Nexam Chemical Holding AB (publ)

cleantech company Nexum have reported for the second quarter of 2024. Joining me in the virtual studio today, I have CEO Ronny Törnqvist and CFO Marcus Nyberg. Please welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you, Mattias.

So, Ronny, before you present, how would you describe the quarter in brief?

It's been a very intensive quarter, a lot of activities everywhere. It has been some difficulties, but mainly quite a positive energy and drive in the company. And we feel that we're moving forward according to the plan that we set out a year ago.

Okay, thank you. So I'll be back for the Q&A. So please go ahead with your presentation.

All right. Thank you, Mattias. Okay, welcome to the presentation of the second quarter for Nexam Chemical. As Mattias mentioned, it's me, Ronny, CEO, and my colleague Marcus. First off, next slide, please. I want to start off with mentioning that this quarter was quite a significant milestone for us in our journey to become a growing and profitable company. We are back to the volumes for the second quarter in a row on the 2022 volume levels that we had with quite a drop in 23. But now we're back on track with the volumes. We have reached the highest EBITDA level that we have ever had in the company. And we're still not satisfied, of course. Come back to that a little bit later. Nexam Chemical is a small, innovative, clean tech company with really big visions. We produce additives for plastics to make plastics better and more sustainable. We're very dedicated to more circular use of plastic materials. And we have products, patents, core competencies that can really make a difference to our customers. Next slide, please. Based on the same or similar ideas around chemical modification of plastics and reactive chemistry and other additives, we have a product portfolio, which is in its chemical structure, fairly similar, but finds very broad application areas. So we work in segments such as lightweighting and miniaturization, technical performance products and so on that are then better because of the additives that we do. On the other end of, let's say, advanced applications, we make plastic materials that are extremely temperature resistant, for example, used in jet engines for airplanes. And then we have two areas that are driven by very strong global megatrends. One is activities in renewable energy, and the other one is a big focus on waste, recycling, upgrading of recycled materials, etc. So that's our range of products. Next slide, please. When I started as CEO about one year ago, We set out a new strategy, a new direction for the company. And what we came to was that we want to focus on building global business around making plastics better and more sustainable. We want to produce additives that enhance performance of plastics, especially for circular use and that bring additional value for our customers. We want to deliver a solid profit and growth over the years to come. So a long range initiative, you could say, and we become, we wanted to become and have become much, much more market oriented, thoroughly understanding our various markets and together with our core competencies, lay the foundation for this growth and global success. So that was the foundations going into this a year ago. We have now done an accelerated cost savings program that has been implemented over that year and is in full effect in the second quarter. We have done a sharp and commercial strategy and a very strong market orientation of the company. And we have reached the ability to fund our operations with our own generated cash. Next slide, please. The Sharpen commercial strategy has been directed towards how to, so to say, dive into each of our market areas and improve our products and offering in order to be a stronger partner for our customers in each of these areas. The areas are lightweighting where we work a lot with foam materials from plastics. The biggest running market on this is PET foams that are used mainly in wind energy, but also many other applications such as transportation and marine technologies. We work in the area of high temperature. It's a classical Nexam set of patents and materials that were developed quite a long time ago, where we have been able to... reinforce our position in creating composite materials that are extremely temperature resistant. The highest temperature resistance that you can reach with polymer materials. And the same type of technology is also used as varnish in microprocessors where we have had also some success recently. We group our activities working with additives for color, durability and other properties of plastics under aesthetics. So we're working on the looks of plastics, which is also tightly related to our activities in the field of recycling, where we have a set of unique chemicals that can improve and upscale recycled plastics and that can also be combined then with the product portfolio and aesthetics to create the novel solutions. Next slide, please. In the wind PET foams that we make additives for is used to a large extent in the wind energy market. It's a really superb material to use as a core material inside the wind blades. However, it's challenging to make this. You have to have an optimum material structure of the foam and to get the right properties. And there is an increasing willingness in this business or this business segment to go towards much more recycled raw materials. And our additives provide opportunity to make much better foams than you would do otherwise. There is an underlying growth in the wind energy market. It's predicted to be almost 50 to 100% higher in 10 years time. We do participate very actively in this market, developing new products, new additives, new combinations to make the foams even better and more cost efficient. And we see that this segment will grow. Right now, we're in a situation where the The PET foam market is a little bit weak for some of the manufacturers, but we see that on the longer term, this market will be very important for us also in the future. Next slide, please. In the area of high temperature, you can say that the additives from Nexam increases the service temperature by 50 degrees C or something like that, which enables to replace metal components in really high temperature environments, such as jet engines, providing a lot of weight saving. And weight saving is the one key technological factor to reduce fuel consumptions in jet engines or increase performance. So rule of thumb is that if you reduce the weight by about 1%, you reduce fuel consumption by 0.75% in the moving parts in the jet engine. There are also numerous other application areas in high temperature field. We are starting to get into more electrification. As electrification of society increases, the performance of those systems are continuously developed and that almost always means higher temperatures. So our solutions for high temperature varnishes and so on become more and more relevant for that industry. Next slide, please. In the area of aesthetics, which is basically then the product segment that we refer to as performance master batch, which is then colors and other additives for plastic producers. We are market leaders where we are present, which is in the Nordic countries and Eastern Europe. We are quite unique in that we offer a lot of advanced solutions to bring in recycled materials into technically performant applications. There's an example, a picture here of his child seat and some automotive components and so on. So we are contributing on the forefront together with our customers to bring in more recycled materials also into more technically advanced applications. And this is thanks to our decades of color matching experience, finding the right colors and also the right recipes otherwise in the plastics combined with our patented additives for recycling. Next slide, please. In the area of recycling, we have put a lot of energy into this over the last couple of years. It's almost like an internal startup, you can say. We are seeing a few customers that buy regularly for their production needs and we have a handful or a bit more of new customers that are in the stage going from validation, testing into pre-production and starting up the use of our additives. And in almost every case, it's driven both by, let's say, environmental aspects that you want to have a higher content of recycled material, or you want to make a product which is more advanced with recycled material, but almost always also a kind of a economical advantage for the customer that the total costs for the application goes down. I will go in a little bit more on the recycling market and how it looks like on the next slide. If you change please, thank you. The global plastics production is, one back please, approximately 400 million tons of plastic materials per year. About 10% of this is recycled or made from bioplastics and the rest is novel plastic materials. In order for the whole industry has a huge ambition to increase the amount of recycled material and biomaterials. Legislation is pushing this, but also a lot of initiatives from end customers and other actors in society. And in order to really meet this challenge and take a bigger portion of these 400 million tons of material into a higher recycled fraction, they must become better. The recycled materials and the bioplastic have to become more technically advanced and be able to meet the properties of new materials. If we look at the next slide, please. Next. Yeah, that one. We have patented solutions for polyolefins and PET. There are two material classes. Polyolefins are materials such as in ice cream packages and plastic bags. And PET is like a PET drinking bottle, for example. Just to understand what it is. That's approximately 50% of all plastic materials that are produced. So we are targeting with our technologies the huge, large material classes here. And we think that's the right way to go forward. So if we move to the next slide, please. Now coming to more of, let's say, quarterly reporting on how it's been going. So financially, our sales amounted to 53.6 million Swedish. It's much more than the poor second quarter of last year, but also a slight growth compared to last quarters. all segments in the company are actually growing. The gross margin has increased a lot. We are on the long-term trend here, six quarters in a row with increasing gross margin. It was 46% this quarter and 43% a year ago. The EBITDA was 2.62 million Swedish, and this was the highest number that we have achieved so far in the company history, and we're quite proud and happy about that. But we're not satisfied because we want it to be much higher than this. The savings program that we have been talking about for the last year has been completely implemented and is in full effect already now in the second quarter that just passed. So that one is, so to say, done now. The cash flow from the operations was 4.47 million and it is an indicator that our plan to generate cash for our operations actually work. And in addition to that, we have a credit facility which is unutilized. And a little bit on what has happened on the market side. During the quarter, we had two significant orders that direct us to the future in high-temperature field. One was together with Sumitomo Bakelite in Japan that currently buy at a rate of about 2 million sick per year. They have now increased their usage of our additives into microelectronics varnishes. And we go up to a pace of about 6 million Swedish per year. And we also have our first order for high temperature varnishes for electric motor applications, which can become quite significant in next year and the years after. In recycling, we have a really increasing traction with many customers. It's still fairly small sales volume this quarter, but it's growing all the time. And we have quite many customers right now that are moving from pre-production, validation, testing into early stage serial production. So we expect much more from this in the months to come. But to give you a deeper view on the numbers, I will let Marcus take over the position here. Thanks, Ronny.

I will try to... get some more details regarding the numbers. First of all, I'd like to add this when it comes to the cash flow. It's really been a focus area for us during the last year to reduce working capital, to put all the savings in place and all kinds of things. We are actually cash flow positive for the first six months, meaning that we've really been focusing on stabilizing our financial situation. And we're really pleased with the result and with all the different activities that every employee really have put in place. So that's something that is really nice for the beginning of this year. We would like to get some more details regarding the sales. And as Ronny mentioned before, we're now back on the levels that we had two years ago. And we can also see that the red here in the presentation is the master batch, like the color and the functional additives, like a little bit not so... complicated additives maybe uh they are picking up again and that means more or less that that industry is is picking up together with our all the all the work that our sales force put into this has really been uh we can really see the result in this and uh so that's that's really nice uh and then we all see the the gray area is what we call performance chemical It is also now coming back. A year ago, we were a bit struggling last spring, but now we see that it is picking up. And once again, this is not by coincidence. That is all the work that the Salesforce has really put into this and our development team and so on. So we see it is. So it's rewarding. Please go to the next slide. And as Tony mentioned, we have been able to increase our margin for, I think it's six quarters now in a row. I know that the question is, of course, will you continue like this? And of course, it's getting harder for every single quarter to go even further, but at least stay on this level. Go to the next slide. Here is something that we normally don't show. We haven't at least showed it before. This is a little bit the split of our sales. A few things to add here is that the lightweight, that is more the PET foam. If you look at this two years ago, then we only had three customers that were placing orders to us on a regular basis. And now two years later, we actually have nine. And then, of course, the question can be, why hasn't this share increased? And this is due to the wind industry that has actually dropped during these two years. We can also see that our team in Eastern Europe, mainly outside of Budapest, are doing a great job when it comes to our Color Master badge. And we can also see that we are growing our high performance. That is mainly what we were presenting a year ago for this big order that end up in the Jette engines. And we can see that we actually get more customers even in this area. And then we have recycling. We have invested quite a lot during that. the last three or four years in recycling. And now we also see that it starts to pick up. We have lots of tests sent out, lots of different collaboration with several potential customers. But now we also see that it starts to generate revenue. Okay, next slide. Here you have lots of details. And I think that the message here is mostly that we have We have been stabilizing our cash situation and that we also have another 20 million in credit facility. That is the main point here. And also that we have, we can also see that on the levels that we are for the moment, we are actually making some money on EBITDA level. We're not on a bottom line yet, but that's our plan to get there, of course. Okay, can we move on to next slide? Here is something that we internally see is really, really interesting. We really have the potential to more or less double our business without any additional investments or any significant increases in overhead. This is something that we have been working on for the last two or three years. invested in new equipment. We have invested in our organization and all kinds of things. And we actually also see this in a single month. In June, we actually saw this. So that means that we know that it's actually working, that we can more or less double our volume without additional costs. And that's, of course, something that's that we are really proud of and it's also a very good sign for the future. We can also see that roughly 90% of our sales is from recurring customers and orders. Okay, go to the next slide. And then I hand over to Ronny again.

So we see that the wind is continuing to turn. We're in the middle of a clear turnaround and we have a really positive outlook for the second half of this year and next year. So growing obviously from 2023, which was a bit of a short year for us. And also going forward, we intend to continue to grow. But this time with increasing profitability, making use of what Marcus said, that we have a functioning organization and capacities to sell far more than we do today. The cost-saving programs, we're quite happy and proud about that. We announced it and we did exactly that and even a little bit more. And it's given us this lower brick even where we can also have a poor quarter and still be okay with our cash flow. The internal focus on market orientation is really changing the culture of the company, I would say. More proud employees and happier customers. It resonates really well with the customers. We have seen substantial market recovery in the wind industry, which is still a little bit weak for us. But in terms of orders on, so to say, windmills and wind parks, etc., has been picking up. And eventually, and not too far future, we should also see increases in our sales in this area because our situation in that market is much, much better today than it was a couple of years ago with many more customers and very many more, let's say, customized additive solutions for these various customers. The product innovation and recycling focus in the master batch business has been really fruitful, I would say. We see a lot of strong positive response from our customers. It's quite competitive market, but we are really good. And the one happy thing that happened this quarter was that Hungary had all-time high sales in June. We have Good order levels coming into the next year in the high temperature segment and continue to develop that. We have done one recruitment. It's a third business manager. We have two business managers already. The third one has been hired. He will focus a lot on Central Europe and recycling. That's two areas where we both feel that we have so much going on on the market that we need to respond to it. And then we see now finally some growing customers and more customers that are moving in from this extremely long validation, testing, development phases into more pre-production and closing up into more production runs in the year to come. Maybe one thing to add on that, it's probably been visible in our various communications also is that This is a very international business. We're selling to various countries or selling to and are working on these kind of industrialization projects in all parts of the world. It's Australia, several countries in Asia, India and other countries. It's in South and Central America. It's in North America and it's all over Europe. So it's a very international business. So this is moving forward and we're happy to see it. Next slide, please. So we feel that we have a strong case here. We have good growth in two of our in the coming years into our main segments on a global base. But we're also working smart and customer oriented in all areas. So I think we have huge opportunity for Nexam in the months and years to come. Okay. Next slide, please. So summary of why should one invest in Exxon Chemical. First of all, because we have very high ambitions and plans for all financial KPIs for this year and next year. We're in a stable situation that we can fund our own operations with our own money. We have proven over six consecutive quarters that we can improve our efficiency and thereby the gross margin. And we should be able to keep at least this level for the coming quarters. We have a growing portfolio of patented clean tech solutions that are driven by these megatrends. There's actually a lot of R&D work for the future ongoing all the time. It's always the case with Nexan, but it's even more focused on, let's say, business opportunity. And there is a lot of things coming in the pipeline. We have done our major investments in production capacity. We can grow with 100% without really investing anything and with very limited additional overhead costs. And the organization is really, it's a bit leaner now than it was a year ago, but it's well-functioning. It's a well-functioning machinery, you could say, in the company. And we have a business model with future potential then for potential external growth and similar initiatives, of course. Okay, next slide, please. That was it for us today. I hope you got a view of what we are up to. You can feel that there is a lot of positive energy in the company. And we really believe in this, that we can make a difference for the customers and for the planet. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Ronny and Markus. And we will move on to the Q&A. And I am happy to present equity analyst Henrik Hintze from ABG Sundahl Collier. Please go ahead with your questions.

Thank you. So this was the first quarter where we saw the full impact of the cost savings program. And you've now almost reached a break even level on EBIT. So looking forward, could you just expand a bit on what is needed to now bring you to real profitability now that the cost savings program is done, basically?

Yeah. The road to get there is by increasing sales volumes and maintaining this more lean cost structure in doing so. And I feel that it's exactly what we're doing. We've been doing all the time, right? Working on this. It's been a bit of a slow market this last year, but we managed to grow anyways. And we continue to do that. And we're not expecting a free ride from general economy recovery. We're really ready to fight for it to get out there into our markets. So initiatives on the sales side is the key for us. and maintaining, you know, current business by being, you know, come with smart solution, be cost efficient, and an innovative partner to our customers and so on. So that's how we see that we can do it. But with the current cost structure, we need a few more millions per quarter, and then we will be, you know, break even also on the EBIT level. And we want to go way beyond that, of course.

Of course. So maybe digging into that a bit more, looking at the coming 12 months or so, do you expect new customer contracts or underlying end market improvements to be the main driver of sales growth or will it be an even mix?

I think we are only counting on, let's say, new business, new additional products, customers and projects. That's what we see. the driver, the underlying markets. Yeah, that would be nice and lucky if that also comes with us. We see some tendencies that the general technical industry in Europe is, you know, coming back a little bit. That's definitely visible in the master batch. We were complaining a year ago that the master batch customers were ordering the same amount of orders, but at lower volumes in each order. And they are now coming back a little bit into higher volumes. Maybe not all the way back, but it's still a little bit positive. So that would help, but we're not counting on it.

Yeah, so if we look at the new customer contracts and things like that, do you expect that to mostly come from entirely new customers or that your current business with your current customers keeps growing?

Both, I would say, because we do have a lot of activities. with our customers, it's often driven by, let's say, their cost structure to find additives that enable them to use lower cost raw materials and so on. And there is an increasing initiative at our current cost base to try to introduce much more recycled materials and they know that we we can help with that and so that there's a lot of activities with existing customers but there are also new customers especially in the recycling field there's a lot of new customers that we that we need to work together with okay so so one specific example is the new high temperature customer that you announced in the in the quarter within wire coating which is a bit of a

I have a new application for you, I believe. The initial order was quite small, but you highlighted that there was a relatively short development timeline here. Could you maybe just comment a bit on the potential here and also more generally on how your new customer pipeline is looking?

Yeah, okay. That particular case, it's an automotive application or automotive-related application in the background on this one. And the production start is set out to be in, I believe, first or second quarter next year. I don't remember the exact date. And the business potential for us is quite significant in the several tens of tons, so to say, on a yearly basis, that one. There are other similar, you know, wire coating animals that are being developed. And as I mentioned, I think, there is a strong trend in electrification that the temperatures tend to go up with higher powers, you know, and more compact designs. So that leads to higher temperatures. So the general interest in the electronics market or electricity market is growing for, let's say, higher temperature solutions. So we believe that in a vague manner that there is a lot of potential there. And we have this one concrete example there. I think it's similar. The volume increase with Sumitomo in Japan is also driven by higher temperatures in electronics. So they need to cover more microprocessors with the highest temperature material. And our customer pipeline, you could say, is... Yeah, it's a mixed of 50-50, you could say, by working together with the existing customers and develop the business there and be a good partner for them and come with new solutions. And 50% trying to reach out to new customers that should have a good business case by working together with us. And we are doing this and we have a sales force, of course, that is employed and business managers for the speciality fields. and the salespeople out on the market in Eastern Europe and the Nordics. And we have a lot of agents and distributors around the world to work on these projects.

Yeah, and since you highlighted the relatively short development timeline on this specific order, maybe you could just give a general comment on how the development timelines usually look like.

Yeah. It's very different, right? If you look at the case of Sumitomo, I think we've been working together for generations, working on this. And now, eventually, we're coming into significant business on that. So it took 10 or 15 years. And we have other initiatives we've been speaking about. We're a participant in the TAPEX project for use of high-temperature composite into civil aviation. that is also something that will take a decade or something before it really blooms up into large volumes. So that is on the one extreme. And then on other extremes, it could be something like almost functioning but a little bit malfunctioning current industrial process that you go in and solve it and then you sell your product in a few weeks' time because you fixed something that didn't work. And you have everything between it. And I say that the wire NML was kind of – already developed before we came into it right and then they need they saw the need for an additive which we had in in this material mix and then we came in fairly rapidly on that if we would have developed that from the start it would have been four or five years and not one year all right thank you very much for that that's all for me all right thank you enric

Okay, thank you, Henrik Hintze, ABG Sundahl Collier. And if we move on, and I have a few questions regarding PET, you mentioned that you technologically have refined the additive and making it better and more cost efficient. Could you elaborate a bit on this?

Yes. For the The PET foam market is developing. It's not only wind energy, right? It's also transportation, marine and so on. And every time we go into a new technology area, other properties might become important. And that needs to then be reflected by product development, changing the foam in this case, you know, for bigger or smaller cells or, you know, wall sizes and so on. So let's say to fine tune, we really have... found several ways to fine-tune the material in order to respond to various things like this it's also when we work with the recycling of PET we had we have you could say a standard solution but we see that that's often not enough you know because then you have problems with acidity levels for example or something like this which is a problem in recycling and then they have to to complement our additive to become more complex and better functioning. That's more or less what I meant with that.

And within the PET foam, where do you see other large-scale usage for that product?

Looking at what our customers are up to in that business, there is a lot of interest for construction material, for example, in transportation to have it as an isolating material in cooler trucks, for example, because there is a lower cost material used today, most of the time polyurethane, but that has a lot of technical drawbacks. with the water absorption and similar, which can then be resolved with PET foam. But then the PET foam needs to be developed so that it can match into those applications, you could say. And that's why we try to be a partner with our customers to be able to develop the foams to meet new markets.

Okay, yeah. And if we move to the Sumito Bakelite deal, it's of course a good deal in itself and with that client, but does it also open doors for similar clients?

You could say our end cappers for polyimides, which is this product group, are quite well known by everybody that are active in that field. So when they see a need, for that type of modification, they will know that they need to call us. We do have ongoing contacts with them, but no one is buying material for $1,000 per kilo if they don't have a significant economic advantage of it, so to say. It is a high-tech material and a niche material that is used only when it's really necessary. But I think it's a small world with a few customers globally, They see this, maybe it is likely that when Sumitomo is so successful with their product, that their competitors will also try to find something similar, of course, and that if the application of, let's say, very high temperature varnishes becomes more and more necessary because of increasing temperature in electronics, we have a good situation for it.

Okay, thank you. And if we move to master batch and reactive recycling, you have previously mentioned that you're having around 50 ongoing projects with the possibility of commercialization. How would you describe the situation here? Are there many that are getting closer?

Yeah. There is a fair amount of such projects that are getting closer and in pre-industrialization and so on. Things that we have been working for one year, two years or three years are now closer to getting into use. So indeed, and there is a lot of projects. Some are small and some are big. But we maintain our intention that we said a year ago already. We do R&D. on things that have a reasonable time to market. And if the time to market is much longer than a few years, then we need to have the R&D efforts financed somehow. We received an order yesterday actually for a development project in the area of recycling, but it's a long-term project. So for us, it's engineering sales this year.

Okay, thank you. And if I were to put myself, step out of my professional role and be more as my private person, I would like to ask when, according to you, can we expect authorities and governments to really regulate and demand recycling of plastic in a way that actually would make a difference for the environment?

Great question, Mattias. I often think about that when I'm not at the job, you know. and it's it's for sure that the governmental regulations and so on are really strong drivers in this there is obviously a question of practicality in that that you cannot force legislation on something that there is no industrial solution and capacity for i feel that the in many parts of the world, not everywhere, but in many parts of the world, for example, in the EU here at home, so to say, but also a lot in regions in Asia and the Americas, there is a lot of sensible first steps and putting into place of structure. We have the PPWR, I think it's the name of a law cluster that is regulating recycled materials into packaging and so on. We see that it's moving in the right direction. A few years ago only, we were sorting plastics in our homes in Sweden, and they were all incinerated. Now they're all recycled, right? So it's going in the right direction, but it's going too slow to my taste. But I think maybe, I hope, five, ten years. I hope.

Yeah, I'll join you in that hope. That was all from me for today. So what remains to me is to say thank you to the viewers that have been watching and to you, Ronny and Marcus. Thank you.

Thank you too. And thank you all the viewers.