Nexam Chemical Holding AB (publ)

Welcome to this Q1 presentation by cleantech company Nexam Chemical. Presenting is CEO Ronny Törnqvist and the presentation will be followed by a Q&A with equity analyst. And you viewers and investors can ask your questions in the live chat. Please welcome Ronny. Thank you, Mattias. Please go ahead with your presentation and I will be back for the Q&A. Alright, thank you so much.

So, quarter one presentation of Nexam Chemical. Nexam Chemical is a company working to improve plastics materials and make them more sustainable through additives. This first quarter had a fairly low sales volume in the sum. But on the other hand, we also are seeing a clear shift of the fundamentals and a strong movement going forward. The changes in the economy right now are boosting the recycling market, and we'll come back to that point. First of all, an introduction of what we do at Nexam Chemical. As I mentioned, we do additives for plastics that make them better and more sustainable. We have a strategy to grow this company and to develop our markets. Our mid-range target is to go from approximately 200 million Swedish kronor per year to 300 million, and then beyond, of course. We have, over the last three years that I've been active in the company, developed our, let's say, go-to-market strategy and the attitude within the whole company to become much more market-oriented. And we focus on our four goals. Or like this, starting from a fairly narrow set of chemicals and other additives that we're using to create these additives for plastics, we are using that into four different market areas. One is recycling, which I will talk about a lot today, which is all about taking recycled plastic materials and by adding additives, make them better. This is the fastest growing part of our business and provides really much interest for the future. Another area is high temperature. This is kind of the legacy technology for Nexam where we make additives that you add to varnishes or composite materials in order to make them ultra temperature resistant. It's used mainly in jet engines and microelectronics where very high temperature isolating materials are required. Aesthetics is our base business with the highest sales where we do colors for the plastic industry and it's color concentrates that are then added to a plastic carrier in order to get the right color, looks and longevity of the products. And then we have the area of light weighting, where we make additives that enable the production of strong foams that are used in composite materials, for example in wind blades and other demanding industry applications. Those are the four areas. If we look at the sales number, rolling 12 months, business split, approximately 57% of the sales are into aesthetics. That is the whole plastic industry where we're located, mainly in Eastern Europe and the Nordic countries, where we provide broad industries with color concentrates. This is a fairly stable business that provides stability and cash flow. We are really strong in that field and are close partners to all our customers and with very fast turnover times and very close relations to our customers. The lightweight segment is approximately 20% of the sales. This is the structural foam. It's another type of market. The customers are located all over the world. It's a very niche market with not a high number of customers, but the ones that we have are very technically advanced and we are at the forefront together with our customers in this field of structural foams. High temperature business is also a niche market with customers worldwide, mainly in Asia and North America. It contributes to approximately 11% of the sales then on rolling 12. This market is characterized by quite long development times and long serial production runs, sometimes five to ten years development time. Recycling, which is our fastest growing segment, we are at 14% of the sales number. This is really a scale-up company internally. It has grown a lot over the last couple of years and we've been working on it for much longer than that. And this is the area which I will focus on today, where we see a lot of short-term and long-term growth potential. So if you look at what we do in recycling, plastic recycling, when you recycle plastics, they become degraded and worn out in various ways. And it's often difficult to find good applications and a good usage of recycled materials. And our additives can move the technical possibilities with the recycled plastic materials. And that is what we do there. In every case, almost you could say, that we sell our additives to customers that use recycled material, it is to save cost. To get a better business case than you had without the additive. So either you enable the customer to use a certain recycled materials and produce more advanced products with it or that they continue to use recycled plastics and can make the same product but at a lower cost with a lower grade recycled materials. In the world plastic consumption is increasing quite rapidly, 450 million tons per year right now of plastics. A lot of it is food packaging but also high-tech applications and other commodity applications of various kinds and it's bound to increase in the coming years mainly driven by food packaging requirements to preserve food better and longer time also in developing countries. On the same time, there is a strong action to try to increase the recycling rates. It's really strong here in northwestern Europe, but equally all over Europe you see a strong drive to continue to develop the portion of plastics that are recycled. And we see strong initiatives all over the world for this. The current recycling rate is approximately 10% in the world and maybe 20-25% here in Europe. but it's bound to increase and there is a lot of regulation that is behind this as well. Our role in the circular plastic value chain is located as an additive manufacturer and additive supplier to either compounders or component manufacturers. So to say, food chain starts with someone collecting and sorting recycled materials, producing, you could say, shredded, cleaned recycled plastics. that goes into a compounder that makes a raw material with a given specification that is then used by a component manufacturer to make parts on the picture here, some injection molded components. But you can also think about plastic bags, toys, packaging material, everything that you make out of plastic. And then these components are then introduced into some kind of brand OEM product. And our position in the food chain here, so to say, is that we add half to 5%, usually 2-3% of our additive goes in together with the compound when you make a component, or it goes in together with the recycled material into the compound at the small percentage rate. So we are, you could say, on the side of the food chain and making it better. The total volume of plastic is 450 metric tons. Approximately half of this constitutes of polypropylene, polyethylene and PET. So that's a bit over 200 million tons per year. As I mentioned before, approximately 10% are recycled. Almost all recycling is mechanical, meaning that you collect your material, sort it, grind it down and clean it, and then it is remelted and reused again. This is mechanical recycling. There's also a method called chemical recycling, when you chemically decompose and recompose the polymer molecules. And then there is also bio-based plastics. We use bio-sourced materials in order to produce new plastic, but both of those methods are fairly low in the numbers. So we focus mainly on mechanical recycling and on the big material grades, PP, PE and PET. How it works? Our additives, this is one of the basic ideas that we're using here, is called the chain extension. You introduce the additive together with the recycled material into your processing equipment. The plastic is molten and when it's molten, our heat-activated chemistry links the molecule back together again, which is then a process that heals the material, you can say. And this is done without any byproducts because all our products that we put inside, the reactive chemicals, actually react and are bonded into the main chain. So the plastic that you get out is equally recyclable and unpoisonous or poisonous as the material that you put inside from the beginning. But there are no special process requirements for our customers to use our products. This is of course the core of the speciality that is complemented with other additive products in order to improve the plastic. So what does it mean for the customer? As I mentioned before, most customers use it because they save money. Typical business case is a customer that is using maybe 80% of an expensive, very good recycled material. In this case for PET it usually comes from bottle recycling. And then they can use maybe 10% of their own production scrap and then need to add about 10% of new plastic material as well in order to provide a thin inner layer of new plastic. And when we collaborate with these packaging manufacturers, they can add our additive and thereby increase their ability to use more of the lower cost material. so by adding our additive you can reduce the amount of the expensive recycled material add more of the lower cost recycled material and then you need to add our additive of course and usually before all the hormis straight difficulties came into the world affecting material and oil prices This was the calculation that typically a producer of PET trays, as they're called, material that you put the cherry tomatoes in, for example, a producer of those kind of products could save 25% of the material cost with our material. But it's changing now. over the last few weeks, price increases have been enormous in the plastic industry as a direct result of shortage and increased prices of oil. So if you look at polyethylene, which is a very commonly used material, the most commonly used material in the plastic industry, It has been costing for the last year about 1.25 euros per kilo. Current prices are towards 230 euros per kilo. So there is a sharp rise in material cost and this of course has to do with the oil price and availability of this material. We see the same on all other materials like PET, polypropylene, everything that we work with. The prices are up more or less double compared to how they were in average 25. So the business case to use more recycled material has just suddenly become so much more tempting. And we see that in interest from customers. The recyclers that we work together with are reporting an enormous interest from customers. So there is something happening in this industry where we are so active right now. And what's happening is then that you add, in addition to regulation and environmental concern, you also add a much stronger vector of raw material economics. Since the materials are going up around 100% and further increases are indicated, and you combine that with the forces such as regulatory demands for increased use of recycled plastics, There is a much stronger return on investment to do recycling projects because it's usually quite a complex technical project to start to use recycled materials. And it's a higher incentive then to use more of these recycled material streams and try to, let's say, screw the content to higher numbers of recycled material. And this, in the end, improves the demand for our solutions of reactive recycling. So we see that the good business case that we had before is actually reinforced quite a lot what was happening right now. And as they say, the oil price goes up quickly, but it falls down very, very slowly. So we believe that this will remain in place for at least... another couple of years and help run the transition that is needed anyway in order to assure more local sourcing in the various countries and the, let's say, enlighten the environmental footprint of the products. So that was a bit about the recycling story and what we are active with there and how that changes just recently. We're going now back to the figures, business update. As I mentioned, the sales volume this first quarter was not so great. 44 million Swedish compared to 49 last year. This first quarter was characterized by a lot of insecurities on the market. People were worried that there could be a war in the Middle East and so on, and that eventually even happened. So there was a certain, you could say, slowness in the whole industry during the first quarter. We did continue to grow in recycling. It was 90% up compared to the same quarter last year. It was a little bit below the fourth quarter of last year. But the trend is definitely there and we have promised ourselves and everybody else that we will do everything we can to double recycling sales this year compared to last year and we're very well on track for that. The slow end customer markets were particularly strong in the lightweighting segment and the high temperature segment. However, I can say now a few days into this quarter that it's looking a little bit better for the second quarter. The gross margin was, as always, we are very predictable here. It was the same as it was last year. We have said that we will be in that range, 48%. EBITDA was slightly negative, of course, due to the lower net sales. We have done a rights issue during the end of last year, beginning of this year, which gave the company 52 million Swedish. before the issuing costs, and now our financial position is obviously much stronger. Cash & Bank is 38 million and an unused credit facility of 25 million Swedish, which is then a totally other situation than we had before, which enables us to put more energy, more dynamics into our sales development. Of course, the largest recycling customer that we currently serve just announced also during the quarter that they will double their volumes of usage of our materials in the second quarter because they are putting it into more products, expanding the product lines. What we also have done in the first quarter as an indirect result you can say of this rights issue is to stock a little bit of raw materials at low prices at a little bit higher purchasing volumes. So that has resulted in a little bit negative cash flow in the quarter. And then we have, of course, the big trouble in the world, which is the war in the Middle East that has had significant implications on industry, both the confidence in security, what is happening out there. And it has also led to these extreme raw material cost surges that I talked about before. So after the quarter end we were above 100 percent price increases for most of the significant materials and of course for us and our customers and our supplier this needs to be compensated by price adjustment so we are adjusting our prices and our suppliers are and our customers are. But that's a process that involves kind of a lot of stress in the whole supply chain. So that is more or less the situation right now and we're looking forward into something a little bit better in terms of top line. Financial update, more of the details here. As I mentioned, the sales numbers, 44 million. Operating expenses and let's say cost levels are exactly as expected, you could say. We are becoming very stable on that front. And more to mention here is that Yeah, I will jump into the next slide. Margin development, we had 48% this quarter. We have a rolling 12 average of 47%. We are in that range, and we are aiming, as we have said before, to come towards 50% or even above 50%. It is possible to do, but what is more significant is maybe that the range between, let's say, 45 to 50, we will be able to stay in that range over a very long time going forward. If you look at the development of business portions, we see that there is an effect that we have this year reduced, this quarter we had reduced sales into the lightweight segment, only 11% of the sales. Historically it's been up to a third of our sales values. And that business is not going so well right now, you can say. And that has to do with the end markets outside of China, which is our market. We do not sell into China any significant numbers. The expansion of wind energy is going quite slow, and that's a driver for this market. We see that the sales in the high temperature segment has been 13, 14, 15 percent, was a little bit lower in this quarter. I don't see that as a problem. It is a little bit of stock correction at one or two customers. We are confident that we'll regain these levels of 12 to 15 percent in the coming quarters or end of this year, beginning of next. And then the recycling, which is then continuing to grow and grow and grow. What is interesting with us is our scalability. We have, through savings programs and other things, brought down our breakeven for EBITDA from 55 million per quarter to 47 per quarter, more or less, where we are now. We're slightly below that in quarter one this year, and that's why we had a negative number. But the past year has shown that we have an organization that can really generate much more sales, new customers and so on that have been compensated for losses into some other areas. And this may be important to say when you compare us to other types of businesses that more or less Everything we sell is recurring business to serial production. So when we get a project, it becomes a serial business and it just keeps on rolling for a long time. And then sometimes some of these products are also the end of their life and then they disappeared, so to say. But it's several year projects that we work on. Another interesting fact is that we can double our sales volume without really changing too much in our organization. We do not see the need to do major equipment investments or change the overhead structure of the company in order to sell much more. So you could say up to somewhere up to 370 million Swedish, we have more or less the same type of cost structure and the same type of percentages. So there is a big and positive scale effect when we manage to sell more. Contribution margin is expected to remain stable and the breakeven point for the top line is that, or like this, if we were to add another 10 million in sales on top of the 47 million, which is our breakeven, then about 35% of that will be on the bottom line on EBITDA. So it's fairly easy to calculate how our earnings will develop if we increase or, God forbid, decrease our sales volume. So we want to increase the sales volume and that's our target and that's what we're working on every day. We did this capital injection into the company recently and we are using it to accelerate our commercial scaling. So commercial acceleration, I'd say this year compared to last year, we have always been quite active on the market. But I mean, we have 50% at least more visibility in trade fair, in the industry event and various sites all over the world. We have increased our customer engagement across Europe, North America, India and are much more active on the market using more both internal and external market resources. And also myself and the rest of the team here in the management are much more active now in the sales process and the technical processes behind getting the business rolling, approvals, etc. We're also taking big steps on the digital side. We're launching a reactive recycling dot com focused web page to focus on the recycling area. And we're also working a lot with, let's say, application driven customer language data and problem solving and finding the let's say, the pain points of various customer segments and also providing data how we solve those in order to become more interesting for more of the customers that don't know us yet. And we're using extensively AI-supported lead generation and market intelligence both to follow material flows in the world where we can be relevant but also in order to find the right people you could say to talk to in order to have much more qualified lead and opportunities. And then the technical proof and faster conversion is of course a really important step for us that we now finally have the means to work much more focused on. So it's generating application data in the various plastic processes and plastic applications that we work inside We do targeted investment in both internal and external lab-scale application-oriented development work. And we're developing, you could say, technical proof packages that makes it easier for the various customers to understand their advantages of working together with us. So we're doing a lot more on this side now in order to continue to grow this curve. This is the sales within the area of recycling of the last... many quarters. And as you see here, first in beginning of 24, we started to see real life into the recycling customers and it has continued to grow well. And I can say with confidence that it's continuing to grow according to the red line for the coming months also. It was 6.8 million in the past quarter. It was even above eight the quarter before that, both close to or well above 100% year on year. We have several new major customers that are ramping up in full scale production and there's multiple trials ongoing. Come back to that. And the largest customer that we have in this field just announced that they will double their use of our material starting now in Q2 and we already have those orders in our production. How far can we go then? If you look at all the plastic recycling in the world and you reduce it down to the plastics where we actually have technical solution and where the reasonable recycling rates that are targeted in the coming years, and that we estimate that we can have a market penetration level of 2% in the world and 5% in Europe, we can reach 70 million euros in this segment. And I think we can reach more than that. So with today's run rate of around 3 million euros, we still have a long way to go and a lot of new customers to convince. So there is a lot of opportunity in this field. This project pipeline overview, we have been showing that for a couple of years now, provided that we're working differently now in our sales, marketing and technical application processes. We have redesigned this a little bit compared to what we have shown before in order to better reflect the actual product stages that we see in our recycling projects. So it starts with new prospect search. There are no specific numbers for that. But then when we start to come into the development stage, meaning that we send samples of our material to customers and they make some testing with it, and then proof of concept going into more advanced sampling and sample studies, we have actually 130 customers who are working with this, 14 new ones during the past quarter that have come into this. So the number that you see there, 130 is the number of customers, plus 14 is then what has been added the last quarter. And then when we go more into scaling up industrialization projects and so on, we have 22 of those ongoing, have added three, coming then from proof of concept stage during this quarter. One of them have also moved on into technical approval. So there we have 12. And then we have 27 currently purchasing commercial serial producing customers, where one is new for this quarter. So it has been changed a little bit compared to before, but this is something that we use in order to follow the dynamics of our market development. Our target is to bring down the lead time from new prospects to commercially purchasing customers by doing these kind of investments in both relations and in particular technical background information for the customers. So where are we now? We're returning to growth, especially in the recycling. With that, the other three business areas are also rolling on quite well as we see it right now. And we're continuing to broaden our customer base. So with every cent above 47 million per quarter Swedish, we do add EBTA. Recycling is really scaling up. We're working very hard to cover all these ongoing projects and industrial implementations and so on and so far in a professional way customers are happy. We have this cost-saving program behind us that enables us to earn money when we grow. And we continue to work really good together with the existing customers in the foam business, but also in the high-temperature business and so on. And our new distributor in North America, we talked about it in the last quarterly report as well, but that is quite significant for us. We see a lot of things happening in North America that are very, very promising for the coming future. And then we did this rights issue, 51.8 million, which then secures the aggressiveness that we need in order to develop the recycling business even faster. So why invest in us now? Well, we have a clear path how we're going to do and where we are going to. First of all, to reach the first level for us, which is a sales volume of 300 million Swedish. And that's fully fundable with the proceeds from the rights issue. And we have the resources in place now to really execute on that plan. We are doing the right investment in order to support that growth, and we continue to have a disciplined balance between growth and cash generation. I mentioned that we did have a little bit of a negative cash flow in this quarter, but only for good reasons and with, let's say, decisions that we took deliberately in order to improve our numbers. We have a focused commercial strategy. It's in line with the key global trends and that have been recently unwillingly reinforced, you could say. And we have a huge untapped potential in recycling. It works. Customers are using it, also bigger and smaller customers, and they see the benefits. And the more customers we get in here, the more the world will spread in the industry. And we have really invested minimal into accelerating this field of recycling and now we can invest a little bit more. So we have that innovation capacity and the strong IP portfolio also for the future. We are a very development-oriented company. We will continue to come with innovation regardless of what happens in the world. And we have the prerequisite now for profitable growth and a scalable organization. And on top of that, we are starting to look around how we could grow our market opportunities by, for example, acquisitions. So that was my presentation of this quarter. Thank you for your patience and listening to this. And thank you, Mattias. And I'm curious to hear any questions from you or Lara.

Thank you so much, Roni. Really exciting to listen to your presentation. And I'll let Lara Mokhtadi, equity analyst at ABG Sundell Collier, start the Q&A off and I'll be back shortly.