Cloudberry Clean Energy ASA (CLOUD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone, and good morning. My name is Anders Lenborg. I'm the CEO of Cloudberry Clean Energy, and I'm happy to welcome you all to this Cloudberry presentation. We have prepared a presentation for you that I will go through in the next 20 or so minutes. And we are, of course, extremely delighted to have agreed on this transformative deal with Orrön Energy. And over the last years, we have been working to scale our platform and to grow the company. And it has always been a goal to create the leading Nordic IPP, and here we are today. So I would also like to welcome the CEO of Orrön Energy, Daniel Fitzgerald, who is joining us in the start of this presentation.

Good morning.

Good morning, Daniel. So we -- as I said, we are extremely delighted to be able to share the news today that we have agreed on this transformative transaction. It's almost doubling the production of Cloudberry Clean Energy's portfolio. We have had a unique position in the Nordics and so have Orrön. And we always believe that 1 plus 1 would be more than 3 if we manage to combine these 2 portfolios on one platform. And we have been working on this over the last months to find a structure and a setup that is right for both parties. And we are very happy that not only that we've made this milestone, but also to welcome a new experienced, very experienced industrial owner into Cloudberry and becoming Cloudberry's largest shareholder. So Daniel, if you have some comments, we would like to open up for you to comment on the transaction.

Thank you, Anders, and great to be able to share this news with the market today. I think for many years, we've looked at Cloudberry's assets, and I'm sure the other way around, it's a really complementary combination where I think the strength of Cloudberry having built the platform out of Norway, expanding into Denmark and now into Sweden is very, very complementary with Orrön Energy assets primarily across Sweden and in Finland. And so with Cloudberry coming into MLK earlier this year, it opened the door for a broader conversation around putting the 2 companies together. And I think what I'm most excited about is the future journey, not the transaction today, which is, of course, very, very important. But with this platform now, we have the ability to really go and grow a Nordic-focused listed IPP, and this will be the biggest Nordic-focused and Nordic-listed IPP. And as Anders touched on, Orrön Energy comes on board as a 27% shareholder in Cloudberry. We bring the support of the Lundin Group and the Lundin family behind Cloudberry in their journey. And I think the entrepreneurship and team within Orrön Energy will also add so much value into Cloudberry's journey. From the governance side, I think myself and Henrika Frykman will join the Board of Cloudberry as part of this transaction, and we will hold the shares within Orrön Energy. So this really is a combination that brings the best of Cloudberry and the best of Orrön together. And going forward, I see this as Orrön Energy's Nordic vehicle where we will be contributing as much as we can into the future growth of Cloudberry. At this point in the market, it's really interesting to see the opportunities for consolidation and growth. And I think having that added strength and that added depth of assets and team gives us so much more than either we could do on our own or Cloudberry could do on their own. And so this, for me, represents a very compelling transaction, I think, and a springboard to be able to grow into the future. We will hold our own webcast as Orrön Energy at 11:00 today. So for those of you who have questions for Orrön Energy or around our future strategy, then I would welcome those questions at the webcast at 11:00 today. And within Orrön Energy, we'll hold this ownership within Cloudberry and we'll then also own our existing greenfield development business, the Karskruv asset and we'll have the means of going and growing the business both through this vehicle and through the other opportunities we have live. So it's just a big thank you to the Cloudberry team. I think this is really a compelling transaction. I really look forward to what's coming next within this platform with Anders and the team as we move forward. And so with that, Anders, I'll pass back to you for the presentation.

Thank you so much, Daniel, for your kind words, and I couldn't agree more. This is a very interesting transaction and an important step on the growth journey of Cloudberry, but it's the future we are looking to. And I think, as you said, this will make us a much stronger platform and a player in the Nordics when it comes to new opportunities. As I mentioned, we have created a presentation that we will go through, and then we will open up for questions after the presentation. And as you know, we have, over the years, built a unique Nordic renewable platform. We have had assets throughout the Nordic countries. And with this, we will expand our network. We will expand our portfolio and also expand our team and we'll have more, I think, over 230 new turbines in our portfolio and reaching around 400 turbines spinning throughout the Nordics. With hydropower, of course, in Norway and wind and BESS projects throughout the Nordics and also working on hybrid solutions. So it's a proven technologies. We will stay in Nordics and stay with solar, wind, BESS and hydro, making this a unique combination of technologies and presence in 10 different price areas and with very different production profiles. So we are working, as mentioned earlier, on creating a large portfolio of producing assets now over 2 terawatt hour in production with a perfect mix between the technologies when it comes to production profiles. And we are also, as we touched upon and Daniel mentioned, we are also looking at how to develop this producing portfolio further with repowering opportunities with BESS opportunities and also hybrid opportunities. So we are very much looking forward to continue to develop the portfolio also. As we also touched upon, we think it's a perfect fit. The 2 companies know each other. We have entrepreneurial cultures, both of us. We are hands-on, nothing fancy here. It's hard work and continue to scale the platform that is in focus. We built this fantastic organization. We have built the platform, and now we are scaling it with this transaction. And I think overhead, cost is going to be down and the profitability will be up. So we will then buy assets in this structure, and we are using our share. So we will have an EGM in August, and we will have to print shares to match the valuation of the deal. And as Daniel said, then Orrön will be the largest shareholder with about 27% of the shares in Cloudberry. At the same time, we have also managed to have a new financing structure in place, a new facility, and we are very happy to continue our good cooperation with the Norway savings bank, and we have now reached a new facility with NOK 1 billion new loan in that facility. So that's how it's going to be financed. We are not using any of our cash, except for EUR 4 million for the working capital in the companies on the Orrön side. Yes. Just 2 words on the history here. As many of you know, we have throughout the last 5 years, grown the platform from almost nothing. I think we had 3 GWh the first time we reported back in 2020. And it's, of course, satisfying to see that we have managed to grow this accretive. We have had several of these transactions up through the years, but not of the size that we see here. It's by far our largest M&A deal in the history of Cloudberry. And at the same time, we have also continued to develop our own in-house projects and have several projects under construction as we speak. But all in all, we have now looking at over 2 terawatt hour in production. And in addition, of course, we have our development projects. And it's also an interesting side to this transaction that we both have worked on powered land projects, and we see also the opportunities to combine this production portfolio with our powered land portfolio. Yes. And we have focused on building a diversified Nordic production portfolio, and we have managed that coming from hydropower in Norway back in 2020, 2021 and then gradually moved into new markets with Denmark, Sweden, Finland. We have built and testing now our first best projects as you see here on the right-hand side, the majority is wind and hydro, but we will also continue to develop the BESS projects. both stand-alone project, but also BESS in existing wind farms, and we will see that continuing, especially in Sweden and Denmark over the next years. And also keeping the portfolio very much merchant exposed. We have entered into some smaller PPAs now in Denmark for NOK 1 per kilowatt hour. And of course, we will continue to look at opportunities, but it has to be for the right -- at the right price and at the right risk profile. But still around 90% of our portfolio is merchant exposed. So back to the transaction. I think we see -- we have bought assets around 230-plus turbines spinning. But in addition to that, we see a lot of scaling effect and synergies. And as I mentioned, the scaling is important for us because we have a platform and we can now take on board a large portfolio of over 700 GWh and still manage that on our platform. So the Cloudberry platform was built for growth, and it's now delivering and we are now delivering on our growth ambitions. And for those who know us, we have said that we have this 3 in 30 strategy and that means we want to have at least 3 terawatt hour in production in 2030. And with this transaction, we are reaching that -- we're taking 60% to 70% of that gap, closing that gap, and we are confident that we will reach that target within the 2030. And also on the synergy side, of course, we see that we have been through some good years. We have been through the bad years. We have always been focusing that we are financed and set up for also the tough years. Now we have come through that. We are looking bright at the future. And with this, we can also see many synergies with this transaction. Especially on the producing side, we will keep on focusing on reducing balancing cost and also to use the market to our advantage when it comes to running the assets on the best possible way. And I think with the organization and the OEM competence to have in Orrön, combined with our asset manager and our knowledge on the Captiva platform in Cloudberry, that will be a very good match going forward. So here, you see an overview of the production portfolio. Yes, we will be more exposed in Sweden. We are happy to see that we are increasing our production in SE3 and SE4 especially. We have not been very big there, but we are going also to continue to focus on Sweden and develop these assets and new assets. And also in Finland, MLK earlier this year, and now we will double the production in Finland with almost 200 GWh. And from that on, also look to build the portfolio stronger in Finland over time. Yes, this is some highlights from the stock exchange announcement. You have here the most important numbers and also some more information on the process going forward. It is quite a lot of work between signing and closing due to the size, but also due to the assets here. We have infrastructure assets, and we need permissions and so on from governmental offices in the Nordics. So this will be something we start working on today. And as I mentioned, we're happy to continue our good relationship and work with the Norwegian saving banks. We have secured attractive financing and at very good levels, we have increased it with NOK 1 billion and actually got a very good facility and with also a lot of flexibility. So we hope to continue our good cooperation with the saving banks and use the new facility also going forward, both with internal accretive growth and external opportunities. Yes. Here is also a closer overview of the assets. We will not dive into that now, but open up for questions.Yes. Thank you. I can -- I've received several questions here, but one of the questions here is related to our data center in the Nordics. And as we have mentioned under our Q1 presentation earlier this year, we saw that we had a unique position when it comes to powered land projects in the Nordics. We have a combination of land that we own and also long leases on land. And that in combination with our powered production competence is interesting for the data center developers. So we have started to develop powered land project, both in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And the same -- on the same at the same time, Orrön has also developed a strategy when it comes to powered land projects. So this combination is just adding more megawatts to our powered land strategy. We have started to apply for capacity for some of the projects and also the zoning processes are ongoing for several projects. And I think we will get back to that in more detail when we see the capacity coming in and how we can use our power also. We think it's going to be a requirement in the future that powered land project data center developers also can bring new production to the market or to the data center as we have seen in Ireland, and we have also seen that discussion starting up in the Nordics that if you are going to consume a lot of power on the data centers, you also have to come up with some percentage of the power that's actually going into the data center. And I think this is a unique position. We see that in Norway, for example, the TSO has awarded over 20 terawatt hours to data centers, but we see very little new production coming into the market here in Norway. And the same we see in Sweden. There is a huge demand, but very little new power producing production coming into the mix. So that's something that we're going to continue to work on. Yes, the plan going forward, this is just in line with our strategy. As I mentioned earlier, we have this Nordic focus. We want to create the Nordic champion. We want to stay with the proven technologies. So this is actually 100% aligned with our strategy. And what you can expect also going forward is to continue to follow the strategy of growth with the Nordic focus and proven technologies. It could be that we're also now looking at doing more fixed price contracts when we have a much larger production portfolio, but we come from a very low level of fixed price contracts on our portfolio. So it will not be a majority of the portfolio, but it could be that we enter into some more PPAs. Yes. Going forward, we will focus on Sweden, of course. It will be our biggest market. But also, we think that this is a very nice step stone into Finland. First MLK transaction earlier this year, but with more power production in Finland, we will also continue to develop our opportunities in Finland going forward and also balancing this with the hydro production in Norway and projects in Denmark. So we are always looking to get the best possible mix between technologies, price areas and the Nordic countries. Yes. Question here on repowering. So that's an interesting question. Cloudberry's portfolio of both hydro and wind assets are quite young. We -- I think our oldest assets is from 2016. It's a good mix with the Orrön portfolio. They have already repowered some of their projects, some of the turbines. And we will continue to develop new repowering projects and also looking at how we can repower these projects in combination with BESS and make hybrid production assets out of the grid connection. So I think it's interesting that we get a lot of new grid connection points and repowering opportunities with this acquisition. And a new question coming in here, ask if we are going to pay a dividend. That's also a question that has been raised earlier. When we listed, we said that we will have to build a large enough portfolio. We have seen lots of opportunities, and we will, over time, of course, discuss with the Board and look into a dividend strategy. And with this acquisition transaction, we are much closer to that discussion, but that's something that we need to discuss on our side on the Board, and then we will, in due time, get back to that and inform the market on the dividend. But that's absolutely something that we are looking at. Yes, it's many questions here. I think time is running. How will reach the 3 GWh? I think the last question here. How are we going to reach 3 terawatt hours? Good question. I think we will continue what we have done so far. It's a combination of in-house developed projects where we see that we can get good returns. We will continue to develop hydropower, hybrid wind and solar projects. And -- but what we also see now is that we have a market that is very attractive and we can get -- do accretive transactions. And if we can do accretive transactions and buy for less than we can -- we are building the CapEx then I think we will focus on using the window we see now in the market, both when it comes to stand-alone assets, stand-alone projects with concession and permits and -- but also looking at other more structural deals like this to grow the platform and use our share or our cash to finance the growth going forward. So I think with this, we are very good positioned for the -- to reach the 3 terawatt hour 2030 goal and maybe also going above. But it has to be accretive and it has to be in -- making sense in the mix of our portfolio. Thank you so much. And for your time, and have a nice day. Bye-bye.