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Uniper Se
2/23/2022
If any participant has difficulty seeing the conference, please press start key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Stefan Jost, EVP Group Finance and Investor Relations, who will start the meeting today. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator, dear analysts and investors. I would like to welcome you to this morning's conference call on Uniper's 2021 results. Our CEO, Klaus-Dieter Maubach, and our CFO, Tiina Tuomela, are here with me today. Klaus-Dieter will start with a view on the current situation at the Russian-Ukrainian border and implications for us before moving to the key events in fiscal year 2021, followed by an update on our ambitions and strategic goals. Tiina will then explain the key elements of the 2021 financials and conclude with an earnings outlook for 2022. As usual, there will be a Q&A session in the end.
Thank you, Stefan. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining our call today. I would have loved to dive unaddressed. Let me be open with you. The situation at the Russian-Ukrainian border leaves us at Uniper profoundly unsettled. And please note that I'm saying this as the CEO of a company where thousands of colleagues work hard every day to contribute a significant share of profits either in Russia or all based on long-standing ties with Russian partners that go back more than 50 years. During that time, a lot has been achieved for all parties based on foresighted collaboration, mutual agreements, and trustful dialogues. My experience is that if solutions based on those principles are not possible, This usually results in consequences with significant costs for all sides involved. Looking at Uniprin now, while we are certainly hoping for a de-escalation, we need to be clear about the risks and the potential mitigation tools at our hands. The following chart summarizes the main aspects in this regard. Europe's key exposure to the situation at the Russian-Ukrainian border can be categorized into four areas. The first one is kind of familiar already. A further escalation might lead to more volatile prices and therefore higher margining and liquidity needs. Tina will elaborate later on the current margining situation. in this context. While we cannot predict how prices will develop going forward, it is good to see that the last days went by without turbulences and that we are prepared. Moving over to Nord Stream 2, it probably did not come as a surprise that Nord Stream 2 got immediately into the focus of political counteraction. As you all know, Nord Stream 2 is completed and ready for COD once the regulatory requirements are met, i.e. the certification process is completed. Yesterday, the German government has taken steps to put this certification process on hold until further notice. Let me remind you that Juniper is a financing partner of Nord Stream 2, the capital interest income. The interest income becomes cash effective after certain milestones, out of which the commercial start is the most relevant one. We are evaluating the impact of yesterday's decision on our claims towards Nord Stream 2, including potential impairment implications from a delayed COD. The third section As of today, we consider it unlikely that the business of Uniper or UniPro could be significantly affected in this regard. The last category is related to possible interruptions of Russian gas supply in our portfolio. Depending on the situation, Uniper could be required to source at high market prices to ensure security of supply for our customers. Whether this would have material implications depends on the duration and the magnitude of the interruption. In less severe cases, Uniper could utilize its flexible assets to cover for the shortfall. On the other side, in more severe cases, regulatory measures would become likely, which would reduce demand and hence close the supply gap to some extent. When it comes to the likelihood of such interruption, the recent public statements on the Russian and European side provide some comfort. It is apparently understood that maintaining the supply to Europe is in the interest of all sides. As we have stated in the past throughout over our 50 years of partnership, Gazprom has always been a reliable partner who delivered as promised. On this positive note, I would like to conclude this topic for now. Let me assure you, Uniper is closely monitoring the situation and evaluating mitigation measures. We will keep you updated going forward. However, while this situation is certainly getting our highest attention, we need also to keep our daily business and the strategy For the energy sector, the year 2021 was a very clear reminder of the major challenge in our industry, pushing decarbonization without sacrificing security of supply. Accordingly, in 2021, we saw many countries and jurisdictions taking new measures and defining new targets the year in which the risks of insufficient energy supply led to unprecedented high and volatile commodity prices around the globe. This extreme volatility has pretty much manifested itself also in Uniper's financials. Looking back, Uniper had in total six ad hoc announcements in the last 12 months. When it comes to the financial year 2021, we raised our profit guidance twice. However, we also needed to take far-reaching liquidity measures and finally communicated the first dividend cut in Uniper's history. I fully understand if people outside of Uniper have a hard time financial situation. Let me help you here by taking you step by step through the key elements. Ultimately, we recorded This positive earnings development showcases once again the ability of our portfolio to capture value in volatile times, especially in our commodity business. Tina will go into more detail on our 2021 performance later. However, this all came at a price. The hedging positions required liquidity management on a scale previously unknown to Uniper. The financing measures we took around the end of the year, involving both our major shareholder and banks, expanded our liquidity framework by 12 billion euro. However, while our earnings performance indicators reflect actual economic value captured in 2021, the liquidity needs linked to margining are only temporary. Standard & Poor's just confirmed our BBB flat credit rating in January 2022, underlining the fact that we run a structurally secure business in markets with exceptional price fluctuations. Even though only temporary in nature, we need to properly and carefully manage those liquidity risks going forward, especially the current geopolitical situation. also our dividend. Accordingly, universe management will propose to reduce the dividend from prior years, 501 million Euro to 26 million Euro for the fiscal year 2021, which represents the minimum dividend in line with German stock corporation act. This proposal has been aligned with our majority shareholder fortune and will be brought forward to the AGM on May 18. Ultimately, the purpose of the dividend cut is to increase the resilience of Uniper's investment capability in a highly volatile environment. Despite turbulent energy markets and often uncertain regulatory conditions, we have a clear focus on leading Uniper into an era of spring 2021 has been to speed up the strategy execution. Uniper has accelerated the coal exit and is now well ahead of the original plan. In addition, we have empowered the Uniper organization, for example, by establishing joint Uniper and Fortum teams for hydrogen and renewables in order to implement growth initiatives more quickly in the future by fully leveraging the capabilities in both companies. Even though more renewables will be the most important building block for the energy transition, the transformation cannot be achieved without maintaining security of supply. For the foreseeable future, gas will play a crucial role here in 2021. We can see that this view has become more and more consensus across politicians as reflected in the German coalition agreement or the EU taxonomy discussion. At the same time we saw that minor shifts in global supply and demand balance, rising geopolitical uncertainties and unplanned outages have led to unprecedented gas price volatility. And the outlook for the gas market is not very promising. The European gas market remains vulnerable. Current reserves in European storage facilities have never been lower in the last 10 years. Comparatively warm winter temperatures and significantly increased energy imports are currently slowing down a rapid decrease of reserves. According to current calculations, supply will be sufficient to meet Europe's gas needs in the current winter season. However, uncertainties are growing. sufficient refill of the European gas torches for the next winter season. Hence, the concerns about Europe's energy supply will prevail for the time being. In this situation, Unifer, as one of Europe's largest gas traders and gas storage operators, plays a vital role in contributing to a secure and sustainable energy supply. Unifer continued to deliver reliably in our European core markets in 2021. In contrast to many of our competitors, we started with full gas storages into this winter. The LNG business offers additional flexibility. Here, Juniper has further expanded the number of traded LNG cargoes to over 350 in 2021. Thus, we contribute to the liquidity of markets and, at the same time, we generate higher returns. Those returns are needed to decarbonize our portfolio. Before I elaborate on our strategic progress, let's have a look at the broader picture in terms of sustainability, where we have made significant progress in 2021. The topic of ESG has become an integral part which plays a central and integrated role in our strategy. As you already know, we are in the process of transforming our portfolio to ultimately become carbon neutral in the long term. This transformation comprises three dimensions, exit, transform, and expand. With respect to these Beyond as part of the annual report, we published not only our first EU taxonomy disclosures, but also our first TCFD report today. This again highlights the importance of environmental factors and the transformation as part of our strategy going forward. Now over to our major achievements in the broader social area. For the second time since 2018, Uniper has received the Corporate Health Award in the Energy Industry category, which is the best known and most successful initiative in the field of occupational health management in Germany. The result of the external audit reflects Uniper's great efforts to promote and maintain the health of employees, especially during the pandemic. This is directly linked to the introduction of our new normal work style that provides our employees with maximum working flexibility for the future. It includes, among other things, providing economic working equipment for home use to our employees. Moving from health and safety to equality. Unipass Board of Management approved recently a company-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion which is divided into five key areas of action. Talent management, leadership, organization, marketplace, and society. The strategy provides a concrete framework to improve our performance in those five fields. Finally, we implemented a talent development program called Evolve that supports the development of our future talents towards leadership positions and expert roles so that they can drive the energy evolution and successfully lead our company into carbon neutrality. Moving to the last block on the slide, there have also been some changes on the governance side. Since last year, the long-term incentivization for executives decarbonization. The other is the so-called ESG target. For the 2022 tranche, this ESG target has been defined as the absolute CO2 reduction of the European fleet over the next three years. To make it absolutely clear, with this element, 20% of the long-term bonus tranche for Uniper senior executives will be directly and quantitatively linked to CO2 emissions. Diversity and expertise is also important when it comes to our governance bodies. We see a positive development here with Tina is our CFO. Juniper has one female member in the Board of Management, which translates into a quote of 25% female members. When it comes to the Supervisory Board, Therefore, UNIPRO updated the competency profile for the supervisory board accordingly last year and also foresees an increased interaction on climate topics in the supervisory board. Last, in 2021, a Sustainable Development Committee was established at our Russian subsidiary UNIPRO to provide effective support to the board of directors in the field of sustainable development. Let's focus now on the part of ESG that is most important to Europe, the environment, or more concrete, decarbonization. Let's start with an overview of our CO2 reduction targets, which form the cornerstones of our transition path in line with our strategy in power energy evolution. As you already know, our ultimate goal is to become carbon neutral by 2050 on group level. For the European generation, We are even more ambitious and committed to be carbon neutral by 2035 already. One target that is probably new to you is our scope three target, which has been published in December 2021. Group level, we commit to reduce our scope three emissions until 2035 by 35% compared to the baseline 2021. While our scope one and two emissions are mainly caused by our power generation, our scope three emissions are primarily connected to our global commodities business. To achieve this target, we will work together with our producers and customers to reduce both upstream and downstream emissions across our value chains. Furthermore, we will gradually transfer our commodity portfolio into a low and no carbon As I already said, our transition towards carbon neutrality is built on three strategic dimensions, exit, transform, and expand. Let's have a look at the exit pillar on the next slide. In January 2020, we announced our initial coal exit plan for Europe. Since then, we have been able to accelerate the phase out even further and shut down coal plants earlier than originally planned. This acceleration has secured a roughly 40% additional CO2 reduction or approximately 15 million tons in absolute terms. To provide you a bit more details, we took the following steps in 2021. In April, at the second round of the German coal exit tenders, Juniper's bid for Wilhelmshaven was accepted. The electricity generation was ceased early December 2021, In July, the Scholzen-C power plant was awarded closure by the German Federal Network Agency and will be taken off the grid. end of September 2024 instead of autumn 2025. In October, we ended our lignite chapter in Europe and transferred the Schkopau power plant to Saale Energie GmbH in line with our initial plan. In December, it was decided the fourth tender that Staudinger 5 will end its commercial operations in 2023 instead of 2025. This means that only Duttle 4 and Mars Structure 3 remain in operation after 2024 in Europe. As stated in the past, with respect to Duttle 4, Unipro is open for discussions with the new German government that communicated its ambition to exit coal ideally by 2030 already. Finally, you see the 2.4 gigawatt lignite exposure in our Russian entity Unipro. As I've said in the past, However, as you know, the regulatory framework and the markets are different here compared to Europe. Accordingly, we need to reflect different circumstances in our decarbonization plans and ambitions for Russia. Nonetheless, we clearly see that the dynamic is picking up here, which is fully supported by us. When it comes to decarbonization, we must not only execute The following slide provides an overview about the magnitude and the areas of capex going forward. We expect to increase our capex in 2022. Maintenance and replacement capex will increase somewhat to roughly €450 million. More extensive measures are scheduled for some of our gas-fired power plants as part of the multi-year maintenance cycle. Looking beyond 2022, our structural guidance for maintenance and repair capex in normal years remains at the 400 million euro mark. When it comes to our growth capex in 2022, we expect the investments to end up above the 500 million euro mark. This is a considerable increase compared to prior years and underlines our ambitions to grow. In 2022, the growth capex will be spent, among others, on our new gas power plant, Aerosink 6, and Chorlen 3. Going forward, all of our capex will be spent within one of the three areas on the right side. While not all of them will trigger material investments in the short term, the year 2022 is key to push those projects significantly to fill up our CAPEX pipeline in future years. The first priority is to get investments in onshore wind and photovoltaics on the ground in Europe. The second pillar, clean thermal generation, aims to further develop our existing platform and competencies in fossil power and heat generation towards a lower carbon offering for green customers. And the third focus area is clean gases. Here we want to drive market development along the value chain for sustainably produced hydrogen and biogases. Let's go into those topics one by one. The joint Fortum and Unifor team for wind and solar, which is geared from Unifor's headquarters in Dusseldorf, will comprise more than 100 employees in the course of 2022. As a joint team, those colleagues develop assets that ultimately will trigger investments either by Unifor or by photon depending on the characteristics of the project an important first step was the investment decision taken in december 2021 to commence the construction of a 380 megawatt wind farm cluster in western finland the project will be powered by 56 turbines supplied by nordics Given the location and the fact that the Helsinki municipal utility is both an off-taker as well as a 40% part in this project, this first investment will be realized by Fortum. This is an important milestone and signal that the team is in delivery mode. The wind and solar team is currently developing a number of projects in the defined European core markets, which can be seen on the map on the right side of slide in northern europe these are mainly further wind projects and in central europe a combination of wind and photovoltaic projects this pipeline is the initial basis to have 1.5 to 2 gigawatts of new renew renewables capacity ready by the end of 2025 within the joint one team and now to the second important strategic building block for future growth Thermal generation with a focus on low-carbon energy use will benefit from a rising demand for reliable capacity from decarbonized gas. In Europe, unexpected unavailability of scheduled power generation from wind and nuclear energy has sparked the discussion about sufficient dispatchable power generation capacities in the future. Thus, UNEPA recorded a significant increase in utilization last year with our European gas-fired and hot coal-fired power plants. In the future, security of supply will come under pressure from two sides. Demand for electricity will develop more dynamically and further reliable baseload capacity will be shut down, especially in Central Europe. In order to ensure sufficient supply going forward, there needs to be a better environment for investments in new, dispatchable short-term, those power plants will need to be still gas-based. Over time, decarbonized gas solutions will take over via new builds or transformation of existing assets. In 2022, Uniper will bring two major gas assets online that will already contribute to the issue of system security and lower carbon energy All of 2022, the 300 megawatt Uniper gas-fired power plant Yersin 6 will be made available to the transmission system operator in Bavaria as a stand-by power plant for 10 years. This facility will be crucial to balancing the grid, which is subsequently facing more volatility from the nuclear exit and the increasing feed-in of renewable energy. By the end of 2022, the CHP gas-fired power plant Scholzen III in the northern Ruhr area is to be commenced and can generate around 130 megawatt of heat electricity for an industrial customer and surplus energy for third parties. By replacing an older coal-fired power plant, Scholzen III Unifer will use its own heat infrastructure at this rural cluster to use waste heat from the refinery site with BP for district heating in the northern rural region in the future and save 60,000 ton of CO2 annually. In the Netherlands, we are making the district heating supply of the city of The Hague more sustainable together with the Dutch energy supplier Eneco and are developing a concept to make the supply CO2-free by 2035. In Russia, our subsidiary Unipro received approval in an auction process for the modernization of a total of five gas firepower plant units with a total capacity of around 4,000 megawatt. spring 2022 and will then receive increased capacity payments for 15 years. For Germany, we see a window of opportunity opening up for dispatchable low-carbon gas-fired power plants if the accelerated coal phase-out is to be realized by 2030. A joint study by Boston Consulting Group and the German Federation of Industries The new German government has put this supply gap issue on its agenda and clearly positioned gas as part of the solution in the discussion. Results are to be provided by a yet to be established commission of experts and evolved parties in the course of 2022. The complexity of the issue is further increased by the fact that the EU, with its taxonomy fuel. But the strict requirements do not adequately take into account the heterogeneous national needs. In Germany, we are prepared to invest around 2 gigawatt of new gas fire power plants if the framework conditions are right, and this fits in with our European Unifer, as one of the most experienced European gas-fired power plant operators, can contribute expertise and brownfield sites here so that new builds could be implemented quickly. Another crucial building block for Unifer's long-term success is its market entry into the European and global green gases business, and here in particular with sustainably produced hydrogen. UNIPER has developed an extensive project pipeline that covers both the production of low-carbon hydrogen in Europe as well as the input of hydrogen and its derivatives, such as ammonia, methanol, and sustainable fuels. In the coming years, UNIPER will focus on realizing this project pipeline. A key focus of UNIPER along the value chain is the production of hydrogen for stationary industrial applications. is the hub for green hydrogen, with which we aim to meet around 15% of Germany's hydrogen demand in 2030. A large electrolysis plant is planned here, possibly with offshore wind power supply by our cooperation partner, Ørsted. On the downstream side of the hydrogen value chain, we have just concluded a cooperation agreement with the German steel company, Salzgitter, pioneering the transformation toward low CO2 steel production. In cooperation with strong partners, we have also worked on projects in important European industrial clusters such as Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the Humber region, and grain in the United Kingdom. Sweden, Uniper, together with Fortum, hydrogen for the production of climate-friendly methanol. The first significant investment decision is now scheduled for the second half of 2022. This is the German showcase project Energiepark Bad Lauchstedt with an integrated concept from wind farm over hydrogen production with a 30 megawatt electrolysis plant up to transport, storage, and marketing. Overall, Uniper aims to build at least one gigawatt of electrolysis capacity by 2030, which is more than covered by our project plans to date. Another focus of Uniper's future hydrogen business will develop in the area of mobility with e-fuels for ships or trucks, as well as sustainable air fuels for aviation. Not to mention our own plans to convert the company's gas-fired power plant. In 2021, Uniper continued its partnership with Siemens and GE to study the conversion potential of our gas turbines to hydrogen. The next step will be to examine test options for the co-combustion of hydrogen or other biogases. A further essential building block in the hydrogen value chain is global origination, as inputs will be needed to meet expected future demand in Europe. Unifer and the Hyport consortium from Oman are already working very specifically on concluding an offtake agreement for green ammonia for Europe. The Russian gas major Novartek is aiming to supply Europe with low carbon hydrogen in the future. For this, Novartek is working with Unifer on the concept to develop a supply chain. The deep-sea port of Wilhelmshaven on Germany's North Sea coast could play a significant role here as it offers an ideal location for a hydrogen import terminal. All in all, we are confident that with a now improved and expanded A strong operational performance, like the one we have seen in 2021, provides further financial tailwind for our journey. More on that from Tina, who will lead you through the details of our 2021 results. Over to you, Tina.
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