Gurit Holding AG

Let me now up front, good morning all together, allow up front to make an introduction, saying that this presentation may include forward-looking statements that reflect the intentions, beliefs or current expectations and projections of Corit Holding AG about the future results of operations, financial conditions, liquidity performance and similar circumstances. Such statements are made on the basis of assumptions and expectations, which may prove to be erroneous. Also, Guret Holding AG believes them to be reasonable at this time. And with this, Philipp, I hand over to you.

Thank you, Javier. Good morning and thanks for being in the call. I'm going to go through only three factual slides. 24, 25, and then post-25. So if we look at 24, first we have lower sales in wind. This is because we are focusing on profitable geographies. In other words, we are selling less to China. The marine and industrial volumes are growing. In this particular business, we did stop some legacy sales uh all automotive sales but in a focused market sales we are growing uh our adjusted operating profit margin went up 50 plus so from 4.4 percent to 6.7 percent with wind footprint is being resized our marine and industry offering and footprint are expanded both in Europe and in the US. Our G&A costs have been decreased. We generated a positive free cash flow and we signed a new three-year banking contract in the last day, in fact. So we have very actively been improving GURID's trajectory in 24. If we move to 25, we will continue to amend our trajectory, so continue to focus wind sales on strategic markets and customers. and we are deploying an optimization tool to win customers in fact it allows them to save resin so this means to save cost to save weight in the blade we are continuing to improve the process after wind plants we are discontinuating our carbon fiber protrusion. As you may know, there is a heavy Chinese competition with a huge overcapacity for carbon fiber in China. And this led us to take the decision to discontinue this business. We are in the first half completing the restructuring of all businesses we wanted to restructure. We start to deliver recycled PET to new industrial segments, for example, transportation or office furniture. We are increasing the sales of specialized foams to niche markets. An example is Subsea. We are having a new CEO. This will be announced in the next 30 days, I would think. focus on three divisions. We are not going to give a sales guidance. We have decided not to give a sales guidance as a possible implementation or increase in all directions of tariffs creates uncertainties that can lead to postponement of investment either for windmill developers or for turbine OEMs. Even when we look at wind market research experts, they are now publishing very different forecasts for 25. So we saw there was not realistic to give a sales guidance. And we believe our adjusted operating profit margin for 25 will be around the 25. four level this means somewhat better for the business we continue and still some losses for the discontinued business which are going to end in the first half um plus 25 we consider in our plans that the accessible wind volumes for us are going to grow three to five percent per year this considers that the offshore boom that was foreseen for some time is postponed at the end of the decade, so not coming in the next two to three years, and that Chinese OEMs will increase somewhat their market share in the Western world, namely Middle East, Latin America, Eastern Europe. This may be pessimistic, that's what we included in our plans. We have the marine and industrial markets growing low single digit in our plans, but those sales are forcing to increase faster thanks to new forms we are introducing and the product substitution allowed by recycled we will have this refocused and flexible organization. Our R&D teams have been repositioned close to a large production site, and we are targeting 10% operating profit margin. Let's say when the environment is more stable. So in a nutshell, The repositioning and streamlining that we have started some months back will bear fruits in 2025 already, but we will still in 2025 have some negative impact from discontinued businesses, and we have this geopolitical uncertainty. And we are convinced that it puts GORIT on a much better trajectory, again, once this geopolitical situation will stabilize. So hopefully sometime in 2025 and after 2025. Now I hand over to Javier for more detailed explanations.

Thank you very much, Philipp. So a warm welcome also from my side, and I'm really happy to present you some more details on our financials, but then afterwards also a little bit our estimates on the markets. So if we start with some key financials, we have been already reporting earlier that net sales in 2024 have been 431.7 million after roughly 460 million one year before. This represents a decline of minus 2.9% at constant exchange rates. Sales, as we heard, have been impacted by some market challenges and the focus on profitable business, meaning that we have been opportunistic, especially in the local Chinese market. Accordingly, we did start a strategic realignment in response and we did announce the reduction of capacities in Turkey being a kitting location and in Italy for PT extrusion. This will lead in the future, also starting this year already, with a better cost structure and a higher utilization of other global locations. As mentioned as well, we will be stopping the carbon fiber protrusion activities during the first half of 2025, just keeping the glass fiber business from our original acquisition of FiberLine. Rebalancing our investments between market sectors will lead to an increased focus on the business currently summarized under marine and industrials. We have been able to significantly improve our operations in the second half year after reporting 5.4% in the first half year. This means that overall for the full year, our adjusted operating margin of 4.9% represents for the second half year a good margin of 8.3% on its own. This means a significant improvement half year two versus the first half year. Additionally, we have been able to secure a positive free cash flow of 4.4 million with an ending net debt of 62.7 million at the end of 2024. So if we see a little bit more the evolution of our segments, I will only be very fast on those overviews as we have been shown this already in January. The segment wind materials reduced to 285.6 million after 307.1 million in the prior year, which represents minus 3.4% at constant exchange rates. Structure profiles contributed with sales of roughly 119 million in 2024. If you go to the segment manufacturing solutions, their sales declined to 45.3 million, which represents a minus of 8.7%. Sales significantly increased in the Asia market while sales in Western countries declined. Main reason being slightly postponements of customer programs. Our second strong pillar being marine and industrial showed a steady development over the last 12 months and across all regions, resulting in sales of 101 million, representing an increase of 1.6%. We have been seeing a stable development over the second half year. and expect a growth in 2025, especially coming from new PET supplies. Overall, our sales declined by minus 2.9% to 431.7 million, which represents a continued business of 331 million. If we move on to the next slide and also focusing on where this improvement year over year is coming from, I want to show you first our cross-profit margin evolution. Cross-profit improved to 18.6%. This shows an improved resilience of our operations. Especially in the second half here, we have been able to significantly improve and I'm really happy about the evolutions our operations have shown and the efficiency measures that have been implemented. Overall, we entered 2024 with an adjusted operating profit margin of 6.9%, which is a significant improvement over 2023, where we reported 4.5% only. Nevertheless, 2024 has been impacted by some restructuring measures as mentioned before. Overall, we have been booking 37 millions of restructuring costs with a very minor amount we are expecting in 2025. Overall, we still assume restructuring costs to be 40 million, which is linked to the realignment of our business. Important to mention out of the 37 million restructuring costs that we booked, 17.7 million are related to impairment charges, meaning having no impact on our cash flow. After one time cost, our operating profit was at minus 7.3 million, which resulted in a net profit of minus 27.8. If you go to a bridge that we have been preparing for you from 2023 adjusted operating profit to the 2024 one, we have been seeing an impact from sales volume price and mix, which shows a slightly positive impact of 0.7 million. This includes a negative amount of roughly 31 million of sales prices, but a significant improvement of the mix and higher production volumes in our locations. At the same time, we have been able to improve efficiencies, which are related to production processes, but also a significant reduction of material, which resulted in a positive impact of 7.3 million. In the last box, we summarized the impact which we saw already in 2024 from restructuring with other measures restructuring being a positive impact of 2.6 million and the second significant impact being a negative currency impact of minus 2.3. Overall, we see the significant improvement to 29.7 million. If you go a little bit more on the balance sheet, the evolution of the trade networking capital, The trade net working capital is the net of inventories, receivables and payables. We are showing here the last 12 months average of the trade net working capital, which shows a significant improvement over 2023, resulting in roughly 86 million. This has for the second consecutive year shown good impact from our focus on working capital and its impact on the free cash flow if we go towards the capex we have been restrictive on investments but did do investments where we see also growth and also future opportunities we did put a second half for manufacturing solutions in india being able to produce molds there apart from our location in China. The free cash flow amounted to 4.4 million. This includes already some impact from the restructuring. So we are happy that we did have a positive cash flow and are convinced that I'm convinced that for 2025 we will be also capable of minimize the cash drain coming from restructuring and operations. So if we go to some more details on our balance sheet. Our net debt, as mentioned before, amounts to 62.7 million, similar to the year before. Our equity reduced to 60.4 million, main impact being from restructuring and impairment charges. If you took the ratio of net debt by EBITDA, we still achieved a 2.5 multiple, excluding one-time effects From restructuring being 19.3 million, we even were able to achieve a net debt by adjusted EBITDA ratio of 1.4, representing a positive evolution year over year. I'm really happy to also being able to announce that we have been signing still in February a new financing contract which consists of a term loan and a revolving credit facility with a total amount of 120 million being part of a club deal with one additional bank partner. It is an unsecured and committed facility which lasts three years until February 2028 with the option to one additional year. We have been securing this financing ahead of the current bilateral credit facilities with the maturity date of December 31st, 2025. Now, let me give you some insights into the main markets, wind still being an important market for us, followed by our growing business in marine and industrial. So if you look at the wind market, we see that the onshore wind market outside of China will grow to 63 gigawatts, which represents a yearly annual increase of plus 14%. We also see at the same time that Western OEMs are improving their financials, strengthening also their ability to execute projects efficiently. On the other side, we see China, where the onshore wind market is stable or is expected to be stable until 2028. We also see the US tariffs, which may have an impact, but still there is a policy to support those incentives and may help this onshore growth in parallel. If we go to the offshore wind, We see that the global offshore wind is on track for a double-digit annual growth, but still with high uncertainties, so the boom may be postponed even beyond the 2028. We also saw that there have been announcements that China's subsidies have been rolled back or will be rolled back mid of 2025. may be having an impact obviously on the Chinese competitors to go internationally. At the same time, new auctions but also accelerated offshore expansions are making us positive about some opportunities here. Overall, in spite of the expected growth in the market, we see that with the accessible wind volumes, our growth ambition is 3-5% annually only. meaning that we stay cautious in spite of positive market evolutions. If we go to the wind sector, if we go to the marine and industrial sector, we see that the marine market continues to grow across all regions. We also see a strong demand for PET across all markets, in particular related to sustainability. We also see strong opportunities in both sectors. We focus at the same time on the wider marine market beyond luxury boats. We see also that there is a growth potential on diversified BET across different segments, including, for example, office furniture. For marine, we expect to grow faster than the overall market over the next five years, driven also by the opportunity to substitute incumbent materials such as wood, and this even in multiple markets. Overall, we expect a high single digit growth opportunity for URIT beyond 2025. If we spend some words on sustainability, And I'm really proud to also repeat our gold medal from EcoVadis that we received in January 2025 and this for the second year in a row. This makes us really proud and shows also our commitment for sustainability confirmed by an external evaluation. At the same time, I want to show you some key achievements that we did in 2025. One of those being that we moved to renewable energy, where 71% of our locations moved to renewable energy in 2025. Also in favor of our employees, we did significantly reduce our lost time accidents by 44%, which also shows that we are really very focusing on reducing accidents all across the world. At the same time, we are also proud to see that 54% of our waste has been recycled in 2024, overall resulting in an 18% reduction of scope 1 CO2 emissions. Apart from external evaluations, we are also really proud to have internal elections. For example, Gurit Magog in Canada has been awarded the Local Community Award. At the same time, our location in China has been awarded Resource Utilization Award. All of this proposed by our people and also proposed by our, also elected by our employees. To give you an idea, our scope one and two targets until 2030 include a minus 42 percent reduction of CO2 and on our scope three targets we anticipate a minus 25 percent reduction until 2030 being already now in the target range, so being much much faster than our anticipation. Now, let me give you a summary about what you have been hearing so far. The conclusion, we have taken significant steps to right-size our operations. At the same time, we are targeting a simplified structure, being one of our key efforts in 2024, but also beginning of 2025. We focus on accelerating growth in high value markets, meaning that this is mostly outside of wind. Leveraging our core competencies will be key to enter new markets, meaning we do not need to invent new materials, but can use, for example, PET in growth markets in marine and industrial. At the same time, we did work on our new strategy and are right now launching it together with our vision. And finally, as you see in some of our slides, we are celebrating in 2025 our 119th anniversary this year. So this makes us proud and obviously hope we could present you that we are designing the next stage of its existence. Related to the outlook. we are expecting for 2025 an adjusted operating profit margin in the level of 2024. Mid-term, meaning beyond 2025, we are following a mid-term target of 10% operating profit margin and are also anticipating a growth in wind of a mid single digit growth and beyond wind, meaning in marine and industrial of a high single digit growth. And with this, I hand over to Philipp for a short summary of the presentation.

Yes, just a few words. So as you have seen and heard, we have been in 24 repositioning, streamlining, refinancing, and at the same time increasing adjusted profit. So this was a huge effort. to put the company back in the right direction. And I certainly want to thank the Guri team and all employees for that. I'm certainly very proud of this achievement. And now I think we can start the Q&A session.

Yes, let's just announce the next dates. We have the 15th of April with our annual general meeting for our shareholders, then the half-year report to be published on August 20, and the Q3 sales October 23. And as anticipated by Philippe, we are really happy to take any question you may have.

We will now begin the question and answer session. Participants can now ask questions by pressing star and 1 on their touch-tone telephone. Questioners are requested to use only handsets while asking a question and turn down the volume from the webcast. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and 2. Anyone who has a question may press star and 1 at this time. The first question comes from the line of Laura Bucher from Octavian. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. The first one is regarding tariffs. I understand there's a lot of uncertainty around the topic, but from your conversations with your clients, what could be the impact in the volumes and sales in 2025, especially now that they're coming in higher than anticipated, and also the impact for your manufacturing footprint? I'll take one by one.

I will take this one. It's not so easy at this time to understand in what direction those tariffs will apply. We heard about tariffs, as you know, from China to the US, increased tariffs, Mexico, Canada to the US. In the last couple of weeks, we heard that those tariffs could be circumvented to things like steel or automotive. We heard about increasing freight rates for Chinese ships going from China to the US. So, as you can imagine, nothing is easier this time. The first thing to understand is that those tariffs are paid by the importer. And this means for us, those tariffs in the vast majority of our sales are paid by customers. So short term, This will mean only that customers will have to pay more if it has competition implications. It will come only in a second term because, as you know, we are industrial companies and it's not like you can move capacities quickly. If we look at the possible impact on our industrial footprint. And here again, this is really assumptions because we don't know anything about real tariff being applied. We could, for example, foresee that we move some finishing centers from non-US countries to the US if really there is a high tariff coming for some products. I'm thinking, for example, about wind kits. Today, those wind kits would be finalized either in India, Europe, Mexico, China. We can definitely finish those kits in the US. We have already a plant there and it would be very easy to increase this. This is limited amount of capex. But again, at this time, we are not certain at all that we will need to do that and we have to wait. What we need to understand also is that the cost of blades imported to the US by our customers will increase but this is not like there is such a capacity in the us to produce it and depending of the tariff level blades for example produced by our customers in mexico plus tariffs are still much cheaper than blades produced in the us and being subsidized by IRA if IRA still exists tomorrow, which we also do not know. So again, it's a lot of uncertainty. We are looking at it step by step. We have some plans developed in case all this happens with some small industrial move, but no footprint revolution on our side.

Okay, thank you for that. Now the second one is regarding the carbon fiber business. Is there any color in what you're planning to do with it? Now the production will stop. Is there any progress in finding an interested party?

On the carbon fiber capacity and machinery that we have, you mean?

Yes. You want to take this one?

I can take it. So obviously what we will do is stopping carbon fiber production in the first half of 2025. And we are elaborating strategic moves either for our machinery or potential collaboration. But right now, our key assumption is that we stop the carbon fiber production in half year one, both in Denmark and also in India.

And the third one is just on CapEx for 2025. How much do you expect and also where?

You mean the investments in 2025? Yes. Let's say we have been strict on the investments in 2024, but obviously supporting our growth areas and we will continue doing this in 2025. So we were reporting before about the so-called fulfillment centers that we build up for marine and industrial, and we will support this business where we expect the growth also going forward.

Okay, thank you. As a reminder, for any further questions, please press star and one. The next question comes from the line of Carol Mardi from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my question. So your gross margin improved by more than 200 basis points in 2024. Could you elaborate on what was the driver for such improvement? Is it based on lower raw materials?

So we have different factors impacting the gross margin. First, if you remember, we had this carbon-fiber-pultrusion business that was losing a lot of money in 23 and we said we would come to a break even with this division in 24 and this is what we have achieved. To be a bit more precise, we had a breakeven for the division with a profit on the glass fiber and a loss on the carbon fiber. And this is the part that we are discontinuing. So this is one part. of the increase in gross profit. The second part is the fact that we have been very careful on sales that were not profitable, even marginal sales in some geographies, in particular in China, which we have stopped. And this improved product mix in the wind material business, which also contributed to this increase. So that's the two main explaining factors for the gross profit increase.

Okay, thank you. And then regarding your restructuring initiative, could you provide a rough number for what is the cash impact for 2025 from the restructuring?

Yes. So what we booked in 2024 was 37 million. Overall, we are expecting 40. And there is some impairment charges linked to this 40 million being in the neighborhood of 18. And we did book a minor amount, roughly 5 million in cash already in 2024 and the remainder being in 2025. most of it.

So five is already booked in 24 and the remainder is out of 18?

So if you take 40, right, you deduct the 18 million impairment, which gives you 22 minus five, which have been booked in 24 already. So you get around the 17 million, and you can assume that the majority of this will have a cash impact in 25, not all of it.

Okay, thank you. And then one last one, if I may. So you mentioned that Chinese OEMs would likely enter the Western world, and you mentioned three areas, Eastern Europe, Latam, and Middle East, if I'm not wrong. Does this mean that you don't expect that they can enter Western Europe or am I wrong assuming this?

It's right and wrong. So we expect them to take a significant market share in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Latin. They will enter Western Europe, but here you have one uncertainty. We have seen them. We have seen them. Maybe you have seen there is one contract in Italy. There is one contract in Germany already. So we have in our plans clearly that they are going to take a double-digit market share in the Western world. But as you know, there are possible duties coming this time from the European Union towards Chinese turbine OEMs. And this could... This could modify the number I just gave you. So we anticipate a slight increase in the market share in Western Europe and a stronger increase in the countries I mentioned before.

Okay, that's clear. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to the speakers for any closing remarks.

Thank you so much for listening. So I hope that we could show you an improved operating performance in the second half of 2024. And this would be the starting point together with restructuring to show also a significant step forward in 2025 and also beyond. Any question you may have, obviously you can contact us and then I'm really happy to see and hear from some of you over the next few months. And thank you so much for listening this morning.