Fertiglobe plc (FERTIGLB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, everyone. My name is Ellie, and I will be your conference operator for today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Fertiglobe First Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand over the call to Rita Guindy, Fertiglobe Investor Relations Director. Rita, you may now begin your conference.

Thank you, Ellie. Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining Fertiglobe's Q1 2021 Results Conference Call. With me today are Ahmed El-Hoshy, our Chief Executive Officer; Haroon Rahmathulla, our Chief Operating Officer; and Andrew Tait, our Chief Financial Officer. On this call, we will review Fertiglobe's key operational events and financial highlights for the quarter, followed by a discussion of our outlook. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session at the end of the call. The quarterly results presentation is available on our Investor Relations website, and I would like to remind you that any forward-looking statements made on this call involve risks and the actual results could differ materially from those statements. With this, I will now hand it over to Ahmed El-Hoshy, CEO of Fertiglobe.

Thank you, Rita. Thank you all for joining Fertiglobe's Q1 2021 Results Conference Call. Before we go into results, I'd like to reemphasize our continued commitment to safety, which stands as our foremost priority. As of the end of Q1 2024, our rolling 12-month recordable incident rate was 0.14 incidents per 200,000 manhours. Although we're happy to note that this is an improvement and well below industry averages, we reiterate our continued commitment to fostering a culture of zero injuries placing significant emphasis on both operational and process safety as part of our manufacturing improvement journey. Moving on to the Q1 results. Our revenues and adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2024 were 20% and 25%, below their levels in Q1 of '23, respectively. That's at $552 million for revenues and $223 million for EBITDA in Q1 of 2024. It is worth noting that these results were delivered in an environment of market volatility and softer prices in Q1 '24 on lower crop and energy prices as well as reduced imports from India and Europe. This was coupled with an improved ammonia supply site globally. With recent production curtailments being reversed over the course of the quarter. And from a volume perspective, we reported a 5% year-on-year increase in our own produced sales volumes compared to the same period last year, driven by a mix of higher production as well as lower ending inventories. This led to a 22% and 1% increase in ammonia and urea own produced sales volumes, respectively. I'd like to take this chance to commend the continued efforts of our manufacturing and commercial teams to prioritize our key strategic objectives, paving the way for further operational milestones over the course of the year and into the future. This strategy aims to create value irrespective of the [ Corny ] price environment by leveraging our young asset base, robust in-house capabilities and logistical footprint. With regards to the active management initiatives to bolster verticals free cash flow generation across cycles, we're also pleased to make progress on our cost optimization program, with 60% of our $50 million run rate target implemented as at the end of March 2024, and we remain on track to realize the full target by the end of 2024. In addition, as highlighted in February with our Q4 results, from 2023, we see potential to generate at least $100 million in incremental annual EBITDA by the end of 2025 compared to 2023, driven by improved production and energy efficiency as part of our ongoing manufacturing improvement plan. Together, these two initiatives can generate approximately $150 million of incremental run rate EBITDA by the end of '25, representing an increase of 15% compared to the 2023 adjusted full year EBITDA. These initiatives provide additional support to our healthy free cash flow conversion and robust balance sheet with leverage standing at 0.8x net debt to LTM adjusted EBITDA on a consolidated basis in March '24. They also enabled Fertiglobe to balance; One, a selective growth spending on value-accretive projects; and two, dividend payments, which have positioned the company to offer one of the highest dividend yields in the market and the industry. As we remain committed to continuing to create shareholder value. In addition, Fertiglobe maintains a firm focus on technology, innovation and digitalization and investing in the integration of artificial intelligence throughout its operations to unlock value, enhance efficiencies and reduce emissions. The company, along with ADNOC is harnessing data integration, predictive analytic applications to support business objectives by improving the performance of equipment, processes and facilities while also implementing AI-powered analytics at its site to enhance safety and reliability through faster, predictive interventions and preemptive issue resolution. We believe this focus on technology can support, accelerate and enhance our manufacturing improvement journey, which we've been undergoing for the last couple of years. As you may have seen in the headlines today, ADNOC announced delivering another low-carbon ammonia shipment to Japan, which was produced at our facilities in the UAE at FERTIL by capturing and permanently storing CO2 at ADNOC CO2 injection well in Abu Dhabi. The shipment was delivered by -- delivered to Mitsui in Japan and will be used in power generation by co-firing with coal and thereby remarkably reducing the carbon footprint of the process significantly. This milestone highlights Fertiglobe's commitment to meeting rising demand for sustainable energy products and our potential to support the decarbonization journeys of downstream industries in our value chain. Finally, let me extend my sincere appreciation to our world-class team whose dedication has been instrumental in Fertiglobe achievements. Their unwavering commitment to safety and excellence has been pivotal in our transformation into a leading global enterprise which is about to embark on an exciting new chapter of growth and value creation following completion of ADNOC acquisition of OCI's 50% equity stake, which will take ADNOC ownership to a majority 86% once all legal and regulatory approvals have been obtained during the course of this year. As previously highlighted, this transaction supports both ADNOC's ambitious chemical strategy and plan to establish a global growth platform, ammonia as well as Fertiglobe's growth plans by unlocking further potential in its core products of urea and ammonia while accelerating the pursuit of new markets and products. Now let me hand it over to Haroon to discuss the market outlook as well as our commercial and operational performance.

Thanks, Ahmed. Let me start by briefly highlighting the outlook for nitrogen fertilizer and ammonia markets. Ammonia started the year on a soft note due to reduced European gas costs and the return of supply following widespread disruptions in Q4 2023. Ammonia prices stabilized in the later half of this first -- of the first quarter, driven by improving demand from the U.S. spring application season combined with various outages in the U.S., Middle East and Indonesia. In the near term, while merchant supply is expected to increase with the arrival of new capacity in the U.S. Gulf and an increase in Russian exports through a new Black Sea terminal, these have seen some delays and are now expected in the later part of this year. Notwithstanding this, several key ammonia markets are showing signs of improved import demand, and we expect this to support the global trade recovery in merchant ammonia towards its historical levels of 19 million tonnes following 2 years of contraction, further supported by industrial demand starting to show signs of improvement. In the medium term, we see tightness in the gray ammonia merchant market with demand growth set to outpace supply growth pushing global utilization rates higher and in turn, providing pricing support. We also see further risk of plant closures in the EU and Trinidad, which is not currently reflected in these numbers. Longer term, while we expect an increase in low carbon projects from 2028 onwards, over 60% of these announced projects are still in the early planning phase with long lead times of over 5 years. It is worth noting that historical trends suggest that only a small fraction of announced projects will actually reach commissioning. Increased visibility on regulatory demand from 2026 onwards provides support for accelerating demand from emerging new applications, maritime power generation and ammonia as a hydrogen carrier combined could generate as much as 24 million tonnes of incremental ammonia demand by 2030, which is significant in a globally traded market of currently around 17 million tonnes. Finally, demand for ammonia bunkering is becoming an increasingly exciting development with demand expected to kick off as early as 2026, 2027 with more vessels adopting ammonia. In terms of urea, trends were mixed during the quarter, on the one hand, warm weather in the U.S., coupled with low inventory levels, has led to strong domestic demand and a material increase in U.S. planted crop area. In contrast, unusually wet weather in Northwestern Europe through autumn and spring has hindered appetite for application weighing on price momentum during the quarter. With Egypt urea prices being marginally below their levels in Q4 2023 and 9% down year-on-year. In the coming months, despite the seasonally slower summer period, we think that overall demand indicators for urea continue to be resilient, including an expected rebound of corn futures in the second half of 2024 and 2025. And improving urea-corn barter ratio in Brazil and strong urea demand in APAC markets. In the longer term, demand growth of 13 million tonnes is still expected to materially outstrip additional capacity growth of 6.4 million tonnes during the '24 to 2027 period supporting prices. Now moving on to the highlights of our performance in the first quarter of 2024. Once again, Q1 '24 was a strong operational quarter where we have seen improved production as well as a significant improvement in energy efficiency. We ended the quarter with a 5% increase in own-produced sales volumes compared to Q1 2023, driven by a 22% increase in own-produced ammonia sales volumes and a 1% increase in urea own-produced sales volumes. As Ahmed highlighted at the beginning, we are particularly pleased with these results in an environment of market volatility as it continue to manifest our teams maintained and sharpened focus on enhancing operational efficiencies and reliability. And we expect to realize more efficiencies and positive progress over the coming quarters. Between our cost optimization program and our manufacturing improvement plan, we expect to generate incremental annual EBITDA of around $150 million by the end of 2025 compared to 2023, which represents an almost 15% increase of our 2023 adjusted EBITDA of $1 billion at 2023 prices. With that, I would like to hand it over to Andrew to discuss the financial results in more detail.

Thanks, Haroon. Let me start with some highlights of our performance for Q1 '24, which is impacted by the lower selling prices for our products on a year-on-year basis, offsetting the positive impact of our own-produced and overall sales volume growth during the quarter. So our revenues were $552 million in Q1 '24. That's 20% below the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, our adjusted EBITDA decreased 25% year-on-year to $223 million in Q1 '24, leading to EBITDA margin continuing to be resilient at 40%. Our adjusted net income attributable to shareholders was $119 million in Q1 '24, 12% below the same quarter last year. So turning to the balance sheet and cash flow performance. As of 31 March 2024, Fertiglobe reported a net debt position of $743 million, that's implying a net debt over the last 12 months adjusted EBITDA of 0.8x, which allows the company to balance future growth opportunities and the dividend payout, supported by a robust free cash generation and a healthy balance sheet. In April '24, Fertiglobe shareholders approved the H2 '23 dividend of $200 million, and that's equivalent to 9 fils per share payable in May '24, and the ex-div date was 9th of May 2024. So this brings our total dividends now for 2023 to $475 million including the 1H 23 dividend of $275 million paid in Q4 '23. Fertiglobe remains committed to creating shareholder value, leveraging our active cost optimization and manufacturing improvement initiatives to bolster that cash flow generation across cycles and maintain a robust balance sheet. In early '24 Fitch and S&P announced that they had placed Fertiglobe on a ratings watch positive and credit watch positive, respectively, on the pending acquisition of OCI's 50% state by ADNOC, with the expectation to raise Fertiglobe's credit rating by at least one notch following completion of the transaction. In '22, Fertiglobe achieved investment-grade ratings from the three agencies, S&P, BBB-. Moody's Baa3 and Fitch BBB- supported by our attractive cash flow profile and a prudent financial policy. Our free cash flow before growth CapEx amounted to $156 million in Q1 '24 compared to $271 million in Q1 '23. And that reflects the performance for the quarter, the lower working capital inflows, the higher maintenance capital expenditures and an increase in net interest as well as lower tax and lease payments. Our total cash capital expenditures, including growth CapEx was $21 million in Q1 '24 compared to [ $13 ] million in Q1 '23, of which $19 million was related to maintenance capital expenditures compared to $11 million in the same period last year. So we maintain our guidance of $110 million, $130 million for maintenance CapEx in '24 with growth CapEx expected at below $50 million. And will ultimately depend on the FIDs of our growth projects, which are in various stages. I'll now hand back to Ahmed for our outlook and concluding remarks.

Thanks Andrew. As discussed earlier on the call and in our results materials, we are about to enter the usual summer level for fertilizers as we've seen in the seasonality period, but we believe the medium- to long-term outlook for ammonia and nitrogen urea market continues to be supported by incremental demand from new and existing sources with limited supply additions in the coming years with perfect visibility on these plants given the various entry and the 4- to 6-year lead time. We're all supported by Fertiglobe's active cash flow support initiatives undertaken by management our first quartile cost positioning and healthy cash conversion capacity. We also believe the company is very well placed to continue to deliver robust results and continue to create shareholder value over time. In addition, Fertiglobe is ideally positioned to be a key player in the low carbon and renewable ammonia value chain as discussed previously, and we're excited about the company's future ventures in this space in this coming chapter. With that, we'll open the line for questions.