Exor N.V. (EXO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome, and thank you for joining the Exor Investor and Analyst Call. Please note that the presentation is available to download on Exor website, www.exor.com, under the Investors and Media, Events & Presentations section. Any forward-looking statements Exor management makes are covered by the safe harbor statement included in the presentation material. Please note that this conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, CEO, John Elkann. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We're very happy with my colleagues to be here with all of you, and we would like to jump in our presentation. We'd like to start giving you a summary of who we are. We are a company that is long-term focused, which is entrepreneurial and disciplined. And this is very much a reflection of how we have been operating over a long period of time and what we do is committed to the long term. We have, in the last 5 years, gone through major rotation in what we own, having disposed and reinvested. It has been close to EUR 19 billion of rotations over this period of 5 years, primarily the divestment of PartnerRe and reinvesting in health care, where Philips and Institut Mérieux have been our largest investments within the health care sector. If you look at Exor today, we are primarily a company that owns companies. And of the companies we own, 4, Ferrari, Stellantis, CNH and Philips represent 70% of our gross asset value, and we will be talking more about them. We also have historically been investing, investing in many asset classes and investing in multiple ways directly or through funds. In 2024, we have decided not to continue our Exor Ventures activity and to start monetizing our investments, which account for more than 100 companies, while we want to concentrate our investing activity, [ disinvesting ] activity within Lingotto, which is an investment management company that we started in 2023. And then we have a variety of other assets that go from cash equivalents to some specific assets like our reinsurance vehicles who come from the sale to Covea of PartnerRe. Before we start, I'd like to ask our CFO, Guido, to walk you through our performance in 2024.

Good. Thank you, John. 2024 was a mixed and definitely not a great year in which we increased our NAV per share by 9%. If you look at the various drivers of it, within companies, the performance was very mixed. Ferrari did fantastically, 36% up in value in 2024. Stellantis did exactly the same with minus 36%. Ferrari is bigger in our portfolio. So net that still drove an increase in NAV per share, while CNH was more or less flat and Philips had a strong performance of 19% up in the year. Also, other companies contributed well, in particular, Iveco and Juventus had a strong performance, partly offset by the share price change in Clarivate. Notably, this year, Lingotto continued its strong track record. We invested a bit more in Lingotto, but the change you see here primarily is coming from its returns. The value of our Lingotto investment increased by EUR 570 million, so very strong performance indeed. And then if you look at others, one part is driven by the buyback where we canceled shares. And in the category, Other, there's largely the reduction in cash, which we used to increase, amongst others, our shareholding in Philips by EUR 600 million. So all of that led to a growth of 9% in our key metric of NAV per share.

Thank you, Guido. So let's start with an overview of our companies and how they have performed in 2024. Ferrari is our most valuable company that had an extraordinary year in 2024 on the back of important launches, on the back of very strong personalization on the back of making the racing activity, the sports car activity and the lifestyle activity stronger. The success of Ferrari led to Ferrari being a company that in '24 reached 50% of our gross asset value. And we like at Exor concentration, but we're cognizant that we need to be also aware of too much concentration, which is the reason why we have decided to sell part of our interest in Ferrari, but being clear about the commitment we have for Ferrari and how much Ferrari is a great company, which is what at Exor, we pride ourselves of doing, which is building great companies. As Guido mentioned, 2024 was a mixed year, and Stellantis had a disappointing year, a year in which both operational issues in particularly North America have led to changes, changes in leadership within the company, changes with our CEO, Carlos Tavares, resigning and I have been asked by the Board to take on responsibility as we are undergoing a search process to find the CEO for Stellantis. The last 4 months have been very active in making sure that the organization is more focused on its regions, is more focused where customers are, is more focused where problems are. '25 is an important year for Stellantis, one of stability and making sure that Stellantis works on its potential. CNH had also a difficult 2024. CNH operates in the agriculture and construction equipment markets, which have had downturns. The end markets in which the company operates have had downturns in '24. And as a consequence of that, the company has had to adjust to lower levels of revenue. The Board of the company also decided to appoint Gerrit Marx as its new CEO. Gerrit Marx used to work in one of our companies at Exor, Iveco, where he has been performing and proving leading Iveco his leadership abilities, which we look forward him applying to CNH. And the company is preparing for an Investor Day in May of 2025 to talk about its future and how it's addressing the actual market challenges. Philips is our more recent company among our larger companies. Philips has had an important 2024 where on one side, it was able to clarify particularly the Respironics litigation in the U.S. and accelerating the improvement of its operations, which led to better profitability and led to better cash flow generations. The positive signals that we have had in Philips have made us decide to increase last year and further this year, our ownership of Philips, which we are capped at 20%. I would like to also take some time on our private companies. They represent EUR 3.4 billion, so a little less than 10% of our gross asset value. They have had mixed results and in aggregate, have returned 5.5% in '24, so less than what Exor returned and less than the MSCI, which is the benchmark we have. We've had stars like Welltec, who has had an extraordinary year in 2024, and this year, we'll be distributing for the first time a dividend. We've had others like Louboutin, who have been facing some of the difficulties that the luxury market has been facing in 2024, but are reinvigorated by making sure that their creativity level is going to be there to take the opportunities that the luxury market represents as we enter 2025. Institut Mérieux, where we partner with the Mérieux family, has been very concentrated on its own portfolio rotation, simplifying it by divesting some of its companies like ABL and increasing in some of its other companies like Mérieux NutriSciences which acquired the division of Bureau Veritas in food testing, becoming the world leader in that sector. The main company of Institut Mérieux is BioMérieux, who has been delivering impressive results in 2024. And I'd like to also mention Via. Via is also a company that in the past, we had its founder and CEO, Daniel Ramot, present. Via is going to have its best year ever in -- it has had its best year ever in 2024 and is among the later-stage company, one that has the fastest growth trajectory. So overall, '24 was a mixed year with some companies doing very well and some companies doing less well, which is why we are determined in '25 to really be focusing and being very concentrated on the overall performance of our companies. I would like now to pass it to Guido to tell you more about how we have been reorganizing our investment activity and how it's become now concentrated as we go forward into Lingotto's funds.

Indeed. Thank you, John. So we decided to focus our new commitments behind funds in Lingotto. So Lingotto is the asset manager we founded in 2023. And this is not an asset manager that tries to gather as much as possible assets under management to have significant management fees as income. This is a business that tries to be a home for exceptional investors to deliver fantastic returns on the money that we've put in Lingotto. And I think on this slide, you can see that the Lingotto Investments team have been delivering on this performance -- on this promise in 2024 by returning 26% on the basis of a significant amount of money we have put in on the EUR 2 billion base, delivering a 26% return is strong. But more importantly, since inception, the IRR of the funds and some like Matteo Scolari hedge fund date back a long time already. We've been getting a 20% IRR from these investments. So we're very happy with this focus on delivering excellent return by excellent investors. If we then move on to the financials, we're not pleased with our overall performance. 2024 was not a great year. It followed a great year. But if we look at our key metrics, which were all incentivized behind a 9% growth on NAV per share is on an absolute level good. But compared to an MSCI World Index that's 25% up, it was lagging. Indeed, it was driven by U.S. and Magnificent 7, but our objective is to outperform the MSCI World Index. And similarly, for [ TSR, ] which went down in the year on the back of a discount that grew from 45% to 50% versus our NAV per share. If we look then at our operational and financial hygiene factors, so to make sure we operate in a disciplined way. We had a very strong free cash flow over dividend paid, largely driven by the strong dividends that Stellantis issued in 2024. We expect for 2025 based on the dividends that have been announced by our companies, still to receive around EUR 750 million of dividend inflow in the year. Management cost in an inflationary environment, we managed to reduce our management cost slightly with a gap that strongly increased. So that improved our efficiency ratio of being a lean company in managing our assets. And if we look at our leverage metric, we stayed around the 10% loan-to-value ratio that we have as a cruising range that we feel very comfortable with. We then move a bit further into our financial profile. We like leverage at Exor, and we like to have a bit of leverage on top of the leverage that our companies have, but in a moderate way. So we decided to have our leverage target reduced from 20% to 15% to reflect that and also to show that we strongly attach to the strength of the credit rating that we have today. We then move to the right side of the slide, you'll see our bond maturity profile. And that's, I think, another way in which we try to manage our leverage in a prudent way by having a well spread out maturity profile with a long duration, and that's what we intend to maintain going forward. As most of you will have read, we announced yesterday a new tender offer for EUR 1 billion. This is essentially the same transaction structure as we did in September 2023, where we'll have a 20-day book building period, in which investors can subscribe in a range from 3% discount to a 10% premium. And given the success of last year and also the demand that we received, we increased the size of the transaction to EUR 1 billion. And for more details on this, I'll refer you to the information memorandum that you can find on our website. We feel this buyback is a great thing to do for us and for our shareholders, given it's an opportunity to buy back our own shares with assets at half of value, in particular, in these turbulent times, while we are a long-term investor, with the discount having gone up to the level where it is. And this is a clear sign of confidence also of us in our portfolio as a good allocation of these proceeds. Maybe, John, would you like to take the next section.

Thank you, Guido. So we believe in ourselves with this large buyback that Guido got in the details of, and we believe in ourselves not only because of attractive nature that the discount provides, but more importantly, for the companies we own and their future. And this is really important to our future as most of our effort is really, as I mentioned before, in ensuring that they perform and ensuring that we make sure that we are active in providing them support and challenge as they progress in their path to greatness with the ups and the downs of it. We will be focusing on looking, as we go forward, in investments that are more of the likes of Philips. And we do believe that 5% of our GAV is at the minimum what we will be investing in the future. We have no intentions of investing as of now, and we are very determined in working and being active with our companies. But as we look forward and we look at where we could deploy capital, it will be within the vicinity of 5% of our GAV. Lingotto is off to a good start, and we believe the potential of Lingotto and the investment managers in Lingotto to provide interesting opportunities of returns for our capital. And we will be continuing to build companies and invest through Lingotto, making sure that we are disciplined, which is the reason why we wanted to be even more stringent with our LTV ratio, as Guido described, of 15%. And we want to be very focused on our main objective, which is NAV per share growth and making sure that we are able to outperform the MSCI worldwide. And continue looking at capital distribution also through buybacks as the one we have announced yesterday. Before answering and with my colleagues, we wanted to make sure that we had appropriate time to answer to your many questions, hopefully, I wanted to end remembering a close friend of mine, a mentor of mine, Ratan Tata. And Ratan was a very wise person. He was an outstanding leader. He was able to lead the Tata Group from the past to the future and from India to the world. And as we encounter uncertainties, which we haven't encountered in '24 and we continue to encounter in 2025, we strongly believe that these are also opportunities of learning. These are opportunities of improving. And these are opportunities of making sure that what we do is done in a way in which the adversities are not only faced, the challenges are not only met, but we also are able to learn and take the opportunities that always exist. Thank you to all of you, and thank you for your trust. And thank you for being close to us, as you are loyal shareholders of Exor. Let's take questions.

[Operator Instructions] The questions come from the line of Martino De Ambroggi from Equita.

The first question is on Ferrari, particularly what's your attitude towards Ferrari shares going ahead? So if it's just a matter of concentration of your -- of the asset in the portfolio, it means that this action could be replicated in the future? Second, it's quite not a short time, but the stock is selling at a 50% discount. So I was wondering what are your main explanations for such a high discount. And apart from buyback, what do you believe is the best way to act? I know the focus is on net asset value per share increase. But maybe I had the third question is the reinvestment, you mentioned 5% of GAV for a new ticket under the new loan-to-value rule, seems to me there are -- there is room for a couple of tickets, not more. And you didn't mention explicitly as in the past what are the sectors you are looking at. In the past, it was luxury tech and health care, the main focus. Are still these 3 sectors are your potential targets?

Thank you for always your good questions. I do believe that our discount on NAV is an opportunity for us to invest in ourselves, which is what we're doing. I also believe that if you look historically, what really is important is the ability of Exor to perform and our performance is really measured by NAV per share compared to the MSCI World Index. We are determined to make sure that this is the case, which is a function of, on one side, having our companies perform. We had a mixed year in '24, and we're determined in improving that in '25. In terms of capital deployment, we are, as I mentioned, today, more focused where most of our capital is, which is with our companies and with Lingotto then additional deployment. And that really will be driving the performance. We are also increasing as is the case of Philips, where we have invested. And we have always believed that if we see potential in our company we own, we would rather invest in it than in a company we don't know. Ferrari has had an extraordinary run. Ferrari is an extraordinary company. And as much as we like in Exor concentration because ultimately, we believe that less is more. If we have a smaller amount of companies, the focus we can have on these companies is higher. We also are mindful that there is a limit to how much concentration we should have. [Foreign Language]

If I may, back on the 50% discount, what is the main explanation that you have for -- to justify? Obviously, we do not justify it, but to understand why the stock is still at 50-plus percent discount and now probably a little bit less because of the buyback.

That has been for some time that our discount -- what I mentioned is that if you look historically, what is important, is to make sure that one performs. As one performs, the discount will take care of itself. So we need to perform better.

Okay. If I may follow up on Iveco, which is planning the spin-off of the military business. Should we totally rule out a straight divestiture of the military business as a sort of a dual track? Or the spin-off is the base case and that's it?

I would say to Suzanne that you would have asked about Iveco. So thank you because, I'd be very disappointed if you hadn't. So she's ready to answer.

Thank you, John. Well, as the Board of Iveco announced, it's considering a spin-off. So a formal decision on the spin-off has not been made, but the Board is actively considering that. And obviously, we'll come back to shareholders when it makes a decision on whether that goes forward. In terms of a sale, as you would expect me to say, the Board of Iveco has a fiduciary duty to consider any offers that come forward. So it certainly will do so; however, the spin, which it's considering is the primary path which the company is considering at the moment.

We are now going to proceed with our next question. And the questions come from the line of Joren Van Aken from Degroof Petercam.

I've got a few. First one, in your shareholder letter, you mentioned that your venture exposure moves from ventures to James Anderson's innovation strategy. And I was wondering if the venture exposure will be through direct investments or via funds? And if via funds, could you share with us some GPs that are involved? Second question would be on Louboutin. Could you talk a bit more about the situation there? I see that the valuation is still at the same level as in H1. But I read in the H1 report that you saw quite a significant improvement of performance going into H2. So I'm quite surprised that valuation is now stable. So I was just wondering if the improvement did not materialize or what is basically happening there? And then my final question would be on the very strong performance at Lingotto, where, again, I read in the shareholder letter that a big part was due to the very nice investment in Carvana. But given the very good performance, I would guess that there was something else too that was very strong in terms of performance. So was there another fund, another strategy that also had a great performance or another investment? I would be very curious to that as well.

We will be investing in Lingotto funds. And within the different strategies, the innovation strategy is going to have a larger scope, meaning that it will be investing in venture, in growth and in public markets within the innovation world. And the unicity of that strategy is one that James Anderson has been doing at Baillie Gifford. And we felt that the opportunity set that we had on the venture side was one that would be better captured within the innovation remit. We have had good performance for the funds of Lingotto in '24. So you're right, intersection has been the strategy where we have most of our capital invested, so the biggest driver of performance. But the other strategies, Horizon and innovation have had good performance in '24. And Mosaic, which is our newest strategy is really going to start in '25. And it's one that will have longer duration and the performance will be able to be understood with an average of 5 years from now. But the opportunity set that we believe is there in what PAM defines the weird and the wonderful is a very compelling one. On Louboutin, I'll ask -- Suzanne?

Thank you, John. Well, Louboutin, as you probably know, is an extraordinary company with incredible amounts of creativity and a very loyal customer following. Louboutin like many luxury goods companies experienced a surge in both sales and bottom line post-COVID, which we were pleased to see. But then has also been affected, like most of the luxury industry, by the subsequent decline in luxury performance, which took place in 2024. So the good news is that the sector seems to be recovering from what we can see within Louboutin at the moment. So we are very hopeful that the performance will now increase from this point forward. And we continue to think that this is a company, as I say, with extraordinary kind of creativity led by Christian Louboutin.

We are now going to proceed with our next question, the questions come from the line of Alberto Villa from Intermonte SIM.

Well, I'll take the opportunity to ask a couple of broad questions about the general situation. Of course, you have an extraordinary observation point about what could be the impact of what is currently going on in terms of trade and military investment and so on. So I wanted to ask you how this could affect your decisions regarding the situation on some of your big investments and especially on Stellantis, obviously, where you are leading the transition -- leadership transition phase. So what do you think will be the final outcome of what is happening right now? How it should -- it could affect your companies in your portfolio? And what do you think about the potential push in investment into military that could also involve some capacity coming from other sectors and there are talks about auto sector being involved in some way or another in some countries. The second question is on the portfolio rotation you had in the last few years. I was wondering if you can comment on what do you think is the position right now you have in your portfolio, if you think there are opportunities to continue the portfolio rotation in the next, let's say, 12, 18 months? And finally, on new investments, any indication on what is your kind of focus right now? We have seen assets potentially up for sale like Versace in the luxury space. I was wondering if this kind of assets is still of interest for you or you're looking to something completely different?

Thank you. The overall decisions that are being made around defense are ones that impact EDV, which Suzanne mentioned. There is no inclination from Exor to invest in defense as a sector. And we do not believe that there is affinities between the car industry and the defense industry. In terms of what has been announced yesterday with the tariffs on the automotive sector as the AAPC, which is the American Automotive Policy Council, which Stellantis with GM and Ford is a member of, made a very clear statement about the dialogue ongoing with the Trump administration and the importance of the competitiveness of the integrated North American automotive sector, but more importantly, the concern on affordability of our products, our products made in America and the implications on demand on what will this uncertainty mean for demand in the United States of America. We are determined, as I mentioned, in really focusing on our companies and their performance in '25. We have done a big rotation, more than half of our assets, if you look at what I explained in the first page between the divestiture and the investments. I probably would like in terms of investments, ask my colleague, Benoit, who has really been responsible of our deployment in health care, which has totaled now more than EUR 4 billion. So it's been really the sector where we have deployed more resources to give you an update on where we are. And that's also where we're adding, as I described before, our additional commitment to Philips, not only in '24, but also in '25.

Thank you, John. Yes, we remain committed to our conviction that the investment in health care are at least in some subsectors in health care are interesting. There has been recently some factors that have impacted the valuation of health care, especially after the -- after COVID, there has been some destocking. There has been some difficulties in demand in China. So the valuation of some assets are interesting. And we are continuing to investigate the subsectors and within the subsectors, the companies that could be of interest for us. And we apply the same criteria. We want to invest at the crossroads of technology and health care in companies that are going to help fixing the structural issues that the health care sector is facing, in particular, the need for productivity, the need for prevention, the need to help the government facing the challenges that the financing of health care is bringing to our societies, our Western societies. This is at the heart of our investment in Institut Mérieux and o BioMérieux, which is very much involved in the prevention and the diagnostic, the early diagnostics. And this is at the heart of our investment in Philips, which really is willing to bring solutions to bring additional productivity to the hospitals. And so we are looking for -- we have reinforced our investments in Philips after their recent results when -- which we consider a good opportunity to reinforce our stake. And we are looking to other opportunities. But to your -- to a previous question, I would say we have always insisted that even if we are focused on the 3 sectors that you mentioned, luxury, health care and technology, we also remain opportunistic in looking at the potential new targets.

We are now going to proceed with our next question, the questions come from the line of David Vagman from ING Belgium.

The first one is when you look actually at the potential investments, so can you update us on your view on sectors you like and on your view on valuation, especially listed versus private investment, in particular, given the change we are seeing politically? So that's my first question. The second is also related to the current volatile macro and political environment. What are you advising your participation, so your companies to do in terms of execution and investment? So are you advising them to be more prudent to slow down or take a long view, be more countercyclical? And a bit same question at your level. So would you rather pose investment or be countercyclical? And last question. So first question on Philips. Can you update us on the latest development? What is your view on potential execution issue and how they can basically continue to improve themselves and...

I mean regarding your first question on the sectors, I think I just said that we remain committed to the 3 sectors that we have identified a few years ago, health care, technology and luxury. It has proved difficult to find interesting targets in the luxury domain in the recent period of the good size and with the good fit with what we can bring to them. But we remain interested in this sector, of course. We have actually invested more knowledge, and we have explored more the health care domain. So this is more the current priority, as I was explaining, and we remain opportunistic outside of these sectors. Regarding valuation, as you can easily observe, I mean, things have been very, very fluid in the last 6 months. And so it's difficult to give you a definitive answer. You have seen how fast things have been evolving in the current environment. And regarding your question on cyclicity versus contracyclicity, it really depends on the sectors. In the energy, for example, there has been currently because of the uncertainty on regulations, because of the divergence of regulations in the different regions of the world, I mean, the pressure on the valuation of energy assets. We are a small investor in energy through TagEnergy. We consider maybe it presents some good opportunities. On the health care domain, we try to stay very, very committed to our thesis that these are -- we should focus on the long-term supporting trends, the prevention, the technology, every solution that we can bring to the profound challenges that the Western societies are facing in the health care domain. And that -- we will continue to invest in these domains and not pay too much attention on the current volatility that are coming from, I mean, the recent decisions on the funding of NIH, for example, or things like this. This is -- we are more looking at the long-term trends than at the current volatility.

And maybe on the Philips -- any strategies -- yes?

Sorry, I forgot your question on Philips. I mean the Philips journey we embarked with Philips based on their the plan that they disclosed 6 months before we invested in January 2023, we are -- they are clearly in the middle of this plan and we are very happy with the first steps that they have done in the implementation of the plan. We see the change that they are implementing, we are supporting the changes that they are implementing. There will be this year, at the end of the year, an important milestone because they are going to define their new plan for the next 3 years. So it will be a good opportunity at that time to comment on the plan of the company.

We are now going to proceed with our next question, and the questions come from the line of Giuseppe Grimaldi from BNP Paribas.

I have actually 2 questions. The first is around the capital allocation. You are clearly in a moment in which you are looking for opportunities to relocate capital. So my question is where you are in terms of time line in the scouting process. It would be helpful if you can share at least a bit of color on that. And the second one is on the portfolio strategy. It seems -- if I got it correctly, what we should expect over time is you to have bigger and more significant positions and so is it fair to say that we are going to have exits over the next months or quarters and then bigger assets that are going to replace the smaller exits that you will do? Is it a sort of fair expectation going forward?

Definitely in our portfolio review process, which we conduct with discipline and diligence, we will be looking at what we believe we should be owning. And you are right that directionally we will be making investments in order for us to have more capital per company going forward. In terms of our capital allocation, I'd like to ask Guido to give you some color.

So on timing because we do have the proceeds from the Ferrari [ ABL. ] We are a long-term investor. I think these are turbulent times, which do provide opportunities, but we're also very disciplined. So we do our fundamental business cases on where we want to invest and we look with patience on the right opportunity in the right moment to invest. So there's no short-term or there's actually no indication on timing on when we would do such investments. We look for the best assets to hold for a long, long time.

We have no further questions on the phone line. I will now hand back Mr. John Elkann for the webcast questions.

Well, thank you. We had great questions, and there are still some that have reached us. So let me address them with my colleagues. One is, it is conceivable for you to invest and take over in a company that Lingotto owns, say, Ocado? What are the synergies between Lingotto and the main investment activities? And I'd like Guido to answer this question.

So Lingotto really operates separately and the Chief Investment Officers of the different funds take their investment decisions in line with the objectives of the fund and not at the direction of Exor. So this is really managed separately. So a transaction like this is not something that we would discuss with our fund managers. I think the attractivity of Lingotto is really into, one, these are people that have proven themselves to be outstanding in what they do in their specific fund strategy. And the other thing which is attractive to this is that it's not correlated directly to the activities that we do. So they invest either with a different lens on public markets or they invest into private markets or instead of equity, they invest in private credit. So I think the diversification that the Lingotto funds provide us is attractive and the great returns that they've delivered to date.

Thank you, Guido. Thank you all for the great questions. Thank you all your support, and thank you all for believing in Exor and thank you all for buying more shares of Exor. Have a wonderful day.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.