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Verbio Se

Q32025

5/13/2025

speaker
Harry
Investor Relations/Moderator

Good afternoon, everybody, and a warm welcome to the Verbio earnings call for the third quarter of the fiscal year 2024-25. Today's speakers are Klaus Sautter, CEO of Verbio, and Olaf Trüber, CFO of the company. They will walk us through the company's performance for the first nine months, touching on key milestones and market trends. Before we dive in, a quick housekeeping note. conference is being recorded and all participants are in a listen-only mode if you have questions please submit them using the chat box and we'll address your questions in the q a session please make sure to preface each question with your name and the name of your company in order to be considered the equity analyst joining the call can also ask a question directly via the microphone Please type the word question into the chat box to be considered. We will open your line at the beginning of the Q&A session. And without further ado, I hand it over to Mr. Sauter and Mr. Trüber. The floor is yours.

speaker
Klaus Sautter
CEO

Thank you very much for the introduction, Harry. So good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for joining us for our third quarter 2024, 2025 and nine months earnings call. I'm here today on the call with Olaf Dröbe, our CFO. As you know, we are proud of our operational flexibility, integrated platform and proprietary biorefining know-how. These capabilities have consistently delivered industry leading returns across market cycles. They also give us real agility in challenging environments. We can shift priorities fairly quickly and reallocate resources strategically, focusing on innovation, high growth segments and value accredited opportunities. As outlined in our last earnings call, we have re-prioritized investments and focused on free cash flow growth. This will become more evident in the coming quarters. Saying that, I'd like to turn it over to Olaf to take us through our financials first nine months in brief and then the Q3 figures in a bit more detail. And then I'll be back with the outlook and finally with the Q&A. So, Olaf, it's yours.

speaker
Olaf Trüber
CFO

Thanks, Klaus, and good afternoon, everyone. I will begin with a summary of the first nine months of 2024-2025. As always, operation production was good. Biodiesel production declined slightly due to commercial factors in Canada, which I will discuss in greater detail in a minute. For ethanol and renewable natural gas or biomethane, we again reported record production volumes. The year over year increase in ethanol volumes, the light green bars in the chart on the far left, was driven by efficiency gains in Europe, especially in Europe, and further de-bottlenecking at the plant in South Bend in the US. Our renewable natural gas production volumes also increased thanks to better utilization at our plants in Nevada and India. Yet our EBITDA declined to 22 million euro from 82 million euro in the same period last year. This was primarily due to the weak first quarter of 2425 compared to the strong first quarter 2324. The first half of 2324 was still supported by strong fixed greenhouse gas premiums under existing contracts and therefore setting a high bar for year over year comparison especially in the current challenging environment. Our net debt at the end of March stood at 154 million euros as we continued to invest in our key projects. These include mainly our plant for speciality chemicals in Germany, and our ethanol plant in South Bend in the US. Capital expenditure totalled €30 million in the third quarter and an aggregate of €91.5 million for the first nine months of 2024-2025. Well, worth to mention, at this time in the previous year, we had already invested close to 130 million euro. Our investments are being actively reduced with a clear further decline to follow by the focus on improving our operating cash flow as Klaus mentioned before. The equity ratio was around 63% and then yeah with that i will now turn to q3 in q3 we improved ebda year over year to 8.2 million euro from 7.3 million euro thanks to developments in the biodiesel segment and the segment author The latter was our trading activities with the reported EBITDA of 5.4 million euro. It contributed meaningfully to our result. Quarter over quarter, the biodiesel segment lost some momentum as we had capitalized on increasing biodiesel prices thanks to favorable rapeseed oil purchases in our second quarter. As you will see in a minute, biodiesel prices have traded sideways since, while our rapeseed oil purchases prices naturally had to come up. Given the broader market conditions, the result is quite solid in comparison. In the bioethanol segment, we were able to further increase the EBDR over the course of the year. A trajectory that should continue into Q4, especially as driving season is coming up in the US and we continue to ramp up production. Let me now give you a bit more color on the individual year-over-year performance of the segment. The production and sales performance of the biodiesel segment in the third quarter of 2024-25 reflects the reduced production and sales volumes in Welland, Canada. Production came down as planned due to the difficult margin environment resulting from regulatory changes in the US. We have ramped up the plant in March this year again thanks to the attractiveness of our location in Canada. Purchase and sales contracts now guarantee a cross margin. Despite this, we were able to increase our EBITDA in the segment reaching €16.8 million, following €11.4 million in the third quarter of 2023-2024. Q3 2023-2024 included a non-recurring negative contribution to earnings from commodity futures. Now turning to the reference charts, these show how biodiesel spreads have evolved. The spreads here refers to the difference between the biodiesel price and the rapeseed oil price. While the charts don't reflect our sourcing strategy, they still provide a useful snapshot of broader market trends. As we mentioned back in February, rapeseed oil prices have come down a bit from their peak and have stayed pretty stable since then. At the same time, biodiesel prices haven't really bounced back yet, mostly because demand is still low and mileage hasn't picked up. Therefore, spreads have stayed flat. But we are now seeing production of competitors are coming down, which is actually a good sign. It shows the market is starting to adjust and that should support prices going forward. In the bioethanol and biomethane segment, we set new production records for bioethanol and biomethane in the third quarter of 2024-2025, confirming our performance gains. This can be seen in the left chart. The bar on the right highlights this trend. Despite the increase in production sales volumes, revenue fell to 181 million Euro in Q3 24-25 from 188 million Euro in Q3 23-24. This is because revenue from physical settled trading contracts was recorded in last year's third quarter and then corrected in the fourth quarter. The decrease in EBITDA of 8.8 million euro is due in part to the challenging biomethane and greenhouse gas quota business. Also, in the same quarter last year, there was a one-off negative impact from commodity futures and the changes in financial asset value. Meanwhile, the startup costs of our growth projects remain the main driver of the negative result in the segment. Let's take a look at the reference graphs. They show how ethanol market spreads have developed. As a biodiesel, they don't reflect our exact purchasing or feedstock strategy, but they give us a useful view on the broader market. During our third quarter, ethanol demand in Europe held up well. But despite that, ethanol prices didn't rise much, largely because production and imports stayed high. At the same time, wheat prices didn't come down significantly, which kept margins under pressure. So overall spreads were tight. In the US, the ethanol market faced typical seasonal weakness in the first quarter. High production and elevated inventories were the main drivers. Looking ahead, there are encouraging signs. Ethanol margins are showing improvement as we move into the second and third quarters. This outlook is supported by several key factors. Stronger fundamentals for corn oil. Reduced ethanol stock levels following seasonal maintenance. Higher blending demand, which is typical for this time of the year. And last but not least, a solid start to the corn planting season. Now turning to our guidance. Our guidance, which was updated in January for the current financial year remains unchanged at the mid double digit million euro range. As of now, we do expect to come in at the lower end of the EBITDA guidance due to the current week margin environment. The lower end. does anticipate a slight recovery in spreads which currently is the most realistic scenario our low marginal costs act as a soft price floor allowing continued production even at lower prices in contrast higher cost competitors have already started to reduce output or idle plants, which should eventually lead to a tightening of supply and support price recovery. Meanwhile, our expectation for net financial debt at the end of the financial year remains unchanged at a maximum of 190 million euro. As I've mentioned earlier, our free cash flow should be break-even or positive during our fourth quarter. Now, let me hand over to Klaus, who will give you a bit of a broader outlook.

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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