Hexagon Composites Ord

Welcome everyone to our Q1 trading update. This call replaces our regular call which was scheduled for next week to present you our Q numbers. Reason for that is that we have executed last night a successful private placement in the amount of 550 million Norwegian kroner. Eirik will touch on that in a moment slightly. I'm happy about an oversubscribed private placement And that shows great trust into Hexagon. Thank you, our investors, for this trust. This cap raise enables us to have a stronger balance sheet and improved financial flexibility. Financial flexibility due to a renegotiated finance agreement with our lending partners, which really substantially reduces the leverage risk and covenant risk which we had and some of you brought up multiple times during the course of the last year. But one aspect is asking for the fix of our balance sheet. The other is walking the talk and what is the management, the company doing. We have executed a significant restructuring over the last 12 months. And one testimony, one walk the talk is what Eric will show you. in the Q1 numbers. We have a leaner cost base and we have tightened cash discipline. This leads to a significant improved EBITDA break-even point. This is also supported by restructuring in one of our markets in Europe, where we are consolidating and moving our production from Poland to our facility in Germany, which will lead to operational leverage in the second half of this year. This will mean that we have implemented cost action with retained capacity to scale. We are the market leader in all our fields and we are able to scale it up when the market comes back. When the market comes back is we are well, extremely well positioned for market recovery and we see first signs of this market recovery Let's take one is the natural gas adoption for heavy duty long haul vehicles as explicitly in the United States where an increased fuel spread will lead to a shorter payback period for these fleets. This is an indication which we see. We see good signs from Act Expo, which is a show in the United States where fleets can experience alternative drivetrain solutions and you can go online see the reports there CNG has taken the stage there and that's promising for me for the way ahead besides that one area which struggled in yeah the last 12 months is mobile pipeline and we really see within the distributed energy solution sphere New segments evolving. And we spoke about this before. And one aspect there are data centers. And I will touch this later in the presentation. Besides that, we also see demand due to geopolitical uncertainties in the world driven by the Iran war about energy independence, energy security. So we see interest and really fast-growing interest in geographies like Latin America and the Middle East in our products and this is also an indication for market recovery at some point. We have entered and we spoke in the last quarterly call about this entered aerospace commercial space exploration with our cylinders and we have another order in that space as well. This is a testimony for what I've said, that we want to diversify this business, go into other markets and make us more resilient. This makes me feel cautiously optimistic, and we are positioned to capture profitable growth in the years ahead. And with that said, I would like to hand it over to Eirik, who gives you insights into our Q1 numbers, but also touches on the refinance agreement and the cap raise. Eirik, please.

Okay, thank you, Philip. And good morning, everyone. Thanks for dialing in. As announced yesterday, we have reached an agreement with our lending banks to amend our existing facilities. And under this amendment, we will reduce the total exposure to 1.6 billion NOK by repaying 300 million on the terminal. and also settling across currency swap on our balance sheet with a nominal value of 200 million by the end of first quarter. We further extend the maturity of all our facilities from year end 2027 until Q2, 2029, as well as extending the runway for the leverage covenant until Q4, 2027. And both of these provide us with additional flexibility to steer through an uncertain market while also reducing the imminent refinancing risk. As you can see on the right hand side, based on performance numbers as of Q1, our net debt after this transaction is expected to be around 740 million NOK and our available liquidity around 600 million NOK. So we should be in a pretty good shape also from a liquidity perspective after this transaction. All in all, the combination of the amended bank agreement and new equity will significantly improve our financial flexibility and position the company well through this transition phase and for a market recovery.

So before we get into the numbers, just a quick note for housekeeping.