Licensing Round Roadshows, or Rondas, as they are called in some parts of the world, have been at the forefront of oil and gas exploration for almost a century now.
During the first phase of a licensing round, Governments and NOCs travel the globe to present their available assets to EPs in major international centres. The countries present their available onshore and offshore blocks in front of exploration managers and chief geologists, followed by detailed presentations on their partnership terms, legislation and tax incentives, all necessary information to attract the right investment matches for their opportunities.
In recent years, researching for, identifying and attracting the right IOC & EP investor has become a real challenge, as major IOCs have diversified their focus (and budgets!) to decarbonisation, downstream, and energy transition among others. This is accompanied by a massive boom of small and medium IOCs investing in frontier and mature markets alike.
Those small and medium EPs have raised enough capital to invest in frontier markets and are actively looking for new opportunities. However, the elephant in the room, aka travel restrictions and layoffs, have introduced EPs to a new norm of smaller scout teams and less access to Roadshows.
In addition to that, the COVID-19 lockdown saw all the oil companies ban their employees from business travel and face-to-face prospecting for a minimum of nine months, since the pandemic started. This surfaced one of plenty of issues of the traditional Roadshows we have been mentioning to Nations in the past: Traditional prospecting has been relying almost blindly on physical, one-on-one meetings.
IN-VR has assisted several countries with attracting investment, and one of the key issues we are now working together to tackle and resolve is government-to-IOC meetings being postponed indefinitely, - Sometimes because the Exploration Manager had been sick, or had to catch a flight so the meeting we had been working so hard to arrange, had to be rescheduled for who-knows-when. Most of the meetings postponed in that way, delayed IOC submission of interest by months, or until the last possible moment allowed by a country’s Hydrocarbon’s code, causing complications along the way.
How do you bypass these problems?
Having a decade of online experience, and the most successful online oil & gas summit in the world, we have discovered and optimised the unique advantages of hosting roadshows online:
Hosting a Roadshow online, is a sure-fire way to attract the interest of IOCs from countries and regions you wouldn’t normally be able to visit that quickly or arrange a sufficient number of meetings to even justify traveling there.This allows for Nations to attract companies interested in a specific type of geology, or looking to diversify in other regions of the world. With online roadshows, these companies can now reliably visit your online data room and have a direct 1-to-1 meeting with your Geology Director.For example, a Canadian operator focusing on the Atlantic Margins, can prospect Morocco, a country that shares similar geology and belongs to the Atlantic Margins, without having to travel, and ensuring that their entire team will be available during the Roadshow to cover all the Geology, Legal, and Financial aspects.
One of the main advantages of an Online Roadshow is that you can not only reach companies from all over the world, but you can meet with and host a roadshow for hundreds of IOC representatives, all of them with their teams, ready to ask all the necessary questions, and without having to go through middle management, before submitting their proposal.
In addition to that, you can host a roadshow for hundreds of decision-makers without booking an overly expensive five-star hotel, and several meeting rooms, reaching costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, as Online Roadshows don’t have huge operational costs and can accommodate dozens of meeting rooms at the same time.
The Covid-19 outbreak saw dozens of summits, exhibitions and roadshows cancelled,including ours, in the span of a month. In such a short time, prospecting and future exploration was brought to a halt all over the world, with countries and companies alike unsure on how to proceed.
IN-VR moved its summits and promotion campaigns fully online, assisting its partner countries in promoting their assets during and after the pandemic. These countries include rising super-stars such as Mozambique, Timor-Leste, Argentina, Mexico and Egypt, to overwhelming response by operators and service providers alike. Our team had already been planning Online Roadshows anyway, so we have been ready to quickly adapt to the situation (now we get less and less questions about our name)
One of the most common challenges after a physical roadshow is how to organise all the contacts you made, and how to successfully follow up with them. When an IOC representative registers for an online roadshow, their details, company, team, and area of operation are all automatically catalogued, and distributed to you in file form following the online roadshow. This automation makes prioritising the companies you are most interested in following up with faster and painless, as reaching out to Exploration and Geology Managers that are educated in your opportunities is only two clicks away.
In addition to that, all IOC representatives will receive your presentation deck automatically, making follow-ups and moving to the contract steps significantly faster.
Online roadshows provide revolutionary new ways to analyse your audience, see which areas of the world you attract the most interest from, which IOCs are the most keen to speak with you, and how they align with your goals.
One of the biggest advantages of online roadshows, is the ability to see which presentations they paid most attention to, where the most questions were raised, which job title and company was engaged the most during the session, and what prompted them to request a follow-up meeting.
This makes planning your next steps more cost-effective and focused, as hosting online roadshows, allows for easier reports to see who you attracted, what their comments were, what to improve on and where to further invest in, for future rounds.
Online roadshows are not a complete replacement for traditional roadshows, but when used in conjunction with physical roadshows and online marketing, they create a holistic approach to Licensing Rounds.
IN-VR is using its 10 years of experience to provide this holistic approach to regulators and governments, and empower them to host the best and most modernised Licensing Round in the region, giving a significant edge over the neighbouring competitors.
You can reach out to us here for your custom campaign and roadshow, or simply email Chryssa Tsouraki at chryssa@in-vr.co.
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