Cavendish Hydrogen ASA (CAVEN) Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Cavendish Hydrogen's Q4 presentation. My name is Robert Borin, and I am the CEO of Cavendish Hydrogen. And with me today, I have our CFO, Marcus Halland. The presentation this morning will take approximately 20 minutes, and there will be a live Q&A session after the presentation. Most of you know us pretty well by now. But for those of you who are new to our company, I will start with a short introduction before I move on to the Q4 business update. In Cavendish Hydrogen, we are in the business of ending emissions from mobility. And we do this through reliable hydrogen fueling solutions across the world. Why is it then that we are focusing on hydrogen mobility and not other solutions like electricity or biofuel? Well, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have strong advantages over combustion engine vehicles like, for instance, no emissions and lower vibration and no noise, which are factors that we consider to be a hygiene factor in the modern mobility business of today. But hydrogen also have advantages over, for instance, battery electric vehicles. And to mention one of them is, of course, the longer driving range, where a well-functioning long-range truck today need to have a range well above 800 kilometers to be competitive. And when I talk about a range, of course, in one charge or one refill. And finally, the grid connection needed to install the hydrogen refueling station for heavy-duty mobility is significantly smaller than the grid connection needed for a heavy-duty electrical charger able to charge a truck in the comparable time. And with the increased electrification of our society today, the limitations of the grid is becoming a growing problem to the extent where it's actually already a showstopper on many European markets where you today need to wait for up to many years to get even a smaller connection to the grid. So in Cavendish, we offer the complete scope of equipment required for installation of a fueling station. If we start from the left to going to the right, the connection panel to the left is where we are connecting the hydrogen or where the hydrogen comes in from the source of hydrogen. Source can be many different things like an electrolyzer, it can be on the slot trailer, it can be pipeline, et cetera. And then the second part here is the hydrogen storage and the hydrogen storage is very much the size of the storage is depending on the type of the store. So if you have an electrolyzer, you typically have a larger storage. If you have a pipeline, there's almost no storage at all. Then we have the actual fueling station, which is sort of the main event. However, that is not really what the consumer sees in the end because the consumer typically interacts with the dispenser, which we have on the right here. And this is where you also have the nozzle, the hose which you are connecting to the vehicle. So where the driver is connecting it to his bus or to the truck or to the taxi if it's a taxi driver. We are also providing services ranging all the way from design and manufacturing to maintenance and operation services. So a one-stop shop in relation to hydrogen mobility. And on that note, I will now take you through the latest business updates and events during the fourth quarter in 2025. In the quarter, we secured a second Italian contract with a new customer. The contract is for 2 fueling stations and with installation in 2026. The volumes dispensed from Cavendish equipment continues to increase, and this quarter was not an exception with an all-time high of 372,000 kilos dispensed from Cavendish installed equipment. And given the recent order, our order backlog is visibly improved in the quarter and kept improving in the beginning of 2026 where we, in January, secured a contract in Germany to build the third bus station that we have supplied on the German market. And we also believe that Germany is a large growth potential market in relation to the bus market, specifically because there are quite some good subsidies in relation to -- or coming from the RED III, the Renewable Energy Directive III in Germany. And if we are looking more into the details of the dispensed hydrogen volumes, we see that over 95% of all the hydrogen dispensed in the last quarter was dispensed by our 29 most recently installed stations with some of these stations filling large volumes of up to 800 kilos per day. And this is a clear trend that newly built stations are no longer, let's call them demo station, but actually commercially back stations installed to fill real volumes of hydrogen to real fleets of vehicles. And we see this as a very positive trend indicating that hydrogen mobility is now finally starting to move into the commercial rather than the demonstration side of things. So a good trend. And looking at the operational side, in the fourth quarter, we completed and handed over the fourth French station together with our partner, MPH. Our third station with a large U.S. customer was in the end stages of completion. This station was later successfully handed over in the beginning of January. We have one station in Poland under construction still. We kicked off the project for 2 new stations in Italy, which are to be installed before the end of the second quarter 2026. We had one new contract award in Germany in the first week of January. And finally, our first Italian station was put into operation and performed really well during the 2026 Olympic Games. And it's not that we are trying to brag or anything, but this is just a really beautiful station located in Brunico in the Italian South Tyrol province. So if you have your way past there, I can recommend to go there and take a look. And before moving on, I also just wanted to show you a picture of the fourth station that we installed in France together with our EPC partner, MPH. And coming from France, we move north to Germany, where we, in January, as I mentioned before, were awarded a rather large project with a value around somewhere between EUR 4 million to EUR 5 million. The contract is for bus station and includes everything from design and permitting to service and operation. The station will serve a fleet of up to 25 hydrogen fuel cell buses daily. And this is the third identical bus station that Cavendish is installing in Germany, where the first 2 ones in Frankfurt and Wuppertal are both performing exceptionally good. So this is a proven concept that we are continuing to develop on in the German market, which we believe is a good growth market. And moving on to the hydrogen mobility market in general, the AFIR, the alternative fueling infrastructure regulation, the national review process is now even though it moves slower than anticipated, it's underway across the member states. In Germany, a new EUR 220 million funding [ call ] has been launched. The new scheme, which bundles the funding for vehicles and infrastructure aims at making the whole application process easier and more bankable in the end because it removes the insecurity and the risk of receiving funding for one part of the project, not the other one. So basically getting funding for the buses, but not the fueling equipment infrastructure. So this is -- we see as a very positive trend moving forward. This model is based on the Dutch SWiM model, which so far has proven to be quite successful. And also in Italy, things are moving forward. Italy is now the second country in EU that follows the German initiative and fully implement RED III into legislation. RED is Renewable Energy Directive. This means that fleet operators, for instance, of buses or trucks can get a significant portion of the hydrogen dispense subsidized through green certificates. And this is, of course, an important milestone for hydrogen in not only the Italian but also the European market since it puts hydrogen side-by-side with electricity and biogas. And finally, before I hand over to Marcus for the financials, I just wanted to mention that Cavendish is now also taking a larger space in both local and international media with a targeted information campaign towards European Parliament around following up on the implementation of AFIR and RED III in the member states. And so far, the response has been positive. We have had a number of politicians visiting us and revisiting them. So far, the response has been fairly positive, and we have mainly gained traction in national press, but we are, of course, pushing forward to make this EU topic moving forward. So the message is basically we don't sit and wait around. We are helping creating the change by ourselves here. So with that said, I would like to hand over to Marcus, our CFO, to walk you through the financials. So please, Marcus, go ahead.

Thank you, Robert. This is the highlights of the financials of the fourth quarter. The revenues ended at EUR 1.9 million, a reduction from EUR 6.4 million in the fourth quarter last year. The revenues are very low this quarter also when compared to the most recent quarters. The main reason for this is 0 deliveries of stations to customers. We have a moderate activity of ongoing installations and commissioning projects, but fewer than at the same time last year. The revenue from our service business is as expected and at the same level year-over-year. Although the revenue is at a lower level, we have managed to keep EBITDA almost in line with last year at a negative EUR 3.9 million. We are seeing the effects from a smaller organization with a more focused approach to the European market that gives us a smaller indirect cost base. So despite the sharp revenue shortfall, we end at an improved EBITDA performance compared to the most recent quarters due to the reductions in indirect cost. Going forward, we expect that the revenue levels will increase somewhat as we are preparing to deliver equipment to the most recent awarded projects in Poland and in Italy. These equipment deliveries are expected to take place during the first half of 2026. With an expected modest increase in revenue, the lower indirect cost base will have a positive improvement of the profitability compared to this quarter. Finally, we see that the order intake is higher than the recognized revenue in the fourth quarter. Ultimately, we are growing our order backlog. And also with a close to EUR 5 million contract award for a new bus station in Germany in Q1, we expect the same for the next quarter. The order intake trend since Q3 2025 has been positive and securing new orders remain a key priority for us, and we have mature and promising dialogues with several potential customers. At the end of the year, Cavendish had a cash balance of more than EUR 20 million, and the cash development in the fourth quarter is improved compared to previous quarters with the cash usage just above EUR 3 million. As already mentioned, we have implemented initiatives to improve the indirect cost base, and we target for further measures to improve our profitability. We also target a lower net working capital to improve the cash development during 2026 compared to 2025. The lower net working capital will happen with the timely delivery of the current order backlog. And if we are successful in order backlog execution, combined with optimizing inventory levels, this is expected to have a positive cash effect in 2026 compared to the levels we see in 2025. So that concludes the financial part of the presentation, and I will leave the word back to you, Robert.

Great. Thank you very much, Marcus. I will now move over to the summary of the year that went by. And for sure, 2025 was a challenging year with a slower-than-expected market activity, absolutely -- So again, 2025 was a challenging year with a slower-than-expected market activity, as I just said. In 2025, we completed significant cost-cutting initiatives, and we also completed some performance improving initiatives or quite some significant performance improving initiatives. And the impact from the initiatives are clearly visible in the fourth quarter, not only financially, but also on the operational performance of our equipment out in the field. And of course, we see that as a result also in our service organization. The order backlog improved in the fourth quarter, leading to a higher revenue outlook for the first half of 2026 compared to the second half of 2025. And finally, we continue to see a positive long-term market outlook for heavy-duty mobility within hydrogen. And Cavendish is, of course, with our extensive knowledge and experience, well performance -- well positioned to take on the challenge to win this market going forward. So that concludes the fourth quarter presentation. And we are now looking forward to seeing you all again in the Q1 presentation on the 21st of May 2026. And we are also now ready to move on with the Q&A session. But before we start, I just wanted to repeat some of the practicalities here. Raise your hand in queues and remember to unmute on your side when you are given the word and tell us who you are and who you represent and what's your question in the end if you have a question and do that after you have unmuted of course. So thank you very much, and we are now ready to take any questions if there are any. Okay. I can -- so far, there are no questions coming in. So with that, I assume that we were extremely clear in this quarterly presentation, and that's good to see you also. If there are any additional questions or if there are any questions coming up after the presentation here after we conclude, then of course, you're always welcome to e-mail them to [email protected], and we will do our best to respond to your request or your questions afterwards. And with that, I would like to conclude the presentation for the fourth quarter and thank you, everyone, for logging on today and listening in. And again, we are looking forward to see you at the first quarter presentation on 21st of May 2026. Have a great day, everyone, and see you at the next presentation. Thank you.