Belysse Group NV (BELYS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the conference call of Belysse Group NV regarding the H1 2024 results. [Operator Instructions] Today, we have with us James Neuling, Chief Executive Officer; Andy Rogiest, Chief Financial Officer; and Ruben Pattheeuws, Group Director of Sustainability and Strategic Projects. Gentlemen, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Lynn. James Neuling speaking. Good morning to everybody, and welcome to our first half -- the Belysse Group's first half results call. If you have not already done so, you can download the press release and presentation from this Investor Relations section on belysse.com. I need to start with bringing your attention to the disclaimer on Slide 2. I will not read it out, but please do make sure you have read it. So now I will talk about the financial summary in the first half of 2024. Then Andy Rogiest, CFO of Belysse Group will take us through the financial review. And finally, Ruben Pattheeuws, Group Director of Sustainability and Strategic Projects, will give a quick update on our BEYOND program. I will then do a conclusion. As Lynn stated earlier, we will end this call with a Q&A session with the analysts following our stock. So let's turn to Slide 4 for the first half financial summary. From a financial standpoint, we saw our first half 2024 consolidated revenue, a total of EUR 144.7 million, which represents an organic decrease of 7.0% year-on-year. Revenue of our U.S. business declined by 6.2% year-on-year, while our European business faced a decline of 7.8% year-on-year. In terms of profitability, the first half 2024 adjusted EBITDA was EUR 21.5 million, which represents a significant increase of 75.1% year-on-year. The net debt at the end of the period was EUR 139.2 million, including a EUR 25.3 million impact from IFRS 16 lease liabilities which brings us to a reduced leverage of 3.2x. Andy will now go more in depth to the financials.

Thank you, James, and good morning to everybody dialing in. First, let's have a closer look at our revenues for the second quarter of 2024. So moving to the Slide 6. So we saw in the second quarter of 2024, a consolidated revenue of EUR 74.5 million compared to the EUR 79 million that we realized in the second quarter of 2023. This is representing a 5.7% year-over-year decrease. In the U.S., our revenue decreased to a minor extent by 1.9% to EUR 42.7 million. That compared to -- the decrease compared to of course, to last year. The volumes of our U.S. division improved compared to the first quarter of this year 2024, and this was mainly led by the higher sales in the education, corporate and residential segments where we are active in. In Europe, our revenue decreased by 10.4% versus last year to approximately EUR 32 million. The decrease in revenue can be explained by lower volumes, primarily in our residential business line. We are now moving into the next slide, which will cover the first 6 months or the first semester, starting with the group revenue. So on the first 6 months, we saw a consolidated revenue of EUR 144.7 million. This is representing a decrease of 7% year-over-year and is fully organic. In the U.S., our Bentley Mills division revenue decreased by 6.2% to approximately EUR 76 million. The decrease reflects the lower volumes compared to the first year -- year half of 2023. In Europe, revenue decreased by 7.8% versus last year to EUR 68.8 million. The volumes in the first half of '24 were below the volumes in the same period last year due to the continued market softness in the residential business and as well as a strategic shift into more profitable product offering in this segment. In the more project-driven commercial business line, volumes in the first 6 months were comparable to the ones we had in the first 6 months of 2023. So let's now turn to Slide 8 to talk about the group adjusted EBITDA. So Belysse Group consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the first half of '24 increased to EUR 21.5 million. This is representing a significant increase of 75% versus the first semester last year and the EUR 21.5 million of adjusted EBITDA represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.8%, where we had 7.9% margin in the first half of 2023. Our U.S. business realized an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 14.4 million in H1 2024. This is 2.6% higher than the first year half of 2023. The adjusted EBITDA and EBITDA margin improved as a result of higher unitary margins as well as fixed cost savings that more than offset the negative impact of the lower volumes. Europe EBITDA -- adjusted EBITDA was just above EUR 7 million, so EUR 7.1 million in H1 2024. Both our adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin have recovered significantly compared to the first 6 months of 2023, which was still at a lower comparative pace. But as a result, the result was driven off the first year half '24 was driven by the lower raw material costs, where we talked about already on previous occasions and the higher margin of the portfolio as well, and not to forget on fixed costs saving measures we have been implementing since second year half in 2023. So we can move on to cash flow. So we ended the first year -- half year with a cash balance of EUR 29 million compared to a cash balance of EUR 35.8 million at the end of 2023. The negative cash flow for -- over the 6 months was mainly driven by the debt repayments, the interest payments, arrangement fee all linked to our previous and our current financing with a total of EUR 15.1 million as well as capital expenditures of EUR 5.2 million, change in working -- other working capital of EUR 4.1 million and a trading working capital change of EUR 2.9 million. This offsetting -- more than offsetting the realized adjusted EBITDA of EUR 21.5 million. This brings us to the chart on our leverage. So net debt at the end of the period was EUR 139.2 million. This includes EUR 25.3 million of IFRS 16 lease liabilities. And this is also EUR 6.1 million lower than the reported value at the end of last year. Given the strong improvement of our adjusted EBITDA and further reduction of our debt, our leverage is now reduced to 2.2x, where it was 4.5x at the end of 2023, and it was 5.5x at the end of first year of 2023. Our total available liquidity, this is also including our available headroom under the RCF is EUR 41 million at the end of June 2024. So this concludes my part, and I will now hand over the floor to Ruben Pattheeuws, who is our Group Director of Sustainability and Strategic Projects for an edit on the BEYOND program.

Thank you, Andy. If we go to Slide 12 for an update on our sustainability pillar, we see that the total CO2 emissions per square meter produced has been reduced by 13% compared to our baseline, which was set at 2018. We have implemented several existing and new energy efficiency initiatives, and we have delivered impact through both lower gas and lower electricity consumption. However, part of these efficiency gains are offset by smaller production runs, especially in residential, which is a conscious choice because those smaller production runs allow a reduction of inventory. In addition, we had a negative factor in the first half of this year, which was the lower solar energy production due to weather conditions in Belgium, which resulted in higher use of so-called gray electricity from the grid. Moving on to Slide 13 for the results of our Lean program. This Lean program has delivered EUR 0.7 million savings in the first half of 2024, which exceeds our plan by 15%. If we measure from the starting point of the BEYOND program in January 2022, our Lean program has delivered EUR 6.8 million in cumulative savings against a target of EUR 5.4 million. And as a reminder, the overall target is to deliver EUR 8 million of cumulative savings by the end of 2025. More than 30 different initiatives this year have so far contributed to these results with a key focus being on quality, material efficiency, energy efficiency and labor efficiency. With this, I would like to give the floor back to James for closing comments.

Thank you, Ruben, for that update. We'll now go to Slide 14 for the conclusion of this presentation. So our first half results this year in terms of consolidated revenue was EUR 144.7 million with an adjusted EBITDA of EUR 21.5 million, which brings us an adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.8%. The consolidated group revenue for the first half year reflects our continued lower market demand in the European residential business as well as softer project demand in the U.S. in the first quarter. Despite the overall softness in the market, the adjusted EBITDA in first half '24 has significantly improved as a result of improved profitability in both regions. Our leverage increased to 3.2x compared with 4.5x at the end of 2023 and our total available liquidity remains strong. I'll now pass back to Lynn for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] I don't think there are any questions. I don't see any coming in. So we have no further questions.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for everyone who's attended the call. As a reminder, we will publish our trading update concerning our quarter 3 -- we have a question from Mr. Hoste, just as we were about to... yes.

Mr. Hoste, you can now ask your question.

I have a couple of questions, if I may. The first one would be on the cost outlook for the remainder of the year with regards to raw materials, wage inflation, transport costs, but also things like electricity contracts, et cetera. Are there any big swings to be expected? And then the second question, yes, if that's the case and that's -- what's your planning on pricing? And also linked to that, the general level of competition in the market, is there -- given the weak volumes, is there increased pricing pressure noticeable, if you can comment on that as well, that would be interesting.

Thank you, Wim, for this question. Look, I'll tackle the cost outlook and maybe Andy will add something to that. I'll start with one of our most important raw material costs is polyamide and what we've seen over the last couple of months, there's a slight decrease in polyamide. Our outlook remains cautious on that in terms of what we've seen as a major supplier of polyamide in the European market. [indiscernible] has just announced that they will close their doors. So that takes some capacity out of the market. Although they were not an important overall player in the market, they've historically been important for us. We have shifted a lot of our purchases to other suppliers over the last 2 years, and we observed from their figures that they had volume decreased last year of close to 60%. Nonetheless, any time any supplier exits a market that can mean a change, which ties a little bit into the transportation question at the moment on polyamide, we see very similar prices across Europe and Asia. We see Asian prices a little bit higher and the difference is related to transportation. But we see because of incidents like the Red Sea, the pirates in the Red Sea and the Baltimore incident has created a global imbalance in containers. And this means that shipping costs coming out of Asia have become much more important than what they were previously. Roughly speaking, for a 20-foot container, they've grown to about $8,000 a square foot compared to, say, $2,000 a square foot at the beginning of the year. So I would say, whilst polyamide prices have come down versus a year and a year before that, too, we do remain cautious in our outlook because of that. On other factors like electricity and gas, we have seen in the last couple of months, a rise in gas prices again. we are hedged to a certain level. We don't expect an important impact on our results as a result of that. But there are future years to think of. And we -- it's a very bitter taste in our mouth, the memory of where gas prices were a couple of years ago when they were north of EUR 300. And now we sit closer to the range of 40. But I think historically, gas prices were sitting around 10. So we continually observe the gas prices. Like I said, there has been a lift recently, but nothing that overly concerns us. Electricity prices tend to follow gas prices. And as such, our hedging remains that we feel we're at a comfortable level to control it. Wage inflation, we have -- and there, I was speaking very much of Europe, by the way. And the reason I focus my comments on Europe is we see more consistency in the U.S. outlook and market. And as Andy has mentioned during the call, we see more of a softness in Europe in the residential business in particular. And hence, we focus more when we talk about cost outlook, our thoughts are a little bit more around Europe. With respect to wage inflation, we don't see anything particularly new. We follow the market rates, whether it be U.S. or Europe. There were some significant wage inflations last year but not so much this year. And in Belgium, in particular, there was some quite heavy wage demands placed on us by the Belgian government last year. That seems to have come to a more normal outlook. In terms of pricing, you spoke about what do we plan in pricing. I think an important point to look at in pricing is we -- I can't speak for what the competitors do. That's a market. I can say what we have observed in our pricing is that we've seen a relatively stable pricing. If that holds or not, I don't know, yes, there is weaker demand in the market in the European market in particular. But pricing across Europe, across the U.S. across both our markets, contract in residential has remained relatively stable. I don't hold the crystal ball to say it will definitely remain like that. But they're -- so far, it's been a good story, and that's played in very importantly into the, I think, quite good results that we've presented for our first half.

That's very clear. Just maybe then one follow-up. Do you have a CapEx budget guidance for the full year?

I will let Andy comment a bit more on that.

On CapEx budget full year guidance is in line with the amounts we have been investing over the past years. So no significant deviations expected to what we have been investing.

And then on the taxes, yes, can you offer us a tax guidance going forward, noting that there is maybe some DTA deferred tax asset variations or whatever. Can you offer us a tax guidance for modeling purposes?

Tax guidance is -- well, the amount we have been publishing on the first year half, again, should give good guidance on the full year. The majority of our taxes are linked to the better results we are achieving in the U.S. rather than the ones we have in Europe.

So thank you all for your attendance, and we are now closing the call.