Koil Energy Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Revenue Surges 56% as Subsea Tieback Demand Accelerates
Summary
Koil Energy delivered a record first quarter in 2026, with revenue climbing 56% year-over-year to $8.2 million and EBITDA rising 69% to $572,000. The growth was fueled by a surge in fixed-price contracts and service projects, alongside a winning sales push and operational efficiency. Management highlighted a robust pipeline, particularly in subsea tiebacks and distribution systems, and announced a renewed three-pillar growth strategy targeting 2030. The company also celebrated the establishment of its Brazil operations and a major new client contribution, signaling a shift toward sustainable, diversified revenue streams.
While the quarter showed strong top-line momentum and improved profitability, the company noted one-time expenses related to audits and marketing that will not recur. The balance sheet remains healthy with $5.1 million in working capital, though net receivables increased due to billing timing. Management emphasized disciplined growth, balancing investment in intellectual property and global expansion with profitability. The subsea market outlook remains positive, with expected increases in subsea tree awards and installations driving demand for Koil’s core expertise in control infrastructure and services.
Key Takeaways
- Revenue reached $8.2 million, a 56% year-over-year increase and 13% sequential growth, driven by fixed-price contracts and service projects.
- EBITDA rose 69% year-over-year to $572,000, reflecting higher volume and operational efficiency, partially offset by growth-related expenses.
- Gross profit totaled $2.6 million, with gross margin expanding 1 percentage point to 32% compared to Q1 2025.
- Selling, general, and administrative expenses increased by $230,000 sequentially, largely due to one-time charges for year-end audits and marketing costs.
- Net income was $241,000, or $0.02 per diluted share, a significant turnaround from a $29,000 net loss in Q1 2025.
- Working capital stood at $5.1 million, including $1.2 million in cash, with an increase in net receivables due to billing timing for fixed-price contracts.
- Koil Energy won several significant contracts, including a manufacturing contract for an offshore carousel and a subsea distribution system for a Gulf of Mexico project.
- The company established operations in Brazil, becoming pre-qualified to deliver projects to five major oil and gas companies, signaling international expansion.
- Management highlighted a strong pipeline of bid activity, particularly in subsea tiebacks, with a 15% expected increase in subsea tree awards by 2027.
- Koil Energy outlined a 2030 growth strategy focused on three pillars: distribution systems, Brazilian expansion, and rental equipment, aiming for global market presence.
Full Transcript
Conference Call Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Koil Energy’s first quarter 2026 conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. After the speaker’s remarks, you will be invited to participate in a question and answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded today, Friday, May 15th, 2026. A detailed disclaimer related to Koil Energy’s forward-looking statements is included in the press release issued this morning and filed with the SEC. It is also available on the company’s website, koilenergy.com, or upon request. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures used in the press release and on today’s call is included in the press release and on the website. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made.
Koil Energy also undertakes no obligation to revise any of its forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date made. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to CEO, Erik Wiik. Please go ahead.
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. In this briefing, I’ll be presenting an overview of our financial performance for the first quarter of 2026. I will also share our renewed growth strategy towards 2030 and discuss how Koil Energy is planning to accelerate further growth. Finally, I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have. Kurt Keller, Chief Financial Officer of Koil Energy, is joining me, and he will provide more details on the numbers. I’m extremely proud of the Koil team delivering another record revenue for this company. In this quarter, we achieved revenue of $8.2 million, representing a 56% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue and 13% sequential growth from the fourth quarter of 2025. This was driven by a winning sales team and an outstanding operations crew.
It represents a doubling of revenue from fixed price contracts as well as an incremental increase from service projects. EBITDA was approximately $572,000, which is 69% higher year-over-year. This improvement was driven by increased volume and was partially offset by expenses related to our growth initiatives. Koil remained focused on long-term growth by funding development of intellectual property, the establishment of our Brazil operations, and responding to the increasing number of requests for quotations globally. We are preparing to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. These investments are clearly contributing to positive top-line growth. We also incurred several expenses in this quarter that we do not expect to repeat in future quarters. I’ll now turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Kurt Keller.
Kurt Keller, Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Koil Energy: Thank you, Erik. For the 3 months ending March 31, 2026, Koil Energy generated revenues of $8.2 million, a 56% increase compared to revenues of $5.3 million for the same period last year. Gross profit for the quarter totaled $2.6 million or 32% of revenues, representing a 1 percentage point increase in gross margin compared to $1.7 million or 31% of revenues in the first quarter of 2025. Sequentially, quarter-over-quarter, gross profit was maintained at approximately the same level. Selling general and administrative expenses during the quarter equaled $2.3 million, up $611,000 from the prior year, mainly due to increased headcount from 64 in the first quarter of 2025 to 79 full-time equivalents this quarter, with significant increases within sales and administration.
A more meaningful comparison is the quarter-over-quarter comparison, which represents an increase of $230,000. This sequential increase was primarily driven by one-time charges related to the year-end audit and marketing costs. Audit expenses were elevated because of new teams and our new ERP system, requiring additional effort to ensure accurate and prudent reporting. Our marketing spend was related to the Subsea Tieback Conference. Neither of these costs will recur in the remaining quarters of this year. Moving to net income. We reported a gain of $241,000 for the first quarter, which translates to $0.02 earnings per fully diluted share. This compares to a net loss of $29,000 in the first quarter of 2025. EBITDA for the current quarter was $574,000, which was $235,000 higher than the prior year period.
This increase was mainly driven by higher volume. Now turning to our balance sheet. As of March 31st, 2026, we reported $5.1 million of working capital, including $1.2 million in cash and $7.5 million in net receivables. This compares to $4.8 million in working capital at year-end 2025, with $1.5 million in cash and $4.8 million in net receivables. The shift is primarily due to the timing of billing and collections tied to fixed price contract milestones.
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: I would like to acknowledge that this quarter’s record performance and operational throughput was exceptional and can only be credited to the great team we have here at Koil.
Thank you, Kurt. Our goal is to deliver profitable growth every quarter. While this is ambitious in a volatile project market and seasonally impacted service segment, our team has now delivered four consecutive quarters of significant growth. The culture at Koil can be described as exceptional responsiveness and safe workmanship. This is our business DNA. Speed and collaboration are cornerstones of how we work, and they form an incredibly effective business model. We remain encouraged by the continued confidence our clients place in us as reflected in the award of critical projects. During this quarter, Koil won a significant manufacturing contract with an international offshore installation company. The scope of work included the modification of a large offshore carousel.
We were also awarded a contract to supply a subsea distribution system for a deepwater project in the Gulf of Mexico, which marks meaningful progress towards our objective of becoming an integrated system supplier. In addition, we secured a significant contract to perform load-out, transit, and installation monitoring services offshore West Africa. Finally, a very high volume of smaller contracts supported and contributed to this quarter’s strong results. We have delivered our three-year growth strategy ahead of schedule. We achieved our first significant subsea distribution systems award, expanded and maximized the opportunities with existing customers, and expanded internationally with operations now established in Brazil. We view this as sustainable growth. As an illustration, new clients added to our portfolio last year representing 10% of 2025 annual revenue contributed about 25% of revenue in the first quarter of 2026.
The global subsea market remains highly attractive, with growth in greenfield projects complemented by even faster expansion in subsea tieback demand, creating a significant near-term global opportunity. Subsea tieback represents the core area of Koil Energy’s expertise. One useful indication of subsea activity is the number of subsea trees awarded and later installed. Westwood Global Energy Group reported an expected increase from 254 subsea tree awards in 2025 to 296 awards in 2027, an increase of over 15%. Planned subsea wells over the next 4 years are 1,375 installations. Our product sales tend to correlate with subsea tree awards as we supply the control infrastructure linking subsea trees to the topside production facility. Analysts forecast subsea tree installation activity closely correlated with our service activity to increase by approximately 8%, even when compared against last year’s elevated installation levels.
I’m therefore very excited to share with you that we have further raised our growth ambitions. Our roadmap to 2030 will focus on 3 pillars. 1, distribution systems. 2, Brazilian expansion. 3, rental equipment. Key milestones towards 2030 include winning foundational projects, delivering integrated solutions, establishing a global rental fleet, and by the end of the decade, being able to offer full-scale distribution products and services across all major subsea basins globally. Bidding activity and order intake continued to increase this quarter. We also continue to expense and invest in new talent and additional assets to support our long-term growth strategy. We remain disciplined in balancing profitability with investment and are confident that our expanded capabilities are positioned for continued growth. We extend our sincere appreciation to our board of directors for their continued guidance and support in shaping and advancing this strategy.
We’re fortunate to benefit from a highly experienced and engaged board with deep expertise in public company accounting, microcap financing, and the subsea industry. Last week, we arranged the first investor day for Koil Energy. Thank you to those of you who participated in the on-site presentation and the following webcast. We had more than 100 participants in total for these two events. Shareholders can find a more detailed overview of our strategy by visiting our webpage, which includes the investor presentation deck, the associated webcast, and a virtual tour of the state-of-the-art facility here in Houston. That concludes our prepared remarks today, so we’ll turn the call back to the operator to take investor questions. Operator?
Conference Call Operator: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question today is from Ian Castle with ISCM. Please go ahead.
Ian Castle, Analyst, ISCM: Congratulations on the Q1. I guess maybe my question would be on the amount of bid activity you’re seeing. You know, we’re kind of halfway through Q2. How would you either quantify or qualify the amount of bids you’re seeing today versus maybe a year ago?
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: Thank you, Ian. Yes, the activity level continued to increase. Last year, if you look at the number of quotations we responded to, we doubled that last year compared to the year prior. The beginning of this year, we are slightly ahead of the beginning of last year. This just continues to increase. Now it comes in, you know, not steadily. We have seen over the last month, significant number of quotation coming in on the service side. This goes up and down, but it continues to increase.
Ian Castle, Analyst, ISCM: Okay. Maybe an additional question on bid activity. I mean, you now have Brazil and you’re getting bid activity there. I know in your investor presentation you mentioned that you have 5 oil and gas companies in Brazil that you’re now pre-qualified to deliver projects to. Can you give us a sense of kind of what the bid activity looks like in Brazil? You know, either like the number of bids or the size of what you’re bidding on compared to what you’re seeing in the Gulf of America.
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: In Brazil, we’re now quoting some very large opportunities and many small. The fact that we’re qualified, it’s a huge milestone, particularly in that country. That put us in a place where we have a chance, and then we see what we can accomplish. There are price negotiations and sometimes we, you know, we leave it behind because we don’t wanna go too low on price. What we have learned so far is that each time we are, you know, sort of going very far in the qualifications and the bidding conclusions. We’re getting to the shortlist. We have good dialogues with the clients.
I’m very positive to what can happen there. We have to balance the profitability. We believe we are competitive because we will do the work in country, most of it. We believe we are competitive on cost in Brazil, but we gotta make sure we balance the profitability here. That’s why we caution. I think we can afford to do that due to the pipeline of prospects coming in. We’re certainly not desperate, but we are hoping to close one of these deals very soon.
Ian Castle, Analyst, ISCM: Excellent. Thanks for the progress.
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: Thank you.
Conference Call Operator: I would like to turn the conference back over to Erik Wiik for any closing remarks.
Erik Wiik, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Koil Energy: Thank you, operator, and thank you for joining our call today. We appreciate your interest in Koil Energy and look forward to the next earnings call. This concludes our call. Thank you.
Conference Call Operator: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.