Icelandic Salmon AS (ISLAX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to this quarter 2 presentation for Icelandic Salmon. We do this presentation in English for our Icelandic stakeholders and shareholders. With me today, I have our CFO, Jonas Birgisson, that will guide you through the financial update. And after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. And it's also possible to send questions into questions@arnalox.is from those who are watching our webcast. Icelandic Salmon is a company listed at the Euronext Growth in Oslo. The company is the sole owner of Arnarlax ehf, which have all the operational activities on Iceland. As Arnarlax sustainable Icelandic Salmon is our common brand for our operational activities and also for our product in the market. We have today 4 small facilities with a capacity of 7 million to 8 million smolts depending on what size we decided to produce. And we are farming on 7 sites, in the southern part of the Westfjords in Iceland, in Sea with a maximum allowed biomass of 23,700 tonnes, and all our production is ASC-certified. We have our harvesting plant in Bíldudalur in the Westfjords with a capacity of around 30,000 tonnes a year. And then we have our old sales team who sell all the fish out in the global and domestic market. Quarter 2, '22 -- '23 was a year where we -- a quarter where we focused on building biomass in sea. We had a harvest volume of 88 tonnes compared to 2,957 tonnes in quarter '22. And this is due to -- we were building the biomass up to get the market size on the fish. The low volume gave a negative EBIT of EUR 3.1 million and this is mainly related to fixed cost due to stop in harvesting. We expect a stable cost development for quarter 3 and continue to harvest on the autumn fish from the '21 generation, as we have been doing, and we expect to see a lower cost in quarter 4 when we start on the spring '22 generation, which has had an exceptional good biological development with good growth and low mortality. We started our smolt output in June. We see that we have increased the size of the smolts. Both average rate and maximum weight and the biggest groups we put into sea was over 700 grams, and so far, we see a very, very good survival rate of the smolts. Our license situation, as I said, we have 23,700 tonnes of maximum allowed biomass, then we have an application for 10,000 tonnes which we are waiting for expected to be issued quite soon. There is some uncertainty if it will be fertile or sterile salmon. But we are quite sure that we will get the license. We will get the sites, which, of course, is a very important assets going forward. We also have an application for 4,500 tonnes which we are not sure about when it will be decided if we get it or not. And then we have application for 2 new sites in Arnarfjörður which we expect to be issued later this year, and that will be a good tool to have a better maximum allowed biomass utilization on our licenses. Another thing that is going on, on Iceland now is that the Ministry of food, agriculture and fisheries, are evaluating and working on a new strategy for the aquaculture in Iceland. And the signals we have got there is that there will be room for growth in the industry built on sustainability measurements going forward. This is a process that takes time, but we expect a proposal from the ministry in September, and it's expected that there will be the political discussions during the winter and decisions made in [ Atigi ] next spring. We are now in a phase where we are finalizing our smolt strategy. We have come up to a level where we have sufficient smolt capacity for our existing licenses. And main items in this strategy has, of course, been to secure the capacity, tank capacity, access to water and so on and also optimizing the production and implementing best practice on the smolt facilities. And we start to see the effect of this for the smolt output in '23, and we expect to increase the number of smolts with approximately 30% and we increased the average weight of our smolt with 35%. And we also see that we have been improving the smolt quality where the survival rate after output in Sea is the main KPI, and that looks very promising so far this year. There are still some smaller biological challenges on the smolt production that we're working on, and there is room for improvement, and that is in work in progress. We will see the full effect of the investments done on the smolt facilities for the harvest volumes in '25 and '26. Then a short update on our strategical important CapEx investments. So we are now implementing 200-meter cages, bigger cages on one more site this year. We have very good experience from the output we did last year in 200-meter cages on our site Hringsdalur. And we see that those cases are very well adapted to our exposed sites in the Westfjords. The other thing we are investing in is barges with big sites in operation, we, of course, need to use a lot of feed and to improve the feed logistics. We invested in 900-ton barges. So we are able to keep up with the feeding in the cages, an important step for the infrastructure that we have. Those barges is also hybrid barges, which will reduce our consumption of fossil fuel significantly. So I will then give the word to Jonas Heidar Birgisson, our CFO. So, welcome Jonas.

Thank you, Bjorn. And good morning, everyone. I'm happy to stand here and briefly present an overview of Icelandic Salmon financial position at the end of the second quarter this year. We have also issued a consolidated financial statement for the first half of this year, and that can be found on our home page Arnarlax.is. Now during the past quarter, we continued to invest in our smart facilities as well as in our SeaWater equipment. And as Bjorn mentioned just briefly we welcome 2 new feed purchase into operation in the period. Total cash flow from investing activities were EUR 7.2 million within the quarter. And our fixed asset increased by EUR 5.5 million. We also built up our biological assets in a period and biological assets at the end of the quarter were EUR 81 million at fair value. And we had a minimal harvesting during the period. that led to a decrease in our trade receivables balance it turned out being a positive impact in our operational cash flow. Now our net interest bearing debt raised by EUR 2.1 billion in the quarter, and we reclassified our interest-bearing debt as a current liability as they mature within 12 months. And we remain compliant with all our covenants and our equity ratio stood strong at 68% at the end of June. Now regarding -- this is only a 6-month period, and at the end of last year, our interest bearing debt including our leasing liability stood at EUR 63 million and decreased by EUR 19 million during the period and entered in june at EUR 44 million. The first quarter showed a good operational performance, and we had a EUR 20 million EBITDA and a favorable working capital effect of EUR 17 million. But our accounts receivables balance at the end of last year were quite high. Yes, and investment activities accounted for a cash flow of EUR 16 million, in the first half of the year. Now in regards to our interest in debt, I'm pleased to announce that just this week, Arnarlax signed a commitment letter with DNB and Danske Bank, for sustainable linked refinancing of our current loan agreements. And the proposed agreement consists of our term loan facility, the revolving facility. And in addition, Arion Bank in Iceland will step in with our overdraft facility and as a security agent towards the agreement. The agreement is totaling of EUR 100 million, is expected to be finalized within the third quarter of this year. Now -- we are also very excited to share with you that we have entered into a advisory service with Arion Bank in Iceland. With the main objective to secure a listing for Icelandic Salmon on the First North market of the Icelandic stock exchange. Now we are working on concluding this process, and we aim to finalize that within the current year. We believe that this is a important strategic step for Icelandic Salmon as well as the industry back home in Iceland. Now I give the word back to Bjorn.

Thank you, Jonas. So at the end of the presentation, I just want to say some words about the outlook for Icelandic Salmon. What we see is a very good demand for our sustainable Icelandic Salmon and the product is very well received in the market, and we have very good feedback from our customers about the quality of our fish. We have -- this year had a very low contract share, and we expect the contract share out this year to be for the year in total to be approximately 10%. We also maintained the volume guidance for this year of approximately 16,000 tonnes. And we see significant potential for growth within the existing licenses. Now with that, we are coming to an end or small strategy, have the needed smolt available in the coming years and with the strategical investments in Sea for effective operation. We see it a good potential for growth within the licenses. And we have said before and that it's maintained that we also expect a significant volume growth in 2024. I will then open for some questions. from the audience or from the webcast, so feel free to ask.

We got a question from Ola Trovatn he mentioned you have secured funding of EUR 100 million to support growth ambitions. Any comments on [ uses ] ? The company seems very well capitalized.

We still have some CapEx projects for the coming years. And as we say, we expect a significant growth, which means that we need to do more in investments in seawater equipment. That means cages, barges, boats and so on. And we are also prepared to some extent, if we should get the potential for further growth within the new framework that comes from the Ministry industry.