RHI Magnesita N.V. (RHIM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you very much, and good morning from Vienna. Here in Vienna, I'm joined by Ian Botha, of course, like usual, and Chris in the IR team. Three key messages for the first quarter. First message, low demand across the globe continues, lower than 2023 even. There is no change to the outlook that we gave recently. We have to remain cautious or actually very cautious. There's no evidence of a recovery in customer demand in our order books anywhere. We are managing the business accordingly. We're on track to deliver our financial guidance with an [ EBITA ] of around 11% or at least EUR 410 million. But really, the demand in the first quarter was bad. Second message. The major development -- the major steps that we could take in the first quarter was the signing of the contract with Balmoral to acquire Resco for up to $430 million in the U.S. We announced this on the 29th of March. We are very excited about this opportunity. Really excited about this opportunity because it will bring a lot of value and fulfill long [ voice ] customer needs. Third message. We are pleased to announce that we signed the first significant large projects to build a green steel production facility, together with SMS Group, who is building this facility, and [ Thyssenkrupp ], who is going to be the operator and of course, also the company who will manage the plant later on. Let me give you a little bit more details on all of them. Let me start with the first one, and maybe the best way is to position it around or to give you a view on what will be our outlook this year. The numbers for 2024, the outlook for the 2024 numbers is unchanged. India remains the bright spot, but demand from customers in the U.S., in Europe, in South America, in China is still subdued. It's lower than in the first quarter even of last year, where already the demand was very low. There's also an increasing export of steel from China into the rest of the world. More or less, this increased export -- these increased export volumes will compensate or even more than compensate for the small demand growth that can happen around the regions -- around the world. This will cause problem for some or many of our steel customers outside of China. We are seeing, like yourselves, also discussions around tariff protection. I think it's -- we need to see how this develops. But this certainly is a component that we can't lose out of sight. There's also out of the same [ base ] drive a surplus of refractory raw material supply from China to around the world. This, combined with the reduced demand, results in lower raw material prices, which keeps the contribution, the [ EBITA ] contribution at RHI Magnesita down at the 1% level for the time being. This is a historic low for us, and we can't see any short-term triggers that will increase this. We are continuing to manage our business through this weakness, carefully controlling our inventory levels. We have -- we are taking many, many small, not very spectacular measures, but quite effective to reduce cost and to contain costs while we operate our plants at historic low levels of utilization. Our cash conversion in the business remains robust. Net debt remains well managed. After maintenance CapEx and dividends, our operating cash flow can continue to be used for acquisitions. Second, [ lock ] of -- second message is around the Resco acquisition. On the acquisition, we hosted a call on the 2nd of April. There's no major update really since then. But to recap for all of those who might have missed this, this is an acquisition of a larger U.S. player, of one of the larger U.S. players with the 10 -- 9 or 10 production facilities in North America, of an enterprise value up to USD 430 million. This is a very important step forward for RHI Magnesita's U.S. business, which is already the most profitable region but needs to be strengthened. The deal closes a gap in our nonsteel Industrial business, where we have been very underrepresented in the U.S. in the past because Resco's products and their business activities are very complementary to RHI Magnesita's existing business, which is more steel oriented, whereas Resco's business has much bigger strength in the petrochemical-, aluminum- and iron-making sectors, where RHIM has been quite underrepresented before. The transaction, of course, is subject to merger authority approval. We are in this process right now. No red flags yet, very professional interaction with the U.S. authorities here. We assume clearance is obtained, we would be then able to complete this transaction in the second half of this year. The driver of this acquisition really or the trigger for this acquisition really have been our U.S.-based customers. And therefore, the logic of this acquisition is that we are going to be able to relocate a lot of production from around the world that RHI Magnesita has imported into the U.S. market, but also that Resco has imported into the U.S. market and produced in countries such as China. We will be able to relocate all of this to U.S. production plants because in the combination between RHIM and Resco plants in North America, we're going to be able to produce pretty much every single product that customers demand over time. So this is the big driver here. This was the trigger point. The initiative was this continuous request from customers since several years actually to domesticate as much production as possible, of course, to give supply chain insurance and to give independence for U.S. customers of the entire supply chain. We can, therefore, reduce imports into the U.S. that will, of course, help on the supply chain and will help to reduce working capital. This is a very nice benefit here, but the driver really is the domestication in order to support customer supply security. Third message, around green steel projects that we're doing for SMS and Thyssenkrupp’s Duisburg project. We've made an announcement a few days ago. We have been awarded a contract by SMS Group, which is a big globally leading engineering company, for the design and the supply of refractories in the linings for the open bath furnace to be installed at the Thyssenkrupp green steel project in Duisburg in Germany. This project is more than EUR 2 billion green steel project, which will eventually produce 2.3 million tonnes of green steel. The production is scheduled to start in 2027. Initially, it will use natural gas for the direct reduction of iron ore and subsequently using -- it will switch this natural gas as a fuel towards hydrogen as it becomes available in Germany. And then this will be a zero or almost zero carbon emission steel production plant. This is a real commitment to the total transformation of the steel industry towards green technology that SMS and Thyssenkrupp are making here. I think it's remarkable to see. And of course, it rewards everybody's support, but of course, ours as well. We are rarely talking about contracts that we do with customers. This is also not the biggest contract that we've done with a customer ever, of course, not by far. And we don't want to disclose too many details here because it's, of course, very confidential. But it's a material new project revenue for us. It's a validation of our strategy to position ourselves as the leading supplier of refractories for these open bath furnaces and other components for the entire green steel transformation. It's an extremely complex product -- project. It needs many, many, many different refractory products, which, after the acquisitions we've made, we can now all produce in our production facilities, but not in one plant, but in many plants, so it's highly complicated. It needs to be all delivered and installed at the same time so that we are never going to be a bottleneck for this project, of course. It has a very high design and engineering intensity. So our engineering organization is very focused on this. All of this is going to be needed for many future projects so that the large-scale adoption of green steel technologies can be implemented in order to transform the steel industry towards a [ car ] of an industry. The requirement for additional pieces of equipment that have never been in place in the steel industry. Between the direct reduction furnace and the blast furnace represents new refractory demand for green steel production. It's compared to the traditional blast furnace and BOF or [ EAF ] route at the end from a competitiveness perspective. This is in line also with the research that has been published by one of the larger iron ore miners that clearly explained that the purification of iron from the DRI facility after the reduction of the iron ore is best done at the steel plant rather than at the mine side through the use of such an additional smelter that is being developed here now for a large industrial [ produce ]. So the implication of this contract go much beyond of this individual contract. If this is the route or this is a similar route that is adopted by green steel production, then this project is supportive for refractory producers, with the products and expertise to support these facilities. It's a new level of complexity for refractory. So we needed a big step-up in RHI Magnesita, but, of course, also in our industry. It's very, very technical. It's very sophisticated, and the supply chain that needs to be put in place for here is extremely complex. We have a [ long ] year experience here not out of the steel industry, but out of our project businesses. Of course, we are proud to have won this piece of business in such a high-profile project with an outstanding OEM partner SMS and of course, with Thyssenkrupp as the end customer, which is a fantastic company. We have huge respect for both of those partners. And I think the team that's working together here is really world class and [ leading ]. This also positions us very strongly to win further business on green steel projects in the future with other customers and OEMs and, of course, in very big collaboration also with SMS. With that, I'm happy to open the call and take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] So we have a question from Harry Philips of Peel Hunt.

A question on green steel and apologies because the line just went dead for a moment. So Stefan, you might have already said some of this, so apologies if you have in advance. Just say, on the green steel, just thinking about the -- not so much this contract win, which looks particularly exciting, but the longer-term potential and the potential size that this opportunity might ultimately create. And then alongside that, the -- any additional investment process infrastructure you might need to facilitate it and a sort of idea of if this is a growth business, we should clearly look at to be as sort of -- hate the word timeline, but as sort of idea of the time scale that would be appropriate to view this in?

Okay. So okay, a very complicated question because we don't have many answers here. So the whole green steel sector now, if we measure it based on specific projects, are about 20 to 25 individual projects. From this, I would say 5 to 8 are specific enough that they are really in planning phase or at the beginning of a planning phase. So this is nothing that will -- and it's very much concentrated around Europe. It's not only Europe, but it's very much concentrated around this. There's a little bit something in the Middle East also, but mostly it's Europe. So we will not have a massive growth business here in the next 2 or 3 years because the technologies here are not one-to-one comparable. So it's a good first step. This one is the really first very big one that is now being actually realized, but most of the other ones are still in [ planning phase ]. What is the investment here for RHI Magnesita? With the acquisitions that we have made, one of the sectors we were eyeing of course, is to be prepared for this green steel transformation. And there were many capabilities -- there were some capabilities that we didn't have. We always talked about the necessity to complement our product portfolio. Well, thanks to some of these acquisitions, we now have, I would say, most or even all of the production capabilities in place in order to fulfill the requirements of these new green steel plants because the chemistry is different, the products are different. The complexity is much higher than what the previous owners of these companies could have handled. But with a big project organization that RHI Magnesita already had and part of the project organization that came to us through one of the acquisitions in Germany, P-D, we now are really very, very well covered and positioned. And therefore, the investment will go more in engineering staff and engineering capability and planning capability and supply chain robustness capability, maybe some finishing work that needs to be done because these are not just refractory pieces, but they're highly finished after the production work. So there's a lot of machining happening once the actual brick production or piece production is completed. And this is where the investment will go, but it's -- in terms of euros, it's not a massive amount. It's more of a capability improvement. Well, timing, if this gets -- if this -- it depends on our customers and their OEM partners, it depends a lot also on government subsidies because, of course, these are big, complex, very expensive projects. The steel industry is not an extremely high-margin industry. So in order to do a technology switch, shut down high CO2-emitting capacities and replace it with low CO2-emitting capacities of this technology, this will take an economic incentive as well. And actually, it was one of the [ decision-makers ] for Thyssenkrupp, I'm sure, that helped them to make that move forward that they got a good amount of support from the European and German governments.

And just to be clear, this is -- the opportunity is obviously the particular DRI open bath furnaces you talked about in the statement. When you look at the SSAB project confirmation a few weeks ago, is your offering into that or potential offering into that if you've got an offering at all into it, is it the same product? Or is that a broader opportunity for RHI products?

No, no. It's a broader opportunity for RHIM products, of course. Every project is a little bit different, but there is always a DRI component. There's this new vessel, which is called ESF, it's electric smelter furnace, which serves -- the problem with the DRI technology is that most iron ores are not clean enough to be producing iron ore out of the DRI that is good enough to make steel. So there needs to be a kind of a cleaning step in between in order to upgrade the iron that comes out. And that happens through this electric smelter furnace. And then you can have an electric arc furnace after this, you can have a BOF converter in order to reduce carbon and all the normal things. But it all has to be connected in a different way. And therefore, the refractory chemistry is different, the ingredients are different, the slack chemistry is different, the design of these furnaces is different, of course. And because these plants are -- we're not -- customers are not building one vessel, they're building many one after another because it's a whole integrated different process, the complexity of these projects is so high. And here, RHIM has a really great, great capability. Why? Because we have this very sophisticated project organization from an engineering and planning perspective, it's engineering and supply chain. And of course, we have a very large wide product portfolio, where we can really choose the best refractory material for each piece here.