Per Wullf
Analyst · ABG. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, John, and good day and evening everyone. Moving to our third quarter summary highlights, on the operations side, we achieved 95% economic utilization for the quarter, another solid result achieved by all our offshore and onshore employees. On the commercial side, although most of the new work is for short-term contracts at or near breakeven levels, we are seeing an improvement in the level of bidding activity. However, we still continue to see a number of contract cancellations and blend and extents [ph] in the market as customers remain focused on preserving cash. 2017 is expected to remain challenging, but we do expect the market to start showing sign of life in 2018 and 2019. This year, we have reduced our operating cost further, and we have lowered our cost base approximately 28% since the beginning of the downturn and we believe we are now at a sustainable cost level operating our [indiscernible] rigs, proven by our quarter-over-quarter cost levels. This is an impressive resetting of our Group-wide operating costs, both onshore and offshore, as we work our way through the downturn. Mark will present the reduction in numbers in more detail in a moment. Now, on to the third quarter operational highlights for Seadrill Limited, utilization decreased from the record level achieved in the second quarter. For Seadrill Limited, we achieved 94% economic utilization on our floaters and 97% for the jack-ups, a fair result considering the fact that we took technical downtime on a couple of our floaters due to crown block repairs. Our backlog currently stands at $3 billion, down from $3.6 billion during the last quarter. Seadrill Group’s backlog stands at $7 billion. Next, we will look at our newbuild deferrals. As you are all aware, we currently have eight units scheduled for delivery in 2017, five jack-ups, two drill ships, and a semi-submersible. We continue progress in discussions with the yards to further defer deliveries as we do not intend to take delivery of any unit without a bankable contract. This decision of course leads to intensive discussions with the shipyards. On Dalian, we are now – where we build our jack-ups, we are ongoing positive discussions to defer all eight non-recourse jack-ups an additional six months with no cash outlay until delivery. The two drillships with Samsung are under deferral discussions as well. The units are not technically ready for delivery and likely won't be prior to the current delivery dates. However, as you will recall, we gave our right of termination with the first deferral agreement of these units. And lastly, we are due to receive our final yard refund installment on the Sevan Developer, our Cosco semi-submersible, in the first quarter of 2017, after which there will be no equity tied up in that non-recourse unit. Now I'll turn things over to Mark who will cover our financial performance. Mark?