Andritz Ag Graz Akt

Good morning from Andritz this morning and welcome to our full year 24 earnings call with analysts and investors. I'm Matthias Pfeifenberger, the head of investor relations, and I have a big pleasure to introduce our hosts today. It's our CEO, Dr. Joachim Schönbeck, our CFO, Mr. Nettesheim, and our new executive board member, Vanessa Helving. What is the agenda today? We'll run you through the full results, including the divisions, then we'll switch over to outlook and medium-term targets, followed by Q&A. And before we start, I'd like to pass over to Vanessa Helving for introductory remarks. Vanessa, please.

Thank you, Matthias. Thanks for the intro and also a sincere thanks to Joachim and my dear board colleagues for the great welcome at the Board of Hundreds. So maybe a few words from my side. Good morning to all. My name is Vanessa Helving, and I'm part of the Android team since January. I'm very excited to take over the new CFO role from April, following a very smooth and professional handover from Lovett Nettersheim. I have already been in CFO positions since the age of 29 and have been working with companies like Siemens, ThyssenKrupp and Fisman Climate Solutions, which was recently sold to Carrier Global. I'm bringing along quite significant experience in the large cap sector. Many fields of my professional expertise actually imply a broad overlap with hundreds focus areas. like plant engineering in general or large project business in specific. But also the focus on sustainable solutions, a strong service offering and also my favorite, digitalization. In my previous roles, I was driving large restructuring programs and portfolio optimizations. I have headed large-scale M&A processes with intense post-merger integration and also special projects like shared service setups and an IPO preparation. Equipped with my experience, I'm looking very much forward to making a significant contribution and help promoting the UnRitz success story to the next level. While I'm today only enjoying the show, I will already meet analysts and investors at our next investor conferences scheduled in March and April and hopefully catching up with many of you and, well, having good conversations. And with this, Joachim, the stage is yours.

Thank you very much. Good morning to everybody from my side. So, we are very happy, Vanessa, to have you on board. Even though we will miss Norbert, we for sure believe that you will help us to improve further. And I hope that the analysts will love it and the investors even more. because tomorrow is a better day than today is one of our DNAs. So that is a very good change. However, as you know, the changes in unreads are very much based on changes in continuity. This was when I took over from Wolfgang Leitner on the CEO, and this will be the same mode of operation we will have in this change on the CFO. as we will be the last time in this round also from my side a big thanks to Norbert for his good contribution and his good guidance of you to the greater good of hundreds I would say the times we are in currently cannot be more interesting, to say the least. However, we see some, I would say, some good improvements in Austria since a week. We even have a new government, and I think it's... Not everybody has heard it. They call themselves the government of economic reason. I would say that's at least a good start. And also Germany is on a good way to form a new government. So I would say that gives a good environment for what we share with you today. Do I click? Yeah. Okay. So, if we look to the hundreds performance of Q4, 2024 and the full year, I would say we made a good end of the year record order intake in December, very strong order intake in Q4. Overall, it brought us to a book-to-bill of one, definitely driven in Q4 by pipe and paper and hydropower. a good recovery in many of our markets across the industries, and we could see a continued growth in the service business, even in the, I would say, more subdued market conditions of last year, service grew quite strongly. We had a slight decrease in revenue year on year, but I'm happy that we can report a stable EBITDA margin. good improved mix from capital to service, solid project execution. We made additional provisions for capacity adjustments in Q4. Still, the reported EBITDA is stable. The operational EBITDA could even improve. We have a stable net income with a record net income margin of 6%. So if we put it in numbers for Q4, 2.5 billion euro order intake, 2.3 billion euro on revenue. The order backlog nicely increased from Q3. We are now almost at the same level we had been in Q4-23, so 9.7 billion. The comparable EBITDA margin was 10.2% in the last quarter. It was on the reported margin 9.0%, 206 million euros, resulting in a net income in the last quarter of 154 million euros, or 6.8%. Looking to the full year, order intake and revenue both settling at 8.3 billion euro. I would say for a not too bad number for a difficult year we had. We have the EBITDA. The comparable EBITDA at 743 million euro, 8.9%. The EBITDA reported at 713 million euro, it's 8.6%, exactly on the level of the previous year. results up in a net income of almost half a billion Euro, 497 million at 6% net income margin. The dividend per share we are proposing to increase by 10 Euro cents per share to 2.6 Euro per share. We made further further way on our acquisition strategy, strengthening our digitalization and decarbonization parts of our strategy. We acquired, summer last year, we acquired Procevex, the market leader of optical web inspection for the paper industry. Extremely successful company, excellent fit, strengthened us in the digitalization in our efforts towards the autonomous mill. On the decarbonization, we invested in Hydrogen Pro. That's our technology partner for the green hydrogen alkaline electrolyzers. And we acquired, beginning of this year, in January, we acquired LDX Solutions. That is a U.S.-based leading company for pollution control solutions. specialized in North America, sales approximately 100 million, believe that it's the right time to enhance our business in the United States. Our intake in detail, we look Q4 full year. You could see that in Q4, the increase compared to last year was significant. Pulp and paper plus 25%, metals plus 6%, hydropower plus 54%. So it's really, it is significant. It's significant, only environment energy dropped in Q4, but you might or might not remember, we had a very large order last year in the Q4 reported, so I would say in total it does well. Looking for the full year, we can see strong growth in hydropower, environment and energy, definitely a reduced demand for pipe and paper and metals. Maybe if you can see the development, if you look on the chart to the quarters, that we had an increase in Q3, an even higher increase in Q4. So we believe there is definitely a change in the market. in the market doing. On the revenue side, we saw a decline, a slight decline in 2024. We had a solid growth in service business. We had a very late, I would say, auto intake pickup, which at the end did not convert into sales in 24, so that sales will come then in 25. We have in pulp and paper, we have the situation that the very large projects of the past years, they're approaching completion in... I would say in metals, the overall drop is not that significant, minus 2%. Hydropower, very stable. But you could see we have an increase in hydropower sales. That's 1% only. But if you see in the last quarter, the increase is 13%. And this basically reflects this business model of hydro. Execution time is rather long and in the first six to nine months rather moderate sales recognition because this is the period when we have the engineering trials, the mock-up will be built. So we are confident that the sales will come. We do not see any delays in execution or any obstacles on our way. In environment and energy, we see the solid growth that we saw is basically across all industries that we are serving. Having a closer look to the service business, we reached service revenue share an all-time high, 41%. Never been there before. That is very good. And that is not only because the capital sales went down, but if we look to the absolute numbers, you can also see that we could increase nicely to 3.4 billion Euro service revenue. This will continue. The 8% is definitely what we would like to see further. Capturing entire lifecycle value is what our customers want. That's a clear part of our strategy. And we will go there with organic expansion and, of course, with M&A. with the large capital orders we have had over the past years, definitely provide an excellent basis to further increase our revenue shares. You can see that we have a solid backlog, significant improvement, 4% from Q3 to Q4. Majority... as usual in pulp and paper and hydropower and with a strong growth of hydropower that share is really significantly increasing you could see from previous year to this year from from 34% to 41%, so that is a significant increase, gives a good solid foundation for the sales recognition in this year. Looking to the EBITDA, The reported EBITDA, as I already mentioned, dropped from €742 to €730 million. EBITDA margin is reported stable, 8.6%. You could see rather stable over the year. Interesting view definitely is on the comparable EBITDA margin. I reported to you already in the last calls that we saw in our industry some, I would say, structural changes which we do not believe will quickly recover, so we took the decision to go for capacity adjustments in certain areas. Mainly in Europe and within Europe, mainly in Germany, this has been accounted for. This is why the comparable margin is significantly higher. So we can report here 8.9%. 743 million Euro, which shows that we are on the operational side, made our homeworks and are on the right way to improve sustainably also our profitability. On the ESG side, I would say we are well on track. Basically the majority of our ESG targets for 2025 we have reached. We are lagging a bit behind on this share of green revenues. We are stuck at the 44%. We believe it will be difficult to reach the 50% in 2025. On the social goals, I would say we are on a good way. The governance is all green. We will define new ESG targets during the year. The greenhouse gas emission targets will be aligned with SBTI. We are in the process of getting their approval across And I would say within Q2 or Q3, we will inform you about the new targets. So I hand over to Norbert to report in more detail about the financial performance.