Paul L. Howes
Analyst · Raymond James
Thank you, Ken. Good morning to everyone. We'd like to thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2014 conference call. With me today are Bruce Smith, President of our Drilling Fluids business; and Gregg Piontek, our Chief Financial Officer. Following my remarks, Bruce will provide an update on our fluids business and Gregg will discuss the mats business, as well as the consolidated financial results for the second quarter. I will then conclude with a discussion of our market outlook before opening the call for Q&A. Now turning our attention to the second quarter. We are pleased to report that both our fluids and mat segments posted strong results in the quarter. Despite the seasonal dropoff in Canada, fluid revenues increased 14% sequentially, led by broad-based revenue gains in the U.S. and a record $50 million of revenue from our EMEA region. Activity under our new international contracts in the Black Sea and India began in the quarter, contributing $7 million to the EMEA region. Meanwhile, our focus on new technology has continued, with our family of Evolution systems setting another quarterly revenue record of $67 million, which includes $14 million in the international market. While a portion of the international Evolution revenues relate to lost circulation and are not expected to remain at that level, we are pleased with the continued improvement in geographical diversification and expansion of the Evolution customer base. As a result of the growth in revenues, combined with the improvement in sales mix and strong wholesale barite demand, our fluid margins have returned to double-digits, passing the 11% mark in the second quarter. In our mats business, rental demand has remained strong, leading to another quarterly record for rental revenues coming in at $28 million for the second quarter. As we discussed last quarter, demand has been robust, leading us to allocate the majority of our production to the rental fleet, leaving fewer mats available for sales. With the lower mat sales in the quarter, our consolidated mats segment revenues were $31 million, down slightly from last quarter. Total consolidated revenues for the company were $272 million in the second quarter, a 12% sequential increase and a 5% increase over the prior year. Income from continuing operations was $0.21 per diluted share in the second quarter, up from $0.13 per diluted share in both the previous quarter and prior year. And while we're continuing to invest in the organic growth of our 2 segments, we're also continuing to return value to our shareholders through our share repurchase program. At the time of our call in April, we've executed an additional $20 million of repurchases, bringing our total -- year-to-date total to 4.3 million shares or 5% of our outstanding share count at the beginning of the year. With that, let me now turn the call over to Bruce Smith, who will review the performance of our fluids business. Bruce?