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TWST: Market cap looks to be around 28 billion at this point. Are they able to continue to generate growth factors and other significant performance at that size?

Mr. Brooks: I don’t think that’s an issue, given the dynamics of the business. It’s going to drive everyone in this industry, as it has driven a number of people over the last 12 months. Some good-sized companies have done reasonably well for the last 12 months as the industry has recovered.

TWST: Who else falls into that strategic formula that you’ve described?

Mr. Brooks: On the service side, Cooper Cameron (NYSE:CAM) is a manufacturer and provider of subsea wells, wellhead equipment and some other late cycle (meaning more production-oriented) equipment. The company’s earnings are essentially at a trough level, but I think the next news that will come out of the company is a pickup in orders. Obviously that will lead to a rise in their backlog and projected future earnings estimates would go up commensurately. They are highly dependent on the awards for and development of a number of new offshore fields in areas such as West Africa, Brazil, the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and even the North Sea. In all of those areas, we have very strong, pent-up demand of work that is being bid but has not been awarded yet. I think the awards are just a matter of time. I would suggest that sometime in the next six months we will see a dramatic increase in the awards for development of these fields. We would expect Cooper Cameron to get the lion’s share of those new awards, as its position in the industry is number one. That will change their backlog picture, and I think that will be the catalyst for the stock to begin to take off.

TWST: Looking back over the past 12 months, they’ve been through a little bit of a downturn in demand. Do all the factors that you described before play into the rebound of Cooper Cameron relative to the past year?

Mr. Brooks: Yes. For the last 12 months, they’ve essentially been living off of their backlog. That backlog has been declining, but we saw in their numbers for the fourth quarter the first uptick in new order rates. That’s certainly not dramatic, but it is the first sign that some things are starting to stir in the international and deepwater markets. This is a company where any orders that come in don’t show up in revenues until almost nine months into the future. So it is a backlog business and, as I said, for the last 12 months or so they’ve been living off of the backlog they had accumulated prior to that period. Now I think they’re primed with this potential for a lot of awards of big field development projects to start showing an accelerating increase in order rates and backlogs.

TWST: What’s the summary statement for the investor audience?

Mr. Brooks: Just to reiterate the theme that we have a very good fundamental backdrop of commodity prices and good cash flows being generated by the producers. The box that the energy industry is in on a worldwide basis between supply and demand can only be extricated by drilling our way out of the box. And that means the oil service industry is going to be a major beneficiary over the next few years of very strong activity and very healthy spending patterns by their customers.