ADS-TEC ENERGY PLC

Welcome to our today's earnings call. My name is Dennis Müller and I'm responsible for product marketing and communication at ADS Tech Energy and will guide you through the event. Within the next 20 to 30 minutes, Thomas Beidel, CEO of ADS Tech Energy, and Stefan Bernd von Bülow, CFO of ADS Tech Energy, will announce the company's audited financial results for the full year 2024. Following the presentation, we will hold the Q&A session of approximately 10 minutes. You could submit questions via this Q4 platform during the event. The presentation includes four statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. And you'll find the detailed disclaimer within the presentation that will be available on the company's website after this event. And with that, I will hand over to Thomas Weider.

Thank you, Dennis. Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear investors, thank you for joining today. Let me just go to the agenda. We have prepared today to present a review of the full year 2024. about how we want to strengthen the partnership with our existing and new customers and what we believe can be done in further and accelerating revenues, especially recurring revenues. And we want to present our strategy for Europe and North America. And after that, I will hand it over to my colleague Stefan, the CFO, who will take you through the financials and then we will sum it up and be open for Q&A. Let's go to the review for the full year 2024. First of all, I'm really pleased and happy to say that first time ever, we can announce a positive cross profit and also a positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year. And that is what we said. And so we are happy that we have been able to deliver that. Also, prediction or what we always said is that service and recurring services will get more and more important. And so we can see that last year, the service revenues almost tripled to 5.6 million. It might be not the very highest number, but it's growing. And it's significantly growing. And so we always explain that we start with hardware, with the eco platform, and then with the hardware and the operations services will come in. We have last year increased our customer base by more than 200%, so more than doubled. to 55 customers across Europe, US and Canada. Customer in this case means that they have ordered from ADS Tech and at least got the first units from ADS Tech. We are focusing on a long-term resilient business model and we explained that several times. We are not a charging company. We are convinced that flexibility especially digital managed flexibility will play a big big role in the future and that is what we are driving forward and charging is one of the uh things we are doing and so we mentioned that multi-revenue streams based on proven technology is important and that turned out and is more and more turning out to be true here we see some pictures from the US with the charge box, which is well known. But also here you see that big storage systems are playing a role and I will come to that later. And also the awards we got, which shows that we are on the right way also from the technology and from the strategy side. Important for us is to strengthen the partnership with our first of all existing but also new clients. That is key for us and we do everything to help and support our customers and partners because based on our ecosystem, based on our technology, they can operate their own business. We always said that we have a platform and our customers, our clients, our partners can run their own business models on our ecosystem. And we are serving with services which are physical or digital. But we have announced that by end of the year, we will also accelerate the business by recurring revenues. And that is what we want to explain again here. Based on 2024, we all know that the market has been volatile. Everybody knows the news about charging then EVs went down. We had the election in the US and it was unclear what to come. But nevertheless, we said, okay, it's a long-term focus and we have to concentrate also on the margin improvements. And that is what led us to the results. which I showed at the beginning. So profitable growth was important for us in the last year. And also that we want to focus on continuing with the partnerships with the current customers, but also with new ones and the new business model. Realizing new opportunities, as mentioned, we do that with existing but also new customers. And we will act now as a full service provider to realize a complete infrastructure project. So besides our partners and customers who are running and operating the systems themselves, Customers came and said, we can provide you sites and please operate and own the sites and do it for us. And that is what we have started by end of last year and we have communicated already. One thing which is also coming back, if you know ADS Tech from the beginning, so CNI, commercial, industrial, and also utility scale battery projects have been very important for us and at the beginning. So we are getting back on track here. We mentioned that already over the last years. First, with the big projects, as with Porsche and the battery-based superchargers, we have concentrated on that. But now we are getting back also on the big storage projects. So in 2025, we will develop large scale best projects. We also have improved momentum in North America. For example, that's also public already. We want new customers such as the Corporation Parkland, which is a big customer, not only in Canada, but also with potential in the U.S. The strategy, still, we believe that ability to act is key. Only if you can control the whole stack, the full stack, then you play a role and you can adjust your business model or the business model to the latest regulations and to the specified markets. This is based on the 10 plus years of experience we had and also continuous focus on innovation, which is still a key in ADS tech. We see that here, the 360 degrees, we call it on the left side. That is what is well known. So we want to control and we control the hardware, the software and also the services, including all the digital services. And now on the right side, We started on a project-based, the own and operate business. So we will finance the sites. We do the operation, the installation, commissioning, and then get the whole revenue stream into the company, which is then the multi-revenue case, which means charging, energy trading, and, of course, advertisement. Here's some screens, some examples where we can see the charge post. The charge post is the first unit where we can combine ultra-fast charging without expanding the grid. So we save the expansion fees. We avoid demand charges and high power rates. But in addition, we get revenues from energy trading and also from advertisement. I just mentioned the renewed focus on CNI. So CNI stands for commercial industrial, but here also utility scale. Large scale systems are more and more getting popular. We can or you can see that also in the news that's international. thing, and we have developed a pipeline, and one is one of the largest, best projects in Europe. We have currently been planned, and we have applied for the grid access. You see the number. It's more than 500 megawatt and one gigawatt hours. So the request or the required land has already been secured exclusively for us, for ADS Tech Energy, and we have already applied applied for the grid connection to the TSO. So we expect that the project can start already during 2025. And also further best projects are coming in and are under development right now with our team. With that short survey, I want to hand it over to Stefan, who gives you more insights into the financials.

Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. So taking a closer look to the financials 2024. So the company achieved a revenue of 110 million for the full year 2024 compared to 107.4 million in 2023. It missed market uncertainties. ADS Tech Energy was able to exceed its previous year revenue roughly 2.5% while growing the customer base more than 200% to 55 customer across Europe, USA and Canada. In late 2024, the company effectively mitigate and resolve risk from a major customer business difficulties by acquiring nearly all the affected end customers directly, which was a significant improvement. success for the company. Worthwhile to mention, Thomas already mentioned it, that we were able to almost triple our service revenue from 2 million in 2023 to 5.6 million in 2024 due to the growing base of installed fast charging solution units. As also already mentioned by Thomas, it's the first time ever that the company can report a positive gross profit and positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024. This was mainly possible because we were able to reduce the cost of sales by 80%, so to minus 90.6 million. This results, as already mentioned in the first time, positive full year gross margin of 90.4 million, which is 70.7% for the full year. This is a significant improvement to minus 9.2 million or 2.7% in 2023. The improved gross margin could be mainly realized due to the reduced material cost and also to higher margin. So the focus in 2024 for ADS-TEC was really on a cost reduction base. This also then results in an operating result of minus 8.6 million, which was a significant improvement by 35.9 million compared to minus 44.5 million to the previous year. Similar, the adjusted EBDR could also significantly increase from minus 38.1 million to positive 2.2 million. It's really important to mention here that the adjusted EBDR only includes share-based payment and not as in the previous year reported share based payment plus write down on inventories. So inventory write downs are not included anymore in the adjusted EBITDA. The cash and cash equivalent ended by 22.9 million in the end of December. The operating cash flow was significantly improved from minus 20.7 million to 16.3 million this year. This is an improvement of 4.4 million. Taking into account that in 2023 it was not included in the operating cash flow, the capitalized R&D of 7.6 million, which was shown under investment due to IFRS rules, the year-to-year real comparison would be an improvement of 12 million on the operating cash flow. To sum this up, We have proven and highly recognized technology. We won several awards in 2024, starting with the German Innovation Award, the Green Product Award, German Environmental Award, and the Red Dot Award. Charge box and charge post have been proven by real operation data from clients. exceeding customer experience due to the very high utilization rates, which is a result of the proven and performing technology. This technology was developed for more than one decade. As a CFO, I'm basically super proud of the strong financial basis of the company. First of all, as already mentioned, we achieved the first time ever positive cross-profit and positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year. In addition, the company was able to secure a convertible note in the aggregate principal amount of 50 million in the beginning of May, be exact on the first May. In addition, we extended our existing shareholder loans for one further year until August 31st. And we can use this as a credit line, which gives us additional 25.6 million, sorry, In total, the company then has enough financial resources and ability to extend its business and invest in operating own units and changing or extending the business to this own operation. The further growth strategy, as Thomas already mentioned, we will strengthen our partnership with existing and new customers. We want to invest and accelerate in recurring revenues. We grow our customer base for more than 200% to 55 customer across Europe, USA and Canada. we will remain focusing on resilient business model backed by long-term multi-revenue and proven technology and also as already mentioned we were able to triple our service business driven by the growing install base and this will not stop in 2024 with the increased install base the service revenue is expected to further grow. With that I close it and go to the Q&A session.