our ExactTX rental wellhead equipment, and that will help drive growth in the company and drive profitability in the company in the short term.

31:38 But what I really mean is in the immediate term, it's not short term equipment. Once we have that equipment in inventory, it will retain its value, retain its reusability. We estimate at least a twenty year life for the equipment that we manufacture. So that gives us twenty years' worth of income in that jackup rental market, which helps really to provide the core stability for the company and the core underlying revenue on which we can then build other medium and long term products and projects, such as the GBP 9,000,000 special transaction and potentially getting into subsea wellheads and other new products.

32:31 So right, I think we're just about there with this. There was very strong management participation in the fundraise. Well over GBP 1,000,000 was placed by our existing directors and ourselves. And there was also a convertible loan, which was redeemed within which was redeemed as part of this transaction. So PLEXUS now has absolutely zero loans or debt, and we look forward to a very strong period of growth to come. Yes. So, a final note on outlook for the company. We, in the very short term, continue to focus on looking for opportunities to rent our fleet of adjustable wellheads.

33:23 In the North Sea, that takes the form of looking at decommissioning work. The Oil and Gas UK forecast about 200 wells per annum need to be plugged and abandoned in the North Sea in The UK sector of the North Sea alone. That rate is not quite being hit yet. So the number of wells in the North Sea which need to be decommissioned is gradually going up every year until more rigs can come into the basin and start to deal with all of that inventory. But the very good news for us there is that we are right in there with rental wellhead products, which are exactly suited to that market. So we see some in what used to be just us waiting and hoping that exploration drilling would go on in the North Sea, we now have a product and we now have access to the market and we now have a strategy to go after the market of being able to rent wellheads and associated equipment to jack up rigs The UK sector of the North Sea and anywhere else in the world, whatever that jack up rig is doing, rather than just waiting for offshore exploration opportunities to pop up. And this continues very strong demand for jackup rigs themselves as well.

34:48 This is data from our consulting company, SGN, who forecast an increase in rig rates themselves around the world for the next three years, which shows that whatever activity these rigs are doing, there is continued and strong demand for their use. Okay. So that's it. That's the end of the presentation. Thank you. I think I will now try to turn to some of the questions. I see there's quite a lot of stuff here, so I'm not sure I'm going to have time to get through all of it. But, yeah, I think the format is that I'll I'll I'll read the question and and and then briefly try to answer it.

35:37 Okay. So the first question is for the funds raised due to be spent on rental inventory, how quickly do you see returns on this investment? As I said, the the the manufacturing lead time for oilfield equipment at the moment and therefore, our own wellhead manufacturing is in the region of nine to twelve months. So we will start we will now that the money is raised, we will definitely expedite some of the equipment so that within nine months, we can start to benefit from renting out that equipment. And as I said before, I can't be too much more specific than I have been already because that's fairly commercially sensitive. But the return on investment, the payback period for the CapEx that we put into rental well net equipment is less than a year. So the equipment will start earning in nine months, and then less than a year after that, it should have fully delivered the CapEx back to us, which will obviously which will then be either used for used to manufacture more equipment as general income for the company.

37:01 Right. The next question. If there is such a strong demand, why don't you raise additional funds for even more inventory? Yeah. That's a good question. That was certainly asked of us during the fundraising exercise as well. We need to be a little cautious about how quickly we grow. This is a dangerous business after all. We have a duty of care to make sure that first and foremost we're acting safely, protecting ourselves, protecting our equipment, protecting our customers. So we have experience of very rapid growth in this rental wellhead business from our previous growth from 2005 to 2015.

37:53 And so we've got a strong view of how quickly we can grow, not just in terms of the cash it takes, but also in hiring and training people, also in not just the sales process, but making sure that our customers realize what it is they're taking on when they work with us because there are operationally different things that customers need to do sometimes as well. So yes, we believe that manufacturing eight systems right now is right. We will see how quickly we need to start to further expand that rental fleet based on demand. And but but the the with the payback period in this rental business being so short, we believe we'll have cash available to to to further expand as we get to the point of being confident in doing so with continued increase in demand and also continued growth in our company to make sure that we can operate and move the equipment around safely.

39:05 All right. I've got a question here. I have a long question, but pretty much says how can shareholders track progress of the Plexus sales pipeline into actual sales? And how confident can you be that the company will deliver a regular flow of contract wins, I guess, to Plexus before? So, yeah, I I do need to say that, yes, we we do have a very strong sales pipeline at the moment. But the the the nature of of our customers and the type of project wins that we're going after at the moment is certainly less headline grabbing than it was ten, fifteen years ago when we were in the high pressure, high temperature exploration business.

39:57 That type of work, customers are quite delighted in. And it also there was kind of large rental large exploration contracts being awarded. There's been quite an evolution of contracting from our customers because, obviously, our customers have been affected massively by changes and downturns as well. What we are typically seeing at the moment is we are entering into framework agreements with customers and some turnkey operators, which means that we have terms and conditions and price lists in place, and then they are calling off individual components or rental systems from that framework contract as is required for single wells or even as part of wells sometimes.

40:48 So we're moving away from big headline grabbing awards, and we will tend to see much smaller buildup awards, which in aggregate will keep us on track with brokers' expectations. The other matter that has changed quite a lot over the years as well is that a lot of the information about exactly who our customers are and what our prices look like is also increasingly commercially sensitive. We really don't want our competitors, or indeed our customers sometimes to know exactly what it is that we're charging for what.

41:36 And so it's very difficult for us to give a, you know, a completely open book on what our orders look like because of those commercial sensitivities. So, what we will do is make sure that through presentations like this, we keep in touch with investors. Of course, our brokers always publish a note, and you can get that by going directly to the Cavendish website. I believe there is a broker's note which sets out their expectations for our growth. And of course, we always need to be in line with those expectations. Otherwise, we will be publishing news that we're not. Anyway, so yeah, so I think it's unlikely that we're going to suddenly get back into massive sales announcements because of the nature of the business. What we will do is find a way of giving investors the confidence that we are continuing on track with expectations and that our equipment continues to be operating well and 100% utilized.

42:55 Right. A question. How soon do you expect to announce new business in sectors like carbon capture and hydrogen storage? Yes, that's a good question. I did mention carbon capture and hydrogen storage. One of the benefits of what we've now done with getting into our exact wellhead rental system is that it's exactly this system which is designed to be used for the pre drilling and maintenance of offshore carbon capture wells and of natural gas and even hydrogen storage. You know, so we we we are we we are essentially already in that business. We're we're talking to to some operators about about renting our our wellheads, but from our point of view, there's no new work to be to be done. We we we are pretty much there already. We are already talking to to customers about the potential for for renting our kit for for drilling those type of of wells.

44:01 And it's, you know, obviously, once once once they come along, if they're material and we find a way of of announcing a sale, we'll be mentioning the fact that we've managed to rent our equipment for a carbon capture well or for a hydrogen storage well, but it's not a new product that we need to develop. We are there already. We we have the we have the inventory. We we are ready to go in those markets. Right. Also, you mentioned your long term focus is on subsea wellhead development and licensing. How soon could this become a revenue generating segment? And how is it going with the Python subsea wellhead effectively is what the question said. Well, yeah, of course, I can't give any forecast or inside information on exactly what we're looking at there.

45:01 But the intellectual property that we own, which covers the subsea the Python, which is the subsea application of POS Grip technology, we believe is hugely valuable. In the special project that we mentioned, it was yet again proven. We were using elements of the Python subsea wellhead in that project. It will still take some time. We aren't quite at the point of kind of presenting the Python subsea wellhead as a commodity product which is ready to go. There are still a few hurdles to overcome to get to the point of field trial and regular sale or renting of that product.

45:50 So yes, it is something that has taken a bit of a backseat for the last six months because we focused, quite rightly, I think, on products which deliver much nearer term revenue and much quicker return on investment. But it is something which will continue to be incubated as part of the medium and long term value in the company. We are still talking to customers and it may be that something suddenly comes up where there's a real need. But we'll really be able to answer that question with more specificity probably in another six months' time once we've finished the hard work on getting up and running with the wellhead rental business. Right.

46:39 So how would you describe the current state of the current UK oil and gas market in the North Sea and globally? Yes. Like I said, the Plexus has a lot of experience of the ups and downs of the energy business. As I said, we were hugely focused on the high pressure, high temperature wellhead rental business in 2015. And when that market crashed, we didn't really have anywhere to go. So what we've done now is redevelop the exact wellhead so that it is the same product and therefore the same wellhead inventory can be used across a much wider range of applications.

47:35 So that means that the wellhead system that we have now, that we are currently using on live projects in the North Sea right now for plug and abandonment work, is also the same product which is used for off shore gas exploration work. So we announced in an RNS five or six months ago, I believe, that we'd secured our first contract in The Middle East for offshore exploration, and that is using this exact EX wellhead. It's exactly the same product that we're using here for decommissioning work is going to be placed in The Middle East for this work for offshore gas exploration offshore in The UAE.

48:24 And so yes, so I guess our reaction to the UK government pretty much stopping any new exploration work going on and heavily curtailing any development work going on, has been to make sure that our product is ready to work in the offshore sector even if those activities aren't taking place at all. So we actually see strong potential growth in The UK North sector in The UK North Sea sector even if we don't have any change in government policy or any new investment in offshore exploration work, we now have a much more diverse range of opportunities and projects for our hardware.

49:19 Right. I'll just see one more. One more question here. It says, what is your funding strategy going forward? Will you need to raise more money to repay the convertible loans and develop new products? So firstly, the convertible loans, which some of you may have seen in the RNSs, that was all wrapped up with our fundraise. So convertible loan notes were redeemed as part of the fundraise. So as I said, so PLEXUS now has no loans and no debt. We believe, and as you'll see in our broker's note, that the profitability and return on investment in this rental business is very strong.

50:15 We will be at a point to be able to reinvest in additional rental inventory, rental CapEx as we need to as part of our growth curve over the next twelve months. In addition to that, we are continuing to do R and D and product development and support work for the medium and long term business. So for example, we are ready with engineering capability and design and manufacture capability for when the next big GBP 9,000,000 special project comes along. So we aren't foregoing any of that. We continuing to pursue that type of business. We're ready to go with that. But the good news is that this rental business is a much quicker turnaround time and will deliver profitability and growth so that we can continue to use that to further grow the rental business and also the other medium long term values in our intellectual property.

51:21 So I think that's I think we're getting towards the end of time. And perhaps, let's see if you can help me with any more questions, Alessandro or No. Craig, thank you very much for answering those questions from investors. Of course, the company can review all the questions submitted today, we will publish responses on the investor meet company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you their feedback, which is particularly important to you, Craig, Could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Thank thank you, Elizondro. Yeah. Well well, firstly, thank you very much for for attending this presentation and for those who who who see the recording afterwards. It's, yeah, certainly the first one of these that we've we've done. I'm sure you appreciate it's rather difficult talking to a blank screen without without seeing any faces. So thank you very much for that. We we we, as a a new board, you know, we are very committed to growth, committed to continual engagement with with investors as well.

52:20 So, yeah, thank you for the opportunity. I'd like yeah. Certainly, I'd like to thank anybody who has participated in the recent fundraise. That's very much appreciated, and I'm sure that you will see either by coming to visit us and seeing what we have here or through our continual updates as to our progress that the capital will be well deployed. Yes. And we look forward to a very exciting period of growth, both in the jackup rental business and in continuing to to look for and and being able to announce some some successes with with other parts of our company and other parts of our intellectual property. So thank you very much.

53:07 Great. That's great. Thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the management team can better understand your views and expectations? On behalf of management team of PLEXUS HOLDINGS PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.