Holcim AG (HOLN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Capital Market Day, and welcome to the launch of our new Strategy 2025. Very excited to have so many of you today here live with us in Basel. And to those of you who can -- who are connecting by video, also a very warm welcome to our Capital Market Day. We had a great start this morning. We showed you a bit how our strategy is working, is executed in the local markets. Everything we do is local. We have local supply chains, local customers. And I think it was very exciting this morning to see how Holcim Switzerland is leading the way in circular construction, in digitalization, in introducing the new green products and making Holcim here in Switzerland the global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions. Very exciting, I think, showcase also for how we will build smarter in the future from 3D printing to new insulation material. I would now like to share with you for the next 30 minutes our new strategy, what are the targets, what are the key initiatives we're going to execute the next 5 years. And then we have exciting breakout groups where we address all the key topics, all the success factors we want to execute over the next 5 years. Time. So let me start with an overview on the strategy and then we go in the breakout sessions. And after the breakout sessions, we have time for your questions and your comments. Strategy 2022, we delivered what we promised to you 3.5 years ago. We have set the targets for 2022. And you have seen that we delivered the promised growth, significant increase in profitability. We have achieved the cash conversion we promised for the last 3 years. So 2021 will be the third consecutive year with a cash conversion above 40%, very excited to achieve that. We have return on invested capital. That was always a big question mark from you, when do we earn our capital cost. And I think 2021 is the year we can well say that we are now well above 8% in return on invested capital. And I'm very proud that our teams have achieved this, and this will also be a key parameter going forward. We also worked on the leverage we promised in the strategy, below 2x EBITDA to net debt. We are well below 2x. And also here, we achieved a new level of financial strength, balance sheet strength, which is important for us going forward. So very excited here to share with you that we deliver 1 year ahead of plan, our targets. Most important, we not only achieved the target, but we set the foundation for the future here at Holcim. Most importantly, our operating model with the strong local leadership, we have taken out 1 layer of management. As you know, we have reduced the corporate cost by, I think, CHF 200 million over this strategy period and very happy that this is fully in place, fully operating. And I think you had a taste this morning about the team of Holcim Switzerland, how motivated, inspired and how empowered they are to lead the markets here in their markets. We have then, I think our growth model is established where we have growth again and overproportional growth in profitability and also all this then hitting the bottom line, most important, our strong cash generation. We have put sustainability and ESG at the heart of what we do. Fair to say, it all started with the new strategy where we are now trying much more holistic view, not only focusing on the factory, especially focusing on how we make buildings more sustainable, to build more sustainable, but also to operate the building much more sustainable, much more energy-efficient. And then we want to be the leader of the circular economy in our markets. We want to make construction a circular business, making new out of old buildings. And that's, I think, super exciting. We made big progress with solutions and products. Our big acquisition of Firestone, we will have more details later in the breakout session. But we had a super start, 15% organic growth in the first 6 months of ownership. That's, I would say, a dream start and shows the potential here with our new business segment solutions and products. Bolt-on acquisitions is also a very big part of our new foundation. We have done 28 acquisitions in the last 3.5 years, very value accretive. And you will hear later from our CFO in the breakout session how this is working and how much this is contributing not only to the growth, but also to the bottom line. So very excited that we are ready now for the next chapter of growth for our new strategy here, 2025 to become the most innovative and sustainable provider of building solutions, come from building material company to a solution company to the global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions. Let's look a little bit into the details. First of all, construction and building materials is the place to be. It's an exciting and growing market based on 6 megatrends we -- I've listed here. It starts with the need for more people to live on the planet, more urbanization, which needs a much more sophisticated building solutions than living on the countryside and, of course, better living standards demanded by the people. And now we have the new requirement of sustainable construction solutions to fight climate change, but also to make our economy and construction truly circular. So we will have a lot of innovation in driving building technologies going forward to make building not only decarbonated but especially making building much more efficient going forward. We have -- when you look at buildings today, you have 30% of the carbon emission in the build phase of the building, so in the building materials, but 70% is still while operating the building. So we not only have to build with less carbon, we also have to make the buildings much more efficient during their lifetime. And very important, we will have more and more repair and refurbishment. You know the infrastructure in Europe but also in North America. Plenty of potential here, plenty of need to properly refurbish and repair. So very exciting market, and I'm super excited that at Holcim now we are here placed in the right spot and leading here green solutions for building and for the construction market. So we are ready. We want to be at the forefront for innovative and green building solutions. You saw this morning how in Switzerland, we introduced the first cement containing 20% recycled demolition waste, super exciting. And we will also do that kind of products in other markets. You will learn more about the green products later. We have a special breakout sessions here. Then the circular economy. This is a big part. We will see ourselves as the main recycler of demolition waste. We have the supply chain in the local markets. All the points you need to take demolition waste in but also to recycle it and then to put it back into cement and into concrete to build new with old. We also have on circular economy, 1 breakout session later where you will learn more details how we do it. Very exciting is our Solutions & Products segment, where we are building now new platforms for innovation and above-market growth. Also here later, we have a breakout session and you will learn more here why this is so exciting. And last but not least, we do this, of course, to increase and further improve the return for our shareholders with superior growth, with superior returns and also leading the ESG ratings. Let me go a bit in the detail, and I would like to talk about our 4 value drivers of the new strategy, how we want to accelerate growth, how we want to expand our new segment of Solutions & Products, how we want to lead innovation sustainability and then also how we deliver superior performance. Let me start with the growth. We will later see much more details. I talked already about the fantastic fundamentals of the construction market with the megatrends, making it a growth sector, but also a sector now for innovation and to make better buildings, to make decarbonization a reality in construction. We set the new targets to grow Solutions & Products to 30% of group sales already by 2025. That's -- we are very now convinced this is the right new segment for us after seeing the success we have with Firestone, very value accretive to the company. So we are very excited to accelerate here and to double here Solutions & Products in the next 5 years. We will also continue our bolt-on acquisitions. We have actually, since the start of the strategy, we have increased every year the number of deals. In the first year, we did 4 deals. This year, we're going to do around 12 deals and all very value accretive, and we want to also here accelerate here the bolt-on acquisitions. We have growth in Aggregates and Ready-Mix business. This was also a part of the old strategy to accelerate to close the gap in performance. We closed the gap quite a bit. We improved the growth, but especially margins and returns in both in Aggregates and Ready-Mix Concrete, and we want to continue here and capture the full potential. Digital will be a big part of our future. You saw this morning, also you will see in the breakout session that we digitalize not only the interface with the customer, but also the whole operations to have our factories running fully sensorized on big data and then also do have all digital organized with our suppliers. Solutions & Products. I'd like to make a few comments. First of all, we're going to grow that to 30% of group sales. So make it the second biggest business for Holcim by 2025. We have already established a super platform for roofing. Already Firestone, when we bought the business, it had a run rate of $1.8 billion. Already in the first 12 months, we will exceed $2 billion with very good returns. That's very encouraging for us, and we will be very excited here to double the business now in the next 5 years. This roofing platform, about half will come from organic growth and the other half will come from acquisitions. Besides roofing, we have other growth platforms. There are other interesting market segments with above-market growth. And also the characteristics we look for in Solutions & Products, I think I have on the next slide. We look for segments which have sustainability, innovation. A large part of it is focused on repair and refurbishment. So ongoing business with strong pricing power. We like businesses which are system selling-based or specification-based selling. And then, of course, technology, which help us to reduce the carbon footprint of construction. And then at the end, this comes with high cash conversion and rather low capital intensity. This is all true for our roofing business, but there are also other segments in building materials where we could enter in the near future. This is the outlook for 2025. You see the green part, Solutions & Products coming from 8%. So already now with Firestone, we move 15%. Maybe already well above 15% with this high organic growth rate and then we want to double that share for the group in the next 5 years by organic growth, but also especially by acquiring other businesses. We have -- I think I talked about this already, how we want to grow Solutions & Products. I move to the next slide, innovation and sustainability. Here, we are the first company in building materials, who has not only committed to net zero by 2050, but our road map is fully checked by the science-based targets initiative. And this is very important to us. We not just make announcements. We have road maps and action plans behind how we're going to reach net zero. And you see here all these elements which are important to us to go forward from using lower clinker factors, alternative fuels. We want to go stronger into renewable energies. Long-term target is that all our factories are run on renewables. And then the green product is a huge part where we have a big success with the introduction of ECOPact and ECOPlanet, how our complete range for concrete and cement, where we already have a 30%-plus carbon reduction on the product. Plants of tomorrow here, to be more efficient is a big part. Circular economy, I'm personally the most excited about that all our sites can become circular, can become recycling centers. We have all the locations in place to take in the demolition waste, to recycle it and to put it back into our new products. Carbon capture, we'll also talk later in the breakout session about this. We have 30 projects at the moment. It will become a reality for us, and we want to operate the first plant with carbon capture by 2030 to demonstrate it's possible and also to demonstrate how we make it commercially work and have a return. Then we are active here across the value chain. So we are trying to work with other leading companies in the world to make our solutions faster a reality. You see the examples how we want to electrify our whole trucking. We are one of the biggest logistics company in the world with around 100,000 trucks on the road every day, and we want to electrify those trucks. You saw the examples how we electrify already the trucks also in the plant. And it's going to be a big part of our future. And this cannot be done alone. We need partners for this, and this is why we partner here with other leading companies. We are -- ESG rating some -- is very important to us. You all as investors know the difficulties with the ESG ratings. There is a handful on the market with a bit different angles also. Shows a bit I think that the sustainability and decarbonization is on the move. It's developing, it's progress in action, and there is no one golden bullet or there is not one framework I think this -- which fits for everyone. This is why we still have quite a fragmented view here. Nevertheless, Holcim, we believe it's important to engage with everyone and it's important to progress with everyone. So this is just the overview and you can expect from us that we will leading those ESG ratings here in the future going forward. We have then for our company, we have a strong road map for 2030 and for 2050. And we took for the new Strategy 2025, we took these targets and set here 8 clear sustainability targets for Holcim for the next 5 years to achieve. And this is our ECOPact, our green range for concrete. We want to already have 25% of our entire Ready-Mix sales in ECOPact product range. That's a goal we want to execute. Circular economy, we are already one of the biggest waste recycler in the world. I think we did around 45 million tons in 2021. And now we have the ambitious target to go to 75 million tons. We want to reuse back in our products but also as alternative fuels and also as alternative raw materials. This is very exciting, a big part of our future. This is why we also have construction demolition waste as an extra target. We believe already in the next 5 years, we can use 10 million tons of old buildings of demolition waste and recycle and put them back into our product. We have green CapEx. We have, at the moment, our estimate, it's about -- will be CHF 0.5 billion a year by the end of the strategy. Nevertheless, we will stay within our normal CapEx budget of maybe CHF 1.4 billion. We're going to have lesser complicated cement CapEx in the future, but everything will move here decarbonization. So there is quite a space for us to switch here the CapEx towards more green investment. We have then also for freshwater, withdrawal reduction targets, for diversity targets, then for our traditional CO2 reduction on the cement. We also have a reduction target. And lastly, financing. We moved already here a lot with green financing, and this will be even a bigger part and we want to have 40% of our financing already linked to sustainability criteria by the end of Strategy 2025. With this delivering superior performance, we have, of course, a detailed road maps for our 4 business segments: Cement, Aggregates, Concrete, Solutions & Products. I talked already about Solutions & Products. Let me talk a bit about Cement. We are very excited about the future in Cement. We're very excited here to lead the green transformation of Cement, to decarbonize. We believe we have very strong market positions, very efficient factories. And now we want to decarbonize here the footprint and lead here the green transformation for Cement. And we will talk more about this in the breakout session, how this will work here in real life. On the Aggregates side, we have improved a lot. I think the EBITDA margin, they came from somewhere around 19% to already 22%. With the old strategy, we still have some gap to best demonstrate practice. So we look forward here to continue. We believe our quarries, we have over 600 quarries in Aggregates globally and there's a huge potential here for better pricing, efficiencies and to increase here the returns. The same for Concrete. You see a bit in our sustainability strategy, the shift. Concrete will be more important in the future to decarbonize buildings, to make buildings more efficient. Is it with our ECOPact concrete, is it with 3D printing, we need better concrete in the future. And this is why we want to be the green concrete company and do everything here to have the best green offerings for our customers. We have Solutions & Products we talked already about. So I will continue here to the targets of our Strategy 2025. We have set, I think, ambitious but very executable targets. First of all, to go to 30% of group net sales with Solutions & Products. We are here very excited about the first success in roofing. That makes us very confident that we should do more of the same. And not only double roofing, but also enter into new technology and growth platforms. Next to it for me is sustainability. We want to accelerate the leadership. We are very excited about the first success in sustainability. When you look at our new green products, when you look at our circular construction model we are implementing in our markets, that gives us a great confidence that this is the right way forward and that we have the local footprint and the local strength to make this a reality in all our key markets. With these 2 big drivers, we want to continue the profitable growth model. So we see a net sales growth of 3% to 5% every year. And on top of that, we want to grow operating profit over proportional. And here, of course, we will have questions later in the Q&A, is 3% to 5% the right target or not. I think it's a solid target and shows that we will grow the business. With the current pricing and you remember in the Q3 results, we shared our price increase of 5% for 2021 alone. And for next year, we target a similar strong price increase that the growth numbers look a bit moderate. But for me, it's important that the company is focusing on the growth. And then depending on the pricing and so on, we will maybe see a higher growth rates or maybe these are the most realistic ones. Importantly also, we grow operating profit beyond the volumes. With all this, we come to the end, to the returns. On the cash conversion, we are also confident we had a CHF 3 billion cash flow already in 2019. Then we had a record of CHF 3.2 billion free cash flow last year. And also this year, we expect a cash conversion of clearly above 40%. That gives us the confidence that we believe we have a great cash flow conversion model also going forward. So we increased here the target to 45%. The same is for return on investment -- invested capital. We increased here to 10%, double digit. This is quite important to us because it comes back to the financial discipline we have now at Holcim. 10% ROIC is a minimum requirement for all your internal investments. Actually, it's not even very high for internal investments. It can be a high number for acquisitions depending on, of course, the price you pay. But overall, for us, it's important that we want to be double-digit return on invested capital, and we have proven the improvements in the last years, and we are confident that this is a good number to be achieved with the new strategy. On the debt side, we want to be below 1.5x of net debt-to-EBITDA. Also important for us that we have the right firing power, that we are solid enough here on the balance sheet to have enough room for attractive acquisitions, of course, and also for attractive shareholder returns. I think with this is what I wanted to share with you as an overview on the strategy. I'm very excited to launch it today with you here at the Capital Market Day. We were looking forward to this to announce we achieved the old strategy early and then set now the new one and also the new targets. I think with this now, we go to the breakout sessions. And we meet later then to have comments and questions from your side. Thank you very much. [Presentation]