We will continue to be proactive in securing land access and permits for future locations, so that we are prepared to be an early mover in identified growth regions. When a market opportunity is identified, we secure an appropriate block of land, either through acquisitions or leases, with appropriate zoning, near high quality reserves and/or near prospective customer locations. This strategy requires us to carefully evaluate potential future demand opportunities, oftentimes several years in advance of the specific market opportunity due to the lead time required for development approvals and land development. We believe that our scale and financial position can provide us with advantages in pursuing this strategy. Our existing land holdings comprise assets that expand our capacity in some of our base markets as well as properties that extend the reach of our offering.
Capital discipline based on returns focused investment and flexible financial structure
We take a thoughtful, measured, disciplined and patient approach to our investments. Our land banking strategy creates an option to develop a property in the future. Our scalable facility design then allows us to match the pace of our investments to demand growth. For example, our Wapasu Creek Lodge opened in 2007 with 589 rooms. As activity in the area expanded, we were able to build further stages such that Wapasu now comprises 5,174 rooms with three central core facilities. We believe that we have an incumbency advantage to extend our contracts after the initial term due to our services and long lead times for site development and permitting.
Our substantial base of operations and cash flow will allow us to pursue and execute our strategic growth plan while maintaining a suitable leverage profile given the contract profile of our existing operations. We believe that our financial strength makes us a more attractive counterparty for the largest natural resource companies. Our capital base allows us to undertake large projects, often involving long lead times, and commit capital throughout industry cycles.
Pursue growth through expanded services
We have opportunities to provide additional personnel related services to our existing customer base. As a trusted partner on issues related to personnel and as an expert in remote workforce logistics, we are pursuing opportunities to manage or assist in the logistics of our guests’ journey from home to our properties to work and back home, including reservations management, flight centers and bus terminals. By expanding our solution to remote site accommodations, we believe that we can improve the occupancy of our lodges and villages long term.
Selectively pursue acquisition opportunities
We actively pursue accretive acquisitions in market sectors where we believe such acquisitions can enhance and expand our business. We believe that we can expand existing services and broaden our geographic footprint through strategic acquisitions. These acquisitions also allow us to generate incremental revenues from existing and new customers and obtain greater market share.
We employ a buy and build strategy for acquisitions. We purchase cash flow producing assets in complementary markets and grow those assets organically. The December 2010 acquisition of our Australian business is an example of our buy and build strategy. We viewed the Australia accommodations market as an attractive market with a similar economic and political profile to our Canadian business. At the date of acquisition, our Australian business had 5,210 rooms. We have since grown the room count by 78% through the addition of 4,086 rooms while adding four villages to that portfolio.
Our History
Our Canadian operations, founded in 1977, began by providing modular rental housing to energy customers, primarily supporting drilling rig crews. Over the next decade, the business acquired a catering operation and a manufacturing facility, enabling it to provide a more integrated service offering. Through our experience in building and managing Syncrude’s Mildred Lake Village beginning in 1990, we recognized a need for a premium, and more permanent, solution for workforce accommodations in the oil sands region. Pursuing this strategy, we opened PTI Lodge in 1998, one of the first independent lodging facilities in the region.
With an integrated business model, we are able to identify, solve and implement solutions and services that enhance the guests’ accommodations experience and reduce the customer’s total cost of remote housing. Through our experiences and integrated model, our accommodation services have evolved to include fitness centers, water and wastewater treatment, laundry service and many other advancements. As our experience in the region grew, we were the first to introduce to the Canadian oil sands market suite-style accommodations for middle and upper level management working in the oil sands region with our Beaver River Executive Lodge in 2005. Since then we have continued to innovate our service offering to meet our customers’ growing and evolving needs. From that entrepreneurial beginning, we have developed into Canada’s largest third-party provider of accommodations in the oil sands region.
Today, in addition to providing accommodations services, we endeavor to support customers’ logistical efforts in managing the movement of large numbers of personnel efficiently. At our Wapasu Creek location, we have introduced services that improve the customer’s efficiency in transporting personnel to the mine site on a daily basis as well as the efficiency in rotating personnel when crews change. These logistical services have generated cost efficiencies for our customer.
Beginning with the acquisition of our Australian business in December 2010, we support the Australian natural resources industry through ten villages located in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia. Like Canada, our Australian business has a long-history of accommodating customers in remote regions beginning with its initial Moranbah Village in 1996, and has grown to become Australia’s largest integrated provider of accommodations services for people working in remote locations. Our Australian business was the first to introduce resort style accommodations to the mining sector, adding landscaping, outdoor kitchens, pools, fitness centers and, in some cases, taverns. In all our operating regions, our business is built on a culture of continual service improvement to enhance the guest experience and reduce customer remote housing costs.
We take an active role in minimizing our environmental impact of our operations through a number of sustainable initiatives. Our off-site building manufacturing process allows us to minimize waste that arises from the construction process. We also have a focus on water conservation and utilize alternative water supply options such as recycling and rainwater collection and use. By building infrastructure such as waste-water treatment and water treatment facilities to recycle grey and black water on some of our sites, we are able to gain cost efficiencies as well as reduce the use of trucks related to water and wastewater hauling, which in turn, reduces our carbon footprint. In our Australian villages, we utilize passive solar design principles and smart switching systems to reduce the need for electricity related to heating and cooling.
Our Industry
We provide services for the oil and gas and mining industries. Our scalable modular facilities provide long-term and temporary work force accommodations where traditional infrastructure is often not accessible, sufficient or cost effective. Once facilities are deployed in the field, we also provide catering and food services, housekeeping, laundry, facility management, water and wastewater treatment, power generation, communications and personnel logistics. Demand for our services is cyclical and substantially dependent upon activity levels, particularly our customers’ willingness to spend capital on the exploration for, development and production of oil, coal, natural gas and other resource reserves. Our customers’ spending plans are generally based on their view of commodity supply and demand dynamics as well as the outlook for near-term and long-term commodity prices. As a result, the demand for our services is highly sensitive to current and expected commodity prices.
We serve multiple projects and multiple customers at most of our sites, which allows those customers to share the costs associated with their peak construction accommodations needs. As projects shift from construction-related activities and into production activities, project headcounts reduce and our facilities provide customers with cost efficiencies as they are able to share the costs of accommodations related infrastructure (power, water, sewer and IT) and central dining and recreation facilities with other customers operating projects in the same vicinity.
Our business is significantly influenced by the level of production of oil sands deposits in Alberta, Canada, activity levels in support of natural resources production in Australia and oil and gas production in Canada and the U.S. Our two primary activity drivers are development and production activity in the oil sands region in Western Canada and the metallurgical coal region of Australia’s Bowen Basin.
Historically, oil sands developers and Australian mining companies built, owned and in some cases operated the accommodations necessary to house their personnel in these remote regions because local labor and third-party owned rooms were not available. Over the past 20 years and increasingly over the past 10 years, some customers have moved away from the insourcing business model for some of their accommodations as they recognize that accommodations are non-core investments for their business.
Civeo is one of the few accommodations providers that service the entire value chain from site identification to long-term facility management. We believe that our existing industry divides accommodations into three primary types: lodges and villages, open camps and mobile assets. Civeo is principally focused on lodges and villages. Lodges and villages typically contain a larger number of rooms and require more time and capital to develop. These facilities typically have dining areas, meeting rooms, recreational facilities, pubs and landscaped grounds where weather permits. Lodges and villages are generally built supported by multi-year, take-or-pay contracts. These facilities are designed to serve the long-term needs of customers in constructing and operating their resource developments. Open camps are usually smaller in number of rooms and typically serve customers on a spot or short-term basis. They are “open” for any customer who needs lodging services. Finally, mobile camps are designed to follow customers and can be deployed rapidly to scale. They are often used to support conventional and in-situ drilling crews as well as pipeline and seismic crews and are contracted on a well-by-well or short term basis. Oftentimes, customers will initially require mobile accommodations as they evaluate or initially develop a field or mine. Open camps may best serve smaller operations or the needs of customers as they expand in a region. These open camps can also serve as an initial, small foothold in a region until the demand for a full-scale lodge or village is required.
The accommodations market is segmented into competitors that serve components of the overall value chain, but has very few integrated providers. We estimate that customer-owned rooms represent over 50% of the market. Engineering firms such as Bechtel, Fluor and ColtAmec will design accommodations facilities. Many public and private firms, such as ATCO Structures & Logistics Ltd. (ATCO), WesternOne Inc.’s modular building division (Britco) and Horizon North Logistics Inc. (Horizon North), will build the modular accommodations for sale. Horizon North, Black Diamond Group Limited (Black Diamond), ATCO and Algeco Scotsman will primarily own and lease the units to customers and in some cases provide facility management services, usually on a shorter-term basis with a more limited number of rooms, similar to our open camp and mobile fleet business. Facility service companies, such as Aramark Corporation (Aramark), Sodexo Inc. (Sodexo) or Compass Group PLC (Compass Group), typically do not invest in and own the accommodations assets, but will manage third-party or customer-owned facilities. We believe the integrated model provides value to our customers by reducing project timing and counterparty risks. In addition with our holistic approach to accommodations, we are able to identify efficiency opportunities for the customers and execute them. With our focus on large-scale lodges and villages, our business model is most similar to a developer of multi-family properties, such as Camden or Post, or a developer of lodging properties who is also an owner operator, such as Hyatt or Starwood.
Overview
During the year ended December 31, 2014, we generated approximately 70% of our revenue from our Canadian operations. We are Canada’s largest integrated provider of accommodations services for people working in remote locations. We provide our accommodation services through lodges, open camps and mobile assets. Our accommodations support workforces in the Canadian oil sands and in a variety of oil and natural gas drilling, mining and related natural resource applications as well as disaster relief efforts.
Canadian Market
Demand for our oil sands accommodations is primarily influenced by the longer-term outlook for crude oil prices rather than current energy prices, given the multi-year production phase of oil sands projects and the costs associated with development of such large scale projects. Utilization of our existing Canadian capacity and our future expansions will largely depend on continued oil sands spending.
The Athabasca oil sands are located in northern Alberta, an area that is very remote with a limited local labor supply. Of Canada’s 33.5 million residents, nearly half of the population lives in ten cities, only 10% of the population lives in Alberta and less than 1% live within 100 kilometers of the oil sands. The local municipalities, of which Fort McMurray is the largest, have grown rapidly over the last decade stressing their infrastructure and are challenged to respond to large-scale changes in demand. As such, the workforce accommodations market provides a cost effective solution to the problem of staffing large oil sands projects by sourcing labor throughout Canada to work on a rotational basis.