Nordex Se

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome and thank you for joining the Q5Figures 2023 conference call of Nordex. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be listened on in mode. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press Start followed by 1 on your touchtone telephone. Please press the Start key followed by 0 for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Felix Sanda. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for the introduction. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Herewith, I would like to welcome you to our analyst and investor call this afternoon. Our CEO, José Luis Blanco, our CFO, Ilja Hartmann, and our CFO, Patrick Landa, will guide you through our slide deck. In the Q&A session, I would like to ask you to limit yourself up to three questions, please. And now I would like to hand over to our CEO, José Luis. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for the introduction, Félix. I would like as well to welcome you on behalf of the entire board, Pachi Landa, Ilia Harmon here with me today, guiding you through our presentation and answering your questions later. For today, we have prepared our usual presentation deck. Going to the introduction as usual with the executive summary for the first quarters of 2023. Our project execution in the first quarter was sequentially better than the second quarter, but still slightly behind our internal expectations. We expect to catch up and complete even higher activity levels in the last quarter of the year, which should also support the improvement in our underlying margins. In the third quarter, we booked 2.3 GB of new orders, which was an increase of 58% compared to the third quarter of the year before, largely on the back of a strong performance in Europe and despite facing delays in non-European markets. The pricing and margins of these orders continue to be stable. In the first nine months, our order intake increased to 4.9 GB, exceeding the 4.5 GB of last year, with generally stable selling prices. Our order pipeline in Europe remains strong. However, let me also note that we continue to face delays in our international order pipeline, which could likely make our installation schedule next year more back-end loaded, like this year, which increases our general risk profile as you can imagine. We are also happy to report that the German market is developing well, although we see lots of early stage delays in not only project permitting, but also transportation permits. Going forward, this could impact project execution, but we hope that this will be addressed in time by relevant authorities and stakeholders. Our revenues rose from 3.9 billion euros by 15% to 4.5 billion euros by the end of September. At the same time, our gross margin also increased to 18.3% in the third quarter, leading to an improved gross margin for the first three quarters of 13.6%. We generally expect further positive developments of the gross margins with a higher share of revenues coming from better quality orders. Although, let me also point out that financial stability of some key suppliers in supply chain could also increase the overall cost, which is impacting margins and could also impact our margins in the future. Our EBITDA level improved as indicated in the last quarter, further in the third quarter to 48 million euros, representing an EBITDA margin of nearly 3%. Compared to our EBITDA margin of 9.4% in the first quarter and 0% in the second quarter, this is a step ahead. This was mainly possible due to higher volume and better underlying margins in the orders in the third quarters. Consequently, we now show an EBITDA margin of minus 1.5% in the first three quarters of the year and expect this continuing improvement in our underlying margins going forward. Outworking capital was stable at minus 10.2%. Our installations increase in the third quarter to 2.4 gigawatts, reaching five and a half gigawatts in the first three quarters of the year. And finally, I would like to confirm our guidance for 2023 and our midterm strategic EBITDA margin of 8%. And with this, I would like to hand over to Pachi for markets and ordering data.