Abl Group ASA

OSE:ABL

Earnings Call Transcript

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the Aqualis Offshore Q1 results conference call. For your information, today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to David Wells. Please go ahead, sir.

[David Wells, executive]

Thank you, operator. My name is David Wells, I'm the CEO of Aqualis. I'm very pleased here to be giving you the Q1 results of 2019, and I'll be giving this discussion with Kim Boman, our CFO; and also Glen Rødland, who is our Chairman, to take us through both the Q1 results and also our press announcement for today.

So I'm pleased to announce that we had revenues of $8.2 million during the course of the quarter, with an operating loss of $200,000 at an adjusted EBIT of $100,000. The good news on the quarter is that we had a very strong positive cash flow of USD 1.8 million and our backlog numbers have increased by 15% during the quarter. I should give a little bit more detail but Q1, traditionally, is a little bit weaker than the other quarters and this quarter has followed the same trend as we've had over previous years.

We had a solid HSE performance, no lost time incidents or accidents. Our cash balance remains very strong at USD 7.2 million. We've had an excellent quarter from the offshore renewable side. Growth continues to be very robust, particularly in Asia Pacific from our Taiwan office with the new office really performing well ahead of our expectations. And that market appears to be very strong going forward.

During the quarter, we also opened up an office in Boston, U.S.A. to target the renewables market there. We think there's great potential going forward, and it's been pleasing to open up that office and start moving into that market as well.

So all in all, the quarter has been as expected. But a great announcement within that is that we have entered into an agreement to acquire the 3 business service lines from Braemar Technical Services covering the adjusting, marine and offshore sectors. It's a great move as far as we're concerned to expand the company, expand the footprint, and we're going into more detail shortly.

But today, I'm just giving you abridged version of our Q1 results. The full release is available to you to look through, and I'm just going to concentrate on the highlights and move on into the outlook. So Q1 has been slightly weaker than expected, but on the same trends as we've had in previous years. Obviously, Q1 is affected by Chinese New Year and start to the year is always a bit slower. We ended up last year with a few strong contracts which came to an end, and we're just moving to the next stage now of additional work for this year.

Our pipeline is very strong. Our backlog is very strong. So we don't see any reason to change our opinion on the outlook of the market. We do think the market is still recovering. It's still going forward, we expect 2019 -- end of 2019 to gradually get stronger. And 2020, we feel little -- some sense of normality might come back to the market.

The offshore renewable sector, as I just said now, is very, very strong, and we are seeing lots of potential, lots of opportunities around the world. We do continue to gain market share across the group, and we feel that things are remaining in -- as has been previously indicated, we don't see any reason to change what we say.

So we feel quite energetic and quite optimistic going forward. And I'd like to move on from here to talk about the acquisition that we announced this morning, which is a very exciting landmark for our company, and we will dig some more detail into that one.

So with that in mind, I would like to pass across to my colleague, Glen Rødland, who is our Chairman, who'd like to make an introduction regarding the acquisition of Braemar Technical Services, and we will give a lot more clarity during the course of this call on this acquisition because I feel that's the important part that we should be concentrating on going forward.

Glen, can I pass across to you to [indiscernible].

[Glen Rødland, executive]

Yes. Thank you, David, for all that introduction and going through the first quarter. That has been the strategy of the company to look for consolidation opportunity. This market has been through a very rough downturn after the oil price falling 2014. And just to give an example, rates -- those target rates we are targeting our clients have fallen between 25% and 40% here on the downturn, and of course, volume has been down, too. So it had been a tough fight for Aqualis and for our competitors.

I think the timing of this transaction is close to perfect. We consolidate the market and become the biggest specialist within marine service and energy consulting in the world, as we see it in all niche, all market. And at the same time, and as I see clear signs that the market is improving. The downturn I say, the downturn was taking the elevator down, it came very fast. It happened within 1 year or 2, the market had a dramatic negative change. Now I see the market is on its way up, but is going step by step, and Aqualis has been able to grow both in 2017 within oil and gas and also in 2018. And we see that trend continue. So -- but it's going step by step.

So I think the timing of this transaction is very good. We are diversifying our revenue base right now, about -- in first quarter, 21% was from renewables and 79% from oil and gas. With this transaction, we will be about 50% from offshore, and we will have adjusting in addition. Adjusting is also -- they serve several industries, but right now they are mostly into oil and gas as well. And then marine is shipping. So we have -- we'll be exposed to the shipping cycle indirectly, too. And then renewables is still windmills. So we'll be more diversified.

What I also like about this transaction is that we buy this for USD 7 million at the outset. That will give a 26% ownership to Braemar. And then there are warrants, we will talk more about the details. But if those warrants, if it -- it's based on earn-outs, 2 sets of earn-outs, can bring their ownership up to 33%. Put it like that, I hope once they get some of their warrants issued or they vest, so they increased their likelihood because -- and their ownership because that would be very positive for the company overall. So we are paying between $7 million and $10 million.

If you look on the balance sheet we are taking over, this company has a balance sheet of $21.5 million, $1.5 million of assets, fixed assets, but $20 million of net working capital. It's not gross, it's net working capital. So of course, it's a big balance sheet. And the aim of this acquisition is to consolidate, take out synergies. And hopefully, we have -- are hitting a sweet spot in the market, but we all also going to work very hard and focused on capital efficiency. I'm quite sure there are possibilities of reducing days outstanding in the Braemar organization.

Just to give an example, we are about 90 days outstanding in Aqualis or 90 days of work that are on the balance sheet, while the company we are buying are in the region of 200 days. So I think there's a lot that can be -- over time, being freed up from the balance sheet.

We are proposing also in connection with this transaction an issue of -- a rights issue. It's fully underwritten by some key shareholders of $6 million. That will take our net cash position in the company up to about $14 million. We do this for at least 2 reasons. One is that we would like to have firing power in this part of the cycle. I -- this transaction is important, but I think we need to do more consolidation going forward.

Both have the possibility to use some cash and also point shares. I think we have a preference for pointing shares. But in some instance, people would like to have some cash as well. Braemar wanted to have shares and enjoy the upsides from this transaction, but there might be other opportunities where we might need some cash.

We are also -- we paid a dividend last year. We had a lot of cash last year. And we decided last summer to pay out NOK 0.9 in dividend. We felt we were over capitalized. At that time, we were looking at a couple of transactions which didn't go through, and we actually paid out the cash because we thought we wouldn't have any use for it. But now, just after that, about September, October last year, this process with Braemar started. So actually, we were a bit early to do this, so we are indirectly only asking the shareholders to put back both costs of what they got paid out last year because now we have got into -- we think that consolidations there is about to start.

So having that as a starting point, if we look on Page 5, if you have that in front of you. So the company, which will be called AqualisBraemar had a pro forma revenue last year of about $76 million. Adjusted EBITDA of $2.9 million. And in total, we have 430 employees.

If you look on the next page, Aqualis, this is all history. Right now, we are 83% oil and gas and 17% renewables. That was last year, for 2018. In first quarter, renewables grew to 21% of the revenue. So the light blue in this doughnut chart is growing quite fast. And renewables was actually, in the first quarter, up more than 100% as David alluded to, mainly based on excellent growth in Taiwan office, but also the rest of the business is doing well.

We -- as you can see from the graph to the left, the lower left, we had 6% margin in 2017, managed to grow despite that the market was flat to down. And in 2018, we had a 7% margin after we lost quite a lot -- 10% in 2016, especially when the market fell dramatically.

If you look on Page 7, we see Braemar. Braemar is -- has several divisions. It's listed on the Nordic Stock Exchange, Braemar. They had their largest activities within shipbroking, but they also have a logistic division and a finance division. So this technical division, which is largely competing with us and other similar companies, or at least offshore is -- so we're a direct competition. But the other, adjusting and marine, are complementary. But within same industry as we are working in.

And you can see on the lower left, you have the history of Braemar. In the good old days, when the oil price was high and they peaked their revenue in fiscal year '14, '15 of USD 55 million and with -- and as you can see in 2013, '14, they went all the way up to 17% margin. And then '12 and -- they have struggling over the last few years. You see the downturn was not as big as for Aqualis because their adjusting and marine is mainly working with accidents and accident response, and working for this year also just to handle the claims and so on. We will get there -- they will get back most of that later on.

So that's less cyclical than their investment market and their operational market because the number of accidents is not necessarily cyclical. It could actually be countercyclical. But of course, the value of the claims, the value of the cargo and the value could be partly cyclical.

So we think this is a very good starting point to take out synergies and to improve the operation of Braemar. We have had very good success with the turnaround of Aqualis, and we are planning to transfer that knowledge, that experience into the new organization at the same time as we see the market is improving.

We see oil and gas is improving. Shipping looks okay. Bulk weights are okay. Tankers look -- and the order book is quite low, so we see a better market also for shipping going forward. We don't see that on the downside. We don't know the upside is coming. And then, of course, renewable will still be a growth area for the combined company.

So if we go to Page 8, just summing up. It's -- we, Aqualis, after this, will have a much broader service offering to our clients. As you can see from a slide that is later on in the presentation, Slide 27, the main or the key denominator for this industry is that we work for the insurance industry. And that's why London is so important. And their headquarters is going to be in London and most of our competitors are also based in London. It's centered around insurance, marine and oil and gas insurance cluster in London.

And we are working on 2 sides for their -- our clients. We are working managing losses and helping them prevent losses and limit [indiscernible] accident should happen to try to prevent and secure values. But -- and then the second thing we are working on is insurance approval. So before the big marine operation is happening or before we get moved, we need to give the operation an assurance or what should you call it, stamp, if you might call it that, that this is good to go. So that's the denominator, both the former Braemar organization and Aqualis have been working on.

And it's complementary. So there's not much overlap except from so many offshore sites. We will get 60 offices together. This is -- so we are in most oil and gas centers, renewable centers and shipping centers, 60 offices worldwide. We think there is significant synergies that can be taken out in the neighborhood of $2 million. And we think this is a company with a very strong balance sheet, no net debt -- we have no debt at all, we have $40 million of cash and a growth ambition. We will be attractive for employees and for customers. And we get a new long-term major shareholder, which know this industry very well. Braemar will own, so as I alluded earlier, between 26% and 33% of the shares in the company.

So I will stop there with the introduction, David, and I think you can take us through the business.

[David Wells, executive]

Good. Thanks, Glen. Appreciate that. I'm going to pass you across now to Kim Boman, our CFO, who's going to take you through the transaction overview. So if you can turn to Slide 10 on the presentation, and I'll let Kim take you there.

[Kim Boman, executive]

Thank you, David. This is Kim Boman, CFO in Aqualis. We are -- as mentioned by the team, we were very excited about this transaction. It will be great for both our -- both clients and for our shareholders. This will create opportunities to expand and develop this company, much more than we had planned for initially. This will give us opportunity to expand into new service lines globally.

I will go into the transaction details on Page #10. Aqualis is set to acquire 100% of the shares in Braemar Technical Services Holdings, which is the holding company for Braemar offshore, marine and logistics business lines.

We will issue new shares and warrants in the combined company to the seller. The maximum shareholding that Braemar can get is 33%. They will get 26% initially. In addition, they will get warrants up to 7 percentage points. The number of warrants to be issued depends on the performance of the business over the next 2 years, measured from the 1st of April 2019. The warrants are split into 2 different parts, 1/2 is based on the performance of the combined entities' EBITDA, that's tranche 1. The second tranche is based on the gross profit of 2 of the segments within Braemar Technical Services, which is marine and the adjusting segments. These are 2 segments that we -- that Aqualis have a limited exposure today.

The closing of the transaction is expected in June 2019. It's subject to AGM approving the transaction as well as certain other conditions. We expect that the closing of the transaction will happen in June.

In connection with this transaction, we will also expand our Board of Directors. The current CEO of Braemar will join our Board. And this segment, that's the relationship between Aqualis and Braemar, remains. We will also change the name of the company to AqualisBraemar after completion of the transaction. Braemar will be our largest shareholder in the company.

If you now move to Slide 11. In connection with the transaction, we will also carry out an equity issue to support the growth that we expect to realize after completing this transaction and also to facilitate the working capital requirements Braemar had. There will be some transaction costs, there will be some integration costs also in this process, but the capital will be used to support growth.

We see -- as mentioned, we see ample growth opportunities that the combined company will have access to after being integrated. The transaction is $6 million, whereof Braemar will have $2 million and then there will be a rights issue of $4 million towards Aqualis' existing shareholders. In the $2 million to Braemar, Braemar will be able to maintain its ownership of 33% in the combined company assuming that the warrants will vest after 2 years.

The equity issues are fully underwritten. Braemar has entered into a precommitment to subscribe for its share and the rights issue has been underwritten by Gross Management AS and certain other shareholders. The price in the private replacement and the rights issue will be announced prior to the AGM in June.

On the right side of Slide 11, you can see the time line for the transaction, and we aim to complete this as soon as possible so we can start the process of integrating the companies, realizing synergies and driving the growth going forward.

With that, I leave the word to our CEO, David Wells.

[David Wells, executive]

Thank you, Kim. So if you go to Slide 13, I'd like to take you through some of the rationale for this merger, and I think we have known -- all of us have known for a quite a long time there's been a need for consolidation in the market. The market is quite tough out there and there's many players who are servicing the sector we service.

If I was going to choose another company that we should get together with, this merger is actually very, very good for us. It's a combination of 2 highly complementary businesses, which makes it even more exciting. We're perceived in the market to be competitors, but actual fact, when you dig down into the details, we both service quite separate parts of the market. For the most parts, we have a small overlap on the offshore side.

If we look at this Slide 13, on the left-hand side you can see the areas of interest in which Aqualis services the market. And we can see here our focus is very much on offshore oil and gas with a broad service offering across the whole sector, not only on the insurance services but also on the third party work to many clients. This is an area where we do compete a little bit with Braemar who are quite strong in the Asia Pacific region, whereas we are much stronger in the Middle East.

The other sector where we service is the renewable market. We've become a market leader as time has gone past. We see lots of opportunities, lots of growth in that area. But it's an area which Braemar do not focus on at all, and so there's no competition whatsoever between the companies.

From the Braemar perspective, they are a market leader on the marine side. And by marine, we're talking here about marine insurance services, with claims for damages, technical due diligence, vessel inspections, vessel surveys, all related to shipping, mainly blue-water shipping, an area where we don't service very much at all.

They also focus on adjusting. They're one of the market leaders in adjusting, adjusting insurance claims services. They are very strong in that area. It's an area where Aqualis has no presence whatsoever.

So we can see immediately, we have 3 of the 4 segments where there's no competition between the companies, and this is what makes this transaction highly compelling because it means that the companies can carry on together, integrate and trade as we are at the moment. There are lots -- the level of competition that you normally expect between 2 competitors joining forces, in which we have to make efficiencies amongst our technical staff. So this is very, very, very exciting.

If we move to Slide 14, we give a breakdown here of the revenues on the different sections. So I'll leave offshore for a moment. We'll come back to that in a second because that's the one where we have a little bit of overlap.

On the marine front, the revenues in 2018 for that particular division was around about $18 million. It's a very stable business in terms of claims, number of ships, a lot going down, maintaining -- in fact, growing every year, and they focus -- more or less 80% of their business is focused on the claims side, on the marine claims, mitigates underwriters for various accidents and incidents, and collisions, engine damages and those sort of things. They are very dominant in that market, very well respected. One of the leading players in that area.

On the adjusting front, their focus here is not only on oil and gas and energy as a whole, but also they focus on upstream and downstream with an element on chemical plants, refineries, mining sector, oil sands. So quite a lot more than just the oil and gas market. Their revenues last year were -- just over $13 million. And you can see here, the graph has been fairly stable over the years but with growth last year, and we intend to try and grow that business even further into new areas.

If we go to the bottom sector, the offshore renewables, we've spoken about that not only in the Q1 results but also been mentioned a few times during this presentation. This is a very strong area at the moment. We've had CAGR growth over the last few years of around about 37% year-on-year. And Q1 has continued that trend, in fact, even stronger than the previous years. So this is an area of growth for us. It's an area which is not covered by Braemar. We will continue our business, continue our expansion around the world. And of course, we get an extra footprint of 4 offices, which we can expand into the facilities already in place.

On the oil and gas front, you can see there that the combined total of both companies was $38 million in 2018, a growth of around about 9% from previous year. That growth mainly came from the Aqualis side. From the Braemar perspective, they are very much focused on the market in Asia Pacific. They're very strong in that market. They have many offices and many people working over there, about over 100 people working in that particular market. An area we also service ourselves, but we are a little bit smaller, and we service a slightly different sector of the market as well. So whilst we are competitors, we're not overlapping competitors all the way through. Our strength lies -- in the Aqualis side, our strength lies in the Middle East where they have very little representation, and of course, we have representation elsewhere in the world where their representation is quite low.

Good thing about this merger is that we will be using the AqualisBraemar name going forward. And Braemar has a very, very strong name in the insurance industry, and we hope to be able to leverage on that name as we expand the offshore services around the world. It's actually a brilliant merger for the 2 companies. Very little overlap. We should be able to move forward very quickly and continue our business without too much disruption on the technical side.

If we move forward onto Slide 15. There's a summary there of the revenues and the gross profits and the EBITDAs of both companies. You can see in the bottom line that Aqualis ended Q1 with about 187 full time equivalent employees and they had around about 245. So the combined company going forward will be 430 people. We will be the largest marine and energy consultants -- independent marine and energy consultants in the world going forward, which gives us a much more leverage into the market.

And you can see the combined totals of the 2 companies, USD 76 million of revenue, which makes us a fairly sizable company now in terms of the business that we do, and the adjusted EBITDA for last year was $2.9 million. So it's a good diversified revenue base of the various sectors and gives us a very strong foundation on which to build.

If we move to Slide 16, you can see the office footprint around the world. Very, very strong in Asia Pacific. Very strong in Europe. Particularly strong in the Middle East, where most of those markets are covered in strength, and we have extra coverage in the Americas. Much more coverage, I think, globally than all our competitors, which is an excellent place for which further growth can be maintained.

I think in total, 61 offices in 33 countries is the number all together. Some of those offices represents the boxes. But nevertheless, that is a very, very, very large footprint. It'll be good for our customers and good for our market as a whole.

Moving to Slide 17. The makeup of the senior management of the new company. I will still retain the position of CEO. Kim Boman, who spoke earlier, will be the CFO. Reuben Segal, who's our group COO at the moment, will maintain his position but his focus will now change and be directly focused onto the offshore side of the industry. And Grant Smith, who's currently the Managing Director of Braemar Technical Services, he will come across and also be a COO focusing on the insurance services. So I think we're still maintaining our strength of our management team by adding Grant into that and, also as mentioned before, James Kidwell, who's overall CEO of Braemar, will be joining our Board.

Within the senior management below, one of the strengths of Aqualis was the strength of our management team that has been more or less maintained in terms of the regional structure. And we're integrating the Braemar senior management into that team, focusing on the business lines. So I think we have a very good team going forward. Well, having recently met most of them, I'm very, very excited by the quality of the personnel that we are getting.

Moving to Slide 18. This gives a very quick summary of the benefits. There's benefit here to all stakeholders. This is why it makes it very exciting. Customers' benefits, we have new capabilities, new business lines for both sides of the company. We'll have increased scale. We'll have a wider footprint. And being a limited competition really allows us to grow and take those benefits across to customers. Our global footprint, in particular, is exciting because it means we'll be able to service our clients in more countries by having people on the ground already without the need to mobilize in from outside.

From an employee point of view, I think this is a great transaction, I think it's a company that actually gives much more opportunity. It gives a much more diversified company. It gives many more career opportunities, and of course, access to a larger pipeline of work and more interesting projects. Good for career enhancements.

From a shareholder point of view, I think this is key. This will provide a lot of extra growth to the company. It provides a lot of upside. It makes the company stronger, more sustainable, more robust. And being an all share, stock transition allows all shareholders to participate in the upside in the combination. So I think all stakeholders will have benefits in this acquisition going forward.

If we move to Slide 20. As with any merger transaction, M&A, there's always benefits, and we see here significant synergies potential for the company which will make us more efficient and more streamlined. The revenue synergies, we feel, could be quite substantial. As I mentioned before, we intend to roll out the offshore side of the market globally to expand right across the group using the benefits of the Braemar name and the Braemar name in the insurance market. We believe there's around about $2 million of synergy, which will be realized over the next 2 years, with a run rate of around about $900,000 a year.

On the cost front, as we bring 2 companies together, there should be quite a lot of synergies that we could recognize. Bringing companies together to share offices, reducing the number of -- or streamlining our management, I think, is the right expression I should use here. There's the economies of scale. There's a lot of benefits of bringing those companies together.

Also, from a Braemar perspective, there is some investment going on at the moment to enhance the synergies going forward and to improve the efficiencies. So I think in -- from both sides, there is a significant potential for synergy and the synergy cost effects that will come out to this.

If we move to Slide 21. Kim has taken you through some of this already. We start with a fairly strong financial position. We are going to raise some extra cash from the market to make sure that we can manage the company going forward. But more importantly, we intend to grow. And that growth requires a capital requirement to help us get through the next sector. So we will, hopefully, also use that for the short-term loan, if you like, and build to return this money back to our shareholders in the not-too-distant future once the company is stabilized and we are moving forward as we expect.

So just to summarize, 23 -- Slide 23, I'll go through again. I think this is an excellent acquisition. I think it's excellent for Aqualis. I think it's excellent for Braemar for many reasons. The company is highly complementary. It will not be disruptive to staff. We should not be needing to streamline our revenue earners. We should get great synergy benefits from both companies. We'll have the biggest service line offering. We should be good for clients with an increased scale as well in terms of number of people.

I talked just now about the unlocking of significant synergies. I think this will add great value to the bottom line. But I think in terms of recruiting people, we'll become a much more attractive employer. Large companies always have benefits over smaller companies, and we should be able to use this to our advantage. And the good thing about this transaction is that Braemar are not actually exiting from us, they will maintain themselves as our largest shareholder. They'll have presence on our board, and so therefore, have a lot of interest in making this merger or transaction a success.

So I think with that point, I would like to conclude. And operator, I would like you to open the lines to questions if people have questions they like to put to us.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from [ Tommy Johansson ] from [ Market One ].

[Unknown Analyst]

Can you start off by giving some color on how do you plan to unlock the significant net working capital position in Braemar?

[Glen Rødland, executive]

Maybe I can give a go first. This is Glen Rødland speaking. This is -- the good news is -- the bad news is that Braemar has a lot of working capital tied up in its business. The good news is that most of the working capital is tied up with insurance industry, which are the main client. So it's relatively strong and solid counter-parties. So the losses they're having on outstanding, call it, customer receivables are industry average as we see it, looking -- we have due -- done a due diligence. So there's not that much loss. So that's the good news.

The bad news is that the insurance industry is a world leader in, what or should I say, managing their cash. They get all the fees and all the payments upfront, and they are quite good at paying out later both the pledge, I guess, and also to the service providers. So I think it's mostly about culture because they are paying much later than the terms and the conditions of the contracts, they are -- so what we are going to do is to gradually work with the organization. Also, make each manager more responsible for the capital side, not only the EBITDA. There has been EBITDA awareness, income minus the cost, but there haven't been, as far as we can see in the organization, that much balance sheet awareness. That was something that was handled by somebody else in the organization.

I think it's a lot about culture, and we see a lot of potential to free up capital. And as I said, they are having more than 200 days in some of the divisions, not on average. But in some of the divisions, they have more than 200 days, while we are, on average, just below 90 days lately. Even that -- even 90 days, if you compare to STACO and Multiconsult in Nordic, the similar business, they have a much shorter -- much less tied-up working capital. But of course, they are working in Northern Europe where there are different technical terms. When you get to the Middle East, the ratio 90 days is -- what you say, 80, 90 days is more normal. So I think there's a lot of -- but that's what I can see -- say at this time. This is all the work that was started after we have merged the 2 companies. But I think it's about incentive and focus.

[Kim Boman, executive]

This is Kim Boman, CFO. To add to Glen's comments. In addition to what Glen has commented, I would say that we will implement a new -- we'll roll out our current ERP system and we'll also -- which will facilitate more -- it should have a quicker and better information regarding the working capital situation. Also, we will look on the best practice of both companies and see what we can do to improve the processes and procedures. We are quite confident that we will be able to release working capital and -- on the combined basis.

[Unknown Analyst]

My second question is in terms of the competitive landscape. How do you see the combined company positioned in terms of site offerings, et cetera, versus your main peers like LOC, Global Maritime and the other large players here?

[David Wells, executive]

Well, we're certainly bigger than those companies. LOC at the moment, I believe has around about 300, 350 employees, whereas we are talking here of around about 430. The next one down is probably Global Maritime oil and gas has around about 200 employees at this moment. So therefore, we will definitely be the largest independent of the main consultancies, taking out, of course, the large ones, which are dominated by the transportation services. But the elements of one of those transportation side, which do bring consultancy, will still be larger than those.

[Unknown Analyst]

Okay. And on the cash position and growth ambitions. Did I understand it correctly that you will hold dividend payments entirely now since you both paid a special and an ordinary dividend for 2019? Will you hold dividend payments all over?

[Glen Rødland, executive]

No. This industry, if you -- in normal situations, looking at consultancy -- and as I said, there's STACO, there's O.S. probably and Multiconsult similar engineering consultancy, they pay dividend quite steadily. The aim for Aqualis is to get into dividend position as soon as possible. And hopefully, the plan is to give it all going from 2020 again. We announced the dividend and last year, we paid out an extraordinary dividend. We had, at that time, $11 million, $12 million on the balance sheet, if I'm not mistaken. Just north of $10 million, at least, we had on the balance sheet.

We thought we were over capitalized, we didn't need to have that much cash just to run the business. We kept the cash for quite some time because we were in negotiations with some potential acquisitions that didn't conclude. And when that failed, we decided we are over-capitalized, let's get out the cash. And then this process with Braemar took off -- or restarted, as I might call it that, 2 months after we paid out the dividend. So the reason why we are bringing the money back is that we see that we have 2 things. The market is clearly turning. And secondly, we would like to grow this business and see a lot of opportunities. So that's why we are taking back the money.

Last year, we paid an extraordinary dividend of $4.3 million, $4.4 million. So we are claiming back $4 million from our shareholders or asking them to put in that. But we will stop paying dividend. And of course, with $14 million, when we get going this free-up of capital on the balance sheet, I can see that we should have quite a lot power both to pay dividend and, at the same time, as we can grow the business and maybe do some smaller acquisitions of companies and/or teams, with teams that we can plug into our business that are complementary to what we have.

[Unknown Analyst]

And the final one from me, and that's on the renewable side. Are you seeing strong growth there? But at the same time renewable now is the smallest part in terms of revenues for the combined company. Is it fair to assume that renewables will be the next growth base for you?

[David Wells, executive]

I think that's a fair assumption. Renewables is really, really strong in terms of investments and investment decision-making at the moment. It's expanded now out of Europe into Asia Pacific. It's expanding also into -- started expansion into Americas. A lot of countries are showing interest. There's a lot of government targets, which had been set around the world in many countries, and I think this will give us a lot of opportunities going forward. Having this larger footprint will also facilitate for us much easier start-ups to expand that renewable business in new countries as well, which is a key benefit to the renewable section of our company going forward.

[Glen Rødland, executive]

If I might add to that. So on growth, renewable is just not going with the market, making sure that we move where our clients are moving. And we see more -- Europe is maturing a bit, even though it's still growing quite fast. But we see our clients are moving to other places in the world. So we are following them and also new clients, like in America and Asia. So we are following them. Take their expertise we have gained in Europe over the last few years, especially in the U.K. and Germany, Denmark, which have been leading this trend. So that -- we take that knowledge and spread it to other markets.

So that's like a big growth plan. But then on -- within oil and gas and adjusting and marine, we see a cyclical upswing especially within oil and gas. And secondly, our aim is to continue to take market share. So that -- so oil and gas is not necessarily a big structural growth, it's more cyclical growth we are talking about and then taking market share. That's our aim. That's why we would like to have firing power, so we can do everything on the same time. So we don't have to, what should I say, be focused on -- if you don't have that much firing power or cash, you might do more prioritization. And I don't think, at the moment, we should try to ride those waves we see ahead of us in our markets.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] As there are no further questions in the queue at this time, I would like to turn the call back for any additional or closing remarks.

[David Wells, executive]

Well, thank you, everybody, for listening to us. It's been our pleasure to expand details of this transaction to you. I hope you'll be as positive as we are about the expectations that we can derive from this merger. And we're always available, myself and Kim, for any follow-up questions if you want to contact us directly. Thank you very much.

[Operator]

Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. Ladies and gentlemen, you may now disconnect.