Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Marshall Adkins - Raymond James.
Marshall Adkins - Raymond James
I am going to leave it up to the next five guys to ask you about your backlog, ten different ways. I want to hear about your M&A stuff. It seems to me this is going to be a key part of the story going forward. I mean, you had phenomenal free cash flow, I would expect you guys obviously to put that to work through acquisitions.
So Clay, I know that you mentioned, and you are going pretty fast there, five letters and ten on small companies. But could you spend a little more time walk us through what you have done to staff up in this area, walk us through the opportunities you are seeing, the relative evaluations etc. I don’t need specifics, but just generically how things look. Are you going to have opportunities, are you going to be able to spin the cash you would have on these acquisitions?
Clay Williams
You bet, great question Marshall. This started about a year ago as the financial markets were melting down and Lehman and Bear Stearns and others were facing their problems. We recognize that there were likely to be some pretty extraordinary opportunities come out at this time. And so, as a result about this time last year we increased our staff in this area, we now have a full time staff with four professionals that pursue M&A opportunities.
We also went through their list and sought to high graded to lop off some of the smaller things at the bottom that were less impactful on NOV, and went out to try to act when the future looks very uncertain. And they have been very, very busy and I will stress we have an excellent, excellent team. All four of these folks do a great job and we are very proud of the job that they have done.
It’s an awful lot of work bringing any one of these transactions over the goal line and for everyone that we bring to closure we typically have to queue up about a half a dozen, six or seven statistically, that we look at and do some level of due diligence on, so it’s a lot of effort that goes into this.
Inclusive of deals that we have closed earlier this year plus the two that we signed that we expect to close here in the next few weeks, plus the five letters of intent, we expect to put about $600 million in capital to work through this effort this year.
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