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Uniper Se

Q32021

11/5/2021

speaker
Operator
Conference Call Operator

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 the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulty seeing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for appraisal assistance. May I now hand you over to Stefan Juth, who will start today's meeting. Please go ahead.

speaker
Stefan Juth
Moderator / Head of Investor Relations, Uniper

Good morning, dear analysts and investors. Welcome to the Uniper Interim Results Call for the first nine months of fiscal year 2021. Thank you for participating in our conference call today. This time, our CFO, Tina Tuomela, will guide you through the Interim Results presentation and answer all your questions. Tina will start with a brief wrap-up of the key highlights and then focus on the financial data. Tina.

speaker
Tina Tuomela
Chief Financial Officer, Uniper

Thank you very much, Stefan. Good morning, everyone. Also from my side, a warm welcome. Before I will go into the details of our financials, I would like to start briefly with the key highlights and shed some light on recent developments relating to our portfolio and strategy execution. Uniper's business performance in the third quarter again exceeded our expectations, which led ultimately to the ad hoc announcement two weeks ago. Accordingly, our financials should not come as a surprise to you today. Adjusted EBIT increased more than 50% year-on-year to 614 million euros in the first nine months of the fiscal year 2021. Adjusted net income increased by approximately 60% to 487 million euros in the same period. We have increased the outlook for our adjusted EBIT by 250 million euros, now with the range of 1,050 million euros to 1,300 million euros. For adjusted net income, the guidance has been increased by 200 million euros to a range of 850 million euros to 1,050 million euros. Turning now towards our strategy and portfolio development. Today, I will focus on the key events in our half-year reporting in August. There have been two dominant themes in the recent months. First, the development of the international commodity market, and second, the federal election in Germany and possible effects on the energy policy. Ultimately, both are linked on the topic of security of supply, which is back on the agenda. With its portfolio, Uniper contributes significantly to security of supply in Europe. With our comparably high gas storage filling levels, we are ensuring reliable gas supply to our customers. I will go more in detail on our role in the gas commodity markets in a bit. When it comes to our power generation, we delivered significantly higher volumes in the UK and German markets from our fossil assets this year. Based on the improved commercial prospects for B-Cloud power in Germany, we are now looking at preparing and bringing back online a 160 megawatt pump storage plant, namely the Habberg facility in Bavaria. In the UK, electricity market reserve demand peaks during the recent shortage period in September. The increase in load factors was particularly strong for the efficient units, one of them being Total 4. At present, there are ongoing discussions between the potential coalition parties of accelerating the German coal phase-out from 2038 up to 2030. As you know, Klaus Dieter, our CEO, has announced our willingness to talk about how DATEN4 could fit into a new context. When it comes to the legal dispute with respect of DATEN4, in August the Higher Administrative Code of Low Trine Petrelia ruled against the defendant, the city of Datteln, declaring the development plan invalid and not allowing an appeal. By now, Uniper and the city of Datteln have filed a complaint against the non-admission of an appeal. In our view, the issue raised by the court in its ruling requires clarification by the highest court, the Federal Administrative Court. Unipo continues to assume that the permits granted to the power plant and underlying development and regional planning are lawful. Despite the currently higher demand for fossil-based energy, we continue to drive the decarbonisation of our portfolio and the focus on green customer solutions in parallel. Uniper has ended its chapter of lignite-fired power generation in Europe and handed over its stake in the Skopal power plant to the minority owner eBay Edge on October 1st. Moreover, as announced some weeks ago, Uniper's engineering service business with around 1,100 employees will be streamed aligned and repositioned. Engineering competencies will in the future focus on universe-owned power plants as well as customers' business in the areas of hydrogen, renewable energy, industrial customer solution and net zero solutions. We are also making progress on our growth investment plans. in the renewable business, our first essential projects are taking shape, even though today I cannot be more concrete yet. There have been a number of recent news items relating to the development of our hydrogen activities. In Germany, the joint venture Flaxseed project, an energy park part lasted with an integrated value chains, including a 30 megawatt electrolyzer and estimated capex at up to 140 million euros, received funding of 43 million euros from the German Ministry of Economics in September. Another example is the memorandum of understanding on joint hydrogen projects between Ørsted and Univer. The main aim here is to establish a hydrogen production facility at our coastal site in Vilmershaven that is powered by offshore wind farms in the North Sea. Finally, Uniper and Fortum are continuing to work on the expansion of the joint one-seam platforms with the three key areas, renewable development, hydrogen, and Nordic Hydro and Physical Trading Optimization. The Nordic Hydro and Physical Trading Optimization area now takes shape under Fortum's responsibility. It includes a joint organization for the hydro asset management and operation in Sweden, as well as its physical trading operations. The entity with 400 employees will start operations during the first quarter of 2023. Furthermore, the nuclear dismantling and decommissioning cooperation between UNIPE and Fortum is operational since October. The initial focus will be on the technical execution of the ongoing decommissioning program in Sweden, followed by a rollout of services for nuclear generators in Europe. At present, around 1,000 colleagues from UNIPE and Fortune are working on over 80 business cooperation projects. Now over to the next slide. One of the key questions this year has been, what is? and what will be happening in the gas market. The global gas markets are showing a number sign of a perfect storm this winter season. China in particularly, but also unexpectedly other markets such as Brazil or Turkey and also Europe have significantly increased their demand this year. Also supply is also increasing, it has so far fallen short of expectations. As you can see on the slide to the left, in Europe, rising demand in meeting falling European production, limited pipeline gas supply, and significantly fewer LNG cargoes. Due to the tight supply and even record prices on the spot and forward markets, Europe and Germany are heading into a winter 2021-2022 with very low gas storages filling levels. Accordingly, the way how temperature develops will have an even bigger impact on the market this time around. Gazprom has run up its own production by over 10% so far in 2021, thus above pre-corona 2019 levels. Nevertheless, Russia was criticized for not doing more to improve the supply situation in Europe. Accordingly, there was some relief around Gazprom's recent statement that it would be able to deliver more gas into the German and Australian storages once it has built up its own Russian storages from the next week on. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether Gazprom will be able to deliver significant additional gas volumes to Europe this winter, especially during cold spell, and whether Gazprom will then be able to use the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The 55 billion cubic meters pipeline representing more than 10% of gas consumption in the EU with two pipes has been completed. One of the two pipes is filled with gas and would be ready for commercial operation. In September, Nord Stream 2 AG applied to the German regulator for certification. As publicly stated, it is expected that this process takes us into the year 2022. As a reminder, Uniper is only a financial partner in Nord Stream 2. Accordingly, Universe gas midstream portfolio is not directly linked to the availability of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Our gas midstream business positioned itself early on successfully in this market, ensuring sufficient supply volumes for our customers and strong optimization position for our assets. This did not only lead to higher earnings and ultimately trigger the ad hoc announcement, but it also is the perfect starting point going forward into a tight and potentially volatile winter season like this. This is best reflected in the storage filling levels at the end of the third quarter. While the European average was only at about 75%, Uniper's storage levels were significantly higher as shown on the next slide. As usual, you find the main operating indicators summarized on this slide, starting with our physical storage levels on the left side. At the end of September, and despite the challenging environment, Uniper's storage filling levels were at 95% and therefore close to prior years level and around 20 percentage points above market level. Next to the storage filling levels you find a breakdown of the generation volumes in our European generation fleet. Overall, and in line with trend in the previous quarters, we see an increase in power generation of about 16% for the first nine months in the current financial year. Looking at the underlying movements, hydro-oleums decreased by about 10% year-on-year, mainly caused by a normalization in the Nordic compared to previous years extraordinary precipitation and snow melt. Prior weather in 2021 led to significantly decreases in inflows and thus limited hydro supply, which will also most likely extend to the upcoming winter period. This development was offset to the certain extent by a precipitation-related 11% increase in German hydro-outfits. Nuclear production increased by 6% as a result of better availability compared to 2020, where we faced extended outages at the Ringhaus and Oskarsham plants. Gas and coal-fired power are up by 34% on a year-to-year basis, despite extended unavailability at our Dutch Mars Luxury Power Plant. This is the result of consistently low wind power generation, healthy demand coupled to the economic recovery but also unplugged interconnection authorities influencing our UK business. In addition, unlike last year, the DATM4 and IRCINC4 and 5 power plants are now fully contribute to the nine-month figures. Our Russian power segment also is showing an increase in generation volumes, however, to a smaller degree. The 6% increase year-on-year is driven by the recovery of domestic consumption and the growth of electricity exports to Finland and the Baltic countries. The overall growth in fossil-based generation volumes translates into a 21% increase in carbon emissions year-on-year. Looking at the full year 2021, we expect this trend to continue. Our specific carbon intensity slightly decreased to approximately 435 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour. Although we could observe a further production increase, the more or less constant level can be mostly explained with the highly efficient units 4 and 5 at the easing power plant site. Moving over to the financial section, starting with a summary of our main KPIs on the next slide. The overall picture after nine months is first and foremost a positive one. In a volatile and extreme commodity market environment, Uniper managed to significantly increase operating performance. However, looking at the magnitude of some of the presented metrics, it is also fair to conclude that Uniper's financials pretty much capture the level of exceptionality that we saw in the commodity markets. Let's go through the matrix from left to right. Both adjusted EBIT and adjusted EBITDA increased by about 200 million euros each compared to previous year. Consequently, economic depreciations and amortization turned out flat year on year with 486 million euros. The adjusted net income followed this positive development and increased by 179 million euros year-on-year, benefiting also from a stronger economic interest result due to a revaluation of our hydro provisions in light of the higher interest rates. While minorities remained stable at 40 million euros, the economic tax rate increased towards 25% as more earnings shifted towards higher taxed countries. Despite a long operational set of numbers, the reported IFRS net income shows a loss of almost 5 billion euros. As explained in the ad hoc announcement, this matrix suffers from a mismatch in IFRS accounting. The deals that Juniper uses to hedge its portfolio are subject to mark-to-market accounting. As commodity prices have jerked, the hedge deals have significantly decreased in value. The total non-operating loss from hedge instruments valuation amounts to roughly 7 billion euros and is reflected in this net income figure. However, the corresponding values gained on Uniper's underlying assets like power plants or inventories are not reflected here as their book values are capped at historic costs under IFRS. This mismatch is only temporary and will resolve over time as the position settles. While the impact on the net income is therefore of limited relevance, the valuation losses on the derivative side did have a very tangible impact on Uniper's financial situation. In many cases, the merchant's hedge deals are concluded via commodity exchanges and bilateral agreements that are subject to hearings. Accordingly, with prices hitting uncharted territory and increasingly out of the money, hedge deals universally faced significant variation margin calls over the last week. The finance team worked very intensively and closely with our business as well as financing partners to make sure that those calls and the resulting liquidity risk were properly managed. In order to achieve this in the most efficient way, Uniper relied on a broad set of tools, including commercial papers, bank loans, intergroup loans, and ultimately also operational measures within our commodities portfolio. The very high operating cash flow reflects to some extent those measures. When it comes to the economic net debt, margining payments do not have an impact here. With every margining payment made or received, Uniper recognizes a corresponding margining receivable or liability, which are all included in Uniper's economic net debt definition. Therefore, not being impacted by margining, the net debt developed in line with the very high operating cash flow. As usual, I will now get into the details of the KPIs, starting with the underlying earnings drivers on the next chart. This slide breaks down the year-on-year development of adjusted EBIT into the main effects. The overall positive delta of 209 million euros after nine months is primarily driven by our international and gas midstream commodity business, which together showed an increase of more than 450 million euros. Roughly two-thirds of this increase is related to the international commodity business, in this case our US and LNG business, that benefited from the market developments in North America and Asia already during Q1. In the past, European gas industry results came in more than 100 billion higher year-on-year compared to the already strong previous year. This is reflecting the successful optimization of our flexible asset portfolio and our good positioning in times of volatile and rising gas prices. Usually, in this business, the earnings are materializing rather in the winter, i.e. Q1 and Q4. This year, however, the gas midstream business has already made a strong contribution to the third quarter due to the way the entire portfolio has been managed in this exceptional market environment. Next, European fossil generation is up by almost 70 million euros compared to already strong previous year. Now we can see the full nine-month contribution from DATEM4 and the K5 e-sink power plants, all of which went in commercial operation during the last year. Additionally, increased prices from capacity auctions resulted in higher capacity payments in UK for 2021. The positive drivers were partly offset by lower availability of mass luxury this year. Our outside generation business is on par with last year's results. On the volume side, hydro is down mostly due to the facility station in Sweden being very high last year, which came down to below normal level this year. However, this is partly compensated by a stronger nuclear generation after lower outages for most of the nuclear assets during last year. Price-wise, given increased spot prices and not fully hedged position on our hydro assets, we see a positive price effect here, while on the nuclear side the achieved prices came down. The next driver is so-called carbon-facing effect that we had already flagged in previous calls, including the last one at the half-year stage. As you know, this is a temporary intra-year effect that will fully revert in Q4. As CO2 prices increase, so do our CO2 provisions during the year, leading to higher expenditures in the first nine quarters. The offsetting gains on our carbon hedges, however, are not recognized within adjusted EBIT until the hedge deal settles, which is in Q4. Given the increase in CO2 prices and the high auto generation volume of the nine months, the CO2 phasing effect reached almost minus 450 million euros in absolute terms, which is about €320 million more than in the previous year. A contribution from the Russian dollar generation business developed in line with last year's results. Here, a negative effect offset the positive performance in the underlying Russian business. The additional contribution from Rezovskaya 3 and higher day ahead market prices in Europe and shown for lower earnings from Saturskaja, Javinskaja, Kutskaja plants, which all moved from the CAC capacity market scheme into the COM scheme. Now over to the operating cash flow. The operating gas flow after interest and taxes amounts to roughly 2.2 billion euros at the nine-month date, which is extraordinarily high. Looking at the waterfall that derives the operating gas flow from the adjusted EBIT on the left, there are two elements that stand out in the terms of magnitude. The first one is the so-called other category, which amounts to 927 million euros. This category summarizes all CO2-related provisions and working capital movements. As already mentioned, we had quite high CO2 provision built up in the first nine months. Accordingly, as those are burdening the EBIT but are not effective, this leads to a significantly positive effect here. In principle, at some point there would be offsetting effect in this category once the actual CO2 emission certificates are delivered into our balances. However, as you know, this does not happen before Q4. Accordingly, we see a very positive effect here that should largely balance out at the full year stage. Let's have a look at the second large driver on the operating gas flow. The net moment in the working capital amounting to 615 million euros. This figure reflects ultimately the way how the individual gas assets, including storages and contracts, as well as market channels, have been utilized over the last nine months and particularly in Q3. Given the extreme and unsustainable commodity market developments, The optionality in the portfolio was seen in a way that emphasized prudence and liquidity. Hereby, the business contributed to meet Uniper's funding requirements before, but also after, the 30th of September. Next, the development of the economic net debt. After nine months, the economic net debt came in at 1.4 billion euros, which is about 1.6 billion euros lower compared to the beginning of the year. Obviously, the main driver here is the high operating cash flow. This is by far overcompensating the payouts for dividends and investments. Lower pension provision and assets with silent obligation further contributed about €450 million to the positive development of the economic net debt. In both cases, this was due to the rising interest rates with regards to the pension provision, the underlying interest rate increased from 0.8% to 1.3% in Germany, and from 1.5% to 2.1% in the UK. For the sake of clarity, please note that the category DIVEX includes proceeds from the sale of our last European Lit Night Assets Compile that took place end of September. Given the positive earnings outlook for the remainder of the year, we expect the economic set to end up at a more than comfortable level at the year end as well. Admittedly, not at current record low levels. Having said that, let's have a look at the updated earnings outlook on the last slide today. As communicated in our ad hoc announcement, we have raised our full year outlook for 2021 adjusted EBIT and adjusted net income by 250 million euros and 200 million euros respectively. Hence, we now expect an adjusted EBIT between 1,050 million euros and 1,300 million euros and adjusted net income in the range of €850 million to €1,050 million. The reasons for the higher outlook are both a stronger than anticipated Q3 and higher expectations for the rest of the year. Aside from the revision of the carbon phasing effects, we expect Q4 to turn out better on the back of our gas midstream and fossil generation business. One final remark on the bandwidth of our outlook. Depending on how prices move until year end, earnings could shift between 2021 and 2022. Given the current tightness in the commodity market, those movements could be quite material. Therefore, even though we feel generally very comfortable with the new outlook, we did not narrow down the bandwidth of our guiding range at this point of time. That brings me to the end of my presentation today. Stefan, back to you.

Disclaimer

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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