Contango Oil & Gas stays debt-free and has about $27 million of cash on hand, and $50 million of unused borrowing capacity.
Kenneth R. Peak, Contango Oil & Gas chairman and chief executive officer, said, Since the founding of Contango in September of 1999, we have raised a total of $60.5 million in various equity offerings. Over this same time, we have expended approximately $64.7 million to purchase our stock through private and market transactions. The ‘net capital’ thus invested in the Company is a negative $4.2 million. In the same time frame, our retained earnings have gone from a negative $2.0 million in September 1999 to $324.9 million at December 31, 2008.
Peak continued, The difference between the number of our shares outstanding of 15.8 million and our fully diluted shares of 16.5 million is comprised of 685,167 options that have an average exercise price of $16.49 per share. Assuming these options were to be exercised ‘cashless’ – the likely eventuality – our fully diluted share count would be further reduced to approximately 16.3 million shares. The number of Mcfe’s ‘owned’ per share as at March 31, 2009 now stand at 22 Mcfe per fully diluted share, compared to 21 Mcfe per fully diluted share as at June 30, 2008. Thus, even though we have not yet drilled any new discoveries during this fiscal year, if you were a shareholder on July 1, 2008, the beginning of our fiscal year, you now own 7% more of the Company, have more Mcfe’s per share, and no debt senior to your ownership. We’ll mark that as a ‘W’ for the first 9 months of this fiscal year.
