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Uniper Se

Q42020

3/4/2021

speaker
Operator

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the analyst and investor conference call of Uniper. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties during the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May now hand you over to Stefan Jost, who will start the meeting today. Please go ahead.

speaker
Stefan Joost
Head of Finance and Investor Relations

Good morning, dear analysts and investors. Welcome to the Uniper call for the 2020 financial year, and thank you for participating. I'm sitting here with our CEO, Andreas Schierenbeck, and our CFO, Sascha Wiebert, and our headquarter in Dusseldorf. Most of you may not yet know my voice. I'm Stefan Joost, and the new head of finance and investor relations at Uniper. I'm new to this position, but not at all new to the group. I have been working for this company for more than 15 years now, most of the time in M&A and strategy. I look forward to getting in touch with you online and hopefully at one point in person. Needless to say, our experienced investor relations team remains at your disposal for all topics and questions. Looking at today's agenda, Andreas will start with the highlights of the past fiscal year and then move over to universe key strategic objectives going forward. Afterwards, Sascha will dive into the details of the financial results and provide an outlook for 2021. Right after the presentation, you will have the chance to raise your questions. Having said that, Andreas, please.

speaker
Andreas Schierenbeck
CEO

Good morning, everyone, and welcome also from my side. Thank you for participating in our conference call today. 2020 was a remarkable year, not just because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We took great care to offer our employees the highest possible level of health precautions through extensive home office options and adjustments to our operating procedures. and that had worked very well. We will continue to develop our organizational processes in this way for the benefit of our employees' motivation and to make process even more efficient. 2020 was always and also a remarkable year in terms of boost business and strategic decisions within the company. Let me start with the essential topics of fiscal year 2020. We can be very happy with our financial performance in 2020. Unibas group earnings ended at the upper end of the guided ranges. Adjusted EBIT increased by 16% and reached the upper end of the range at around 1 billion euros. Adjusted net income increased disproportionately by 26% to 774 million. The key factor here was the improvement in economic interest income that we anticipated and the lower operating tax rate. And now to the outlook. we expect another very solid operating result for fiscal year 2021, albeit not quite on par with the prior year. But I will go into more detail on the outlook and the key earnings drivers for 2021 in the second part. Let's turn to the development of Uniper's portfolio and its strategic evolution. The financial and strategic update in March 2020 was the initial spark to enable us to significantly accelerate our development in the changing energy world. We have placed a much stronger focus than before on decarbonizing the portfolio. For 2035, we have set an ambitious target for Uniper to become carbon neutral in European power generation. It was also a message for our own organization, empower energy evolution and managing the transition by setting up new sustainable sources of earnings that's the top of Uniper's radar. This year, Uniper is working to specify further targets for reducing carbon emissions. At the same time, we want to make the development steps in terms of ESG more transparent to further improve Uniper's ESG rating. In 2020, Uniper also took steps to align its organizational structure with the new strategy. One example is in the area of renewable energy. We want to move out of the niche where we have already been operating internationally for some time in the business field of solar and wind power purchase agreements. In the area of entering a sustainable hydrogen economy, we have set up a team which enables us more and more to utilize our competencies in a variety of different projects on the value chain. With the support of European policymakers, we hope to be able to launch the first commercially functioning flagship by 2024-25. Here we are talking about electrolysis plants in the range of 25 to 100 megawatt. The year 2020 saw quite a few new projects initiatives. Going forward, our task now is to put our projects and plants into practice. Coming to the next slide. As already mentioned, 2020 saw some highly volatile commodity markets throughout the year, with a clear upward trend towards the year headline. For the fossil commodities, gas in particular is sensitive to swings in the economic outlook. The price rebound was supported by cold waves in Asia in December 2020 and early January 2021, followed by cold snaps in Central Europe and the US, and led to strong demand peaks and massive price turbulence, especially in the gas and energy markets. In our view, Globally, natural gas will remain an important fuel for the transition to then be decarbonized over time. I think this winter season has done quite a good job to remind us of that. Moving over to carbon. Here the European allowance unit price has increased by around 150% since its low in March 2020. The key driver for higher prices is the commitment of the European countries To reduce their carbon emissions even more than initially planned by 2030, European emissions was raised from cuts of 40% in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels to minus 55%. Following the gas and carbon prices, electricity prices in Europe showed also a recent uptick. In Central Europe, the price-setting power plants tend to be fossil, which explains the level of coagulation. Nordic electricity prices have also recently recovered significantly from their lows. As the linkage between Nordic and German outright prices is still limited as of today, the upward trend was far more influenced by the weather situation than the carbon rally. Bark and darkspats show how fossil power plants move in the merchant market. Darkspats remain weak, spark spreads in our two important markets, the UK and Germany, are at reasonable levels. The German peak spark spread has been in the double-dicted area now for quite some time. This development was the base for bringing back the German CCGG power stations Irving 4 and 5 into the merchant market in October 2012. However, Uniper fossil power plant portfolio is more than just about how high the spread level is. Given the embedded optimality, the value capturing does not end by hedging, which means looking in a positive spread and then waiting until delivery. If markets are volatile, like they have been from 2018 to 2020, you are able to churn those positions, which means buy back spreads once they collapse and potentially re-hedge again later. By doing so, you can capture significantly more value than with a static hedge approach. There is not a stable correlation between volumes and earnings on a spread plan. The year 2020 is a good proof point for that, as you will see in better sections. Now from the underlying market and our key performance indicators on the next slide. On this slide, you can see how operating KPIs are developing during the business year 2020 compared to 2019. Let's start with the global commodity business. We have started 2020 with full physical gas storage facilities and unusually high level due to warm winter last season. However, entering the winter season 2020-21, the market changed. An early cold spell in Asia diverted energy cargoes from Europe to Asia, which has been reflected in rising gas spot price on the European markets and higher withdrawals from storage since the beginning of December. Physical storage level At the end of the year, we are back to a seasonal normal of 75%. With the cold waves in Central and Northern Europe, storage withdrawal further accelerated in January to mid-February 2021. At the end of February, European storage levels were around 37% almost at the normal level of recent years. The recent market developments enabled Unipass gas business to get a promising start into the year. Once again, one might say. Looking at our European generation segment, the power generation volume has fallen by 14% year-on-year. The decline is clearly attributable to the COVID-19-related lockdown in the second quarter. As a reminder, at the half-year stage, we saw a decline of 25% here. Coming up at 14% lower volumes at the year-end means the second half of fiscal year 2020 was largely stable compared to prior years, going through the individual essence classes. Hydrovolumes in Sweden benefited from higher precipitation all over the year, while hydrovolumes in Germany were clearly below average due to long periods of drought during last summer. Nuclear was down around 30%, mainly driven by the closure of Ringhals 2 and extended outages at Oskarsham 3 and Ringhals 1 and 3. The low starting point for 2021 means that even with the closure of the Ringhals I nuclear plant at the end of 2020, we still expect overall higher nuclear generation volumes in 2021. Gas and coal fired power generation was down 12%, mostly due to a lower power demand caused by the COVID pandemic and the greater availability of renewables. After a strong decline in H1 2020, 35% the second half was way better with an increase of 20% Here the start of that in four coal power station and bringing two gas plants losing four and five back into the merchant market as a main positive one The volumes and the Russian power generation business showed a pattern very similar to the European Following a double-digit decline in the first half of 2020, it was affected by unusual warm weather in Q1 and a lower demand due to COVID-19 and the OPEC-plus agreement that became effective from May last year. Hydrogeneration production in Russia increased significantly in 2020 in both pricing zones. That also results in lower prices. Finally, Unibus carbon emissions for the group were further down 9% for the full year 2020. The decline in the second half of the year was slowed down by the increasing deliveries of the fossil power plants. Overall, this is a move into the right direction when it comes to our decarbonization efforts, targets going forward as summarized on the next slide. We are constantly working to improve our ESG performance and to make our achievements more transparent to the external world. Beyond, it is important to understand ESG is not only a side topic for us, It is an integrated part of our new strategy and daily business. For example, as part of our sustainability improvement plan, most of our teams have annual ESG targets defined, and most importantly, we consider various ESG criteria, including emissions, for all of our new assessments. Thus, it is central for us to look at this topic not only in retrospectively, but also prospectively, starting with the retrospective view. Putting decarbonization and the energy transition at the center of our new strategy, we made very significant steps ahead during the last fiscal year, 2010. With our group-wide carbon intensity target of an average of 500 grams per kilowatt from 2018 to 2020 coming to an end, we saw the urgent need to set ourselves new, rather mid- to long-term targets, and above all, more ambitious carbon reduction targets. In March, we firstly announced that we will make our European generation business carbon neutral by 2035. At that time, we had already reduced our direct emissions from our European generation business by 50% since 2016, the year of Uniper's start. Last December, we committed to an additional target to cover the entire Uniper group on the one hand and extended our target to all scopes of emissions on the other hand. Our base case and overall commitment is to become carbon neutral by 2050 on group level, including Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. This is also in line with the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement. However, the path to this goal is of crucial importance. For European generations, we have made our path clear. As already mentioned, for this part we will be carbon neutral by 2035. As a further intermediate step, We will reduce our emissions by 50% by 2030, starting from our 2019 emission level. For our global commodities and Russian power business, the quantitative path is not yet so clear. However, driving the decarbonization for those two segments is also essential to achieve our 2050 carbon neutral target. For global commodities, it is most relevant to reduce scope 3 emissions. As a reminder, here we are talking primarily about those emissions that are linked to gas and coal we sell to our customers, and that, once burned by our customers, will ultimately turn into Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions on the end. As we do not have direct control over the technologies and processes of our customers, reducing Scope 3 emissions is significantly more complex and requires even more collaboration. Nevertheless, we set ourselves goal to come up with concrete and quantitative Scope 3 targets during the course of 2021. For Russia, we have the qualitative mid-term target to focus on renewable capacity schemes and to build up carbon-free capacities. Uniper is known for delivering on its promises. Therefore, it's important to point out that our decarbonization ambitions are well-founded on a track record of significant progress so far. Our major improvement in terms of carbon management and disclosure is reflected in our CTP rating. In 2020, we were able to further improve our score from B- to B, which is in line with the energy utility network sector's average. Another important milestone in this regard was the announcement of Unifas Ambition's coal exit plans for our 8 gigawatt coal-fired capacity in Europe. As a first step, We successfully submitted a bid for our 875 megawatt hardcore plant Heiden and the first tender under the German coal phase-out law. As a result, the plant sees commercial electricity production at the end of 2020 and will permanently be commissioned on July 1st, 2021, unless the transition system operator and the regulator BNSR determines that the power plant is system-relevant. Looking at all aspects of ESG, we also made progress on the S and G letters. This is, for example, reflected in our SUM assessment score, which has improved significantly from 15 to 37 points, towards the industry benchmark score of 42. The CSE questionnaire is now issued by S&P Global and provides the base for the Dow Jones sustainability. When it comes specifically to the S, In ESG, the topic health and safety for our people has become even more important in recent months. Overall, we received very positive feedback from our employees, expressing a high level of appreciation for the measures Unibus adopted to safeguard their health. Also, in the area of work safety, we managed to achieve a TRIF of 1.17 in 2020, which is a significant improvement from 1.48 in 2019. This positive performance is due to the consistent high level of occupational safety across the entire group. To further improve in this area, Uniper has committed to achieve a TRIF at or below 1 by 2025. Those achievements do not go unnoticed and further add up to Uniper's overall attractiveness for new talents. Uniper was able to attract a large number of new talents during 2020. leading to an overall increase of 200 employees. While not a huge increase yet, the percentage of female colleagues moved into the right direction from 24.6 to 25.2%. Finally, the average employee turnover rate of 3.7% has been at the lowest since the inception of Uniper in 2016. This is an important indicator for us, even so, we are aware that this metric is to be interpreted carefully in the year like 2020. Let's now have a look at Unibus ESG priorities for 2021 and beyond. By now, we already have two important achievements I would like to highlight. First, since the beginning of this year, ESG is a significant part of our management compensation. Specifically, that means that 20% of our long-term incentives will be dependent on predefined ESG times. The LTI Trump 2021 is, for example, linked to the implementation of the TCFD framework that UNIFA committed to in December of last year. The implementation project is driven by a team of experts from different departments to fully reflect the scope and underlying idea of TCFD that for us goes beyond the simple tick-the-box disclosure exercise. Second, 2021 is the year which will mark the end of UNIFA's lignite fire power generation in Europe. Already in February 2020, UNEPA signed an agreement to set a 58% stake in the Lignite Fire Power Plant in Schkopau, in the eastern part of Germany, to Saale Energy, a subsidiary of EPH. The transfer of ownership will take place in October 2021. So, what we are working on for the rest of the year and beyond. As already mentioned, we will define concrete mid-term scope three emission targets, which are particularly important for our global commodity segment. and we will intensively work on the implementation of the CCFP framework. The same applies for the EU taxonomy rules, which will be obligatory for reporting starting with the fiscal year 2021. As a last point, we will push forward existing and initiative new projects aiming at reducing our Scope 1 emissions of our fleet. However, the year 2021 will most certainly be a challenge when it comes With the commissioning of the German coal power plant Dattelt 4 in mid-2020 and the plant commissioning of the Russian lignite plant Beriot III in the first half of 2021, our direct emissions will most likely increase, assuming all generation else will be equal. This shows not only the importance of the emission level to our decarbonization targets, it also highlights that the scope of all decarbonization measures needs to go far beyond the shutdown of older coal plants. This is very much summarized in the next slide. It gives a comprehensive overview of UNIPA's strategic milestones that we can see already today. There was a strategic and financial update in March 2020. We sent a clear signal to the market to support the path to a more sustainable and decarbonized world and to make a significant contribution to the energy transition. On this slide, you can see the three layers of our strategy. First, decarbonization via the phase-out of coal. We already covered this today. Second, in the short to mid-term, we have significant growth investments in the non-wholesale area that are focused on security of supply for regulators and other customers. Third, the area of investment in decarbonization of gas. gas and other green technologies and businesses which are today already in our focus but will gain more weight in terms of financial figures in the mid to long term. Our investment budget for organic growth investments for the year 2021 to 2023 amounts to about 1.5 billion in total. Uniper has always been a reliable partner who provides security and diversification of energy supply to its customers. From the short to mid-term, This area plays a key role from a CapEx perspective. Due to the increasing share of volatile feed-in from renewables, transmission system operators face the challenge of enduring stability in the power grid. In the UK, Unipa was awarded four six-year contracts to provide innovative grid stability services as Killing Home and Grain starting in 2021. In Germany, Unipa is building a new 300-megawatt gas-fired power plant Irving 6. for the TSO in order to prevent system outages. It is expected to enter service in the last quarter of 2022. Unipro, Unipro's subsidiary in Russia, will make significant investments in the modernization of our four large units at the Gutskaya power site, totaling 3.3 gigawatts. After refurbishment, the unit will be back to the grid between 2022 and 2026 and will provide greater security of supply. But it's not only regulators that Uniper is supplying with secure and affordable energy. For example, the conversion of the Schorfenstein and the Ruhr region from coal to gas that Uniper is driving forward is in full swing. Here, Uniper will be offering its industrial customers individual energy solutions with the supply of electricity, heat, and other services. The resulting return from those projects will be another catalyst for the third layer, for instance, investments into the areas of renewable energies and hydroterms. UNIPA's goal is to organically develop a portfolio of photovoltaic and onshore wind assets of over 1 gigawatt in its core European markets by 2025. This portfolio is to be expanded to 3 gigawatts in the years thereafter. We see additional growth options in the renewables and the Russian markets as a new investment window will be opening in 2021 under a technical renewable capacity program. Unipro will focus on developing options to enter renewable energy. In the longer term, we see even more potential in entering the hydrogen economy, where Europe aims to play a pioneering role. Unipro already has extensive experience in operating hydrogen plants, as Unipro was one of the first German utilities to produce green hydrogen based on electrolysis processes. Uniprac is in the process of developing an extensive range of projects and will focus on realizing its first electric project in the next few years. In Eastern Germany, at the chemical site in Leipzig, a joint venture with Uniprac called Energiepark Bad Lauchstedt is underway and awaiting approval. This is a fully integrated project with a 30 megawatt electrolyzer. The plan is to supply green hydrogen to companies in that industrial cluster by 2024. Another flagship project is a collaboration with the specialities chemical company Perstop in order to produce sustainable methanol by 2025. In cooperation with Fortum, the project has been developed to supply green hydrogen by means of a 25-megawatt electrolyzer plant and renewable energies and so on. Due to the very good infrastructure conditions and sales potential, Unipass must flag the power plant site in the port of Rotterdam as suitable for hydrogen production. Here, in a joint venture with support of Rotterdam, we're examining the option of building a 100 megawatt electrolyzer, which could be realized by 2025. Just last week, we joined forces with H2EIG, newly founded for Hamburg, Siemens Energy, and other partners to develop the generation and supply of green hydrogen, as well as green process and district heating at the Hamburg war work site. The game changer lies in the interaction of three future technologies for the production storage of green hydrogen, green heat, and peak electricity from renewable energy. We also want to join the hydrogen trading platform. The vision is to expand the concept commercially by 2030. We have said it before, Europe will by no means be able to cover its entire energy requirements for green hydrogen by itself. Uniper is also working intensively on solutions to be able to cover this gap through imports with the option of blue hydrogen, for instance, produced from conventional gas with CCS solutions. In this environment, Uniper is very well positioned in the growing hydrogen market with excellent procurement, optimization, trading, and risk management. Having said that, I would now like to head over to Sascha for the financial part. Sascha and I will be ready to take on your questions. Thank you.

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This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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