Meyer Burger Technology AG (MBTN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Meyer Burger Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to the management of Meyer Burger. Please go ahead.

Yes. Thank you very much, and welcome, everybody, to this webcast. We are -- we would like to discuss the strategic decision the Board of Directors of Meyer Burger has taken. And here with me from management team are Gunter Erfurt, our CEO; and Manfred Häner, our CFO. So the decision Meyer Burger has taken the change is that we will change our strategy from being an equipment supplier to enter into the manufacturing of solar cells and modules. The background and the reason for that is that for the last 20 years, we basically have been key for transferring technology, PV technology into the industrial production. Meyer Burger has been a key for many transitions in this direction. However, we never really got our fair share to the profit pool, and this change is basically the reason for our decision here. The activity of the solar cells -- manufacturing solar cells and solar modules will be done in-house. So we will take it into our hands. We will stop selling the equipment to the industry but enter into a captive business model where we get the full benefit of our -- the value chain for this technology. And there are 3 -- on the next slide, you see the 3 basically cornerstones for that decision. There are -- there is a growing global solar market. Especially in this segment, we are focusing on the high-margin residential and commercial rooftop segment. There is a growth expected for that segment, 8%. So that gives us a growth opportunity in this market. We do have a superior and proprietary technology with our heterojunction SmartWire and this technology has a significant advantage compared to all other technologies in the market right now. And with those -- this technology, if we just use it in-house and not selling to the industry anymore, we have access to the full profit pool. And with that, we will be able to sustain profit levels, higher profit levels and increase the value for our investors. On that slide, you can see the history, 20 years of industrialization of technology. We have been key for many transitions, almost all manufacturer, leading solar module manufacturers do have our equipment, are using our equipment. There are about 350 tools -- production tools sold and installed in the industry. And today, we have more than 50% of the total -- global PERC production capability has been delivered by us. And it's not only the PERC equipment, the PERC technology. It has started already in the early -- in the late '90s, '99. We introduced wire saw for the industry. It went on the SmartWire technology development in 2013. In the PERC, in general industrialization, which is still the standard today, the industry is using and benefiting from technology Meyer Burger has developed and introduced to the market. And again, now we are at the change to a new technology trend heterojunction SmartWire. And with this change, we will not go ahead and again, distribute the technology to the industry. We will take the full benefit of that technology and industrialization on this technology. And to go into more details, I would like to hand over to Gunter Erfurt, who will lead us through the whole presentation and give us more insight in the decisions.

Good afternoon, everyone. It's my great pleasure to explain the details around our strategic decision to evolve into a new Meyer Burger and becoming a leading solar cell and module manufacturer. So why is the time right to do this change from a technology perspective? As it was already mentioned, Meyer Burger has led the last technology cycle in the solar industry, which is a solar cell technology called PERC. This is the workhorse of the global industry. The technology was initially developed and industrialized by Meyer Burger and sold into almost all leading solar cell manufacturing sites globally. And this technology now after being deployed for around 8 years is now reaching the end of its technology life cycle. And in Photovoltaics, there are 2 ways to reduce the cost of manufacturing: solar modules, on the one hand; of course, the supply chain optimization, which goes with scale. This is already scaled out, if you will, with 100-plus gigawatt mass manufacturing. There is, of course, always some room for improvement, but the scaling is -- has evolved into such a high level already that further reduction is minimal. And so the big level the industry has is performance increase. And because the metric in PV, the most important KPI for any manufacturing is, dollar per watt peak. So if you have, for instance, a sheet of glass that you put into your module then it matters a lot if your solar cells have a high efficiency or a low efficiency. And if you cannot increase the efficiency then you cannot reduce the dollar per watt peak because it goes with higher efficiency. And so that's where we are coming in now because with this end of the technology life cycle, we have a situation where Meyer Burger has developed its own proprietary and patented technology, heterojunction SmartWire, to a level where we are today already and confirmed by the renowned Fraunhofer Institute from Germany, an advantage of 2 year compared to the standard module technology and other heterojunction technologies. And with this advantage, we start now a technology cycle that's pretty healthy, unlike the PERC cycle that came to an end or is coming to an end as we speak. And so we have further room for improvement to achieve even higher module performance, and as I explained, accordingly, lower manufacturing step costs. Other technologies that we sometimes read about in the industry, which is a technology called TOPCon is working in the lab, but not in the fab. It is not ready for mass production and the introduction is facing severe problems in the integration and cost problems in other simpler terms, the effort needed to implement this TOPCon technology is not generating the payback that would be needed in order to confirm the invest. So why is Meyer Burger in a situation that we can tackle the challenges of going into own solar cells and solar module manufacturing, it's in our DNA and it has been now for 20 years that Meyer Burger delivered with its product, the KPIs that are the same for the production manager in -- at the producer. So we deliver throughput. We deliver a yield. We deliver performance of the sales and the modules that has been now for years in our contracts for our tools, that's exactly what we are measured against. And this is why we are -- we can deliver a very professional performance here in building up our own manufacturing. That's what we did since almost 2 decades now and have been proving to be able to do this also with this brand-new technology in a customer project of 600-megawatt size that is now running this equipment 24 hours and producing a very successful product. So it's very compelling to enter into solar cell and module manufacturing because an equipment that contains such a high technology value that in the past, we handed out or passed on to our customers to let them capture the value in producing cells and modules while Meyer Burger sells the equipment once and achieves the respective result at the EBITDA level. For instance, if you use this equipment containing such a high-technology value, you can, of course, generate a value within the period of use, which is a regular 7 years in the PV industry, and there is an enormous multiple in between the old business model and the new business model, plus the effect that was already explained if we take the technology captive and don't allow the market to access it, then it's not only captured with us. On the other hand, if the technology step-change or Meyer Burger is doing such a disruptive change, the industry is without the technology provider. And so we can even increase the gap between us and other solar cell module manufacturers. A captive model means exactly that in contradiction to the previous model, the old model, we are not selling our value technology to producers. We do this in-house ourselves with modules and cells, no equipment, any further sold -- anymore sold to third parties. With the exception of what we call standard PV equipment. So if customers -- existing customers would ask us to supply PERC equipment and other tools which go into the standard space, we will continue to do so. And the same is true also for our global service that will continue without change. A ramp or to grow into cell and module manufacturer, we are already today envisioning a clear expansion goals, believing in our product, believing in the strong market, but we will, on the other hand, also start with a small volume of 400 megawatt only, but we'll grow as quick as possible into a gigawatt scale and anticipate to have reached 5 gigawatt by the year 2026. And even though the business case is not based upon this, but it's a great support also that is being provided by the momentum that is currently coming alive due to all the discussions around the European Union Green Deal and initiatives in Switzerland and Germany, everywhere, it's the talk of the town, how the industry and the energy business can transform from today's fossil-fired energy into a sustainable green energy. And that will, to a large extent, be based on solar, and we believe we can capture the value and tackle the market accordingly by becoming a European champion, that is, of course, also the only big player outside of Asia. And using Swiss technology in a product that's made in Germany is another quality promise we can provide to our customers. So a product like ours, that is a game-changer in the performance. In terms of the energy, the solar energy harvested from the same area is a product that the customer is also willing to pay a price for because the performance, also for the customer, is going to be better. And I'm explaining this here with an example taken from the utility segment, so the big scale installations of 100 megawatt and plus, in that specific example, we talk about an installation in the United States. And we would assume, according to market research, an average sales price for modules of around $0.30, $0.31 per watt peak. And a product like what we ambition to build with our leading technology is generating way more energy on the same -- from the same area of in-store modules. And with this higher energy yield, in order to achieve the same energy -- solar energy costs, the exact term is levelized cost of electricity, so dollars per kilowatt hour, our module can be priced $0.10 higher than a standard Asian mass product because the energy yield is higher and the levelized cost of electricity is the same. If we -- from this value pool that's generated by our leading technology, if we then assume we give about 20% to 25% of it to our customer, then we have a win-win situation where Meyer Burger is achieving a good margin through these premium prices, while we provide the customer with a lower levelized cost of electricity. So it's impossible -- it's possible to sell a module for a higher price and at the same time, provide the customer also with a great value and lower cost of electricity -- levelized cost of electricity, and this is a benefit to customer's value. In the premium, high-price, rooftop segment, so these will be smaller systems that go on a family home. Assuming a home and the respective solar system that would power a household for people, then we would assume it's an 8-kilowatt peak system that is being installed on the rooftop. A customer building a home for, let's say, $0.5 million is putting a rooftop system on that roof for fairly small amount compared to the overall investment, and this installation is going to power this house, this home for the duration of 30 years. That's currently the standard lifetime of a solar installation. And if you then look into it, the logic is the same as for the utility, there is a technological, a lever, a value that comes from higher energy density from our module and the higher energy yields. And for a home, for residential rooftop, the size of the roof is always limited. Small homes and then you can put more energy on the -- in the same area of space. And another effect, I already spoke about, customers are willing, that can be researched in the market, and it's -- this is reality. Customers are willing to pay for quality, for Made in Germany, for Swiss technology, that's like with any other product, this has been valued. And if you have a choice -- today, you don't have a choice. Now only -- or the majority, the bulk of the product is coming from China. And so we believe positioning ourselves into a growing market with such a leading technology, plus the fact that we built Swiss technology into a module that's made in Germany, we are strongly convinced that what we see in the market today is also effectful for us, and then we can achieve a higher price also from these criteria. The position of our product is, in some way, unique because Meyer Burger has made the mission impossible possible to develop and industrialize a technology that achieves the highest efficiencies in the market and the highest energy yields. I explained this technology value-pool already, but this being produced at very, very competitive costs. When we speak about very competitive costs, then we are strongly convinced and know from the proof-of-concept that we have achieved end of 2019 that we can achieve a cost level that's very similar to today's PERC technology. To explain this a little bit, heterojunction technology is -- it took us 12 years to develop it to the level, but the technology and the production process is a very lean process. So it requires less process steps than today's PERC technology. So you need less people and so on and so forth. So that makes the technology so much competitive in terms of the manufacturing step costs, but with this price level, this high performance, we can place it in the premium market. So our competitors would not necessarily be the Chinese or the Asian players that you see here, LONGi, JA, Q CELLS, Jinko, Canadian as a few examples. By the way, all of them are -- have received the PERC technology tools from Meyer Burger. We enabled it. We enabled their growth in the past years. But the competitors are, for us, in future, companies like LG, SunPower and Panasonic, as those are the ones playing in the high-performance markets. The interesting element here is, unlike SunPower and LG, and because of their comparably higher manufacturing costs, they can place the product only in the rooftop segment. Given the fact that we have achieved the low manufacturing step costs, we can also open other market segments for us, and that's why we are -- we strongly believe our product also works very well in the utility scale. Utility scale is super important for the growth -- for the further growth because the utility is big installation segment in solar, is making up 50% of the overall market. And how does it look like in terms of the margins? I already spoke about it. We have made the mission impossible possible to generate a technology or develop a technology and industrialize it that can be produced at very competitive costs. You see that here, you need to compare our technology or our cost to, I think, the Asian PERC competitor. So just to put it in perspective, almost at the same level, but due to the module -- very high module efficiency, we can achieve these very attractive ASPs, and so high margins. Whereas, the other high-efficiency competitors, as I just explained, are suffering from very high manufacturing costs and so they are -- they can only be successful in high-price segments such as rooftop. And so we are selling at pretty much the manufacturing costs of the high-performance competitors and this is a very unique position, which enables us to play in these different segments, but to also achieve remarkable market share in the high-efficiency segments. The markets we are looking into are the ones that -- where the market size is fairly decent and provides the growth in the future and where the price premium schemes that I just explained are accepted by the customers. And that can be seen for years now in Europe, the U.S. and also very attractive markets are Australia and Japan, both -- even though, one might not think, when we see Australia, it's a big country, but for regulation reasons, in Australia, also rooftop of installation size of -- for solar system is limited due to a regulatory system. And so it matters if you can provide a technology that achieves or that harvests more solar energy from the same area. And of course, for Japan, it's -- everybody knows, it's a small country, highly or very densely populated. And so it matters a lot to -- if you have a solar system that is achieving higher efficiency than others if you have limited area of space on your rooftop. So if we are breaking out the market regions that I just mentioned with EU, U.S., Australia, Japan, then the breakout here is shown with 45 gigawatts expected in 2021 and then we see a very decent growth in the years to come. And I already mentioned that we initially are going to start in 2021 with 400 megawatts. So this is less than 1% of the overall market that we are targeting. Having such a great product, in our opinion, the risk involved in placing it is very, very low because we have, of course, in the process of the preparation of today's announcement and the announced strategy change, we have, of course, gotten in touch with potential customers beforehand and we have already today received letters of intent from potential customers in the U.S. and in Europe of a total of 2-gigawatt cells and modules production per year. I just said, 400 is the plan. 2 gigawatt, we have letters of intent. These are nonbinding. So they need to be ironed out, but we have discussed intensively the LCOE scheme, the high-performance scheme with those customers, and they all confirmed that this is justifying a higher premium. And so we are very happy that we are already at this stage and more of these levels of intent are coming as we speak. Speaking about the introduction, of course, timing is of essence. We need to be fast, and we want to be fast. And what we are envisioning is to revitalize existing former cell and module production infrastructure and logistics infrastructure, which is available for immediate use in Germany. As you may know, Germany did have a remarkable production size in solar with only a few companies that have survived and the locations available of very high quality and ideally suited to take capacity of up to 5 gigawatts, that's the mid-term, long-term growth pattern that we are envisioning and that can all be -- all go into existing infrastructure, which is available. And what's also very important for a fast track access and fast track go-to-market is, at the end of the day, people make the difference. And we have a very, very strong team in Meyer Burger that I'm very proud of that has delivered this great technology. But if we go now into cell and module manufacturing, you need partly other skill sets. So we need to hire people, that's required. And so we know that these skill sets that are needed that they are available because people that -- thousands of people that had worked in Germany's PV industry, they are still alive, of course. And there is -- even with the few announcement Meyer Burger had made in the past months, when we announced that we are evaluating this option, has already led to many inquiries with our HR people and the question when do you start, I want to join. So there is a lot of enthusiasm and we believe that the people side has to be resolved. That's very important for a quick ramp, and we believe, going to this historical solar manufacturing hubs makes a lot of sense also from that perspective. So that being said, the existing infrastructure and the availability of skilled people will enable us to start production and sales of the first volumes coming from this 400-megawatt installation initially already in second quarter in 2021. And last but not least, but very important for us, and of course, also for investors is that we can save a lot of CapEx by using existing infrastructure. This comes on top of the facts that I already mentioned. A few words about the technology position, which is one of the insurances of this new business strategy, as we already pointed out, the industry would not be -- would not exist at the same level as we see it today globally without Meyer Burger. We've been the technology provider. We've always been ahead of others. So now we have the confirmation of Fraunhofer to be 3 years ahead of others. And this chart shows you, the gray area, where the mainstream technology today is positioned in terms of module efficiency and where Meyer Burger is. So the blue part that's named Phase 1 here is the technology that went into the business plan that's the current technology, which, as I explained, there is still a lot of headroom to be improved. So we are -- we will be able to achieve mass manufacturing efficiencies between 21% and 22%, which is about 1.5% higher than what the bulk of the global industry is able to deliver. And we, of course, we are not standing still, never standing still in technology development. Our team has, just 2 weeks ago, gotten the confirmation of new solar cell record of 25.4%. This is outstanding, delivered from an industry player, usually, such cells are even hardly achieved by research institutes, and Meyer Burger has it done already. And that's the technology that you see here in Phase 2, which we call IBC. And this IBC technology has even more headroom and we are on a good way here to make the technology also ready for mass manufacturing and we can implement it as soon as we need it. And the last but not least, but strategically also very important and supporting, of course, the strategic move is our stake that we took in Oxford PV a year ago in March 2019. Meyer Burger being the largest shareholder with some 19% stake in Oxford. And of course, we are not only a shareholder, we are the technology partner of choice. And now together with the Oxford team, we are taking their brilliant technology position and Meyer Burger is translating it into the mass manufacturing-ready equipment. And so this will be open to skies to achieve efficiency levels of near 30% in the long run. And so summarizing what I just explained, we can position ourselves in the market segments, which allow the price premiums. We can, of course, also control the volumes, and in order to keep the prices at the highest levels and generate with it sustainable margins. And not only is this possible in the first place, but due to the captive model that our technology leadership is not shared anymore with anyone, which would dilute the value, it will be a sustainable case. We have the upside potential that I just explained on the previous slide with our -- all our technology developments that are ongoing. It's a proven technology. As I said, we have an existing site and the capability -- existing sites that we can use and the capabilities that enable a fast track go-to-market. And it's a long-term secured investment due to our position with Oxford PV. And with this, I would like to hand over to our CFO, to Manfred Häner, to guide you through the transaction structure.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Manfred. With the announcement -- with the announced transaction size of CHF 165 million, we will secure the full equity financing of our business plan, ensuring a successful transformation. We are derisking the execution by hiring -- by bringing in substantial investment and backstop commitments upfront. We have not only the support of our main shareholders, but we were able to bring in a well-known Swiss fund manager into the transaction upfront. At the same time, we want to ensure that everybody can participate in the offering. Therefore, existing shareholders will be given the right to subscribe to the shares at the discount to current share price. The exact discount will be determined the day before the EGM. With the 2 structures outlined on this slide, we give shareholders the choice between 2 options. Subject to market conditions, they can opt at the EGM either for option 1, a pipe, driver in equity of up to CHF 55 million tranche, combined with the discounted rights offering. Our structure 2, a straightforward discounted rights offering with a CHF 50 million backstop from Sentis Capital, our largest shareholder. The pipe tranche is still open for additional commitments from investors. In structure one, each franc invested in the pipe will also have to be matched with CHF 1 backstop commitment in the discounted rights issue tranche. As a result, 2/3 of the capital raise could be committed upfront. If we are successful until July 6 in filling the full pipe amount of CHF 55 million combined with backstop commitments of an additional CHF 55 million. We also give here a short outlook to our business plan. As mentioned by Gunter, we will now start with 400 megawatts. However, our aim is to grow as fast as possible to 1 gigawatt of cell and 1 gigawatt of -- 0.8 gigawatts of module. However, to realize this, we will need about an additional CHF 100 million of debt. We are pretty sure that once we have started, meaning within '21 and '22, we will be capable to raise this debt. If that's possible, we see a turnover somewhere between CHF 400 million and CHF 450 million with EBITDA margin of about 25% to 30% within the 3 years. Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much, Manfred and Gunter, for the explanation. Before we come to the Q&A session, I would like to highlight again the 6 main points of our new strategy, the highlights of the new Meyer Burger. First, we do have a superior technology. The heterojunction SmartWire technology has advantages compared to the standard processes used in the industry today as well as other heterojunction technologies, which are available in the market. So we have a higher efficiency and higher energy yield and therefore, are most attractive to the market. With the captive business model, we will have a much better access to the full profit pool to the value of that technology and our leaderships. And also, we will be able to protect our know-how and not distribute in the know-how and the technology into the market. So the captive business model gives us access to profit and security. With the premium products, which are producible, it's relatively low manufacturing costs, we will have a unique positioning in the PV industry, again, targeting high-value market segment, premium product market segment, which, of course, also allows us to sustain profitability of our company, to the benefit of the company and the investors. The proof-of-concept, which has been achieved already in the market by one of our customers, is -- gives us securities that we will be able to transfer this, to go into this direction and become a seller module manufacturer. We will have ramp-up capability by using the existing infrastructure already in the market, as Gunter explained, first of all, time to manufacturing is much shorter. We will save on the investment and we'll benefit from skilled employees, skilled people around which we will need. And the last point here, the timing of that whole transfer -- transition into a new company is right. The whole discussion about environmental, warming -- global warming, Green Deal of the European organization, European Commission, the climate targets, which are given out, all that supports, of course, very much our new attempt here to revitalize the solar industry in Europe and take the full advantage of that. So with these last words, I would like to hand back to operator. There is one more message. You have the ability to submit questions in writing, and we will answer these questions in writing afterwards. And now we will go to the Q&A session. And I'm handing back to the operator.