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Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uniper Analyst and Investor Conference Call First Quarter Results 2024. 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 by dialing the one on your telephone keypad. May I now hand over to Stefan Joost, who will start the meeting. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to welcome you to our first quarter results of fiscal year 2024. So, we are here in our regular setup, and next to me on today's call is Jutta Dönges, our Chief Financial Officer. Jutta will lead you through the presentation today, and as usual, there will be a Q&A session at the end. Now, let me hand you over to Jutta Dönges, please.

Thank you, Stefan. And good morning, everyone. A warm welcome from my side. Let's kick it off with the highlights and major achievements in the first quarter. We have successfully started the fifth year 2024. In the first three months, Uniper's new KPI as of January this year, the group adjusted EBITDA amounted to 885 million euros, following an exceptional strong first quarter in the prior year. The development was mainly driven by declining achieved gas and power prices in less volatile markets. The bottom line came out even stronger. The group adjusted net income has risen to 570 million euros. The performance is fully in line with our expectations. And today, we confirm our outlook for the full year for adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income. Before I will provide more details on our figures during the presentation, Let me highlight some remarkable achievements during the first quarter which underpin our financial stabilization. I am pleased to emphasize that we recently achieved a meaningful milestone in our financing leeway. We have refinanced and extended our syndicated credit facility from 2018 of 1.7 billion euros to 3 billion euros. This is our first credit facility that anchors our sustainability targets. namely our carbon reduction targets and the strategic expansion targets in renewable energy. The new sustainability-linked credit line has a maximum maturity until 2029, including two options to extend for an additional year each. The new RCF gives Uniper the financial headroom needed to support our operations going forward. At the same time, we were very delighted with the high level of demand and the confidence of our lenders. The order book was well oversubscribed, which is a clear signal for universe regain stability. As a result of our accelerated financial recovery and our exceptional sound performance in 2023, the rating agency S&P Global confirmed in March our corporate investment grade rating at BBB- with a stable outlook for the third time in a row. Notably, our standalone rating improved by three notches. Correspondingly, S&P revised its assessment of the so-called likelihood of extraordinary government support downward, thereby reducing the government uplift from five to two notches. Ladies and gentlemen, the high rating uplift for our standalone credit rating confirmed our efforts and ambition of further strengthening our financial as well as our business risk profile by de-risking our business activities. A further improvement and a higher predictability of our earnings streams are essential steps on the way to become a standalone investment-grade company again. As announced during our presentation for the financial year 2023, we have implemented a new IFRS segment structure to reflect how we see our business going forward, which we report for the first time today. As our strategy is to transform Uniper into a leading provider of green energy in Europe, we have adjusted our segment accordingly. This enhances our steering towards our green transformation. The former segment, European Generation, is split into two segments. Green Generation, which contains our existing carbon-free generation and our over-time increasing renewables business. Flexible Generation, under all generation activities that contribute to ensuring grid stability and security of supply, a key pillar of the energy transition in UNIQA's core markets. The former segment, global commodities, has changed into greener commodities. As said earlier, our aim is also to transform our commodities business over time into a greener commodities business with increasing shares of green gases like hydrogen for our PPA activities. One example for our role in security of supply and delivering green bespoke solutions is the recent expansion of a power purchase agreement with our long-standing customer, Deutsche Bahn, for a further five years. This means we will supply around 88 gigawatt hours per year of green electricity from our Swedish hyper power plants. Let's now move on to slide four, which highlights our strong focus in strengthening our financing base. Before we will dive into our financial numbers, I would like to take the opportunity to have a closer look at Unipress financing instruments. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, I am proud that we have successfully expanded Unica's access to financing via credit markets in recent weeks. In our approach, we were guided by four key financial objectives. First and foremost, we want to ensure that Unica always has sufficient liquid funds available. This is particularly important to support our operating businesses with adequate liquidity. On the one hand, we have developed strategies to better manage our margining requirements and thus minimize the potential liquidity risks. And on the other hand, we have credit facilities with a broad range of plans in place to cover collateral for margining obligations, if appropriate, and serve working capital needs. Secondly, and just as importantly, We want to ensure that we have sufficient access to diverse and flexible financing instruments that will enable Uniper to pursue significant transformation investments in line with our strategy. Supporting these two goals, Uniper has a new revolving credit facility of 3 billion euros agreed since March, replacing the previous one of 1.7 billion euros. The new credit line serves as a constant liquidity reserve and as a flexible financing means of working capital. As mentioned before, the new credit facility agreement has been signed for the first time as a so-called sustainability linked credit facility. Financing conditions are partly new to the achievement of carbon reduction and strategic expansion targets in renewable energy. This is a major achievement and a clear sign that the financing market is recognizing Juniper's regained stability and new strategic direction. In addition, in April, we completed the re-establishment of our 2 billion euros debt issuance program, which is listed at the Luxembourg Stock Exchange. This provides the next fundamental step to regain credit market readiness and gives Juniper technical access to the EU bond market. On top, I would like to briefly remind you that we have already prolonged our Euro commercial paper program in the amount of 1.8 billion euros in the second quarter of 2023 to flexibly cover short-term liquidity needs. These key financing instruments provide us with considerable financial headroom to support the green transformation of Uniper going forward. Bear in mind, Due to our very comfortable economic net cash position of 4.5 billion euros at the end of the first quarter 2024, we are not yet making use of any of these credit facilities, with exception of a base issuance of our commercial paper program to be visible in the market. Back to our financial objectives. The third essential aspect is the full redemption of the utilization under the KfW credit facility already in 2023. The KFW facility expires in 2026. After our financial turnaround in the financial year 2023, we are less dependent on the KFW facility and together with our new RCF, we are confident to further downsize it. And accordingly, we also have been able to take a major step forward and have reduced the KFW credit line from 11.1 billion to 5 billion euros at the beginning of May. Fourth, our ultimate goal is to achieve a solid standalone investment rate rating. As already mentioned, the latest update from S&P has brought us considerably closer to this target. We are working hard to achieve our goal as quickly as possible, also to make Uniper fit for the capital markets again. Now, over to the key financials for the first quarter 2024 on the next slide. Looking at adjusted EBITDA of 885 million euros for the first quarter of this year, the earnings trend is within sight of prior year's record figures, despite substantially lower achieved power and gas prices. I will explain the result drivers in detail on the next slide. Operating cash flow doubled year on year and stands at 1.45 billion euros. main driver and the reason for the significant deviation from the operating performance is the absence of effects from liquidity measures during crisis years that had burdened the first quarter of 2023 operating cash flows. Adjusted net income of 570 million euros in the first quarter of 2024 is 112 million euros higher than the already good prior year figure and our operating style. The largest effect comes from a very good economic interest result in line with the development of our cash position and driven by lower utilization of financing instruments. I will come back to adjusted net income in more detail during my presentation. The net income of 462 million euros is in par with adjusted net income. The enormous swing with a negative year-on-year effect of almost 6.5 billion euros is mainly caused by the absence of the release of long-term provisions for onerous contracts. To remember, a significant provision had to be recognized in 2022 for potential future losses in the gas portfolio following the discontinuation of Russian gas supplies and was reversed at the end of the first quarter of 2023 as a consequence of significantly lower market prices. As already mentioned, following the enormous financial turnaround in 2023, Uniper had achieved an economic net cash position at the end of last year. Thanks to the very good operating cash flow, this position was further expanded to more than 4.5 billion euros at the end of the first quarter 2024.

On the next slide, I will dive into the key drivers for adjustment with the aims.

While flexible generation, as in the prior year, was the most important earnings driver in the first quarter 2024 in absolute terms, this waterfall graph clearly shows that the most positive earnings improvement compared to the prior year resulted from our gas midstream business as part of the greener commodity segment. The gas business was able to achieve a significantly more positive contribution in Q1 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2023, which was extraordinarily burdened mainly by the liquidity measures taken in fiscal year 2022. In general, gas midstream delivered improved earnings compared to the previous year, but remained a negative territory. The decline in the greener commodities power trading business shows that the trading result has returned to more normalized levels after a particularly positive previous year in which Unica benefited considerably from a volatile market price environment. The adjusted EBITDA of the green generation segment shows noticeable lower contributions compared to the same period of the previous year. Break it down further, Swedish nuclear energy benefited from price-related higher earnings because of the stressful hedging transactions. In addition, nuclear energy was able to increase its generation volume in the first quarter of 2024 due to the improved availability of Brinkhals IV. However, these positive effects were more than offset by lower margin contributions within Swedish Hydro and German Hydro, mainly due to lower prices. Also, the contribution from our pump storage and storage hydro plants had been lower due to less favorable peak-based spreads. Nevertheless, the outlook for green power is overall positive. As announced in February, we are still convinced that we will achieve a higher result for green generation for the full year 2024 than in the previous year. The negative delta in the first quarter will turn positive towards the end of the financial year latest, as the fourth quarter 2023 was negatively impacted by the recognition of nuclear provisions. Flexible generation. Even though this block is negative on a year-over-year comparison, I would like to emphasize that we have achieved a very good operating result here. Nevertheless, the extremely good result of the previous year, in which we achieved record high spread, has not been repeatable as we have indicated in prior statements. In addition, due to the lower prices compared to the previous year, the production of gas and in particular coal-fired electricity was less profitable and therefore lower. Accordingly, we did not only experience a negative price effect, but also a lower volume effect. In contrast, The impact of the temporary carbon phasing effect on the earnings and flexible generation was positive in the first quarter 2024 on the back of lower carbon prices. For the outlook, it should be taken into account that this positive driver will settle at the end of the year. Slide 7 shows the reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to adjusted net income for the first quarter 2024. Main messages are First, we have a positive economic interest result of 52 million euros, which was boosted by our high cash position and lower commitment fees for our credit facilities, which also has a positive impact on the adjustment income. And second, at 154 million euros, we see significantly lower depreciation and amortization than in the first quarter of the previous year. This is due to the high impairments mainly in our fossil fleet booked during 2023. And third, the income tax of 206 million euros corresponds to a tax rate of 26.3% for the first quarter of 2024. The tax rate reflects the mix between local and international results. Now over to the operating cash flow on the next slide. In the first three months of this year, the operating cash flow came in at 1.45 billion euros. In relation to the operating profit, Uniper has a cash conversion rate of well above 100% in this period. The waterfall clearly shows that this is due to the changes in working capital of almost 1.1 billion euros in total, which follows a pattern of seasonal withdrawals from our gas inventories. In addition, the potential fall in gas prices and lower working capital requirements, which has a positive effect on the operating cash flow. And now for the latest figures of Uniper's economic net debt. At the end of the last year, 2023, Uniper had an economic net cash in the amount of almost 3.1 billion euros. And at the end of the first quarter of 2024, the net cash balance improved to 4.5 billion euros in line with the positive operating cash flow. Capital expenditures came out at 79 million euros. The other block mainly includes the change in asset retirement obligations and a decrease in nuclear provisions due to positive FX effects. Various pension provisions were rather stable and increased in the single-digit million range due to minimal changes in interest rates. Last, I would like to conclude my presentation today with a confirmation of the given outlook for fiscal year 2024. We continue to expect an adjusted EBITDA in the range of 1.5 to 2 billion euros. For the adjusted net income, we continue to anticipate a range of 0.7 to 1.1 billion euros. Looking at the remainder of the year, we still expect a very solid performance in 2024 on the back of an overall and absolute very good performing business. Before I hand over to Stefan Joost, let me briefly summarize. We had a good start into the year. We are delivering on our commitment and our priorities. Before we go into the Q&A session in a couple of minutes, I would like to take a moment at the end of my presentation to thank Stefan, for whom today's call will be the last one as Uniper's Head of Group Finance and Investor Relations. Much to our regret, Stefan has decided to take on a new professional challenge outside of Uniper. I would like to thank him for his truly outstanding contribution to UNIPA. Stefan played an irreplaceable role during UNIPA's crisis in negotiating the rescue solution by the German government and with regards to the stabilization and financial recovery phase in the past year. We will all miss Stefan a lot. On a personal note, I wish him great success and him and his family All the best for the future. And with that, I hand over back to you, Stefan, to kick off your last Q&A session. Stefan, please.

Thank you very much for your warm words, Joran. It has been always a pleasure and always good fun to serve our analysts and investors with such a strong IR team. Now of Sebastian, but also before of Adam. We can start our Q&A session now. And that's why, operator, I'm handing it over to you, please.

Thank you. Now we will begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial star 1 on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, kindly lift the handset before making your selection. One moment, please, for the first question. The first question comes from the line of Anna Webb from UBS. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. There's two from me. Firstly, there were some reports in the press last week that the remaining Russian gas contracts you have could create risks for any re-IPO or return to the market process that I think has been discussed for 2025. So if there is anything you can comment on whether that would be an issue that would delay the timeline, or if that's sort of a normal part of the business, if you could talk about that. And I assume some of these Russian gas contracts will have rolled off anyway, naturally, since 2022. So if you can confirm how much you still have contracted with gas from Russia, that would be really helpful. And then secondly, sort of a related question. Is there any other conditions you have to meet before you can make any possible return to the market? I know you still have a number of asset sales to complete, including Datan 4 as part of the nationalization EU approval. But do you need to complete these before any potential return to the market? Or is that just sticking to the 2026 deadline? And then finally on that, could you give us the latest update, if any, on the remaining divestments? Thank you very much.

Thank you, Anna, for your questions. Good to hear you. Let me start with the second question, and then the third, and then come back to the Reuters article. The second question, with regard to any prerequisites for a potential return to the market, your question was relating to the list of disposals, and those two things are not linked. There's the obligation of the German government to exit by the end of 28. And there's obviously a long list of prerequisites that need to be fulfilled to be able to go back to the capital markets to do a re-IPO, if that would be the path that the German government would decide. But this is not linked to the other remedies that we have to fulfill. With regards to the disposals, this is, as you mentioned, they need to be completed by the end of 26. And with regards to the progress, you asked whether there's anything new. We talked about this back in end of February when we talked about the full year results for the last year. And there was the announcement that we have been able to sign a contract to sell our Hungarian asset, Gönnyő. This is Basically, where we stand right now, we are expecting the closing of that deal in the second half of this year. And other than that, there has been made brokers in terms of preparation for the other assets that still need to be disposed. And you can expect to see some news flow over the next couple of months when we will bring those potential transactions to the market. On the first question, the Reuters question, Well, I think it's known that we have been in arbitration proceedings with Gazprom Export since the end of 2022. The proceedings are still ongoing, and we are awaiting a decision by the tribunal during the course of this year, potentially at some point over the summer. I think that was known news that has been in the public sphere already. And I can confirm that we still have the supply contracts with Gazprom, and they run until the middle of the 2030s. So they are in place, but we are awaiting for the decision by the tribunal and would expect that we will be able, based on the decision by the tribunal, to further clarify our future position in relation to the contracts with GPE. And I can confirm, but that's probably also not really new, that since August 22, and until today, there has been no Russian gas flowing to Germany under these contracts. I hope that answers your question. I think there was a question also with regard to the volumes under those contracts, roughly 250 terawatt hours a year.

Great, thank you very much.

The next question comes from the line of Louis Bouchard from Odoo BHS. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my question. Stefan, all the best for your new endeavor and professional challenge. Regarding the Russian contract, sorry, I'd like to come back a little bit on this topic, if you don't mind. More to understand what would be eventually the mitigating factor that you could put in place, meaning that probably I guess that the central scenario is to try to cancel this contract to make sure that you don't have gas flowing back to you by 2035. But if you could not, considering the liquidity in the spot markets that you have, because I guess that some of your volumes are now supplied from the spot market, maybe don't you have some possibility to mitigate the impact by using the flexibility that you have in your new contract and replacement gas fuel so that you have not too much impact into your supply business if you have to commit on your take or pay contract with the recent suppliers? That would be the first question. The second question is more regarding the flexible generation business and the evolution that we could expect. Clean spark spread and clean dark spread are, of course, downward oriented. Anyway, you have a very good contribution in the first quarter. We know that there is some phasing effect embedded in it. Could you give us a bit of color by the end of the year, how it could evolve going forward, and where do you see it by the end of 2024? Thank you very much.

Good morning. Thank you for your question. I understand that the entire topic around the Russian gas contract is of high interest, but as I said before, we are in an arbitration procedure, and therefore I want to ask you for your understanding that we cannot speculate on any of these things, any comment on how we could mitigate anything that would be not only to interest for you, but to anybody else. So that is something we rather prefer to be silent about. I hope that you understand that really. And on the flexible generation, I think according to our outlook, I can confirm again that we expect a solid result for flexible generation. We have seen in the first quarter that the extraordinary result compared to the last year and to the first quarter of last year. It has not been repeated because of two effects, mainly lower spreads and also lower volumes as gas and coal-fired assets are less profitable than before, so volumes obviously also go down. continue to anticipate that 24 adjusted EBTA and flexible generation and the greener commodities segment will be significantly below the respective prior year levels. I hope that answers your question.

Thank you. Considering the first answer, do you mind if I have a follow-up on another topic then, to have two questions? And the question would be more regarding your future development, notably regarding the CAPEX plan and the investment plan. You only post 79 million CAPEX on the first quarter. You have 8 billion commitment for the next six years. Would like to understand if and when you plan to actually increase and speed up these developments, notably in renewables, green gas, etc. And if you have some firm development that you can seek at the moment and in which you could start to invest in the relatively short term. Thank you very much.

Yes, I'm also happy to answer that question. I can understand if you look at the capex of the first quarter that this is probably not in line with the overall number for 24 that you would expect to see. Still, there is a significant commitment to invest already this year. A part of the 8 billion target has not changed, but what we said before, it is true that we are dependent on clarity with regards to regulations. So the German Kraftwerkstrategie, so the CCGT plans, you know that there has been an announcement that the German government is committed to having built 10 gigawatts of capacity, and we are waiting for more information and clarity around the economics. Once we have that, we will be able to take decisions on investments. We are, from an operating perspective, we are ready to get started on this one, and I just want to stress that our ambition will play a very important part in that the realization of the Kraftwerk strategy has not changed. There's also some other regulation outstanding with regard to the H2 transformation, the grid and all these things. We are waiting for those things to become clearer and at the same time we are working full steam ahead on our removal strategy and also with regards to our commodities business where we, as we said before, want to add more greener gases and gas derivatives. And there have been a couple of announcements just recently with regards to partnerships. So we are working on these. We have a couple of projects, also very significant projects in terms of capex in the pipeline where we would expect to take the financial decisions this year. And once we have done that, we will come back to you and inform you about that and provide more clarity on that.

Thank you very much.

Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please dial star one on your telephone keypad. The next question comes from the line of Ingo Becker from Kepler. Please go ahead.

Yes, thank you. Good morning. You were saying this morning that you see a normalization of of your earnings. Can you elaborate a little on whether you mean inflexible generation as a whole, or how the trends look like here in gas versus coal-fired generation? And also, maybe, what about Glocco? Would you say you see a normalization towards historical pattern in all those reporting lines, or are there different trends? Thank you. And also, if I may, sorry. You're saying that apparently the coal and the gas fired EBDA numbers, which show coal almost flattish and gas down, apparently are impacted by the carbon phasing effect. And I was wondering how did the carbon phasing impact the gas versus the coal fire generation EBDA trend year over year? Thank you.

Yeah, good morning, Ingo. Good to hear you again. With regards to the normalization along our reporting lines, I think this is, I can only reiterate what we said before and also back in February when we gave the output for the full D24, but that has not really changed. But let's go through the segments each by each only. green generation part, we said that we will actually see a normalization, but overall, we expect 24 to be even stronger than 23. That is because 23 was burdened by significant provisions for the nuclear business, which we are not expecting to see again this year. So 24 greener generation particles we stick with our previously given outlook that this will come out even stronger than last year. Obviously, market price development has an impact on this, but we have very good hedge levels for the outright positions, and therefore, we are confident that we can stick with the outlook. On the flexible generation, I think that Q1 gives a a good indication of the full year already. In the UK, we still see good spreads. On the coal generation side, we have seen in the first quarter strong contribution front end loaded. And as you rightly pointed out, and as I said before, when you look at the results for the coal generation part, there is this carbon phasing effect, which is may need two to some other technical effects. We have low CO2 certificate prices right now. As we produce generation, we book the corresponding provisions for that, and the hedges will only settle at the end of the year, and then the positive effect that we see now in the first quarter will reverse back and will be equaled out. So that was the effect I was referring to. when I mentioned the carbon phasing positive effect. Just to make sure that nobody is overestimating the coal contributions that we are seeing now in the first quarter. But overall, we still expect strong results from coal and gas in 2024.

Thank you. I can ask, you would still expect the coal trend to be less down than the gas trend on the full year basis post-carbon phasing, similar to what we've seen in Q1?

Well, I don't think that at this point in the year we can specify that, actually.

So I would leave that open.

Understood. Thank you.

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Once again, it's star 1 if you'd like to ask a question. It seems there are no further questions. I hand the conference back to you, speakers.

All right. Then I think we can... Close the call. Thank you, Jutta. And again, this is my last quarterly call. I'd also like to say thanks again, the analysts and investors, for remaining so committed to Unica during all the times. In my view, it's definitely worth to stay tuned with the exciting Unica journey also going forward. I will always certainly keep an eye on that. So thank you all, and we close the call for today.

Thanks. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may now disconnect.