NRC Group ASA

Welcome to the Q4 presentation from NRC Group. Due to COVID-19, we will do this as a webcast, followed by a Q&A session at 10 o'clock later today. As always, the activity level in NRC Group drops in Q4 due to entering winter season. We ended up with a revenue of 1.6 billion, which is 5% less than last year. We deliver strong results from our Finnish operations. However, this is compensated by weaker than expected results from our demolition and recycling business in Norway. The order intake for the quarter is 1.4 billion, somewhat lower than what we aimed for, driven by weaker order intake in the Swedish business and in rail construction in Norway. On the positive side, we deliver a strong cash flow from operation in quarter four and for the year as total. And this is an important indication for us that we are moving in the right direction. And this leaves us with a solid cash position of 610 million at end of year. COVID-19 is still impacting our operation, and especially in Norway. The latest travel restriction closing the Norwegian border for foreign workers leads to higher production costs and lower productivity for some projects. And we also see that the uncertainty caused by this is delaying startups in some projects. The effect of this is biggest in our civil construction in Norway and within the environmental segment. In rail construction, we are more dependent on local employees and some of our activities are defined as critical for society and we will get exemptions from travel restrictions if needed. Our safety results are improving and we had zero serious injuries in 2020. And we also see that our lost time injury rate is declining. However, we are not satisfied with the results and we will continue with our systematic work to improve also within this area. The sickness absence rate is increasing to 4.8% in 2020. This is partly driven by COVID-19 and we expect a normalization of this level during this year. Sustainability. Building sustainable infrastructure is the core of NRC Group. That's what drives our market and provides us with a very positive market outlook. Internally, we are also focusing on reducing our own climate footprint during the operations. But our clients also see increased focus on climate change. This provides a good commercial opportunity for us. Also, investors and regulators have an increased focus on sustainability. This leads us to improve the reporting on this topic going forward, and we will implement this extended reporting during 2021. And we also believe that the EU taxonomy will further highlight the sustainability of our operation. Then Dag will take us through the details on the financial side.

Thank you, Henning. As Henning said, we had a revenue of 1.58 billion in Q4, which is 5% lower than last year. The underlying organic growth was negative in all countries, as expected, and especially in Norway. Total revenue for 2020 was 6.45 billion, which is a 4% increase, mainly due to positive currency adjustment. EBITDA excluding M&A in fourth quarter was minus 10 million. The weak results in the quarter is related to Norway and Sweden. In Norway, it's mainly due to the weak results in the demolition and recycling business, NSS, and it's explained by a significant write-down in one project due to a dispute with a customer. Weak profitability in the existing portfolio as well as reduced revenue due to lack of fulfillment of elements in the earn-out is also reasons for the low profitability. In addition, low revenue in the civil operation has affected the profitability negatively due to reduced scale effects. The weak results in Sweden is mainly due to low revenue and low profitability in the projects we have produced in the quarter. In Finland, we have strong results in the quarter. EBITDA was 8.3%, up from 4.1% the same quarter last year. And the total EBITDA margin for the full year 2020 in Finland was 5.7%, up from 5.2% last year. The main reason for the improved profitability is good performance in the light rail projects. In total, the EBITDA excluding M&A was 50 million Norwegian kroner for 2020, which is an EBITDA of 0.8%, which is at same level as we announced 21st of January. M&A expenses in the quarter shows an income of 9 million, and this includes an earn-out compensation due to the negative results we have had in NSS related to the earn-out. Looking at the pre-tax profit for the year, it's minus 94 million versus last year, which was minus 178 million. Moving to the balance sheet and the main changes from 2019 is the strengthening of the balance sheet. Our cash position has increased to 610 million up from 154 million last year. And the improvement is explained by the private placement we did in quarter one, 2000, as well as strong operational cashflow. Our interest-bearing debt excluding leasing has decreased as we have repaid bank debt with 119 million. But this is partly offset by currency adjustments due to weakening of Norwegian kroner versus Euro. Adjusted for currency effect, our net debt has been reduced with approximately 550 million in 2020. Equity ratio at the end of the year was 47%, which is up from 37% in 2019. Our cash flow from continuing operation in Q1 was 110 million, up from 63 million in Q4 last year. In 2020, our existing operation has generated 312 million in cash from operation, which is an improvement of 350 million from last year. We are satisfied with the results with the cash flow in quarter four and in 2020. And this is a result of our continuously sharp focus on working capital improvements. The improvements in 2020 is mainly in Sweden and in Norway. Net cash flow from financing activities is minus 98 million, and the main items consist of repayment of debt of minus 40 million, payment to leasing is minus 42 million, and payment for net finance minus 17 million. Our financial position at the year end is robust. We have a cash position of 610 million, unused credit facilities of 200 million and our net debt is 1.16 billion. It consists of a bank debt of 595 million. We have a bond of 600 million and leasing agreements totaling 573 million. The right part of this slide shows the repayment schedule for our bank and bond debt. And the repayment the next coming three years will be, as you will see, the repayment the next coming years is around 150 billion each year. The bond is a bullet and has repayment third quarter 2024. Henning will now go through the operational business, market update and our focus areas for 2021.

Thank you, Dag. We have implemented several improvement measures during 2020. In our rail construction business in Norway, we have been able to realize the full effect of the improvement program we started last year. The new management coming on board late 2019 and early 2020 has done a very good job at improving our core commercial processes related to tendering and related to project execution. In Sweden, we have not been able to realize the full effect of our improvement program due to the losses in the old project portfolio. However, we have achieved big improvements. We have significantly cut our fixed cost base, and we see that the projects we have won for the past 18 months with the new management is yielding much better profits. And this is an indication of improved tender processes, and also we are gradually improving control in our operations. In our maintenance business in Finland, we ended 2019 by losing maintenance area one, our biggest maintenance contract. And our mission in 2020 has been to regain our competitiveness in that business. We have significantly cut the costs, we have reduced number of employees, we have reduced our active machine fleet in order to increase the flexibility of our cost base. And this we will see the full effect of from second quarter 2021. On the tendering side, we have been very successful in maintenance. We have won three out of the three major maintenance contracts in the market, and we have won them on a healthy project margin. Our main focus for 2021 will still be to improve the profitability, and we will continue to focus on our key commercial processes. Winning the right project at the right price is a key to get a good start of a project and to realize profitable projects. And when we talk about this in our improvement programs, it's all about selecting the right projects for calculation that fits our competitive position. It's about sharpening the answers on soft values in the tenders to secure that we secure even higher scores. And it's of course doing thorough cost calculations, identifying the opportunities to reduce cost in order to be competitive on price. And of course, we need to use our market intelligence in a systematic way to improve our tender strategy. When it comes to operational excellence in our projects, it takes more time both to implement and see the results of the implementation because it impacts the whole organization. It starts with a robust project organization, making a solid production plan, making sure we have a good plan for purchasing, that we have good processes. for contractual follow-up and risk management. And we also need to have solid processes to improve our financial predictability by measuring our production against the real progress. On top of this, of course, we need to secure that we have a competitive cost base in the company. And we have a business with huge impact on seasonality, and we have a business requiring a certain machine fleet to operate. This yields a high cost base, but still we have potential to improve and reduce our cost base by better utilizing the synergies across our business lines. The work we have done in Rail Norway in 2020, the work we have done in Sweden in 2020, and the work we have done in the maintenance business in Finland will continue to yield positive financial effect into 2021. And of course, we will address the weak results in our demolition and recycling business in Norway the same way which has proven to yield results in these improvement programs. In Finland, we are delivering strong results in the quarter, driven by the light rail projects. We see strong project execution across projects, and we see that the organization works in a very systematic way with the development of new light rail projects. This quarter, we will hand over the first stage of the Tampere Tramway, And we were very happy to announce that we were also able to win and execute the second stage of this project with the 16 million euro contract we announced in fourth quarter. And we are also working with the second extension of the Tampere tramway and we hope to be able to also announce this project during 2021. And this is important for our light rail business in order to continue the development of this business. Our book-to-bill ratio in Finland last 12 months has been 0.8. This is mainly due to a low tender pipeline. Our heat rate for new tenders has been good in Finland this year. And as said, we will see the full effect of the actions to reduce or increase the flexibility in our cost base in Q1 2021. In Finland, we see a solid increase in the tender pipeline, almost doubled on the rail construction side from three months ago. This is very positive as it confirms what we have been waiting for, to see concrete projects in the tender pipeline based on the huge increases in the state budgets allocated to rail construction and upgrades in Finland in 2020 and 2021. When it comes to the light rail business, we are in the closing stage of the development of the Crown Bridge project. And if everything goes according to plan, the City Council of Helsinki will approve this contract for construction during the second half of 2021. And again, this is a really important project to continue the development of our light rail business in Finland. The fierce competition in the Swedish market is still here. The low activity combined with the old project portfolio driving down the average profitability in our project portfolio leads to still weak results in the Swedish business in quarter four. However, it is much better than last year. Our improvement measures will continue. So our goal is, of course, to deliver better results in 2021. And we are closer to completion of our zero margin projects. And in 2021, we only have 135 million kroners left in production. And this, of course, significantly reduces the risk. With a book-to-bill ratio in Sweden for the past 12 months of 0.8, we are starting to see the effects of that in the activity level. And we saw a negative growth rate in Sweden in quarter four of minus 4%. And we expect this trend to continue also into quarter one and quarter two. And this is one of the reasons for why we had to re-guide for 2021. In Sweden, we have three business areas, whereas civil construction is the smallest one. The main focus here is to expand our customer portfolio. And the contract we announced for doing groundwork for a wind farm in Sunde municipality last week is a good example of this. When it comes to rail construction, it's all about increasing our heat rate. And as we have said several times before, we will not compromise profitability to boost volume. The old project portfolio we have taken losses in has mainly been within this segment in Sweden. However, as said, we see that the projects won and executed by the new management in Sweden has a much more healthy margin and a much more healthy risk level. And this makes me confident that we will also regain profitability in this segment. Our maintenance business has been performing steadily throughout the last three years. This year will be very exciting when it comes to the tendering activity. During the next nine months, seven maintenance contracts will be out for tender, whereas three of them is operated by NRC Group today. This is of course both an opportunity and a threat for us. Our goal of course is to at least defend our market share, but also to increase the profitability in this business throughout this tender cycle. In Sweden, we still see a strong tender pipeline and we expect it to continue in that way going forward. The big question in Sweden, of course, is how the competitive situation will develop. Our expectation is that a continued high tender pipeline will lead to a normalization of the competitive environment. However, it has taken more time than what we believed when we entered 2020. And of course, there's still a risk for this to take more time. In Norway, we see a low activity level for the quarter, and we have substantial capacity to take on significant projects, if winning them at the right terms. Our order intake for the quarter was 354 million, driven by two important contracts on the environmental side, contributing to the construction of the new Fornebu metro station. But we also won the upgrade of Nittedal station, a 220 million contract, which is a joint effort between our rail construction unit and our civil construction unit in Norway. The weak result in Norway in quarter four was driven by the weak results in our demolition and recycling business. As Dag said, we had to take a significant write-down in one project due to a disputed change order. But we also see that the profitability in the portfolio was too low and lower than what we have seen before. On the civil side, It's all about volume. We need to increase the revenues, win more projects to get back to a normal profitability level. And with a thin order book in civil and entering the year with a lower profitability than normal in our demolition and recycling business, this is also one reason for why we had to re-guide the profitability for 2021. The transformation of the rail construction business in Norway is not finished, but we are very satisfied with the progress we made in 2020. The focus will continue in this business by improving our key commercial processes, and we expect the work we have done to continue to yield better financial results going forward. Within civil construction, it's all about winning projects at the right terms. And we are, of course, working hard to fine tune our tender process in order to increase our heat rate and get back to a more normal activity level. Within environment, our main focus is, of course, to restore the profitability within the recycling and demolition business. And we will use the same recipe as we have been using in Norway. We will strengthen the management team. We will work systematically with our core processes related to tendering and project execution. And we will secure that we have a competitive cost base in that organization. The nature of this business is short project cycles, and the market outlook for the business is good. So combined with the improvement measures we are doing, we are confident that we will yield significant better results for 2021. However, we will not come back to normal profitability this year. In Norway, we also see a strong tender pipeline and the tender pipeline is expected to be strong also going forward. And this is confirmed by ambitious levels approved for rail construction and upgrade and on the civil side in the Norwegian state budget for 2021. So the market outlook is positive in Norway. So to sum up, it's been a challenging year for NRC Group in 2020. And our main focus in 2021 will still be to improve the profitability through focusing on our core commercial processes, tendering, project execution, and achieving a competitive cost base. The financial results are more or less at the same level as it was in 2019. However, I think the organization is much stronger today than what it was one year ago. The actions we have done in 2020 and will continue to do in 2021 will yield better results. Our long-term ambition is to improve significantly our operating margin by improving our core processes in combination with an attractive, fast-growing market. And when I see the achievements we have made within the areas where we have had the sharpest focus in 2020, I'm still confident that we will reach our long-term ambition.