Halliburton Conference Call Highlights

Halliburton

reported its third quarter earnings on Monday. Shares of the company are up one percent. Below are some highlights from its conference call: Operational Highlights: • Record company revenue of $8.7 billion. • Delivered industry-leading revenue, and operating income growth both sequentially and year-over-year, once again outgrowing our peer group. • New quarterly revenue records for both North America and the eastern hemisphere with double-digit sequential revenue growth in Latin America. • Exit rate for this quarter for North American margins was over the 20% margin mark. • Company operating income increased 21% sequentially. North America grew 15%, Europe, Africa, CIS, 16%,and Latin America more than doubled by growing 126% from the prior quarter. • Now moving to our international markets, despite the geopolitical issues we faced in areas like Russia, Libya, and Iraq, our eastern hemisphere activity continues to expand at a steady rate. • This quarter we repurchased an additional $300 million in stock. • Board of Directors has approved an additional 20% dividend increase. • We've delivered industry-leading double digit revenue growth in the eastern hemisphere. • And as we look ahead to 2015, we anticipate the rate of growth may slightly moderate due to headwinds. • In Brazil, negotiations on the recently retendered directional drilling contract are progressing. • We expect to be operating under the new and more profitable contract as we transition into the first quarter. • Results: • Starting with North America, revenues were up 9% sequentially. • This strong all organic growth was relative to a 3% increase in the U.S. land rig count. • Operating income was up 15% over the same period. • Margins for the quarter averaged 19.2% with our September exit rate coming in slightly higher than a 20% mark. • In the eastern hemisphere, revenue and operating income increased sequentially by 4% and 6% respectively. • Growth was led by Europe, Africa, CIS, where revenue and operating income increased 6% and 16% respectively. • On a year-over-year basis, we have seen tremendous revenue growth across • Middle East Asia. • Saudi is leading with a 60% improvement and India, Iraq, and Thailand have all delivered growth over 30%. • The conflict in Iraq resulted in a shutdown of the majority of activity in • Kurdistan and Northern Iraq. • However, the majority of our operations have been in southern Iraq, away from the fighting, where activity levels have remained relatively stable. • We're expecting the effective tax rate to return to our normalized rate of approximately 28% to 29%. • We now expect our 2014 capital expenditures will be approximately $3.2 billion and depreciation and amortization to be approximately $2.1 billion for the year. • During the third quarter, we recorded income of $66 million in discontinued • We announced today that our Board of Directors approved a 20% increase to our quarterly dividend from $0.15 to $0.18 per share resulting in a cumulative • 100% increase to our quarterly dividend over the last two years. • As previously stated, our intention going forward is for our dividend payout to equal at least 15% to 20% of our net income. • We bought back an additional $300 million in shares during the third quarter. • We still have $5.7 billion remaining in repurchase authorization from our Board of Directors available for future stock buybacks. • Middle East Asia is expected to have a high single digit sequential improvement with margins approaching 20% for the quarter.