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TWST: Can we begin with an introduction and brief historical sketch of TGS-NOPEC (Oslo:TGS.OL)?

Mr. Hamilton: TGS-NOPEC was formed in its current state by a merger in 1998 between TGS Geophysical Co., which was previously a privately held U.S.-based company, and NOPEC International, which was a publicly traded company in Norway on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Prior to that, each of those companies had been founded in the early 1980s by ex-oil company executives who saw a need in the market for widespread availability of regional seismic data that oil companies could use to better their understanding of some of the producing basins around the world.

TWST: How does the business model work?

Mr. Hamilton: In the seismic industry there are really two ways for companies to operate. One way is referred to as the contract model, where an oil company hires a seismic company to go and do a seismic project specifically for that oil company. The resulting seismic data is owned exclusively by the oil company and they retain it for their own internal use. As far as the seismic company is concerned, this is essentially a services or a cost-plus type business model. The other way, which is the way that TGS has pioneered its business, is what we call the multi-client model. In this model, TGS-NOPEC basically develops ideas for projects that it believes will be interesting to many oil companies. We go out and acquire the data in those areas at our own risk, and the resulting data is our property. We then sell non-exclusive licenses to many oil companies to use that same data. So it’s a tremendous cost savings for the oil companies, and it gives us the opportunity, if we do our business right, to make much higher multiples than under the contract model. One other benefit of the multi-client model is that, as owners of the data, we can create derivative products based upon the original seismic data. These derivatives can generate meaningful revenues in and of themselves but also can help prolong the sales life of our data.

TWST: Do you have strengths in specific geographic markets?

Mr. Hamilton: Historically, our strengths have been in the Gulf of Mexico and in the North Sea. We have branched out quite a bit over the last five years. We have large databases now in Australia, Indonesia, offshore Brazil, offshore eastern Canada, and a number of countries in west and northwest Africa.

TWST: So you are looking at some of the frontier markets also. Will you be developing that coverage?

Mr. Hamilton: Yes. We try to keep a balance in the portfolio between very frontier areas, emerging areas, where there perhaps have been one or two discoveries made, and then the mature well-developed producing areas like the Gulf of Mexico or the North Sea.

TWST: Does that give you some resilience, to a degree, against cyclicality?

Mr. Hamilton: It does. I think more important is the fact that we operate under a different business model than most of the other seismic companies. We do not own and operate a large fleet of our own vessels or a large number of our own crews, like the other players do. Our concept is to come up with the ideas for these projects, talk to oil companies about them, and gain confidence that they’re indeed going to be winners. Then we go out and contract in the assets necessary to do the surveys.

TWST: Looking forward, can you outline the strategic direction and some of the key objectives you are aiming for over the next year or so?

Mr. Hamilton: The main thing we want to do is to continue to build up a very comprehensive library of data assets around the world. And that’s both seismic data and digital well log data. We’ll be a little bit cautious about making major new investments. We’ll want to have the support of the oil companies before we go out and spend large amounts of capital on those things, but that is the goal. We’ll continue to add data at a fairly steady rate to our library.