Emeren Group Ltd

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by for Ameren Group fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Please note that we are recording today's conference call. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Yuji Azai, Managing Director of the Blue Shirt Group. Please go ahead, Mr. Azai.

Thank you, Operator, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss fourth quarter 2022 results. We released our shareholder letter after the market closed today. It is available on our website at ir.mrun.com. We also provided a supplemental presentation that's posted on our IR website that we will reference during our prepared remarks. On the call with me today are Mr. Yiming Liu, Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Keqian, Chief Financial Officer, and Mr. John Yuen, CEO of North America. Before we continue, please turn to slide two. Let me remind you that remarks made during this call may include predictions estimates, and other information that might be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements represent MRIN Group's current judgment for the future. However, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Those risks are described under risk factors and elsewhere in MRIN's filings with SEC. Please do not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect MRIN's opinions only as of the date of this call. everyone is not obligated to update you on any revisions to these forward-looking statements. Also, please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures mentioned during this conference call are in U.S. dollars. With that, let me now turn the call over to Mr. Yumen Liu. Yumen?

Thank you, Yuja, and good day, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. I'll give a high-level summary of our full year 2022 results and then elaborate on recent strategic initiatives as well as to provide guidance for 2023. Then Ke, the company CFO, will review our financial results for Q4 in detail. After that, we'll be joined by our North American CEO, Jiang, for the Q&A. Beginning with our financial performance, we closed the year with 81.4 million revenue, 30.1% gross margin, and 17.4 million EBITDA. amid challenging market conditions caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, volatile energy markets, inflation, supply chain disruptions, and rising interest rates. Despite these challenges, we continue to execute our core solar project development strategy, diversify our global footprint, and at once are positioning as a leading global solar company. Let me summarize our key accomplishments in 2022. First, we monetized about 192 megawatts of solar projects in 2022, compared to 128 megawatts in 2021. Those primarily include 70 megawatts of utility solar projects in Pennsylvania, 12 megawatts of community solar projects in the US, 58 megawatts of utility projects in Poland, and 12 megawatt utility projects in Germany. Second, we grow our project pipeline to our record 3 gigawatts. In the beginning of the 22, we set a goal to grow our mid- to late-stage pipeline to 3 gigawatts at the end of the year. Thanks to our team's strong execution in face of our challenging microenvironment and our strategic acquisitions, we achieved that goal. Third, we acquire a 50 megawatt fully operational Solar Farm in the UK, which initiated our European IPP strategy, which will add predictable and stable cash flows to complement our product sales business. Fourth, we acquired Ameren, an Italy-based utility-scale solar power and battery storage project developer. Ameren has over 2.5 gigawatts of pipeline under development at different stages including over 2 gigawatts of solar projects and over 500 megawatts of storage projects. Additionally, we commercialized our first inaugural IPP project in Hungary. The 10 megawatt project is our first self-developed and self-constructed IPP project in Hungary, which is another project to our growing IPP assets in Europe. And lastly, We accumulated over 1.5 gigawatt of storage pipeline. We are optimistic that storage business initiatives and growing pipeline will become an important growth driver for the company. We expect contribution from our storage business beginning from this year. Looking forward to 2023 and beyond, we are well positioned in the world's fastest growing solar markets. that are benefiting from increasing demand for clean energy, rising PPA price, and supportive government policies. For our project development business, we continue to see strong demand for solar projects globally. We entered 2023 with three gigawatts of high-quality mid- to late-stage pipeline, and we anticipate to monetize approximately 400 to 450 megawatts in 2023, and we are targeting to grow this pipeline to four gigawatts by the end of 2023. Beyond 2023, we are targeting to monetize a minimum of 500 to 600 megawatts a year. We are excited for strong contribution from our recent acquisitions, Princeton Solar Farm and Airman platform. We expect this assets to contribute approximately $20 million revenue, and $10 million EBITDA in 2023. Regarding our IPP strategy in Hungary, as a result of S&P and Fitch negative revisions to Hungary's credit rating in January 2023, due to persistently high inflation, economic weakness, and external foreign policy pressures, we have decided to explore the sale of our previously announced 50 megawatt projects in Hungary, which we expect to close sometime in the first half. For IPP strategy in Europe, including Poland, we will continue to build our planned 50 megawatt projects, but now anticipate the completion to be closer to the end of the year. In China, we are aligning our strategy to the rest of the world as develop, build, own, or sell compared to the original strategy of develop, build, and own as IPP. In conjunction, we are refocusing our efforts to five provinces that have the most favorable power prices and regulatory environment. We anticipate setting all our solar assets outside of these five provinces and some in these five focus markets, which will help strengthen our balance sheet. China made some payment of its previous renewable energy subsidies at the end of Q4 2022 and Q1 2023, of which we received approximately $8 million. This is extremely positive for the sector and increases the values of our assets in China. In terms of guidance, We expect 2023 full-year revenue to be in the range of $140 to $160 million. We expect gross margin to be approximately 30%, and net income to be between $17 million to $21 million. Ke will provide more details on our guidance momentarily. Now, let me turn the call over to our CFO, Ke Chen, to discuss our financial performance. Ke?

Thank you, Yiming, and thanks everyone again for joining us on the call today. I will now go over our financial results for the fourth quarter. As a reminder, a long gap-to-gap reconciliation is included in our shareholder letter. We use long gap measures because we believe they provide useful information about our operating performance that should be considered by investors along with the gap measures. Q4 revenue was 40.8 million, up 41% sequentially, and 79% year-over-year. Largely driven by our project development business in Europe, the U.S., and the contribution from our Brownstone acquisition. GAAP's gross profit was 11.1 million, up from 8.5 million in Q3 2022, and 7.2 million in Q4 2021. The gross margin was 27.2%. Turn to our operating expenses. Operating expenses were $6.2 million compared to $3.5 million in Q3 2022 and $8.7 million in Q4 2021. Net income attributed to Amerang Group LTD common shareholders was $4.8 million. Net income per AGS was $0.08 compared to $0.05 in Q3 2022. and lead loss per ADS of $0.02 in Q4 2021. Cash using operating activity was $7.8 million. Cash using investing activity was $0.2 million. And cash using financing activity was $5.4 million. Now let's review the balance sheet. Our cash balance as of Q4 2022 was 107 million compared to 123 million at the end of Q3 2022. The decrease was primarily due to the Emerald acquisition construction of our projects in Poland and Hungary. Our debt to asset ratio at the end of Q4 decreased to 11% compared to 12.8% in Q3 2022. Moving to our guidance. For 2023, we are changing our near-term guidance approach for the first half instead of just a quarter due to timing of project sales. For the first half of 2023, we expect revenue to be in the range of $70 million to $75 million. We expect gross margin to be between 24% to 27%. Now, we would like to open the call for any questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.

One moment for our first question.

Our first question will come from Donovan Shaffer from Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. First, I want to ask about the market in Poland. PV Tech magazine had a two-part series out this month titled Poland's Rise to European PV Heavyweight. And in that, they talked about the northern, I think it was in the northern part of Poland, there are some challenges with grid congestion because there's capacity on the grid being reserved for wind projects. But then in southern Poland, I might have those reversed, but I think that was right. Southern Poland, it was still pretty easy to get interconnections. So I'm curious if that's your experience, if you guys are kind of more in the north or the south, and if this has anything, if there's any connection here to kind of the delay you talked about bringing the Poland projects on in the second half of the year versus kind of your earlier thinking. Thank you, Donovan.

It's a very good question. In fact, that is exactly the challenges we are facing in Poland. We were preparing for the 50 megawatts in Poland IPP gradually in the 12 months, straight up. But as of the conjectures in the grid approval, that the start of the construction process gets a little bit delayed. We are looking towards the end of the year to connect the the IPP portfolios in Poland. But even so, our projects in Poland remains to be very diverse across both south and north. And Poland remains to be one of the biggest markets for our company in Europe.

Okay, great. That's helpful. And then turning to China, I'm curious if you can give us an update on the process of selling off some of those assets, you know, in the prepared remarks and in the letter to shareholders, you know, it sounds like there was some improvement there with the, um, subsidy payments. I think before I'm correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I believe on the last, on the third quarter call, you suggested you might sell as much as a hundred megawatts in China. Um, and 20, uh, 2023. I don't know if that's still the case. Has anything changed there where you're not trying to sell off as much of those assets as quickly? Just kind of an update there would be great.

Okay. China sees three major changes as I described earlier. One is we refocus our China development activities to only five provinces. In the past, we were working on projects in about 10 to 12 different provinces. Now we are more focused. Number two is we have over 160 megawatts of the projects spread out in about 10 different provinces. And we have made the decision literally end of last year to get very focused, sell all the projects outside of the five focus provinces, and also even sell some of the projects in the five focus markets. So the number we are considering selling is around half of the current portfolio of 160 plus megawatts. So the ballpark, you said 100 megawatt number is not too big a difference as we talk about 70, 80 megawatts for now as our minimum target. The third one is we also have started our storage commercial scale storage project development in Zhejiang province. And we do plan to focus on certain areas in those markets and build up those storage portfolios in China. I'd like to, would you comment on the subsidy payment?

Yes, Donald, I just want to comment on the subsidy payments. Again, at the end of December, we saw this subsidy coming in. which were surprised to everyone in the China market, that drive up the value of all the projects in China. So originally we actually tried to sell around five to six megawatts in China in December. Because of this changes, the valuation changes, we hold up about like four to five projects we didn't sell. decided to delay that sale in 2023 because all this valuation changes. And again, in 2023, we continue to see this pattern of subsidized payment. Even though there is some uncertain timing, we believe the Chinese government will continue paying some of these subsidies. So that really helps us to re-evaluate the valuation of all our China assets, which is very beneficial for us this year.

Okay, that's great. And if I can get just one more question in, I want to ask, with the converting to a New York-based auditor who is subject to the public account of PCAOB oversight, I know that addresses the I forget the name of the law, but there was the thing that was threatening, you know, delisting actions. So you guys have taken that step, but I'm curious if, um, you've had any more thinking about or any thoughts around whether you guys might consider converting to, you know, like a more direct listing in the U S, uh, instead of the, the ADR listing the way you guys currently have it. Just curious if there've been any developments on that.

Yes. Um, I think, uh, First of all, our shareholder structure has changed also completely. Most of our shareholders here in the U.S., so that's a good thing for us as we focus on, many focus on the European and the U.S. market right now. Secondly, yes, we are changing also to match the PCAOB rules. So, again, the next step, natural step for us is to fire 10Q, 10K in 2024, which will give more transparency to the shareholders. So then we will go from there to think about the next step, what we should do if we should change to a direct listing instead of ADR.

So you're saying that in 2024 it would be a 10K filing and not a 20F filing? Is that right?

Yes.

Oh, interesting. Okay. All right. Thank you, guys. I'll take the rest offline. Thank you, Donald.

Thank you. One moment for our next question. And our next question will come from the line of Philip Shen from Roth. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Quick follow-up on the China asset base. Given the subsidy payments that you got in December and the increase in the value of those assets, can you quantify in any way how much higher that value is now of your 168 megawatts on balance sheet? What was the aggregate value before, and then how much do you think it increased by? Thanks.

We see two things, Phil.

Number one is the value absolutely goes up as when we are, we were, or we have been in the process, sales process, setting the projects, talking to our interested buyers, and we see the price is going up. So the, I don't want to discuss the details as we are still in the sales process for at least two portfolios in China. Okay. The second is we do see that the, not only us, but a many many solar companies have received in during this period about three to four months time starting from december last year to about february this year that receive a total billions of subsidy payment and that is a big encouragement to solar companies and that is why we see more interest coming into the play into the game that people are hoping to own more solar farms owning the cash flows. So with that in mind that we see the more buyers coming in and the value absolutely is going up.

Phil, let's give you some color. Phil, we cannot talk about the actual pricing because it's very confidential, but from the people look at the account receivable discount, it used to be like 30 to 40%. Now this only maybe only 10% discount. So that's how much is changed.

Okay. All right. That's great. Thanks. Can you talk about how many megawatts of the China of the 168 megawatts you could sell in 23? You know, you talked about focusing on five provinces, but when you aggregate it all, you know, what's the expectation in terms of how much you could sell this year?

Okay, twofold. One is other than the five focus markets, we have about 70 megawatts, and we target to sell all of them. And also in the five focus markets, we have another partial new one and legacy ones, possibly another almost 100 megawatts. We'll sell part of them. So that's the target. That's why I mentioned earlier that our target is to sell about half of our portfolio.

Okay, awesome. Thanks, Yiming. So shifting over to your guidance, can you give us a sense for the mix? So of the $150 million midpoint revenue for 23, what's the rough mix between IPP revenue versus... modernization revenue? Would you expect to have a greater mix this year versus last year? And then can you also give the geographic mix? Do you still expect Europe to be the vast majority of your revenue, or do you think the U.S. can catch up this year? Thanks.

Yes, let me answer this. So geographically, first of all, I believe Europe is still the most important market for us. I think we see roughly around 63% around Europe. And from China, around 22%, and from US, 15%. So that's the geographical breakdown. In terms of the business type, I think because we talk about, again, the COD sale in Hungary, so we're looking at, again, about 50 percent revenue from there and also poland and roughly 33 30 like 32 33 percent uh from the ngp rxp sale and uh risk about 20 percent from ipp business great okay thanks for all the detail uh good um now

You guys talked about the modernization presumed in your guidance is for 400 to 450 megawatts of solar. How much storage is assumed in your 23 guidance? Storage sales, thanks.

In fact, it's not included in this 450 or 400 to 450 megawatts. But we absolutely believe we will have either I don't want to disclose this number, but it will be a good contribution to the 2023 number, both from Europe and China, and also part of them from the U.S., as we do have PV plus storage projects. We expect to sell them in 2023 in the U.S.

Right. So in your $150 million revenue guidance for 2023, you have a storage estimate or revenue contribution from storage in there. Is that fair?

Yes.

Great. Okay, and you can't share from a megawatt hour standpoint what that might represent. Is it a healthy fraction of the 400 megawatts, maybe like 100 megawatt hours? Is it that high or is it too high?

No, I mentioned that in the revenue, yes, we considered, but the 400 megawatts of the number, the sale, does not include the stock. Yeah.

Right. Okay. Well, we can talk more about that later, I guess. One last question, and I'll turn it over. In terms of the banking turmoil in the U.S., I know the vast majority of business is not here in the U.S., but our view is that the market hasn't really changed. The cost of financing really hasn't changed too much for utility scale. but was curious if you could talk about what your customers are experiencing, not just here in the U.S., but maybe also in Europe, if there's anything there to talk through. Is it even possible that the cost of capital is actually getting better, maybe going lower for your U.S. customers because the base rates have come down so much and the spreads have not widened as much? So just curious if you can talk through how that banking – turmoil in the U.S. is impacting your business and if there's anything to talk through for Europe as well.

Thanks. Why don't you cover Europe and talk about U.S.?

Yes. Again, we check all our customers, our clients. We didn't see any change currently from Europe. Again, our customers and clients are I mean, again, their banking system is all sound and we were positive about all our relationship with them right now. We didn't see any change for right now.

Yeah, I think to a point that when we sell our projects in Europe, we still see a strong long list of the interested parties. So we don't really see a change. And even with the high PPA price as big demand in Europe, we still see the value or the very encouraging price offered to us and not really impacted by high interest rate.

Great. Is that true for the U.S. as well?

Yeah, man, I can help you too. Go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, it's a little bit maybe of a frustrating answer, but keep in mind that even in the community side, we're dealing with projects that have a two to three year wavelength from start to finish. And on the utility side, it's longer than that. So a short term blip related to a specific bank's balance sheet or concentrate customer concentration risk or something like that, even though they do have a renewables lending business, specifically SVB wasn't an issue for us. I think the longer wavelength issue is the cost to borrow, you know, over, you know, multi, even when folks buy our projects, they don't, they haven't locked in necessarily the exact term financing that they're going to put in place in a large, you know, a super large project. that still might be a year away from construction, even though they've technically bought it from us. So, you know, the real answer is we're insulated from it just because we don't, our deals don't, you know, move basis points when there's basis points moves with the, you know, from policy. That said, the longer wavelength issue of interest rates and cost of borrow absolutely will affect us long-term. But the PPA and those are most likely related to inflation drivers or other macro policy stuff happening federally. And the PPA rates are likely responding to that as well. And I maintain, I mean, it's a biased opinion, obviously, but I maintain that the value of development stays constant and maybe gets even more valuable as the value as the presence or the availability of high quality development assets get smaller and smaller because there's literally fewer and fewer good places to put solar type thing. I think in the US, the development margin is more a function of the supply and demand of high quality development. Even though everything you said, yes, higher interest rates will make cost of money more expensive for the projects. But then again, PPA rates are also rising as well. So the sliver that we occupy in development stays pretty protected.

Great. Thanks, John. I was actually making the argument that perhaps rates might be coming down for solar specifically because rates are coming down and the spreads I don't think have widened as much, certainly for a resi, but I think also for utility scale.

Yeah, but even on a resi deal, you know, the life cycle of a resi deal might be six to nine months or something. It's been a while since I've really paid attention to what their sales cycles are to construction, but it's certainly shorter than ours. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'd also probably use my argument against me and say, if there's quick movements down, we wouldn't see that instantly, but eventually, you know, it would catch up with us.

Great. Thanks very much, guys. I'll pass it on. Thank you, Phil.

Thank you.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Pavel Malkinov from Raymond James. Your line is open.

Thanks for taking the question. Last time we connected, I guess it was in November, there were still a lot of fear in the European electricity market about what would happen this winter. And of course, since then, we've seen a pretty dramatic decline in coal prices, natural gas prices, and therefore power. I'm curious how the current state of project economics, from your perspective, compares to what we saw last year, But if we zoom out a little bit, how does it compare relative to historical levels as well?

Very interesting question, Paolo. The quick answer to this one is the current merchant price of Europe in most countries are still in the around $150 per megawatt hour, which is significantly higher than the normal predicted tariff back to 12 to 18 months ago. In our financial model back to 18 months ago, I'm talking about the end of 2021. In general, we use about $80 around in the PPA price. And now you hear 150, around 150. It's around two times. So the tariff still provide a very healthy economics to the solar farms. That is why the development of business on the solar project side is still very, very healthy. Also, another point is, in many countries in Europe, as of this strong demand of the solar, the banks allow for even merchant-level financing. It was not the case back two, three years ago. But now, as the price stays pretty firm with the high demand in Europe, the merchant-based financing is very possible in quite several countries.

Yeah, Pavel, I just want to add, again, Hungary, we have 10 megawatts today. Merchant price still at 150 euro per megawatt hour. And our Brownstone project, we did sign four-year PPA.

uh long-term ppa average over 150 pounds per hour so for us we are still pretty good staying on the european topic you you know you discussed the macro headwinds in the hungarian market thinking about the opportunity kind of from the opposite perspective are there any Since Europe, you are not currently operating, but you are seeing interesting opportunities to perhaps establish a presence.

You know, Paolo, I missed yours a little bit, a couple points, but let me try to understand. You talk about Hungary only or generally Europe?

Well, are there any countries in Europe where you are considering establishing a presence?

Oh, yes. Hungary, we've been in Hungary for over six years by far, or even a little bit longer if you talk about old-time module sales. We still believe Hungary is an important, a good market for us doing project development, although we decided not too long ago as of the rating change to sell our long-term plan, the long-term IPP assets. Okay. But in other countries are, if you pay attention to the, uh, uh, the market, we are currently in literally the seven countries in Europe. We have most of them, uh, very, very high level country country credit rating. Okay. And we do plan to do in more countries, not only development, but also apply our general IPP strategy. For example, not beyond UK, we are considering some other countries like Spain, like Italy, like France, and beyond Poland too. All those countries we are considering building IPP assets.

And then lastly, switching to the United States, throughout last year, module supply was a problem for a variety of regulatory and protectionist reasons. Is it fair to say that today module supply is back to, let's say, pre-COVID normal levels?

Yes and no. Okay.

In the U.S., in fact, I would not say that we are getting to the level of the pre-COVID, but in fact, the price is better than the pre-COVID as I see it. The thing I say is not as good as pre-COVID is the forecast of the pricing trend. Pre-COVID, like three years ago, people forecasted the price of the modules per watt will go to 20 cents or lower. And it's not the case and jumped to doubled instead of 20 cents. And Europe is absolutely going that way. Pre-COVID or even going to more aggressive going into 12 months from today. But the U.S., I don't see those below $0.20 module price, but I see it's absolutely lower than the pre-COVID price.

That's very helpful. Thank you.

Thanks. Thank you, Paolo.

Thank you. And as a reminder, that's star 11 for questions, star 11. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Amit Dayal from HC Wainwright. Your line is open.

Thank you, Graf and everyone. Could you give us a little bit more color on the storage business model? Are these basically sales that are attached to, you know, your project sales or your IPP, you know, build out? And how the margins, you know, for the storage side of the deployment flow comes through for you guys?

Okay, the storage business is really different from country to country or region to region. US, we have the biggest portfolio of the storage at PV+, that's attached to the solar farms. That is one side of the story. Similar thing in some European countries, like in Poland, in Italy, in France. But at the same time that we are also developing independent standalone storage facilities in U.S., in Poland, in Spain, in France, in Italy. I will say, as we announced that we have over 1.5 gigawatts, not gigawatt hours, gigawatts of storage portfolios, and I will say about 60%, 70% of them are attached to the solar farms in all different countries, but another at least about 600, 700 megawatts or minimum, those are independent solar storage facilities. In China, we are also developing smaller scale or we call commercial scale storage facilities focusing only in certain markets. Zhejiang, for example, as we do see the opportunity to make pretty nice margin building up the need or building up the facilities to meet the need of the customers. And storage, as we mentioned, it will become a very good factor starting this year contributing to our numbers to the company.

Okay, understood. I have some other questions on this, but I'll take that up with you after this call. And then just one more from me on the net income guidance. Are you factoring any uptake in interest income from the cash balance that you have?

Oh, yes. We are very concerned. You're right. Yes. We're taking advantage of a high-interest, yeah, deposit.

Okay. Understood. Yeah, that's all I have for now. My other questions are already addressed. Thank you.

Thank you, Ahmed.

Thank you. And I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I'll just turn the conference back to Mr. Liu for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Operator. We are thrilled to share our strategy is rock solid and our execution record is outstanding. Our profitability is constantly on the rise and we are pumped up with excitement for the opportunities that lie ahead. We can't wait to keep you updated on our progress in the coming months and we sincerely thank you for being a part of this journey with us. If you have any inquiries, please do not hesitate to reach out to our investment relations team. This concludes our call today. You may all disconnect.