CKX Lands, Inc., a Louisiana corporation, began operations in 1930 under the name Calcasieu Real Estate & Oil Co., Inc. It was originally organized as a spin-off by a bank operating in southwest Louisiana. The purpose of the spin-off was to form an entity to hold non-producing mineral interests which regulatory authorities required the bank to charge off. Over the years, as some of the mineral interests began producing, the Company used part of the proceeds to acquire land. In 1990, the Company made its largest acquisition when it was one of four purchasers who bought a fifty percent undivided interest in approximately 35,575 acres in southwest Louisiana.
Today the Company’s income is derived from mineral royalties, timber sales and surface payments from its lands. CKX receives income from royalty interests and mineral leases related to oil and gas production, timber sales, land sales and surface rents. Although CKX is active in the management of its land and planting and harvesting its timber, CKX is passive in the production of income from oil and gas production in that CKX does not explore for oil and gas or operate wells. These oil and gas activities are performed by unrelated third parties.
CKX leases its property to oil and gas operators and collects income through its land ownership in the form of oil and gas royalties and lease rentals and geophysical revenues. The Company’s oil and gas income fluctuates as new oil and gas production is discovered on Company land and then ultimately depletes or becomes commercially uneconomical to produce. The volatility in the daily commodity pricing of a barrel of oil or a thousand cubic feet, or "MCF," of gas will also cause fluctuations in the Company’s oil and gas income. These commodity prices are affected by numerous factors and uncertainties external to CKX’s business and over which it has no control, including the global supply and demand for oil and gas, and domestic and global economic conditions, among other factors.
CKX has small royalty interests in 20 different producing oil and gas fields. The size of each royalty interest is determined by the Company’s net ownership in the acreage unit for the well. CKX’s royalty interests range from 0.0045% for the smallest to 7.62% for the largest. As the Company does not own or operate the wells, it does not have access to any reserve information. Eventually, the oil and gas reserves under the Company’s current land holdings will be depleted.