Aqualis ASA (ABL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the ABL Q4 presentation. My name is Reuben Segal. I'm the Group CEO of ABL, and I'm welcome today also with our Group CFO, Dean Zuzic, who will give you some information about our financial figures. For people that don't know me, I graduated from Newcastle University in the U.K. back in 1996 and subsequently went across to Dubai, where I have been living for the past 26 years. I'm the founder of ABL, along with my colleague at the time, David Wells, who you remember as the outgoing CEO. David and I have worked with each other for many, many years, and I know that will give us a smooth transition into what we're doing going forward. This is my first time presenting as the CEO for our quarterly figures. So I look forward to taking you through it. So to begin, first of all, I would just like to draw your attention to our disclaimer. It is in our presentation. You are very welcome to read it in your own leisure, but I would just like to draw your attention to it, please. So let's get into the numbers. First of all, I'm glad to say that the year overall finished in a very positive manner. The year itself was also very positive. We are able to generate revenues of over $150 million during the year, with an adjusted EBIT just under $10 million. This was driven by many parts of our business, but in particular, it is the renewable side of our organization, which has had the most dramatic growth. Year-on-year, it is growing anyway, but our renewables business has grown by more than 53% over the last 12 months. But in particular, the revenues of this organization have doubled and doubled again. Back in 2018, we were able to double from 2018 to 2020. We doubled our revenues with the acquisition of Braemar Technical Services. And then again, we doubled our revenues with the acquisition of LOC. However, we're also able to continue our growth by approximately 8% over the pro forma year if you combine the 2 organizations. I can also confirm that we paid out our dividend as agreed of NOK 0.5 per share during the year, and we were also able to complete the total integration of the LOC Group of companies. This in itself was a big task, as you know, and we have talked about this in the past. We were also able to complete the acquisition of East Point Geo or EPG. We were able to complete the acquisition of OSD-IMT in Q4, and we're also able to complete the balance of the Innosea transaction, which came through with LOC. So it's been a very active year. We've had to do a lot of things over the year as well as drive our growth and our margins as well as pay out the dividends. So I'm glad to say we really had a very, very good positive year. But let's talk about Q4, in particular. Again, the year also ended very well when you consider all the things that we had to do during the year. And that's not taking into consideration COVID and all the other factors that are out there. The market is all going in the right direction for us as we see it, both in renewables and oil and gas. And this allowed us to grow our revenues to $37.8 million during the quarter with an adjusted EBIT of $2.5 million. This, again, is about an 8% increase pro forma when you combine the LOC company with the AB company. We also have a strong cash balance of $19.8 million. This is down from $23.2 million, but there's reasons for that. We paid out our dividend as we agreed. We also completed the acquisitions of OSD-IMT, EPG and also Innosea. So overall, we have a very good strong cash position. We have interest-bearing debt of $11.7 million, and I'm glad to say that we continue to pay back that on the schedule that we've been given. We have reported to you previously that we would pull out $4 million of cost synergy. I'm also very happy to report that, that continues. We've pulled out approximately 50% of that during 2021, and we expect to take out the balance of that during 2022. So far, we are on track and all the things that we put into place, you can see that's driven our growth and will continue to drive us into 2022. In addition to that, we confirm that we will pay out a semiannual dividend of NOK 0.3 per share, and that will be confirmed during our AGM in June 2022. So all in all, a positive ending to 2021, and that has gone -- also gone into 2022. So just to confirm what business we're in. Of course, you've seen some of this before, but for people who haven't, we continue to push our growth in all our businesses in the renewable sectors, the maritime sector and our traditional oil and gas sector. As I've already reported, a lot of strong growth in renewables, but I'll also give you a little bit of information on where we're going in the oil and gas side and the maritime side as well. Again, what services do we provide? Again, we have discussed some of this before, and I will just -- to reconfirm, we continue driving in engineering and consulting business. We also are strong in the loss prevention and also in the loss management side of the organization, but we've continued to grow our services. We've now gone into battery storage. We've gone into onshore wind, and we have much more in the engineering consulting box after bringing on the likes of Longitude and Innosea. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that as we go forward. We've also been doing a lot more technical due diligence over the last 12 months. And there's been a lot more acquisitions going on around the globe, and we've been involved in many new activities there as well. So good business, good growth in new areas for us. Our loss prevention is our heritage side of the business. Marine Warranty, in particular, rig inspections, we continue to be a market leader. We have seen some exceptional growth in that over the last 12 months, particularly going on into Q4 in the oil and gas side, and I will show you some of that. But it just reconfirms what we see happening in the market. Our bidding has continued across the loss prevention sector and again, strong growth all the way through. And finally, on our loss management side with the acquisitions that we have, again, by far, the market leader in this particular part of the organization with loss management. That is our typical hull and machinery, P&I and salvage related work. Very, very, very good performance, and I will show you some of that coming up. Again, we continue to grow organically as well. We are now touching close to 1,000 people around the globe. This during the COVID time, in particular, has been one of our main strengths. As you've seen, to travel around the globe has been exceptionally difficult, but I think we have completed -- I would like to say 100%, but certainly, 99.9% of every job we've been given, we've been able to attend because of our global footprint. We've expanded offices, we've expanded into countries and this is our -- one of our core strengths across the organization, and we will continue to do this going forward in 2022. I think the other nice thing as well, apart from anything else, renewables is 27%. We did state and we continue to state that we would like our Renewables division to be 50% of our revenues going forward by 2025. We are on target to do that. 27% was the growth of renewables during 2021. And in Q4 alone, it now accounts for over 30% of our revenues. We continue to see exceptional growth across our renewables business, and it's across all sectors. And again, I'm going to show you some of that in a moment. But for me, one of the nice things that takes -- that we take away as an organization, we are no longer focused just on one region or one part of our business. No more than our -- no region now accounts for more than 24% of our revenues. It's evenly spread across the globe. It's evenly spread across our offices, and it's evenly spread across our business lines. This takes away the seasonal commonality when we have cyclones and typhoon seasons or Christmas or Chinese New Year, so this is a really strong part of where we're going. We will continue to diversify and continue to grow. And again, this has been very, very good for us during the COVID period in particular. And that has seen why we've grown our top line revenues. So talk about the markets a little bit. Everybody knows that renewables is growing. There is no hiding that fact. But we are also seeing that just from what we're bidding. We're seeing it from what we're winning. You can see that over the last -- over the years ahead, we expect -- over the next 8 years, we expect the installed offshore wind to increase by 4x, is still exceptional growth going on in this market, and we see that by the number of jobs that we have been given or being awarded or bidding. But in particular, the part that I like and take away from this being a global organization is that we are no more dependent -- we are less dependent, should I say, on the European sector. Europe used to account for over 70% of installed offshore wind. This is decreasing to become 50%. We've opened offices in Japan, Korea, Taiwan. We are expanding down into Brazil, and we are seeing already exceptional awards going on in these locations. So we are no longer just fully relying on our business in Europe. We are now becoming more and more reliant on the business that we see and particularly across in Asia, which just confirms the graphs that we see. So I'm also very delighted to confirm that we've been awarded Erebus 2 owner's engineering. This is approximately a $4 million contract for us over the next 3 years. You may remember, we spoke about Erebus 1 back in 2020 when we were appointed by our client, Blue Gem Wind. Now we've been appointed on Erebus 2. This is a project for offshore wind off the coast of Wales. And our client is a combination of Simply Blue Energy and Total. They came back to us. Having a repeat client is always nice. It means that they have faith in what we do, quality that we deliver. And I think this award just shows testimony to the quality of people we have inside the organization. Another recent win, which will happen back end of Q4 was with ScotWind. In total, there were 17 projects were awarded for new fields in Scotland. We were appointed on 4 of those 17. Both of the clients that we bid with, both won. We were delighted with that, and that's a total of about 20% of the overall capacity we were involved in. So this is great for what we will see going on in 2022 and beyond into '23 onwards. So this is exactly where we wanted to be. We continue with the same type of development in the U.S., across Europe and now, as I said earlier, into Asia, Japan, Korea and so on. So all the -- all going in the right direction. And like I said, we've been in the fixed and floating wind. We're by far the market leader in floating wind, engineering consultancy, but we continue to push. We continue to drive our technology in wave and tidal, emerging technology and, in particular, floating solar. We are becoming, again, one of the leading developers of engineering consultancy in floating solar in other developing countries. We've opened in offices in Ireland, in France and in Brazil, and we continue expansion in our typical -- our more -- shall I say, more embedded parts of the organization, too. We've also enhanced our services. We've gone into onshore as well now, onshore wind, battery storage and hydrogen. And that all ties in with what we want to do with the energy transition as well. So all going in the right direction. We've put these foundations in place during back end of 2021, and we will see the growth of this going into 2022. But that's on the renewable side. We are seeing the same growth also in oil and gas. I mean we've all seen that oil has gone now in excess of $100 a barrel. The growth that we expect to see here in the CapEx spending is the strongest growth that we have seen since 2012 and 2013. We see that in our bidding that's going on. We see it in the awards that are going on. But these are sanctioned on the basis of $60 a barrel. So if you see what is happening and it's everywhere, it's in the Middle East, it's across Asia. It's in Brazil. It's here in Europe. The CapEx spending and the OpEx spending that we're also involved in is just picking up day by day by day. With our global footprint that we have, we will hope to capture more and more of this going forward in 2022. And this is just a testimony to what we've been doing. China, as you all know, have had extreme sanctions and lock -- sorry, not sanctions, lockdowns during the whole COVID thing. But nevertheless, we have still been able to pick up the Enping and the Kenli marine warranty project. This is a total of about 11 platforms and 30 subsea pipeline installations and other subsea parts of the installation. We are the marine warranty provider on this particular project. And the nicety about this project, again, about our energy transition. This is the first project in oil and gas in China that will be using carbon capture technology. That's directly in line with what we said is our vision for the energy transition. So we are super happy to be involved in this and again, testimony to the people we have in our offices in China. But also our Maritime business is seeing a resurgence as well. So it's across our business. We've been instructed on almost 3,000 projects over the last 12 months, 3,000 projects that we've had to attend, whether or not they've been in Northern Canada or across in Australia, East to West, North to South. 1,100 clients have put their faith in ABL over the last 12 months, and we've been able to attend almost every single project we've been awarded. This is just one example of our network and how it works. This was a recent collision of a vessel over in India. We had our resources in India, the UAE, the U.K. and also our engineering division in Exeter in the U.K. also involved. Very few companies can give this entire one-stop-shop type solution, but we've been there and our global network continues to be very beneficial for this type of work. Also on the acquisition side, OSD-IMT. It's not the biggest acquisition. It's certainly not necessarily a top line for our revenues, but it's strategic importance to what we wanted to do. We have said that we want to go more into the energy transition. We said we want to go into selling more products and services. By having OSD, they came with a portfolio of over 150 vessel designs. And these vessel designs allow us to go out there into the market, new technology, hydrogen vessel design and uses not only more resources that came with the acquisition, that gives us the ability to sell these designs going forward. So a very strategic acquisition, if not necessarily a direct top line acquisition. It's not only about what's happening outside the organization. It's about what's happening inside the organization, too. We continue to recruit. We continue to grow. Getting people is not easy. Everybody is after people. So the trick is not only to find new people but also to keep our people. We spent a lot of time, and we continue to spend a lot of time on training. We continue to spend a lot of time on our people and making sure that they're happy working with the organization. We've increased our headcount by 4% just on quarter-to-quarter, and we have also increased our subcontractor share as well. This gives us a very nice flexible cost base and allows us to keep the growth going, while at the same time, keeping our costs under control. We continue to recruit. We continue to bring on the most -- the best people we can possibly get our hands on. We have a big recruitment driver as well for graduates and undergraduates and that's happening as we speak. So all in all, a lot of good things happening internally as well. At that point, I'm going to hand across to Dean Zuzic, our CFO, and he will take you through the numbers. Thank you.

Thank you, Reuben. Let me just run you through the numbers quickly. If we go first. As Reuben has mentioned, we have a significant increase in revenue. If we look at the reported figures, we basically doubled the size of the company, but that's because we -- the figures this year include LOC, which we acquired in December of last year. Pro forma adjusted figures show that we have had a growth in revenues of around 8%. Our EBIT came in at $2.5 billion, around $500,000 in, I mean, adjustments in that figure. That's the adjusted EBIT. Most of that related to share option costs. We had some $15,000 in integration costs that we also adjust for. So $2.5 million, more than doubling from the adjusted figures that we had in Q4 of last year. But as I said, Q4 2020 does not include LOC. We've had growth in all of our areas, basically, the strongest growth coming from our renewable consultancy, OWC, which has a pro forma growth of 54% this year. So it's continuing to grow. I mean, strongly also a specialist engineering arm, Longitude has a growth of almost 60% compared to the same period last year. But as Reuben mentioned, I mean, we do see activity in our traditional business areas growing to the oil and gas and the marine sector that's given us growth in all of our -- in all of the, I mean, regions that we work in. Strong EBIT contribution from Asia Pacific in Q4. strong EBIT contribution in the Middle East as well. We are a bit less satisfied with Europe and with the Americas, even though they do show quarterly I mean growth compared to 2020, but both Europe and the Americas were probably the areas in the, I mean world that was still affected by the Omicron restrictions and holidays. That led to a bit lower utilization than what we would have liked to have. The renewable arm OWC has basically 0 EBIT in Q4. I think it's worth mentioning -- we have mentioned before that we are -- this is a part of business that's growing the -- arm in most. We have hired a lot of people this, I mean, year, so -- that are not 100% productive yet. So we are investing in future. I mean, growth. Q4 shows, I mean this cost related to new hires, but also the fact that there was an extremely high level of bidding activity in Q4 related to the renewables business that we expect will give a significant activity and contribute to the increase in our main revenues as we go into 2020, I mean, too. We've also seen, as Reuben has mentioned, ScotWind, a few people got that. I mean, several of the partners that we were working with on the ScotWind offers. Actually, I mean, one, and that also will be a significant source of work for us going forward. So we expect a significant pickup in profitability in OWC as we enter 2022. The numbers, Reuben has already mentioned some of them. These are the, I mean, reported figures as you can read them in our P&L, almost a doubling of revenues compared to what we reported last year. Again, I mentioned again, LOC was not included. That is the reason for that. So the pro forma base were up 8%. Our EBIT -- reported EBIT went up from a loss of $0.4 million to a gain of $1.9 million, adjusted $2.5 million that we did show earlier. So adjusted EBIT margin of 6.6%. We would have liked that to be somewhat, I mean, higher as we do have a goal of much higher EBITDA margins, but we are showing quarterly improvements. So at least things are going the, I mean, right way. Another thing worth mentioning here is that we do after following the acquisitions, we -- our depreciation has increased, partly due to an increase of depreciation on the right-of-use assets, but also from the -- from customer contacts that are also being depreciated by $100,000 quarterly. Cash position, I mean, it is still strong. We had -- we ended the year with $19.8 million, almost $20 million in cash. It's somewhat down from what we had at the end of Q3. Cash flow from operations was positive. We did some investments, $0.7 million related to the remaining shareholdings in Innosea and the smaller OSD acquisition that Reuben has already talked about. Financing $4.3 million in cash reduction, of which most of that went to dividend payments. In December, we have also been paying down debt. I mean our debt installments are 800 and -- almost $850,000 quarterly. That brings down our debt, of course, from $2.5 million to $1.7 million. During Q4, our capital leases increased somewhat because we had to renew some of the contracts on our offices that went basically from 1 year maturity to 5, which is the normal renewal period that we have on most of our main offices. Working capital, $35.5 million. It's a bit up from $35.2 million. If anything, I must say this is probably the figure that we are most dissatisfied with. I mean we have had focus on getting down working capital throughout the year and haven't really met our targets, as was said, for the end of the year. Several reasons for this. This is a mixed bag. I think a lot of attention was put to introducing a new ERP system, which was, I mean, basically integrating the 2, I mean companies where we introduced where we took LOC over to the Aqualis ERP system in the period, July to September. We weren't really in place until the end of October. And that demanded a lot of attention from the -- I mean, back office. In addition to that, we did see COVID, of course, still played in. It was difficult collecting, especially in the Far East. They had the home office restrictions, difficult to get hold of people. And the -- some of this resulted in us not being able to I mean, improve our working capital tie-up at the end of last year. But be in no doubt, this has major attention. We have said that we will improve this and the whole company is I mean, geared now going forward since we all are on the same ERP system to put as much pressure on getting this, I mean, number down. Our goal, we have said that we would like to be between 70% and 80%. I think maybe 80% is more of a steady-state situation given the structure of our business now, but that should free up going from 94% to 80%, should free up significant cash as we move through 2022. Dividend is always a nice slide to show at least as the bars look like they are. We paid out 25 -- NOK 0.25 per half year, bringing total to NOK 0.5 in 2021. We -- which amounted to $5.4 million. We are increasing this NOK 0.3, so increasing dividend with -- the suggestion is to increase dividend. The proposal is to increase dividend by 20% up to NOK 0.3 in 2022; two, of course, to be voted through at the AGM in May, but this will increase our total dividend to almost $6.4 million for this year. It shows that we are confident and also in some of our working capital measures and so on in terms of freeing up cash and to our expectations to the business 2022. 2022, we believe will be a strong year for us. So having said that, back to you, Reuben.

Thank you, Dean. So just to wrap up, how do we see the market going forward, what do we see our own position going forward? And how will it reflect going into 2022? So as I already mentioned, the renewable sector is booming all over the place. What we intend to do in onshore wind, offshore wind, offshore floating, floating PV and the other renewable technologies, we continue to see that strong growth. Our renewable sector has grown in business lines and in countries and has grown by over 50% over the last 12 months. We continue this focus. We continue to improve the profitability as well of renewables. As Dean said, it was a little bit flat during Q4. And the reason for that was the growth we brought on the new offices, and we brought on the new people, and we brought on the platform that would allow us to go into 2022. We saw the opportunities. We saw the available people to us, and we took it. There was a cost to us doing that in Q4, but we will see the fruits of that. We're already seeing the fruits of that going into 2022. So we will continue that growth. We will also continue selective M&A. I mean, no doubt, we have said in the past, we will continue M&A. We will continue M&A. We don't believe the pricing at the moment on some of these opportunities out there fit with our requirement. But we will do selective M&A if it's right for us to do. In oil and gas side, we can see a huge upturn in spending. We can see it in both CapEx and OpEx, and we operate in both sides of the business. So this is some of the strongest growth we've seen since 2012 and 2013, and we can see the same with our rates. It has been a squeeze on rates over the last few years, but we are coming out of that now. And that is clear in the bidding that's going on. We are positioned extremely well in the oil and gas sector. We're in every major place, every major location, and we will continue to grow that. Again, M&A opportunities. We feel that maybe the pricing of the M&A opportunities are better for us in oil and gas. We can see some potential out there. We will continue to explore it, but it must be a strategic fit with what we're doing. We're not going to go off and do M&A for the sake of doing M&A. It has to be a strategic fit with what we're doing. And there are some good opportunities out there. And finally, on the internal side, we have doubled and doubled, and we will continue to grow this organization. We have set ourselves some very, very strong ambitions over the next 12 months and forward as well. But we must also improve our capital efficiency. What Dean said is quite right. We've had a tough year in the sense that we've been integrating, and we've been pulling out all that we said we will pull out, but we need to do more. COVID is hopefully behind us, and we will do more. We will put a lot of focus on this myself and Dean and rest of the organization, big, big push and drive to get this cash out of the organization. Top line is okay for us. We can keep going after that top line. There's a lot of work out there, but we must improve our capital efficiency, and we will be doing that. And finally, one last point from here. We have an excellent QHSE record. We intend to stay on top of that QHSE record. We are the market leader. People watch what we do, and we will continue being the forefront of our QHSE. So finally, just to wrap up, last slide. We see the strong operational growth in Asia Pacific and Middle East continuing. We have got low utilizations across OWC in Europe, but we can see already in Q1, we're coming out of that. If you see the growth going on in our renewable sector in OWC and Longitude and in Europe as well, there is strong growth already going into Q1, and that will continue. We hope that will drive our revenues. We will drive our EBIT margin as well. We have an exceptionally strong outlook. We have renewables that are strong. The oil and gas sector is strong and also our maritime sector is strong. Hopefully, this is the perfect storm that we go after and chase both revenues and EBIT over the next 12 months. We will continue to focus on pulling out the synergy that we've said. We quoted very clearly $4 million. We believe we've already pulled out $1.9 million, and we will continue to pull out the balance of that synergy over the next 12 months. And our capital efficiency, we believe in what we're doing. We believe in the strategy that we've put into place, and we believe in the various procedures that we have implemented to pull that out. We have said and then we stand by giving out the dividend of NOK 0.3 per share over the next 6 months, and that will be ratified during the AGM in June. So consolidation is there. We will continue to grow. We will continue to consolidate, and we'll continue all aspects of our business. It has been an excellent 12 months. It was an excellent quarter, and we can see the same going on into Q1. And at that point, I'm going to stop. Thank you very much for your time and attention today.