Nordex Se

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Nordex SE Q1 Figures 2024 conference call. I'm Diti, the call-us-call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star, then zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Ms. Anja Seeler, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, Madam.

Thanks, Vicky, and also a very warm welcome from our side. Thank you for joining the Q1-24 Nordics Conference Call. My name is Anja Seeler. And I joined Nordic beginning of May as head of investor relations, as some of you may already know. I do look forward to connecting with you over the next weeks. With me in the room are our CEO, Jose Luis Blanco, our CFO, Ilya Hartman, and our CSO, Pachi Landa, who will lead you through the presentation. Afterwards, we will open the floor for your questions. As always, we ask you to take notice of our safe harbor statements. Now I would like to hand over to our CEO, Jose Luis. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much for the introduction, Ania. I would like to welcome you as well on behalf of the entire board. As always, I would like to start with our executive summary for the respective quarters. We had a strong start of the year with a very strong order intake of around 2 gigawatts compared to around 1 gigawatt we booked year before. This came with a stable ASP and within our respected margin requirements. We also made some early progress. In U.S., we booked our first order, 148 megabytes, not in first quarter, but in April, after a long period of time, and this is a good sign. We hope to keep building on this and keep growing our U.S. order pipeline this year. In terms of our financial performance, we again had a better start to the year compared to last year. Our sales increased by around 30% to 1.6 billion based on a better project and product mix. Our gross margins remain steady at around 20%, 19 to 20%. As a result, our EBITDA margin came in at 3.3% compared to minus 9.4% last year. This very significant improvement in performance comes in mainly on the back of a better project mix, better execution, and as well, some cost elements on some projects improving better than expected. Also keep in mind that the first quarter of last year included some heavy costs on account of inflation, supply chain disruptions, and so on. But as we have seen last year, these effects are shocks, have slowly receded, and we see now a more stable environment this year. As a result, we now expect a much more stable margin profile this year within our guidance range. In terms of installations, We completed 1.1 gigawatts in the quarter compared to 1.3 gigawatts last year. This is slightly behind our internal planning, but we are confident on catching up during the year along with the delayed backlog of last year. On the liquidity side, we ended the quarter with a liquidity level of 741 million. This is mainly driven by seasonality of working capital. we expect the working capital ratio to normalize later during the year. Finally, we maintain our guidance and our mid-term outlook of 8% EBITDA margin, and our results in Q1 show first how our margin profile could improve as better quality orders starting to flow through our financials in an unstable and more normal environment. also provide an early proof that we are making good progress towards profitable growth and achieving our mid-term targets. Moving on to the next page, let me provide a quick update on markets and market share, although Pachi will elaborate further. As you have seen during our last call, we have become number three globally text China with a market share of 17% in terms of order intake. Since then, the full year installation data has also become available. Hence, to complete the picture, we thought that this would be useful to you to provide an update on that as well. As you can see, We have significantly improved our market share last year as our regulations recovered substantially. We are still fourth largest turbine player globally in China, but now with a very little gap with the second and the third player in the market. This is just another example to show that we have successfully scaled up to a 7 gigawatt company and will target to scale up further beyond 8 gigawatts in the coming years. And now I would like to hand over to Pachi for discussing markets and order intake. Thank you, José Luis.