Andritz Ag Graz Akt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Andris' quarter three results webcast. I'm Susan Trust, head of group communications and marketing, and I will be moderating today's webcast. I would like to introduce our president and CEO, Joachim Schoenbeck, and our CFO, Norbert Nettesheim. After the presentations, you will have the possibility to ask questions. Now, without further ado, I would like to hand it over to our CEO, Joachim, please.

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning also from my side. Thank you very much for attending our call. Yeah, we have to recognize that our biggest wish for this year did not materialize. We were looking for the first year since a while without a global impact and a global new crisis, which unfortunately did not happen. We faced the war against Hamas in Israel and Gaza, and we are a bit uncertain what will result from that for the months to come. On the other side, we also had some good news. The constant increase of interest rates came to a halt. So in Europe as well as in the US, interest rates did not increase further. Also, inflation came down, which we believe is a good sign for what is to come. And then for the first time since more than a year, the Korean export has risen over its year-to-year comparison figure for the first time since 13 months in October, which we also believe is a good sign that the global economy might improve. might improve from what is to come. Looking to the impacts from the war on Hamas in Israel, on hundreds, we can heavily report that the impacts are low. We had only four orders in total, with a total order volume. of around 50 million euro with an order backlog of 20 million euro so we expect this is going to be suspended a bit we had we had cleared all our construction construction sites there and can report that all hundreds personnel returned safely to their homes our own operations in israel our daughter company otorio focusing on cybersecurity. Operations have been a bit impacted by the services the employees had to do. They were called in to the army partially, but we can report that all services for our international contracts could be fully performed as promised to the customers. So if we go to the hundreds, numbers for the third quarter. We could continue the strong growth in revenue and earnings. And out of the still high backlog, order booking was significantly down compared to third quarter of 2022. We had two large pulp and paper orders booked in the third quarter of last year. with roughly 1 billion in total, and that is for sure what we are missing out. So, therefore, the order intake is down, but we are not greatly concerned about that. Revenue is up by 11% to 2.1 billion. The backlog is still healthy with above 10 billion. The EBITDA went up by 16% on a quarter-to-quarter basis to 176 million euro and the EBITDA margin in the third quarter increased from 8.1 to 8.4%. The net income rose by 27% to 125 million euro in the third quarter. Quick look on the year to date, on the first three quarters of the year. So we still can report a book to bill ratio of still above one with order intake of 6.5 billion euro and revenue of 6.2 billion euro, even though the order intake was down from last year's. 7.5 billion. On a backlog, I reported EBITDA year-to-date 9 is 509 million euro. The EBITDA margin remains stable compared to last year at 8.2% and the net income of 346 million was up more than 30%. So we made an, we believe, important acquisition. We acquired a data international. It's a leading engineering company offering complementary technologies in growing markets with a very good fit on the technical side as well as on the regional side. We have with our combined portfolio, we can enable complete solutions now for dewatering and drying. for starch, biofuel, and food industry. All three markets, we believe, will significantly grow over the next years. Founded already in 1968, DEDAT has already a significant installed base, so sustaining a very stable service business on that. and we further improve our readiness for new markets we believe to develop that is on plant-based proteins as well as lithium processing. The data will be reported in our business area separation. Revenue is about 90 million and we have roughly 100 employees. Further on, we acquired the company Nuff. It's a manufacturer of manual automated control valves, safety process control, mainly for the pulp and paper industry. It's a strong legacy company, more than 100 years history in pulp and paper with an, I would say, appropriately installed base. It's based in Linköping in Sweden. Very good technical products, a bit neglected over the past years and we believe that within our pulp and paper will be an important acquisition for us to further improve our automation, digitalization business as well as providing full solutions to our customers. This will be reported in our pulp and paper business area. This year's revenue will be about 15 million 50 employees and we believe that from there we can generate a strong growth. Look to the performance in the third quarter in more detail. We can say that the service and mid-size projects are well on track. For sure, we're missing the large orders in pulp and paper, the one, as I said, the one billion from last year in quarter three that made a significant gap. However, as you can see, we could grow all other business areas in order intake also in the third quarter of this year, especially hydro. Hydro is up by 7%, metals up by 1% in separation by 4%. That is quite good considering the circumstances we in general have. Here you can see the order intake split up in service, smaller capital orders and these large capital orders and you can see that it's quite stable even growing in the service and it's stable in the smaller capital order business on the Of course, the very large orders were not on the market, so we could say that we did not lose significantly, but circumstances at the moment are for sure not for the very high investments. We have a significant increase of revenue based on the execution of our healthy backlog. So all business areas could increase their revenue substantially. Pulp and paper up 13%, metals up 14%, hydro up 6%, separation was up 7%. First of all, it's good that we could roast the revenue, that we could diligently execute the large orders, that we could overcome the supply chain bottlenecks, that we are well on track in executing the orders on time and budget. We are very happy that the service business is continuously growing. We have over a five-year period compound annual growth rate of 9%, which is well above the general trend. And you could see that from the $3 billion in 2022, if we now... Compared with the last four quarters, it's significantly up. And it shows that we are on the right track in growing this business stronger and further than the capital business. You could see in the third quarter, revenue is nicely up. for the entire group from 763 million in last year to 829 million and all business areas contributed to that. If we look this at a larger scale on the year-to-date nine, increases is even larger we could grew from 2.1 billion to 2.4 billion the total service revenue in pulp and paper we are up to by more than 130 million to 1.3 billion metals nicely grew from 286 million to 330 million hydro went up from 352 to 450 million and also separation even though they already have a 41 percent share they could grow to 464 million euro the service business so we are very happy that we can even in a more challenging market environment, increase the service revenues and that for sure has also a lot to do with the good capital business, with the good market shares we could develop in the projects over the past years when the big projects were on the market. The order backlog is still favorably high, €10.4 billion. The majority comes from pulp and paper and from hydro, and of course the majority comes from the large capital orders. Only €2.3 billion out of that is related to service business. We have a significant increase in earnings and it shows that we, despite the challenges we had, that profitability remains very good. So the EBITDA went up from 426 million to 509 million at a constant profitability of 8.2. If we adjust that for extraordinary items, we went up from the 423 million to 513 million. That's even up 21%, as we had a positive impact last year with the sale of a property. And we had this year some smaller restructuring barriers in the order of 4 million euro. In total, I think it's a stable profitability we can report. And the same applies if we look to the various business areas. stable in pulp and paper, hydro and separation, and very nice development in metals, significantly up in the profitability from 2.3% to 4.5%, showing that we are on the right track there. So the details to the financials will be reported to you by our CFO, Norbert Nettersheim. Norbert, if you please continue.

Yeah, thank you for passing on to me. Ladies and gentlemen who are on the call, also good morning from my side. I'm happy to have a pleasure to present you this time again an increase in interest Net income margin, start this time at the right side of this slide, 5.6% net income margin, a number which we didn't see for hundreds, at least as long as I can look back to the past. And this is the result of, let's say, the very good operational performance Joachim explained already, EBITDA. The rest from EBIT 8 down to net income is pretty much unchanged compared to previous periods, so I will not reflect too much on that. The only thing to mention here is that with the amortization we have a major impact now, which certainly creates a little bit of a tailwind for net income. This is simply due to the fact that the Schuler IFRS amortizations are over now after the acquisition in 2013. It helps a little bit technically, but let's say the major impact comes from the real operational results. And this we see then also in the net income. The next topic which also is now an issue which shows a little bit of an improvement compared to what we showed you in the first half here. You maybe remember that in the first half here I elaborated a little bit on this net working capital changes at Andretz. We had a huge impact on cash flow by the increase of the net working capital in the normal cycle of operating business. In the first two quarters, it was about 360 million. And I told you also in the last call that this trend of increasing working capital will not continue in the same way as it did in the first half here. So in Q3, we saw only another good 30 million cash relevant increase in working capital. So in total, we expect that this is now, let's say, mostly digested. Depends a little bit on all the income intake of the last quarter. on the down payments and prepayments from new orders but again I would say we will not see similar effects as we saw it in Q1 or Q2 means now with this let's say slowing down of this increase in working capital we show now also a positive cash flow of 75 million and for the quarter We have here more than 150 million cash flow. That means in Q3, we brought more or less our results also into the treasure box. Cash conversion rate was favorably back to nearly one in Q3. In the small box at the right upper side of the chart you see the explanations on working capital and I simply want to point out line 1, line 2 and the second line before the end. These exactly are the lines which increased due to the execution of the large orders, increase in contract assets, increase in inventories, and increase in advance payments to suppliers. This is simply the normal effect out of the execution of the major orders where we got the down payments in previous periods. Generally, prepayment situation is pretty stable. So what we consumed, we also got. So the last line contract liabilities is nearly stable, which means that, as I said before, we are coming now more in a steady state of working capital developments. That's it on cash flow. And because it's so important, I added two slides. additional slides on that. Here you see the average cash flow of the last full seven years was more than 300 million. So it means when you remember the operational results of the last seven years, we are more or less bringing everything down to the cash flow, what we report in profits. And you can trust that we are heavily working to continue this in the future. And with regard to the quarter-to-quarter, view on operating cash flow. I have added here, only as a one-time slide, just this month, this quarter, a quarterly view on the cash flow, and you see here how significantly it is fluctuating from quarter to quarter so these comparisons quarter three to quarter three of previous years is mostly very much influenced by the by the order intake situation and by the by the down payment situation for the large orders when you Go to the three years rolling average, which you see at the right side of this slide. It's a much more stable business and the numbers are much more favorable as we see them from one quarter maybe to the next quarter. So this is just a little bit of an education, but allow this please for my side to get a little bit clarity into this cash flow development topic. So that's about the cash flow. Cash flow ends at the end in the liquidity and the balance sheet. and also here you see that from the end of the second quarter to end of the third quarter we have improved the net liquidity went up by 125 million the gross liquidity didn't go up that much reason was very simply that we are still in the process of let's say optimizing our balance sheet a little bit so we paid back 100 million of debt in the Q3, which then, let's say, leaves us still a very comfortable cost liquidity of 1.6 million. And compared to the size of our company, I would say we are here in a very favorable position and we are ready to execute whatever has to be executed and where we need cash for. So that's about the liquidity situation. And last but not least here, this summary slide more for you to read in the papers. Most is set. Order intake, URFM has emphasized on, huge order is missing. Revenues significantly increased. Cash flow influenced by networking capital. topic at the last line I would quickly emphasize on employees increased but most of this increase is due to acquisitions and due to temporary effects in the staff on construction sites which as soon as construction site is done then also will be adjusted so it's not an increase in fixed cost capacities or in fixed capacities and will not be a burden for the future periods. So that's it from my side. Pass back to Joachim. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Norbert, for the explanations. Let's have a quick look to the various business areas, starting with pulp and paper. First, have a view on the markets of our customers, which usually give a good indication what is going to come. We could see in September very nicely for the first time since 11 months, we could see an increase in prices in northern bleach softwood craft. That's, I would say, a significant market turn for bleached eucalyptus craft. We could already see four months consecutive price increase. So I think that is good, even though demand for paper on board still remains below levels of 2022. I would say these are first good signs. With that, and we believe that also the... ability for investments will increase next year with our customers, even though we do not expect a large greenfield project in the next year to come. So therefore, we are cautious in planning and we, as you have learned in the previous years, On the capital side, we are very, I would say, very used to be very adaptable in our capacities to serve the large projects when they come and not to go into restructuring when they don't come. So this flexibility is there. However, we still see a demand for modernizations and also for the new businesses with the green products, the side stream utilization in the pulp mills. That is definitely going to come. Order intake in the third quarter, low to 600 million. Backlog... dropped due to the execution of these large orders by about 18%. Revenue nicely up by 13% to almost 1 billion, and the EBITDA with a margin of 10.3% on a very satisfactory level. Looking to metals, The situation of the metals customers is, I would say, is still good. Relatively high investment activity is still going on. Steel prices came down from the peak in May 2022, but still at very healthy levels. And investment activities in the steel industry basically are focused around, first of all, the green steel and undertakings as well as the e-mobility. And for both of these activities, we have many products to offer. We have the green hydrogen electrolyzers, carbon capture activities, On the battery side, we are providing, I would say, state-of-the-art technologies we received on order for a pilot line for this next generation solid-state lithium-ion batteries. I would say that's a very significant step in our direction. Silicon steel will become of high demand to accommodate all these motors needed for the mobility. Weight reduction vehicles will play an even more important role and fuel cells for trucks. you might have learned that significant investments have going on there and we also part of that. And you can see that the financials very favorably developed in the third quarter as well as in the first three quarters. order intake well up in the year-to-date nine, basically driven by metals processing, order backlog nicely up by 13%, even though also the revenue by 14% in the quarter and 19% on the year-to-date nine. With EBITDA, significantly increased from 40 million to 63 million from 3.6 to 4.7 percent on the year to date on the year to date nine um i would say confirming that we are that we are moving in the right direction we would like to bring your attention to the to the first large order we have received for our green hydrogen activities. It's one of the largest electrolyzer orders in Europe so far. It's a 100 megawatt installation for green hydrogen from the steel company Salzgitter in Germany. It's a pressurized alkaline electrolyzer with technology from hydrogen probe. And we will deliver basically the plan and process engineering, piping, automation. We have the assembly of the electrolyzer stacks. That's the, I would say, the core element of the electrolyzers and the installation and the building. So we are very happy that after Coppe Energia in Finland, who gave us the feed contract in the second quarter that we now have the first firm delivery contract. So looking to hydro, that's for sure one of the market segments where market prospects are still very favorable. We see market picking up basically in all regions except Latin America. And while in EMEA and in North America, it is mainly related to modernizations and rehabilitations. We see new build in China and in APAC. So it's a good mix. Hydro will have a very high strategic relevance for the energy transformation that is planned in many countries around the world. It is important for grid stability out of the inertia of the technology employed and of course it's very important that a gravity is available 24-7 which is not the case for all renewable energies. If we look at the numbers, you can see that the order intake and revenue is up compared to last year. The EBITDA Margin is down from last year as the difficulties we had in the longer lasting hydro projects from the supply chain issues over the past years, especially what came from the Ukrainian war, materialized only now and so therefore I would say we need some more months to address that. So the EBITDA margin is down to 5% in the first three quarters, down from 5.3%, but we believe that we have cleared out now these orders. Looking to Our last business area separation, we have an order intake which is up in the third quarter but which is slightly down in the first three quarters to 909 million stable backlog. The revenue increased substantially in the third quarter as well as in the first three quarters. And here we can happily say that the growth that is prevailing and is based on the good growth in the service business, which also helps our profitability in the markets we are serving in separation, also investment decisions have been a bit delayed for the large capital orders and therefore we had to make up from the service. We had on the third quarter, we had a very nice development on the EBITDA, EBITDA margin up to 12.2% and we are confident that we can further increase the service share in that business and maintain the good profitability. Coming to the outlook, market outlook as I said basically not changed. Financial guidance for 2023 is confirmed. We see an impact on the investment and project decisions. We see a relatively constant and good demand for the green products and also service remains stable enable us to grow that business the economic and geopolitical environment is closely challenged closely monitored by us so we will continue for 23 with a profitable growth and we repeat that we anticipate a significant increase in revenue and earnings and we expect a stable profitability on the EBITDA margin level compared to 2022. So thank you very much for listening to our presentation and if there are any questions we are happy to answer.

Yes, thank you for your insights, Joachim and Norbert. So next we will move on to a Q&A session. To ask a question, please follow the instructions you should see on the screen now. I would also like to remind you that you need to press star five to start the question. The lines are now open, so please go ahead.

Please state your name and company. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Good morning, can you hear me?

Yes.

Yes, hi, good morning. It's Akash here from J.P. Morgan. If I can start, I have two questions, please. The first one is on pulp and paper odor intake. So you had 615 million in the quarter and you were sounding a bit cautious on the green field where you don't expect any more orders in 2024. The question I have is that you also sounded a little bit optimistic on some given some improvement in pulp prices. So the question is more about what sort of order and rate shall we expect going forward? Because if I annualize 615, it will be substantially below what market expectations are. So maybe if you can talk about the prospect for pulp and paper order intake in the next 12 months.

Agos, thank you very much for the questions. As I said, the large greenfield projects, we anticipate rather for 2025 than for 2024. We for sure will grow the service business further also for next year. for the medium-sized modernizations and potential side streams, biomethanol, lignin separation, these areas. There are projects and as we see the prices on our customer base, is developing further, we also believe that we will see some improved investment activities in the next year. So we would consider a quarter of 616 rather the bottom of the cycle than that we expect that to continue further.

Thank you. And my second question is on M&A pipeline. You announced a mid-size deal in the quarter. We see that the multiple in the equity market have come down a lot since the start of the year, and you have a very overcapitalized balance sheet. Maybe if you could talk about what sort of activity are you seeing in your M&A pipeline and is there any potential target that could be size of, let's say, Shuler or Xerium, for example. Thank you.

Yeah, we are, as you could see from the acquisitions we made, we are further targeting that. We are looking on opportunities. For sure, we are in the position to proceed with acquisitions of our interest. We will stay with our basic philosophy on acquisitions that it should be complementary to our existing business. So direct competition will definitely be monitored very carefully. And I would say the focus definitely is on the service business and the automation side. We will continue that, and we are active in some discussions already.

Thank you. I'll go back in queue now.

The next question comes from Sven Weier from UBS. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear.

Yeah, very good. Thank you. Listen, the first question I had was more precisely on Q4, right? Because we've all seen that Q3 was very, very silent, let's say, on big tickets. You just had this green hydrogen order, but otherwise it was relatively quiet. Now, when we start to look at your press releases that you had since the beginning of Q4, it was actually quite noisy, especially on the pulp side. I mean, I have no idea how big these orders are. But I guess you just said that the order intake in Q3 you had in part was probably the bottom. Is it fair to believe that Q4 could already show a tangible upswing just simply because you already had a few big tickets? And maybe the same question also for the other divisions. Thank you.

Thank you for the question. It was a quiet quarter. If you look to pulp and paper, I think we have, even with a very reserved environment we have, we could increase the order intake in the other three business areas that should not be overlooked. We believe that the fourth quarter On the pulp and paper side, we expect some improvements. But of course, the difficulty with the future is that we don't know it. But as I said, we expected or we believe that the Q3 order intake on the pulp and paper side is on the bottom side of the cycle.

And in the other three divisions, what is the activity there? I mean, it was good in Q3, no doubt, but do you also see some big tickets for the other three divisions for Q4?

We for sure see something in hydro. And for metals, we would rather see it on a continuous compared to the To the previous quarter this year, I have to say that I don't have the quarterly figures for the oil divisions from last year now in my head. So I cannot really judge on that. But I would expect them order intake stable compared with Q3 of this year.

Thank you. And just my question then on the hydro margin, you already mentioned maybe there was still a delayed impact from inflation. I was just wondering, I think you said that might still continue for a few months. So do you think that the issue will be dealt with by the end of this year and then 2024, there's no more impact on this? Or how should we think about the hydro margins?

Yeah, we believe so. That is a fair assumption. We had to clear out certain supply chain issues which surfaced during this year only. As you know, many of these hydro projects, they continue over five, six, seven years. So we usually have price adjustment clauses in. So Inflation will finally be, I would say, shared between the customers and ourselves. But usually the mechanisms are such that we clear that with the customer rather at the end of the project than on a consecutive base. But of course, we have to account for the costs to come as soon as we know them. So therefore, I would say we have a time shift there which has impacted the profitability. And we believe that we will be back to a stable situation next year.

The final question, if I may, is just, Again, on hydro, and you talked about the regional prospects. I mean, I'm wondering also more specifically about Africa, right? I mean, we all know there's a huge untapped potential there, but I guess in the past also maybe more politically difficult to get the project ahead. I mean, now with the overall energy transition going on, do you sense... kind of a renewed momentum in Africa that things are getting done or starts to be done or do you still think that will take quite a few years until we see more?

We are not very upbeat that we could increase our order intake from Africa substantially. Last year we booked a large project in Senegal You might recall that. And we rather believe that this will continue on that level. A political environment is definitely more of relevance to the development of the African market than, I would say, the desire for energy transition in the Western world. I would say it's a more slow process.

Understood. Thank you very much, Dr. Schoenbeck.

Thank you.

It seems that we don't have any more questions coming from the audience. So this means that we will conclude this webcast. So ladies and gentlemen, one more. Okay, please.

Please state your name and company. Please go ahead.

Hi, it's Akash here from J.P. Morgan again with a follow-up. The follow-up question I have is that you have announced a capital market stay on January 24th, and I'm wondering if you can talk about what shall we expect. You have done some change in the segment structure last year, so will it be fair to expect a new margin target for the segments? Thank you.

Yeah, we can, that is what you can expect, margin targets for the segments and I would say more refined strategy and I would say a renewed roadmap as the 2022 to 2024 roadmap is coming to its, basically to its end.

Are there any more questions coming up? One, I believe.

The next question comes from Peter Rotheneicher from Veda Bank AG. Please go ahead.

Yes, hello, gentlemen. So in the quarterly report you have, as in the half-year report, once again the statement of risk of capacity adjustments needed. Comment a little bit how evident is this looking into 2024? So in particular, what do you consider is the situation regarding capacity utilization for the big pulp projects? Is there a risk of some necessary adjustments? And is this statement only referring then to pulp and paper?

No, we don't. As I said, we are quite... We are quite used to the capacity adjustments between the years when we have these large projects under executions and the years where we don't have that. So the capacity adjustments we need to do are in the majority of a temporary kind and will not have a significant impact on the bottom line of our results. So we are quite used to that process and therefore we It's only that we need to maintain our ability to deliver the large projects over the times when they are not on the market.

Another question regarding the hydrogen project. So I saw you now explicitly booked them. within the metals. Can you comment what is the reason for putting it into metals and not pulp and paper? And does this mean all hydrogen projects or activities are then booked within metals?

You are right to question that, but we now happily have the first big order from a steel customer, so you could think it's the right place to book it. It is part of metals as it developed from our own development around that and that came from metals as we have electrolysis. technology available in metals from our galvanizing plants. So, this is where it originates and this is why we have it in metals. But you could also see that we are serving various industries with that. KUPE Energia is from the energy utility sector. Salzgitter is from the metal sector. So, therefore, it's a It's more historically driven than the outcome of a clear market consideration.

With regard to the first order from Finland, do you expect the follow-up order for the construction to come up quite soon?

We believe and we hope that it will, in the first half of next year, that the investors will get a final go, have clarified everything for the financing and that we get a green light for full notice to proceed. I can tell you on our side, the feed study, everything is on time and delivered to the satisfaction of the customer. And we have not heard any shortcomings there.

Recently I've read in an article that the cost of production for hydrogen seemed to be much higher than initially expected. So what is your view on this? Might it have a negative impact on investment activity in your view?

So at least we are not surprised by the costs, but of course we can see that in public opinion this energy transition is made of many illusions. So there might be people who thought that green energy is for free. We never had that idea, but we can confirm that the costs are within what we have promised and guaranteed to the customer. Okay, thank you.

Okay, it seems that that was the last question we received today. So I would like to thank the audience and wish you a good day.

Thank you very much from our side. Okay, bye-bye. Thank you.