Yara International Asa

Welcome to Jara's fourth quarter results presentation. Today's presentation will be held by our CEO, Svein Tore Holsetter, and our CFO, Tore Ever. There'll be a conference call at 1 p.m. Oslo time where you can dial in and ask questions. Login details can be found on our webpage under Investors. And with that, it's my pleasure to hand over to our CEO, Svein Tore Holsetter.

Thank you, Maria, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and thank you very much for joining our fourth quarter presentation. As always, we start by looking at our safety performance, and the TRI has continued on an improving trend and reached an all-time low at year end. And in 2024, we had our 10-year anniversary for our safe by choice way of working. And we're now below one for TRI, and that marks a significant milestone in our continuous work to improve safety. However, safety requires continuous focus, and we still have incidents and we still have accidents that should have been avoided and could have been avoided. And we have had a weaker start of 2025 than we did in 2024. But we will solve this with our Safe by Choice way of working, and we will continue to work on reaching our ambition of zero accidents. Jan has delivered a strong operational performance in the fourth quarter. We've achieved record high production and safety performance as I just went through. And we delivered on our emission reduction target as well. At the same time, we're delivering on our cost reduction program with $90 million of reduction in fixed costs since launch. And combined with improved deliveries, we have partly offset the effect of lower market prices, resulting in an EBITDA excluding special items down 10% this quarter. However, we do see improving nitrogen markets going into 2025. We're proposing an annual dividend of Norwegian kroner 5 per share to the annual general meeting. Our top priority remains to increase free cash flow and shareholder returns. We're pleased to report a record production performance in 2024, and I want to give a huge credit to all my colleagues for this great achievement. We have produced all-time high ammonia volumes. It's up 4.4% compared to last year. And that excludes major planned maintenance and curtailments. We have also produced a record high finished products volume, and we're running our plants as effectively as possible. And this is key to maximizing our production margins and also contributes to reducing our emission intensity. For 2024, our greenhouse gas intensity reached an all-time low of 2.8%. putting us on good track to reach the 2025 target of 2.7. Turning now to the EBITDA variance for the quarter. Nitrogen prices are lower this quarter compared to a year ago, while energy cost is fairly stable year over year, giving an overall negative margin impact on the EBITDA. Total volumes are up 5%, main in Europe, reflecting increased premium deliveries. Fixed costs are $28 million lower than a year earlier, and that's reflecting progress on our cost reduction program, including both divestments and also the first wave of actions taken across Yara. Yara's capital allocation policy remains firm, with an overarching objective to maintain a mid-investment grade rating. Although underlying results for 2024 have improved compared with a year earlier, one of costs, including restructuring costs and impairments, saw reported net income for 2024 ending at the same level as 2023. Furthermore, we ended the year with a net debt EBITDA at 1.8 towards the higher end of our target range of 1.5 to 2 times. On this basis, Jara proposes an annual dividend of Norwegian kroner 5 per share for 2024. However, we remain confident that with the combination of cost reduction, portfolio optimization, and a tightening nitrogen market, that Jara's financial position is set to strengthen with increased cash flow and sustainable profitability. This, in turn, will enable funding of value-accretive growth and increased shareholder returns. As part of this, Yara will consider further cash distributions in line with our capital allocation policy. Maximizing long-term shareholder value is the sole driver for Yara's capital allocation. Over time, this means both improving earnings in our core business and achieving value-accretive growth. However, improving returns is a core focus, irrespective of potential future growth plans. This includes cost and capex optimization, reprioritizing assets and markets, and potential divestments to grow free cash flow. Whether redeployment of capital is ultimately made through dividend payments or investing in large-scale growth price depends solely on what generates the strongest long-term value creation for our shareholders. And investments in large-scale growth projects will require excellent strategic fit, strong returns, and sound funding. Funding such investments will require multiple levers to enable flexibility and cost efficiency, both through the product funding period and the market cycle. There is generally strong interest in ammonia growth projects, enabling JARA to explore equity partnerships and different potential structures as part of a funding plan. I will now hand over to our CFO, Tor Gjever.

Thank you, Svein Tore. We've already seen that underlying EBITDA is down 10% year over year, mainly due to lower market prices. Fourth quarter 2024 results were also impacted by several non-cash effects, including negative special items of $230 million in operating income, and a currency loss of $260 million. This resulted in a negative net income in fourth quarter of $290 million compared with a positive $246 million a year earlier. Underlying earnings per share decreased more than EBITDA primarily reflecting a close to zero effective tax rate on a loss before tax of $292 million, compared with a year earlier when we had a 20% effective tax rate on an income before tax of $246 million. The main reason for the low effective tax rates this quarter is that we have not recognized deferred tax assets in all subsidiaries due to uncertainty of recoverability. The negative special items and tax impacts I just described resulted in a ROIC of only 0.5% for the quarter in isolation. However, for the full year, ROIC was 5% on a 12-month rolling basis, showing an improvement from 2.9% in 2023, but clearly with more work needed to reach a satisfactory return level. Turning to operating capital, the increase this quarter reflects seasonally higher inventory volumes in addition to increasing market prices. And there was a similar effect to that also a year earlier. Cash from operations was stable year over year as the lower earnings after tax were offset by a lower operating capital increase. Finally, our investments are lower, reflecting strict capital discipline with lower capex. We had a 5% increase overall in crop nutrition deliveries compared with a year earlier, mainly thanks to a significant increase in nitrate and NPK deliveries in Europe. In Americas, lower commodity deliveries in Brazil were offset by higher premium product deliveries across the region. In Africa and Asia, deliveries were down mainly due to flooding in Thailand, which impacted application. Industrial deliveries were slightly higher, mainly within chemical applications. And for clean ammonia, deliveries were slightly lower due to limited availability from our ammonia plants in the US and Australia. Turning to our cost reduction program, we've seen good progress since the launch of the program with a total reduction of $90 million when comparing with the run rate or rather the last 12 months as of the end of second quarter 2024. The next phase of FTE reductions is already initiated, including a voluntary process carried out in Norway during the quarter, achieving approximately 20% FTE reduction. In most of our locations, FTE reductions will be implemented during 2025. And we anticipate the full savings to be gradually phased in during mid to end 2025 with a restructuring cost of approximately $130 million. Longer term fixed cost targets are under development, and we continue to assess further cash release and return improvement opportunities. Our capex for 2024 ended at $1.1 billion, $100 million below guidance, reflecting strict prioritization of both maintenance and growth capex. The 2025 CAPEX guidance remains at $1.2 billion, reflecting a cyclical low-maintenance CAPEX of $750 million and $450 million in growth CAPEX, of which $300 million is committed. The committed growth capex is related to highly profitable projects that are progressing well, namely Sloyskill CCS, the new Yara Vita plant in the UK, and the sulfuric acid project in Finland to safeguard our highly profitable NPK production. Uncommitted CAPEX increases from 2026 onwards, representing significant financial capacity, which will only be allocated to projects with strong double-digit returns and strong strategic fit. In addition, we'll continue reviewing our plant portfolio to further optimise CAPEX. Together, optimization of maintenance and uncommitted growth capex represent significant funding capacity for value accretive investments and shareholder returns. We saw a slight increase in net debt through the quarter as cash earnings were more than offset by investments and the seasonal buildup of operating capital. The positive other category mainly reflects the non-cash effects, mainly recognition of pension plan assets, currency translation and leasing impacts. Now let's take a look at our full year P&L statement. Compared to 2023, we had lower revenues and variable costs, mainly reflecting lower prices for both finished products and raw materials. Despite negative impacts from one-off costs, pension fund buyout and impairments, operating income increased significantly compared with 2023. This reflects higher margins and deliveries, including a positive mix effect on delivered volumes. 2023 operating income was also impacted by inventory write-downs, position losses and impairment loss, the latter mainly for our Tatra plant in Belgium. In 2024, we recognised a non-cash currency loss of $321 million, which is a translation loss on US debt positions, partly offset by gains on internal positions in other currencies. The effective tax rate in 2024 was high, as tax losses in some countries are not recognized as deferred tax assets due to uncertainty of recoverability. Including these one-offs and non-cash items, our basic earnings per share decreased from 19 US cents per share in 2023 to 5 US cents per share in 2024. Looking at the balance sheet, total assets were 6% lower compared to 2023, mainly reflecting currency impact on non-current assets and lower current assets. Lower trade receivables mainly reflect lower prices, while the lower cash is driven by repayment of bonds. The change in equity is explained by currency translation and dividend payment. All in all, we've kept a solid balance sheet. Finally, for this section, let's take a look at the fundamentals for the nitrogen market. Going into 2025, nitrogen fundamentals are strong. The key factors are U.S. nitrogen imports, Indian imports, and Chinese exports. For U.S. net nitrogen imports, they are lagging with below a quarter of a million tons of nitrogen imported season to date as of December, compared to a total estimated import need of approximately 3 million tons. In India, lower production, higher sales and lower imports indicate a 4.1 million ton lower inventory coverage compared to a year ago. And on the supply side, Chinese exports have been very limited in 2024. The sum of these factors has led to demand-driven price increases well above historical averages. And in addition, looking ahead the next couple of years, there are very limited urea capacity additions in the pipeline compared with trend consumption growth. We therefore expect nitrogen markets to tighten in the coming years. And with that, I will hand you back to Sven Tore.