Serena Energia S.A. (SRNA3) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and thank you for attending the earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2025. My name is Raul Cavendish. I am the IR Officer of the company. And we'll go through the results of 2025, and then we'll have a Q&A session with our CEO, Antonio. Now speaking about the first quarter of '25, our production has reached 1,899 gigawatts hour, which is a drop of 2.5% year-on-year, mostly due to high nonrecurring curtailment events. If otherwise, we would have a growth of 9% year-on-year in production. This most important event was the drop, a collapse of the transmission lines that go from Belo Monte plant to the Southeast markets, which affected all renewable energy plants. So this event by itself affected our production by approximately 10% with an electric power curtailment when we were partially compensated by the rules provided for the regulation. In addition to that, there were 2 other reliability events during the quarter that also affected our production. One of them was the division of a transmission line so that a renewable asset could be operational and another event of a division of transmission line that a transmission line that will become operation that improves the flow between the south of Bahia and the Southeast during 2025. That will help us. The EBITDA in the quarter reached BRL 310 million, which is a 10% drop year-on-year. Naturally, curtailment events have impacted results at around BRL 30 million, net of the provision for refund of BRL 10 million. If it wasn't for that curtailment event, we would have been close to BRL 340 million in an EBITDA. Our leverage, there was a very small increase quarter-on-quarter, but also pressured by a quarter that has a seasonally lower cash generation and some stronger cash working capital events compared to last year. Looking at the rest of the year, there were 2 major advances in the U.S., the signing of a PPA as-gen in which we were able to substantially decrease our risk in the U.S. We captured a very high price environment, and we locked prices of energy at high levels. We also signed a PPA in the long-term and a shared infrastructure agreement with one of the most important players for the development of AI data center structure in the U.S. This agreement will be finalized within 90 days as soon as some conditions precedent are fulfilled. And we'll start a stronger wind season next quarter, and we see a normalization of curtailment from now on. And we see a good dynamic both in Brazil and U.S. in terms of prices. So we believe the second half of the year will have -- the second quarter will be more favorable. And on Wednesday, this week, we received the communication that Actis and Antonio with [indiscernible], along with GIC Infrastructure proposed a take-private transaction. We'll go into further details about that in our Q&A session. Now going through the dynamics that affected production, we break down the -- what used to be the P50 in the long run and how that was translated into actual and economic production. We see an incidence of resources 6% lower than the long-term P50, impacting our production by 641 gigawatts hour -- 141 gigawatt hour and the curtailment that affected us a 306 gigawatt hour before refund and also reliability of performance and 69 gigawatt hour of impact. So when we look at effective production, it is lower than the P50 in the long run. After the reimbursements and OEM agreements and the refund from curtailment according to ANEEL that we had the credit provisions made this year, our economic production would have been equivalent to 15% lower than our P50 in the long run. It is also worth highlighting that the drop in the production line in the transmission line from Belo Monte prevented us from capturing the benefit of higher winds. So the -- we have the chart, the effective production of Assurua and what would have been the production if it wasn't for the nonavailability of the production transmission lines from Belo Monte. So we would be working with an incidence of resource of 3.7% above P50, which is equivalent approximately to a P30 in the period. Moving on to this next slide, we have the operational KPIs. Energy production, we see a drop of 3% year-on-year. The Energy gross profit has a similar drop and the unit gross profit per megawatt hour was pretty much in line year-on-year with a drop of 1%. EBITDA grew by 16% year-on-year and cash earnings were close to 0 in this quarter, mainly due to the seasonality of the business, along with the operational effects of the quarter, as we mentioned. And the recurring cash flow for the quarter also had a significant drop as to regarding needs of working capital and CapEx. Moving on to the next slide, we try to break down the evolution of EBITDA year-on-year. And here, it's important to mention some points. First, there was some growth in gross profit from energy ex PTC, but the gross profit was lower than the growth of expenses, both for existing assets and new assets. And there was a significant impact of BRL 30 million approximately in PTC lower when compared to the first quarter of '24. And that was expected because in 2024, there was a special allocation rule in which we captured 58% of the PTCs we produce. And as of 2025, we only do with 1%. And if it wasn't for the curtailment events, we would have a gross profit of BRL 340 million. In the main slide, we give you an update of the U.S. market. So the first quarter of '25, our captured price at Goodnight 1 was approximately $10, which is virtually twice the amount captured in '24 and twice would have been in Goodnight '23 if it was operational. And this is due to a colder winter or demand for heating increase and naturally gas prices, which is a very important commodity in pricing in the U.S. that is translated into energy prices in Texas allowed us to capture better prices. Our outlook for prices in Texas for the rest of the year remains positive. But as we already said, our strategy was that once we found a long-term solution for Goodnight 1, it would make sense to look for structures in which we could reduce the volatility of gross profit from energy in the U.S. in the merchant strategy, and we were able to sign a PPA in the as-gen modality with no risk of volume in order to substantially reduce our gross profit of energy for Goodnight for the years of '25, '26, while the long-term agreement for the data center provider is not effective. The prices, both for PPA as-gen as well as long-term PPA with the data centers are pretty much very in line what we look at the curves, and they reflect a very healthy price environment in the U.S. for renewable energies. And we expect this -- we hope and expect that these dynamics continue, and our assets are very well positioned to become energy providers for future data centers that will be around the cluster where the plants are located. And with that, we finish the earnings presentation, and now we'll move on to the Q&A session, and our founder, Antonio will answer the questions. Thank you for attending.