Engie Sa Ord

It's my pleasure to welcome you to our Q1 results and strategic update presentation. We have three speakers this morning, Catherine McGregor, Judith Hartman, and Paolo Almirante. A quick view of the agenda for this morning. We will start with our Q1 results with a brief presentation on Q1. This will be followed by Catherine leading us through the strategic update, putting strategy into action. and she will be joined by Paolo Almirante on renewables, and following which Catherine will walk us through energy solutions, networks, and thermal activities, and future energy systems. And then Judith will present on the capital allocation and financial outlook, and finally concluding remarks from Catherine. And as usual, there will be a Q&A at the end of this presentation where you will be able to ask your question directly to management. And without further ado, I'd now like to hand you over to our CEO, Catherine McGregor. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Aarti, and very good morning, everyone. I am so pleased to be here with you this morning to first present to you quickly a strong Q1 2021 performance and then switching gears to show you how we are putting a strategy into actions. We had indeed a strong start to the year in Q1, where we delivered 10% organic growth in EBIT, and that was underpinned by solid operational performance. We have also made strong progress on our group simplification. We have set up a new organization, which I will go back to later, And our strategic reviews are on track. We actually continue the rationalization of our portfolio with the disposal of NG EPS, which was announced, and the exit of activities in Turkey. For the full year 2021, we are reaffirming our net recurring income group share guidance in the range of 2.3 to 2.5 billion euros. Our first quarter was indeed underpinned by solid operational performance. We commissioned half a gigawatt of renewables, including our first fixed offshore wind project, the Seamade in Belgium, and we are on track to deliver the three gigawatts that we have targeted for 2021. Also in renewables, we have successfully integrated the 1.7 gigawatts of Portuguese hydro assets that we acquired in December last year. Our networks maintain high level of safety and reliability, and in client solution, the activity level was fully in line with our expectations. Finally, our Belgian nuclear assets which records the level of availability at 95%, which is to be compared to last year Q1 2020 at 69%. With that, I will hand it over to Judith for her financial commentary of Q1 results. Thank you.

Thank you, Catherine. And good morning, everybody. It's great to be with you today. So, indeed, a very good start into the year. You can see that we had growth on both EBITDA and EBITD. And I'm pleased to, in particular, talk about the 10% EBIT organic growth. We had a negative foreign exchange impact of 77 million. This was mostly due to the Brazilian real and a positive impact on scope of 49 million, which was mostly driven by the Suez disposal, which, in fact, Suez had been negative last year in the first quarter. and also a positive contribution from our hydro acquisition in Portugal helped us to drive this growth. Strong cash flow generation helped us to keep the net debt stable, and we are very pleased to reaffirm our guidance for 2021 today. On the next page, you can see how this translates into the different activities. Operationally, I would mention the following items that had a very positive impact on our financials. The renewable contribution from the additional commissionings were clearly a positive. Networks had a positive impact in Brazil from both power lines and our gas pipeline. And then, of course, the 95 percent nuclear availability contributed very positively to this result. On the more exogenous factors, the Texas extreme weather event had a negative impact, in particular on renewables for about 80 million. The colder temperatures in France were clearly a tailwind for networks mostly. And then we also had a normalization of our CHEM performance that you can see in others, where of course last year in the first quarter with a very high volatility, commodity prices, Chem had had a very outstanding quarter. We've also worked on SG&A during this quarter. It's one of the important topics that you will hear again later in this presentation, and that helped us also to improve the growth that you're seeing in front of you. A few words about the balance sheet. The CFFO of 1.7 billion is funding our capex of the first quarter, and hence the debt is stable. On the CFFO, maybe two comments. One is on JEM, lower margin calls helped us to drive this improvement. That's about two-thirds of the amount and one-third very good performance from our working capital requirements. And again, very pleased about this since this is a big focus area for us. With that, Catherine, over to you for the strategic update.