Flughafen Wien AG

Good afternoon. So welcome again, everybody, for the conference call regarding our full year 2024 numbers. With me now, CFO Mr. Ofner, guiding you through the results, and also COO Mr. Jaeger, giving more insights on recent traffic developments, the traffic outlook, and the developments in our business results. And I hand over to you, Mr. Ofner.

Yeah, good afternoon. And many thanks for your interest. We today published full year 24 results. And as you can follow on our slide, revenue went up to 1,052,000,000 plus 13%. EBDA at 442 plus 12.4%. And group net profit at 239 million plus 27%. And 46 million thereof comes from Malta International Airport. What underlines the importance of our subsidy in Malta International Airport for our business results. The good results enable us to do both, to increase our dividend to 1.65 per share plus 32 compared to last year, but also to expand our investments here on the Vienna airport. and therefore our CAPEX will go up from 200 million last year to roughly 300 million this year. We can do this CAPEX without borrowing, so we will finance it out of our own funds, and we foresee that we will see substantial investments also in the years to come, but on a pace that is not jeopardizing our results. If you look further down, one of the reasons for the positive result in 2024 is that our financial result converted into 15.5 million plus from minus 4 million in 2023. And the reason is that we repaid, as you remember, the EIB loan end of 2023. So in general, 2024 lays the basis, as you see in the following chart, for further growth and we see that aviation remains a growth factor and we will see growth also in the coming years. The chart also shows that we recovered fully from COVID times and are now given our results and EBITDA, even stronger than we have been in 2019. And the only major obstacle we see, despite the poor economic situation, is regulatory issues arising from Green Deal regulations on the European level. and I will come back to that issue a little bit later. So, given the situation of our expenses, you see that consumables and services used was more or less stable, reflecting the price stabilization of energy, especially we saw in 2024. Personal expenses went up 10.5%, which is the major part due to our new collective agreement of plus seven. And on the other hand, of the fact that we have 263 additional employees totaled for 2024, which was caused by the overall growth of 9%. And other expenses we see extensive maintenance work, runways, technology, Malta airport, And as one of the costs for the noise protection program of 23.9 million. And this program will be realized in the next eight years. And will hopefully bring some comfort to our neighbors. If we look at our cash flow situation, you see that the cash flow from operating activities went up 15% to $443 million due to the higher payout ratio of our dividend and additional capex. the free cash flow was reduced to 114 and you see on the other hand CapEx went up from 107 to 190 and net liquidity went up to 511 and also our equity rose by 7% to 1.667 so overall we see a very strong balance sheet and a very sound situation in regard of financing. Our balance sheet structure, I think compared 2019 to 2024, shows that our equity went up almost 300 million euros. And therefore, as I said, we have overcome the COVID problems even stronger than we have started. All that enables us to come to a record dividend, the highest ever. we had in our company of €1.65 per share, which equals a dividend yield of 3.2%. What is, I think, very, very fine, given the price increase of our share in the current periods. So one of the Factors we see for the future is that we will expand our operations here on Vienna Airport by constructing the south expansion of Terminal 3, which should bring additional revenue and profit once it's operational. We are in time and in budget. And we hope that we can open the Terminal 3 South extension in 2027. And from all what we know right now, we will be able to do it within budget and within the timeframe give up. Another expansion project is Office Park 4 expansion. Around 17,000 square meters of high quality office and conference space is planned. And a start of construction there should be in 2026. There are a lot of other projects. And we are also working alongside the project team for the third runway. and most likely we will see in 2026 how to move forward in regard of that project.

So what is the only real obstacle we see?