Metso Outotec Corp

Good afternoon, good morning, everyone. This is Juha from Metsos Investor Relations, and I want to welcome you all to this conference call where we discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2024 results, which came out earlier this morning. The results will be presented by our president and CEO, Sami Takaluoma, and CFO, Eva Sipilä. And after the presentation, as usual, we will have the Q&A session. Before we get into it, I want to remind you about the forward-looking statements we will be making in this call, and with these words, I'll hand over to Sami. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Juha, and good afternoon also from my behalf, and welcome to this call where we look at Q4 performance. Highlights for the quarter, market activity was very much in line with our expectations, and we continued to have Minerals equipment orders coming through from the funnel that we have and for the quarter, we were having the healthy adjusted EBITDA margin of 16%. And also we were delivering strong cashflow from our operations during the quarter. Looking at that from the figures point of view, So orders received comparing to the 23 last quarter, they grew by 13%. And sales was then declining the 5% from the previous year last quarter, mainly because of the order intake slowness in the past. Adjusted EBITDA was $203 million. That was 10% below the last year number, bringing that then to the relative 16.0. And operating profit, 167 million. And earnings per share from the continuing operations in the quarter 4-24 was 13 euro cents. Cash flow from the operations, that was growing 32% compared to the year before. 286 million. That was in the nutshell of the Q4 key figures. Looking then for our two segments, starting from the aggregates where we were keeping the profitability remaining very healthy level in that sense. Orders received comparing the last year, end of the year, more or less the same level, 294 million. We did have one acquisition that we did for this segment and that was giving the support for the order volumes as well. Generally, we do see that the mobile equipment market especially is soft and remains soft at the moment. And both equipment orders and services orders were down by 1%. Sales, similar story. more or less at the same level than one year ago, 290 million now. So services share, no changes there either. So we remain in 35% of the sales coming from the services. Adjusted EBITDA, despite the lowish cycle of orders, We are having 46 million for the quota that is giving us the margin for the segment 16.0. And this is a result of very active cost management, how we have been able to maintain the healthy margin level for the segment aggregates. Then looking at the minerals where we did see the strong equipment orders coming through in the Q4, continuing what we started to see in the Q3 already. So the orders for the portal close to 1.1 billion, significant growth for year before. Heavily this was driven by the copper and gold customers that clearly started to be more active in releasing the orders. Equipment orders grew 40% and the services orders grew 3% in the quarter comparing the previous year. Sales was 982 million. Services was 4% down from the year before and equipment 11% down. The share of services because of the product mix was now then moving to 64% compared to 62 year before. Adjusted EBITDA for the mineral segment, 167 million euro. That gives the margin of 17 exactly the same as it was year before. Same story here. We have been maintaining the resilience for the margin by having active cost management and also sales mix was supporting this quarter. Worthwhile noticing that in the Q4 minerals segment numbers we have few million additional warranty costs that were identified at the end of the year and these are one of costs that we now recorded in. And then for the proposal that board has made is to increase the dividends. It's now 64% of the EPS from the continuing operations. So 38 Euro cents from the 36 previous year. And as normal, we do it in two payments, one in May and one in October. And the total payout value with this proposal is 314 million Euro. And then, Eva, if you continue from here.

Thank you, Sami. Good morning, good afternoon to all on my behalf as well. Building on what our CEO already discussed, I'd make a few additional comments on group income statement. So METSU's operating profit margin for 2024 was 15%, so a notch up from the previous year, despite the fourth quarter, including some 19 million of non-recurring costs, mainly from capacity adjustment costs in minerals. The net financial expenses continued to be very stable and ended up with exactly the same 80 million figure as in the previous year. Our effective tax rate for 2024 was 25%, well in line with our expectations. The earnings per share for 2024 from continuing operations were 59 cents. On a quarterly level, the graph on the right illustrates that the result from the discontinued operation was clearly positive in the fourth quarter after the big negative in Q3. The businesses under divestment delivered a positive result for the quarter, and that is supporting, of course, also The result, even more significant, however, in the fourth quarter was that we received confirmation that the Q3 business termination costs are tax deductible, and we booked the full deferred tax asset on it, and hence the positive outcome for the discontinued operations. And this really ends closing partly the gap between the two earnings per share figures for the full year. Regarding our group balance sheet, the total assets at 7 billion euros were slightly down from the end of September and 140 million down from a year ago. Non-current assets are up following investments in both organic and non-organic growth, while current assets are down. Some of you have followed our inventories closely, so indeed we did deliver a reduction in them, some 50 million during the fourth quarter, which equals well to the change from end of 23 as well. Now, considering the need to finance the business termination that took place in September, we are satisfied that our interest-bearing liabilities or gross debt, if you may, was up less than 80 million in the year and down during the fourth quarter. With the second chunk of the dividend consuming some 150 million of cash in the fourth quarter, the net debt remained flat at 1.2 billion euros from the end of September. Group cash flow from operating activities for the fourth quarter was strong at 286 million euros. We made half of the 2024 cash flow of 576 million in the final quarter. Continued healthy profitability and a release of cash from networking capital contributed to the outcome. I would conclude that delivering clearly better net cash flow from operating activities in 2024 versus 2023 is a good achievement if you remember the one-off cash flow of $275 million in discontinued operations in the third quarter. Moving to my final slide on our financial position, I already touched on cash and net debt, noting just that liquid funds consisting of cash and cash equivalents amounted to 431 million at the end of December. And the final thing to mention on the funding side is that during the fourth quarter, we drew half of a new 150 million euro loan. Our gearing was just below 45% and debt to capital just below 36% at the end of the year. And with that, I would hand it back to you, Sami.