Solar A/S (SOLARB) Earnings Call Transcript

Welcome to the Solar Annual Report for 2022. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded. Today, I'm pleased to present Jens Andersen, CEO; and Michael Jeppesen, CFO. Speakers, please begin.

Thank you. A very warm welcome to this fourth quarter webcast for the Solar Group. Together with me here at our headquarter online, I have my colleague, CFO, Michael Jeppesen. The agenda for today is a general business update with highlights for year 2022 presented by me. Then I will give you some insight about our revised strategic focus areas, but also our progress within our sustainability work. Mike will then present our fourth results, including a high level of cash flow statement and naturally some comments to the year 2022, but also our guidance for the year 2023. And finally, we will have a Q&A session. First slide, please, highlights with an all-time high EBITDA of DKK 1.191 billion, an increase compared to last year of 29% or DKK 264 million. We can look back in the Solar Group on a very strong year, where we also slightly exceeded our latest guidance of an EBITDA of DKK 1.17 billion. But I think even more striking, we delivered an EBITDA margin at 8.5% compared to an EBITDA margin of 7.4% last year. Our substantial contribution to this execution is our core plus strategy, but of course, also a very strong market that delivers stronger growth rate than we expected. I want to thank my colleagues for their continued efforts and dedication that has resulted in 17 straight quarters of EBITDA growth. In all fairness, it needs to be emphasized that we have realized one-off price increases of approximately DKK 250 million, which is on a historical high level and DKK 100 million higher than 2021. But it also underlines that we are capable to push price increases out in the market, which is a very important business bring in our industry. Even with a historical high inventory level caused by severe supply and demand profits during 2022, we delivered a return on invested capital or ROIC after tax of almost 26%. Therefore, at the Annual General Meeting, the Board of Directors will propose a 2022 dividend distribution of DKK 45 per share. This year, our guidance is a revenue of DKK 13.7 billion and an EBITDA of DKK 900 million. Adjusted for price increases, mainly roll over effects from 2022, we expect slightly negative growth in all main segments. This is partly compensated by the expected strong growth within Climate & Energy. Furthermore, we expect one-off price increases to normalize in 2023, meaning that no significant amount of one-off price effects are included in our guidance. Next slide, please. We have revised our strategic programs, 2 years into our core plus strategy, it is time to revise our strategic focus areas ambitions. In general, all our strategic focus areas have shown good progress in 2022. Our concept share reached 23% and is firmly on track. Climate & Energy delivered so far at 40%, and we remain confident that we can keep up the pace and has changed our ambitions incredibly. Industry achieved an overall share of revenue of 33%, which is in line with our expectations. And finally, trade delivered so far a 17% . So we have increased our card to above 15% from previous above 7.5%. As we embark the final year of our core plus revenue, we continue to see opportunities ahead and the development of our strategy for the next period is already in progress. Looking ahead to the strategy period, we are confident that our strategic focus areas offer much more potential and that we will deliver an average EBITDA of more than 6.5% in the years ahead. Next slide, please. Solar is determined to play an active part in the green transition. As a part of our ambition, we have committed ourselves to the science-based target initiatives, which is right now in for validation. Several initiatives have been implemented to reduce emissions from our own operations. We have, for instance, phased out more or less all gas boilers for heating and instead installed heat pumps and solar panels. Furthermore, we have installed EBIT charters at our own locations, and we have continued the progress of upgrading our light to LED and of course, sensors. Right now, 84% of our electricity comes from renewable sources. Then we also acquired lately a property of 50 hectares near to our head office in Denmark. In the coming years, we expect to acquire additional properties and focus will be on rebounding the land and restore biodiversity. Our target is unchanged to be net 0 in our own operations by 2030. And in 2022, we managed to reduce with 23%. I will now give the word to Michael for some more insights to the financials. Please, Mike.

Thank you. please turn to Page 7. Revenue in terms of DKK increased by 9% despite some headwind from FX. Regardless of this, we actually came out with almost DKK 3.7 billion compared to DKK 3.4 billion last year, equal to an adjusted organic growth of probably 12%. Similar to what we have seen in the preceding 3 quarters, price increases remains a substantial part of the organic growth. but we do actually still see growth in volume in Q4 as well as in the preceding quarters. Our strategic focus area, Climate & Energy continued to deliver very strong results with astonishing 116% growth in Q4. All 3 segments delivered strong growth rates, particularly trade, which came out with 50%. It should, however, be mentioned that the point of reference was fairly low combined with that they took some orders with a slightly lower margin risk. But regardless, it's an impressive growth. Looking at industry, we saw solid growth in all subsegments. And although utilities came out below the average within the industry segment, it still delivered solid growth rates. As expected, growth within installation came out below the average growth. Turning to Page 8. The EBITDA of DKK 326 million Q4 was, as Jens mentioned, the 17th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in EBITDA. The main growth driver of the margin expansion was the increase in gross profit margin, combined with lower costs, which delivered an astonishing 1.1% point increase compared to the year before. If we take a closer look at the gross margin, we see the price effect added additional 0.9% or DKK 70 million compared to DKK 35 million the year before. As mentioned at the previous slide, we did execute some large orders with low margin and adjusted for this, we actually continue to see an increase in the underlying margin in all main segments, meaning that our core strategy continues to deliver results. If we look at the cost level, external operating costs, as in many other companies, we are starting to see the impact from inflation on our cost, energy cost, cars, maintenance, licenses and so on are increasing. What we have seen so far is more or less in line with our expectations, but we expect this to continue. Staff cost remains very well under control, but also here, we are seeing increasing salary inflation. In total, staff costs and external operating costs were 0.4% below last year. Turning to Page 9. If you take a look at the full year 2022, we see a similar pattern as in Q4 with a margin expansion from 7.4% to 8.5%, of which the 0.4% can be explained by the results of our core plus strategy continuing to deliver strong results, but also price effect of 0.6%. The increase we saw in the external operating cost was more than offset by lower staff costs. In absolute terms, earnings thereby increased from DKK 911 million to DKK 1.175 billion equal to a lift of 29% in EBITDA. If we take a closer look at it and adjust for one-off effects, we see that the underlying business results increased from an EBITDA of DKK 799 million, which is 6.5% to DKK 960 million, which is equal to 6.9%. Turning to Page 10. Looking at the cash flow. We see a positive impact from operating activities of DKK 242 million, which is the normal seasonality effect on which I'll comment shortly. Investing activities of DKK 38 million. It should be noticed that the investment in the expansion and operator of our central warehouse in line is the main part of the DKK 22 million that we invested in PPE. The expansion of Central Warehouse in line is now more or less finalized according to plan and budget, and we are very happy with the way it has been executed. But if you take a closer look at the operating activities, we can see that the main change is receivables, which bring in DKK 177 million, which is actually below the level we saw in '21. It should have been noticed that December came out stronger than the year before, which explains the delta. So it's not that we see any substantial change in debtor's ability to pay. Inventory, as Jens also mentioned, increased slightly. And even though we have seen some slightly improved performance from some suppliers, and we expect this to continue. The time being, we decided to stick to the increased inventory level that we built up during '21 and '22. It is important to notice that similar to what we saw in Q3, approximately 85% of the increase is A articles meaning fast runners. So we're not increasing the risk that we have in our books. But this, of course, means that we all other things equal, have an increased net working capital. Turning to Page 11. If we look at the net working capital, it increased in Q4, also compared to what we saw in Q3, and the main driver here being increased inventory, but also the development in accounts payable. There's nothing structural change. So this is just a snapshot that you have seen. Despite the increase in net working capital and the investments we carry out, we managed to deliver 26% return after tax in-- on the invested capital. If we take a closer look at the gear, we see the impact from the seasonality -- and -- but combined with payment of DKK 658 million in dividends, investments of DKK 259 million. We -- and of course, the increase in net working capital. The gearing ends at 0.9%, which is an increase from the starting point, which was 0. If we adjust for one-off, our average gain is around 1.14 in the year. Turning to Page 12, guidance. As Jens said, we expect a revenue of DKK 13.7 billion, which is corresponding to an organic growth of approximately 0 and an EBITDA of DKK 900 million. Both in 2022 and '21, we've seen substantial positive one-off effects of DKK 215 million and DKK 112 million, respectively. We do not expect this to happen in 2023, meaning our vans do not assume any significant one-off income. And if you look at the markets we're operating in, in general, we expect them to be negative or statement in best case, and this goes for all segments despite quite a substantial impact from price were lower FX, particularly in H2, we do see increased uncertainty. During the last years, we have successfully managed to be ahead of inflation, but we have seen in the last quarters of 2022, that cost inflation is starting to pick up and accelerating. We expect this trend to continue into 2023 despite on the initiatives we have taken, which will ensure that the inflation will remain well below the general inflation. Finally, at the Annual General Meeting, the Board of Directors will ask for improvement of payment of DKK 45 per share, equal to a total of DKK 229 million. In addition, they'll ask for permission to pay out additional dividend up to max DKK 50 per share. Thank you.

Thank you, Michael. Then I think, if I may speak. It's time for questions. If you have any, please? [Operator Instructions] As there are no questions, I will hand it back to the speakers for any closing remarks.

Thank you. Thank you for listening in, and have a nice day in front of you. Thank you. Bye-bye.