Martin Craighead
Analyst · Scott Gruber with Bernstein
Scott, this is Martin. Let me start with the one you bring up Iraq. If we thought that the market was kind of better defined in terms of what the scope was going to be, what the risk profile is going to be. But I think as you've heard from a couple of our peers, the bidding activity there is very high and there's a lot of work to be done. And this is both from the national oil company, as well as the foreign participants. Let me put it this way, we've participated in every IPM bid, to use that term. We've obviously submitted prices but we've been on the sidelines in terms of getting on the field when the pricing environment is so unattractive. Again, given the fact that, if you see what happened in Mexico, if you see what's happened in some of these other high-profile IPM bids, the opportunity to make a profit is very limited. So I think the industry, our side of the industry, needs to rethink the way it approaches it. That aside, you're right, the reason that we reorganized into the geomarket organization was to grow the top line at faster rates that what we were experiencing before. And as I said in my comments, that's happening. But the best way to further grow those margins is to continue to grow that top line. We're taking actions that we can most -- near-term control in terms of the cost, in getting those down and particularly, in the overhead functions where we experienced some redundancy. Now in terms of trying to get other business, as I said in the comments, there's an incredible response by the customer community, which I think is being rewarded already with the work we're getting. We see the BJ organization stimulating even further, working together. And I can tell you that whether it's Vietnam, whether it's Australia, whether it's the big award we just got in the Philippines, whether it's bringing BJ more solidly into our business in Norway, we're seeing a lot of nice projects come our way. But the final point I'll make here, Scott, is that unlike North America which is a transactional market, we reorganized 18 months. Officially, we had all of our people in place, probably about a year ago. And the international market is not transactional, there's contracts there that are years in the making. And by that, I mean it takes months for the tender to come out, it takes months for the tender to be awarded, it takes months sometimes to mobilize. And it can take months for the customer to actually start spending. So you put that on top of contracts that already ran three to five years. It's not surprising that it takes a while to rebuild the revenue. But in terms of the mechanics, the way we're executing out there, I'm very happy with the job the guys are doing in terms of building their share.