Verbio Se

Good afternoon, and on behalf of Montega, a warm welcome to today's earnings call of Verbio, following the publication of the Q1 figures of 2023-2024. The CEO, Mr. Klaus Sautter, as well as the Head of Investor Relations, Mrs. Alina Köhler, will guide us through the presentation and the results in a moment. After the presentation, we will move on to a Q&A session in which you will be allowed to place your questions directly to them. So with this, we're looking forward and I hand over to you, Mr. Sauter.

Thank you very much. Welcome. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, to our Q1 earnings call. I'm here with Alina Köhler, our head of investor relations. and we will cover our first quarter results and discuss current topics. We prepared a presentation, so let's start with the presentation, first page. So first of all, the key figures in Q1. So we delivered in all segments new production records, new production volume records, and this is underpinning our efficiency measures in Europe. And additionally, new capacities mainly related to our acquisition of the ethanol plant in Indiana, South Bend Ethanol. But as I said, also due to the bottlenecking in our German production units, we were able to increase the volumes in ethanol and biodiesel. The production of renewable natural gas went down a little bit, but this is due to our de-bottlenecking measures in the ethanol plants where we had to stop production partially to implement new technique, new equipment to increase the production in the next quarters. EpiCA came down from 121.4 million to 48.8. And this is, well, it's not comparable because especially in the last quarter, we had still the advantage of favorable feedstock positions. So the result with 50 million EBITDA, which is up sequentially down on year on year, but compared with the last quarter of the last business year, I think it is a reasonable margin what we were able to achieve. Our net cash was 10 million euro. So this is due to the investment growth. We did about 50 million of investment in our growth project. The equity ratio is at 72.6%. And now let me hand over to Alina to explain you the results in the biodiesel segment and furthermore. Alina, please go ahead.

Thank you, Klaus, and also a warm welcome from my side. So let's first look at the EBTA bridge from Q1 2022-2023. to Q1, 23, 24, which you can see here from the left-hand side to the right-hand side. So clearly we saw a decline in our EBTA, which was driven by both segments, biodiesel and bioethanol. And as Klaus just mentioned, for last year, especially in biodiesel, the comparability is not given. We had a very good feedstock position there, which was beneficial, and it was matched by very extraordinary biodiesel prices. So clearly, we're still happy that we could report a sequential increase in the quarter, which you can also see on the right-hand side of the chart here. The decline in ethanol year over year is mainly driven by lower ethanol margins, but also by the cost impact of our growth ambitions. This includes the ramp up of Nevada, our new biorefinery, but also an impact from South Bend ethanol. And just as a reminder, we acquired South Bend ethanol in May this year, And since then, we're taking optimization measures there, which also means we cannot run it at full production capacity at all times. Furthermore, we did have some inventory valuation adjustments in the segment, and we will talk about this in a bit. But let's go into more detail in the biodiesel segment. So as already mentioned, due to the low comparability, Comparability, we focus on the sequential performance here. And quarter over quarter, we have seen a strong increase in sales of more than 20%, as you can see here in the light green bar in the chart. We actually arrived at a sales figure of 323 million. And this was mostly driven by the improvement in biodiesel prices. But also we managed to increase our production to 161,000 tons per quarter, which is a new record production volume. So this covered with our purchasing policy of purchasing our feedstock two to three months in advance. led to a very good EBITDA of 45 million, which is actually a positive EBITDA swing of 55 million quarter over quarter. Just as a reminder, if there's anyone new on the call, last quarter, our EBITDA was impacted by biodiesel imports from China, which are actually a fraudulent industry. which is actually a fraudulent product and which pressured the biodiesel prices much lower. And in a declining market, we of course have a disadvantage due to our purchasing policy of buying two to three months in advance. So the question is, what's new with the Chinese biodiesel? As you can see here in the chart, the biodiesel exports from China have actually declined quite a bit. 40,000 tons month over month, and that is actually half the volumes that we've seen in January. So it's really coming down strongly since the EU investigation started in mid-August. Further, we would expect this decline to continue going forward, and hence the pressure of the biodiesel prices should not come back. But let me come to the biodiesel market in general. So here in the chart, you can see that with the imports from China coming down, the spreads have been increasing throughout the quarter. That's reflected by the green line. And spreads in general are biodiesel prices minus rapeseed oil prices, just if anyone is in the way of the term. And here, like I said, you can see that it's increasing throughout the quarter, so from July to September. And if you compare to our last quarter, which is the gray line from April to June, you can see that it's quite strongly above that line there. However, now if we compare to the last year, you can also see that the market spreads last year in the first quarter were very, very high, which we even managed to surpass due to our really good feedstock position at that time. If we now look at the drivers of spread, so that would be, like I said, the biodiesel prices and the rapeseed oil prices, we can see that biodiesel prices primarily have come up quite strongly, but also rapeseed oil prices have decreased over the first quarter. But now let me hand back to Klaus, who will lead you through the bioethanol segment.