Oklahoma City-based Panhandle Oil and Gas reported net income grew to $15.4 million or $0.92 per share for its third quarter ending June 30, 2019. This compares to $14.1 million or $0.83 per share for the same period in 2018, according to a company press release issued on Thursday.
Panhandle also reported royalty interest oil, NGL and natural gas sales increased 12.2 percent to $11.0 million in the first nine months of 2019, as compared to $9.9 million for the same period last year.
The Company repurchased $6.5 million of stock during the first nine months of 2019 at an average price of $14.95 per share. Nearly $2.5 million was purchased in the third quarter.
Panhandle continued to reduce its debt by ten million – from $51.0 million (as of September 30, 2018) to $41.5 million (as of June 30, 2019) — which has declined further to $38.0 million, with $6.5 million of cash on hand, as of August 8, 2019.
“I am very pleased with Panhandle’s third quarter and year-to-date 2019 performance,” said Paul F. Blanchard, Jr., Panhandle’s President and CEO. “We’ve generated significant cash flow and net income by executing our strategy of actively managing our mineral portfolio. Our proactive leasing effort continues to yield meaningful royalty production growth, biased toward oil production, which is supplemented by the lease bonuses we receive. We believe we are also generating material shareholder value through our targeted divestitures of mineral acreage and the largely tax-deferred redeployment of those proceeds into mineral acreage we deem to have lower risk from both a geologic and development timing perspective. In addition, we have materially paid down our debt and have improved our already ample liquidity, while repurchasing $6.5 million of our stock.”