Freehold Royalties Q4 2025 Earnings Report

Freehold Royalties EPS Results

• Actual EPS: C$0.31
• Consensus EPS: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• One Year Ago EPS: N/A

Freehold Royalties Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $69.76 million
• Expected Revenue: N/A
• Beat/Miss: N/A
• YoY Revenue Growth: N/A

Freehold Royalties Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q4 2025
• Date: 3/11/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, March 12, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 11:30AM ET

Freehold Royalties (TSE:FRU) Ltd is in acquiring and managing Oil and Gas royalties. It operates in two segments: Canada, which includes exploration and evaluation assets and the petroleum and natural gas interests in Western Canada; and the United States, which includes petroleum and natural gas interests held in the Permian (Midland and Delaware), Eagle Ford, Haynesville and Bakken basins primarily located in the states of Texas, Louisiana, and North Dakota. The majority of its revenue is generated from Canada Segment.

Freehold Royalties Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Freehold reported a fifth consecutive year of record production at 16,294 BOE/d in 2025, with liquids rising to 66% of mix and liquids contributing 90% of revenue.
• Positive Sentiment: The company generated CAD 235 million of funds from operations (CAD 1.43/share), paid CAD 177 million in dividends, reduced long-term debt by CAD 18 million, and invested CAD 38 million in oil-focused royalty assets.
• Neutral Sentiment: 2026 production guidance is 15,500–16,300 BOE/d with a softer first half and expected H2 ramp from Permian pads, DUCs and permits, and the outlook does not include potential impacts from recent Middle East events.
• Positive Sentiment: Operational improvements (surf actants, lightweight proppant, longer laterals and refracs) drove roughly a 10% year-over-year improvement in U.S. production type curves and supported increased leasing activity.
• Neutral Sentiment: Capital priorities remain dividends and debt reduction, with disciplined, opportunistic acquisitions (Permian mineral title) and an NCIB in place; management is not hedging and would consider buybacks only after achieving leverage targets (below 1.5x).

Presentation

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Freehold Royalties Fourth Quarter 2025 webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, David Spyker, President and CEO. Please go ahead.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. On the call with me is Shaina Morihira, our CFO, and Todd McBride, our Manager of Investor Relations. Before we get started, please be advised that certain statements on this call are considered as forward-looking information, and we caution the listener to review the advisory on forward-looking statements in the news release and MD&A found on our website. In 2025, we achieved our fifth consecutive year of record annual production, delivering 16,294 BOE a day from our North American royalty portfolio. Over this five-year period, we have grown our liquids weighting from 55% to 66%. This high-value liquids production component contributed 90% of our total revenue in 2025.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Our 2025 oil and natural gas liquids production was 10,730 BOE a day, an increase of 12% from 2024. Our North American portfolio is very well balanced, with 55% of our production coming from Canada and the other 45% from the US. As our US portfolio benefits from premium pricing and a higher liquids weighting, the US accounted for 53% of our revenue. During 2025, our US royalty volumes received a 35% pricing premium compared to our Canadian production. Our US natural gas received an 80% premium over our Canadian natural gas price due to the proximity to US Gulf Coast LNG facilities and significantly more egress options than in Canada. In 2025, we generated CAD 235 million of funds from operations, or CAD 1.43 per share.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

With this funds flow, we paid CAD 177 million in dividends to our shareholders. We reduced our long-term debt by CAD 18 million, and we invested CAD 38 million in oil-focused royalty interest assets comprised of mineral title land in undeveloped drilling areas in the core of the Permian Basin and gross overriding royalty interests in Canada. These lands are all in early stages of development, with mineral title lands held in perpetuity and are in areas that have significant undeveloped resource and drilling inventory. Activity levels, particularly in the second half of 2025, were affected by lower commodity prices and generally cautious capital deployment as broader macroeconomic headwinds and uncertainty in outcomes of geopolitical tensions led to some operators to slow their activity.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

We were also impacted by continued multiyear weakness in Canadian natural gas prices, which has reduced the gas-directed drilling on our Canadian royalty lands. We expect production to average between 15,500 and 16,300 BOE a day in 2026. This outlook reflects the slowdown in activity experienced in 2025, the continued weakness in Canadian natural gas prices, and the potential production impacts of the late January winter storm in the Southern United States, all of which are expected to moderate volumes in the first half of 2026. However, we expect a ramp up in the second half of the year, supported by existing well licenses and permits, active current drilling programs, and an inventory of drilled but uncompleted wells.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

To be clear, our guidance range does not consider the impacts of the recent geopolitical events in the Middle East, and we recognize the potential for a significant oil supply response if oil prices remain elevated. Although our message is muted to start off 2026, we are excited about the resource expansion that is occurring in our core operating areas. In the Permian, operators are deploying surfactants to improve inflow characteristics and are using lightweight proppant to enhance frac stimulation. None of these initiatives existed even a few years ago, and now they are having material impact to production type curves. Our average production type curve in the U.S. has shown a 10% year-over-year improvement as operators continue to perfect their craft. We are also seeing more activity targeting the deeper formations that underlie the Permian, namely the Barnett and Woodford formations.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

This has been one of the drivers of our record levels of leasing in 2025. We had CAD 8 million total in lease bonus revenue, which was up from CAD 3 million the previous year. In November, we've had a first four-well pad permitted on one of these new leases targeting this Barnett Shale. In Diamondback's Q4 earnings call, they estimate they have 900 Barnett drill locations. Just gives you an idea of the scope of this opportunity set. We see several other operators also targeting the Barnett, including Ovintiv, who announced they will be drilling their first well in 2026. Sometimes it's easy to forget that it was only 15 years ago that successful combination of horizontal well drilling with multi-stage fracturing would grow the Permian to over 5 million barrels per day of oil. They call it adding another Canada.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Today, longer lateral lengths and drilling efficiencies are driving costs down across the industry, and operators are consistently talking about the capital efficiency gains they realize year after year, while continually recovering more oil for less dollars. This longer lateral length theme is also showing up in the Eagle Ford, where ConocoPhillips will be drilling over 23-mile wells on our royalty land in 2026. Those three-mile wells will be double that of what the historical average drill length has been. They're also pursuing a refrac program this year, so targeting wells completed prior to 2016 that were understimulated when initially drilled. Freehold has a royalty interest in approximately 500 wells that would be refrac candidates. We're super excited to see how these major operators will further enhance efficiency and productivity, with these improvements expected to be quickly adopted by industry.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

For Freehold, having high-quality assets in these premier basins places us in an excellent position to benefit from these tailwinds. On the Canadian side of our portfolio, capital continues to be directed toward our oil-weighted assets in heavy oil, both at Clearwater and Mannville stack, and in Southeast Saskatchewan, targeting light oil. In Q1 of this year, we've seen a return of Viking light oil drilling activity, which was absent for the last half of 2025. On the natural gas side of In there we've had License 23 Montney wells on our Northeast B.C. royalty lands. In Canada overall, our average well performance improved by approximately 35% year-over-year as operators are targeting premium acreage and optimizing well design.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Our portfolio offers investors exposure to premier oil and natural gas basins across North America, including our growing heavy oil segment in Northern Alberta, the lighter oil plays in Southeast Saskatchewan, exposure to Gulf Coast pricing with our Eagle Ford assets, and growing light oil and natural gas production from the Permian. Industry innovation continues to deepen our portfolio as we continue to benefit from operators' ingenuity. We are looking ahead to another strong year for Freehold as we continue to deliver long-term value for our shareholders. Before closing 2025, I would like to thank our staff for their tremendous efforts in successfully transitioning from the long-standing management agreement with Rife Management to becoming a fully independent Freehold. With that, we're pleased to take your questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Patrick O'Rourke of ATB Capital Markets. Your line is open.

[Patrick O'Rourke, Managing Director at ATB Capital Markets]

Guys, good morning, thank you for taking my question. I guess just going to the guidance here, you've talked about a little bit of a lower first half, higher second half. Maybe to unpack that a little bit, sort of how the cadence of production growth looks, and then where you expect, exit volumes to be and, sort of the path specifically that you're watching that give you confidence there.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah. Patrick, I think, you know, how we're thinking about it internally here, you know, kind of think the lower end of guidance for the first half of the year and the higher end of guidance for the second half of the year. What that's driven by is just, you know, the slower drilling activity coming out of last year takes a bit to regain that momentum. Of course, we're dealing with spring breakup in Canada, which is always a bit slower time for the Canadian side. But what we're really looking at to support the back half volumes is some of the big pad activity that we've got under Diamondback and Exxon in the Permian.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Also those 3-mile wells and those refracs that we're talking about in the Eagle Ford, you know, the insight that we're getting from Conoco is that production will be coming on in the second half of the year. In Canada, we've got the Montney drilling that Ovintiv is doing that we see coming on in the back half of the year, as well as, you know, we have some exposure under Spartan Delta in the Duvernay that we expect to come on in the back half of the year as well. We've got, you know, clear line of sight to those back half year volumes.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Like I said before, that's based on, you know, our view coming out of 2025, and does not take into account any potential increase in basic capital deployment in this current price environment.

[Patrick O'Rourke, Managing Director at ATB Capital Markets]

Okay. I think that's probably a great segue into my second question here. I guess as you think about the environment we're in, and it's very volatile, and, you know, I think this is all speculative as well. To the extent that you see potentially an acceleration of production from your underlying royalties and stronger pricing, if cash flow outstrips your current expectations on the, you know, somewhat conservative deck that you've used, can you sort of lay out where your free cash flow priorities would lie for any of that excess cash flow?

[Shaina L. Morihura, VP, Finance and CFO at Freehold Royalties]

Hi, Patrick, it's Shaina. I can answer that question. I mean, I think what you said at this point, it is fairly speculative. We're kind of 12 days into this elevated pricing environment, so we're not getting too attached to it yet. If we start to be in a period of longer, higher pricing, we would certainly look to obviously continue to pay our dividends, and that would obviously bring down our payout ratio a bit. For any incremental cash flow, we would look to offset and apply that to the balance sheet. We'll continue to be patient in terms of looking at acquisition opportunities. I think if you're in a period of elevated commodity prices, there could be a bit of a larger gap between, you know, buyers and sellers. We'll remain disciplined around that.

[Shaina L. Morihura, VP, Finance and CFO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah, I think it's too early to tell how long this higher pricing environment will last.

[Patrick O'Rourke, Managing Director at ATB Capital Markets]

I guess if I could just quickly follow up, the one thing I didn't hear is any, you know, any sort of, context around a potential for any share buybacks. I just wonder if you get to a target debt level if that would come into play at all.

[Shaina L. Morihura, VP, Finance and CFO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah. I don't think we've, you know, put out publicly that we have a target debt level that would initiate share buybacks. We have a target of being below 1.5 times. We'll continue to look at share buybacks. Obviously, we have the NCIB in place, but as we've mentioned previously, I think if we've got alternatives in terms of reinvesting in the business and continuing to acquire those undeveloped acres in the Permian or even within Canada, that's where we would look to deploy capital. We see the benefit investing long term in the business.

[Patrick O'Rourke, Managing Director at ATB Capital Markets]

That's great clarity. Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jamie Kubik of CIBC. Your line is open.

[Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC]

Yep. Good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. Can you offer a bit more color on the production profile of the Canadian portfolio and the trend you've seen over recent quarters? Can you also maybe comment a little bit on the activity that you're seeing on the Canadian side to start 2026 and maybe contrast that to what you saw at the beginning of 2025? Thanks.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah. On the Canadian side, Jamie Kubik, we can break it down in a couple different ways, you know, kind of walk through some of our core operating areas. You know, we just start with the Viking. We had mentioned that one earlier. You know, what we saw was that, you know, Viking Capital went away after Q1 last year, and that was an area of production decline in the portfolio. You know, we see in Q1 activity back again, but I think that's generally operated by Teine as a private co. You know, we're seeing kind of Q1 activity levels from them and then a bit of a tapering off of activity for the rest of the year.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

In the Clearwater, well, I'll group Clearwater and Mannville heavy together. You know, those two areas have provided consistent growth for us, you know, over the past couple years, and we see that continuing this year with that part of the portfolio growing. On the Southeast Saskatchewan, again, we're seeing that growing. It's been growing year over year as operators are you know testing out multilateral technology in a number of different ways in Southeast Saskatchewan with some pretty encouraging results. We see capital continuing to be directed there. Some of the other plays that you know would be a little bit more gassy for us would be the Deep Basin and Cardium.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

You know, the Deep Basin, you know, we're seeing that come off just a function of gas prices. That decline in Deep Basin has been ongoing for the last three years and you know, since we had the weakness in gas pricing, you know, starting in 2023. We would expect that to continue. If we do get some stronger oil pricing, you know, we may see that come back a little bit because there is some liquid there that can be quite attractive both in the Deep Basin and in the Cardium.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Probably the other bright spot that we can talk about in Canada right now is the kind of Mannville section we call kind of west of Highway 2, that kind of Garrington Caroline up into that Ferrier area where operators like TAQA and Whitecap, Pine Cliff Energy has been drilling some wells. Tourmaline have been active in there. You know, targeting Mannville Sands. There's a number of different in there, whether it's Walker, Ellerslie. We've seen some pretty interesting results there. Finally, yeah, with our Boundary position under Ovintiv in Northeast BC, they drilled you know, 3 wells last year. They've got 23 wells licensed this year, and those are high impact wells in our portfolio.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

That's how we see Canada right now shaping up in a bit of a kind of play-by-play breakdown.

[Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC]

Okay, thanks. Maybe just to ask a specific, but given the Montney wells would be impactful, like, are those assumed at a 5% royalty rate or lower on Freehold's acreage, or can you talk a little bit about-

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

3.5%. That's a 3.5% royalty. Yeah. It's a meaningful number on a CAD 20 million-CAD 30 million a day well.

[Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC]

Okay, thanks. Maybe just quickly, and apologies if this is in your presentation somewhere, but can you talk about maybe the guidance split between Canada and the U.S. on what you would expect from a production basis in 2026?

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah. I think how we're you know thinking of the US that the US would be. I would say we're probably seeing throughout the year we go from quarter end to quarter end of this year that that's probably seeing 5%-7% production growth. The decline is coming out of Canada a little bit. Those volumes those Montney volumes really show up in Canada late in the year is how we're modeling it right now. Whereas you know the drilling of the big pads in the US are really starting to show up kind of middle of Q3 and growing into year-end.

[Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC]

Okay, thanks. Maybe last question for me is, you know, you set your budget at 65, and I know you mentioned this a little bit already, that you meant you set your budget at $65/barrel WTI. Obviously, we're much higher than that right now. Freehold hasn't historically hedged. Would you look to layer in hedges in 2026 to capture some upside on oil pricing? Maybe second part of the question is, where would you put incremental free cash flow if prices do materialize above where you're budgeted?

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah. We've not been a hedger and aren't considering that at this time. You know, just if we look at the call on capital in our structure, you know, it's not required to execute a capital program, and our balance sheet's in good shape. First call on incremental capital, as Shaina mentioned, would be, you know, against the balance sheet, so just to target paying down debt. You know, I think we do, you know, continue to see opportunities on both sides of the border and it'll be interesting to see how that transpires in a higher price environment.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

you know, we see lots of opportunity to continue buying, you know, placing free cash flow in, into buying this mineral title in the core of the Permian, where you got kind of, you know, this 5,000 feet of opportunity and so definitely continue on that as well.

[Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC]

Okay, thanks. I'll turn it back.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Okay. Thanks, Jamie Kubik.

[Operator]

Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star one one. I show no further questions at this time. I'd like to turn it back to David Spyker for closing remarks.

[David Spyker, President and CEO at Freehold Royalties]

Yeah, I appreciate everyone's participation in the call today. Saw some good questions and, yeah, we're super excited about the business and looking forward to talking to you next at the AGM in May. Thank you very much.

[Operator]

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• David Spyker, President and CEO
• Shaina L. Morihura, VP, Finance and CFO

Analysts

• Jamie Kubik, Director at CIBC
• Patrick O'Rourke, Managing Director at ATB Capital Markets