Qatar National Cement Company (Q.P.S.C.) (QNCD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to QNB Financial Services Qatar National Cement Company Conference Call. Please note that this call is being recorded. I'd now like to hand over to our moderator for today, Roy Thomas. Roy, please go ahead.

Hello, everyone. This is Roy Thomas from QNB Financial Services. I want to welcome everyone to Qatar National Cement Company's First Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. On this call from Qatar National Cement Company, we have engineer Essa Mohammed Ali Kaldari, the Chief Executive Officer; Viswanathan Hariharan, the Finance and Administration Manager; and Saqib Parvez, the Head of Finance and IR Officer. We will conduct this conference call with management first to view on the company's results, followed by Q&A. I will turn the the call now over to Engineer Essa Mohammed Ali Kaldari. Go ahead, Essa.

[Foreign Language] Good afternoon, and a warm welcome to everybody. Thank you for taking this time to join us for our first quarter 2024 conference call. This day, we will cover the following topics, financial performance, achievements, future plans and question and answers. Let's start with the financial performance for the first quarter 2024. The revenue has declined marginally from quarter 2023 by 24% and 17% from the first quarter compared to the first quarter 2023. Despite the external challenges, we have posted a profit of QAR 51 million compared to QAR 53 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 and QAR 64 million in the first quarter 2023 which is a decrease of 4% and 20%, respectively. This decrease is mainly attributed to the pricing in the first quarter of 2024. Shareholder equity as of March 31, 2024, noticed QAR 2.9 billion compared to QAR 3.09 billion in the previous year which reflects a robustness of our financial strength. Our achievements, we have -- despite the external challenges, we have not lost our focus and we are right on track to achieve our goals for 2024. We optimized our production costs, especially in the consumption of gas, electricity, commodity and other costs. We already got our approval on the demand of our land in municipality and the industrial areas. Some of our future plans for 2024, we will be initiating the tendering process for construction of the warehouse and the corporate lease from the ministry of municipality in the industrial area. We will continue to reengineer our production process to further optimize our operation cost. The company will continue putting efforts to introduce alternative fuel which will help in reducing CO2 emission, explore -- continue exploring alternative sources of revenue to increase the shareholder win and 0 accident at workplace. And thank you, and we are open for any question and answer.

[Operator Instruction] Our first question comes from [indiscernible] from [ Orion Investment ]

I've just got one question. Could you tell us -- could you talk a little bit about the pricing environment for the cement segment as we understand last -- at the end of last year, there was some discounts, which continued -- could you -- in this year also a little bit, could you talk about how that is panning out?

During the last quarter of 2023, the pricing dropped to QAR 170 -- but from -- since the beginning of this year, from the 1st of January, the price were revised to QAR 220 and until the end of the first quarter, beginning of April the price went back to the original price, QAR 250.

The caller from [ Ashburn ] your line is now open.

Just on the pricing in terms of outlook. What led to the removal of the sort of promotions that started last year? Is it purely a seasonal thing? Or have you sort of seen a better backlog or order book now that makes you confident to, as an industry, raise those prices? And then my second question is just to try and understand, on your working capital side, I think you had built up a bit of inventory. Just trying to understand the outlook from working capital and how you're seeing that playing out for the rest of the year.