SGL Carbon SE (SGL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SGL Carbon Conference Call on the Q1 Results 2023. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead.

Thank you. A very warm welcome to our conference call about SGL's business development and results in the first 3 months 2023. On behalf of SGL Carbon, our CEO, Torsten Derr and our CFO, Thomas Dippold, will present financials and our expectations for the upcoming months. Later, we will answer your questions after the presentation. Now I hand over to Dr. Torsten Derr.

Thank you very much, Claudia. Good afternoon to everyone. We are very proud to present solid financials in our first quarter. And we again made positive progress in almost all KPIs. Our group sales are up by 4.7%, and we realized EUR 283 million turnover in the first quarter. Our EBITDA pre, our most important financial KPI, grew by 9% to EUR 40 million. Thomas, our CFO, did great progress. Equity rate was again boosted to almost 40%. How are the businesses running? We have, again, increased demand in semiconductors, especially in the field of silicon carbide semiconductors, and this boosted our sales in our business unit GS, Graphite Solutions. Also the 2 small business units which we run, Process Technology and Composite Solutions, developed very well and other entry was very satisfactory. Our business unit, Carbon Fibers was burdened by the expiry of the BMW i3. We lost Carbon Fibers business by the discontinuation of this business. We moved into wind energy and saw a temporary dip. We will explain this later on in our presentation. We want to inform you that we increased our CapEx a little bit by 1/3 and all the additional CapEx is running into our business unit Graphite Solutions for the expansion of graphite components for the silicon carbide industry. For the outlook, we confirm the guidance we gave you last time. Our sales in 2023, we expect on prior year level. EBITDA will be in the range of EUR 160 million to EUR 180 million. With this brief summary, I would like to hand over to my colleague, Thomas Dippold.

Thank you, Torsten. Also a warm welcome from my side, from [indiscernible]. It's my pleasure and my honor to guide you through the figures for the first 3 months of the year 2023. On Slide #5, you can see the group top line and also our most important KIP, EBITDA pre, our development. As Torsten already mentioning in his brief introduction, almost EUR 284 million top line, which is almost 5% up compared to the first 3 months of last year. This is an increase of EUR 12.8 million. Three out of four business units contributed. The most -- the biggest one, Graphite Solutions, is plus EUR 21 million growth in their top line. Process Technology, also given the size of the business unit, a very remarkable EUR 6.6 million increase; and Composite Solutions, a net increase of EUR 4 million. Why net? I show you later on when we come to Composite Solutions. There were a couple of one-off effects that have to be taken into consideration. And yes, those 3 business units overcompensate the shortfall in our Carbon Fibers business. Again, we tell a little bit more about that when we come to the specific business units. The top line growth is maybe even more remarkable. As Torsten was already pointing out, we -- this is -- 2023 is the first year without any effect of the so-called take-or-pay contract with BMW on the i3 contract. Two years ago, we had a full year with this very profitable contract. Last year, we had 6 months and there was the first 6 months for comparison. And now in 2023, we don't have that anymore, and we have to compensate that in a certain way. Secondly, you've probably read our press statement that we gave out -- that we published during the first 3 months of the year, that we sold our business in Gardena. This is also something worthwhile mentioning and this is an effect that we don't have in the first 3 months of 2023 anymore, but it was there for the whole time last year. This is an effect we see in our business unit Composite Solutions. So those 2 effects were somehow overcompensated and still we have a decent growth of roughly 5% in our top line and we are very satisfied with that. And SGL is really on track. When we come to the bottom line, we even see a further increase of 9%. So again, we were able to increase our operative margin. And we like the development we see so far, especially as the first quarter tends to be a little bit a weaker one compared to the other 3 quarters. However, when you look to the right side, the sales split of SGL Carbon, Graphite Solutions stands for roughly 50% of the group sales. And therefore, it's only -- maybe as a consequence, to take this in an increasing focus of the group. This is also where we tell you a little bit more during this presentation. On Slide #6, you see the development of the aforementioned Graphite Solutions. The growth expectations that we gave you are really on track. Our top line grew by almost 18% from roughly EUR 120 million last year, to a little bit more than EUR 140 million this year, an increase of over EUR 20 million. And why that? Mainly was solely because of the strong rise in the semiconductor top line. Those businesses grew by more than 50%, yes, because we also neglected a little bit the solar business. We moved or shifted a lot of production from solar to semiconductors, where the margin is higher, and this is why our top line grew also price-wise. Automotive and industrial applications are also contributing and are on track. And despite the already double-digit or 20%, 20-plus percent margin, we still were able to increase our profitability in a higher percentage than our top line. Our EBITDA pre grew by almost 20% or EUR 5 million from EUR 25.9 million to EUR 30.9 million in the first quarter of 2023. This stands for a margin of almost 22%. And there's more to come because as Torsten pointed out, in the first 3 months of the year, we invested EUR 19 million. This is far higher than the same amount last year. At the same time of the year, the first 3 months of the year, last year, we invested EUR 7 million. So you see a big increase in our CapEx figures. And this is thanks to the high customer down payments that we received from our many silicon carbide semiconductor customers who gave us some down payments and we take the down payments and invest the money in expansion of our capacity. On the next slide, you see the development of our Process Technology business, PT. As we pointed out in our last presentation, they were very good in acquiring new projects on a global scale. So we really have a worldwide, very balanced demand. Our sites in the U.S. are doing well; our sites in Asia are doing well; and especially our sites in Europe are doing very well. So we have a very good order situation. Our top line of Process Technology grew by more than 26% coming from EUR 25.3 million in the first quarter of '22 to now reaching EUR 31.9 million in the first 3 months of 2023, which is an increase of EUR 6.6 million. This is really a remarkable increase that we see there. This is project business. And apparently, our colleagues are doing a great job in really penetrating the market and simply delivering on the good order situation that they have. And there's also more to come. The order book stands for at least some 6 to 9 months, what we have there normally. So we can say also until end of the year, it looks quite promising, the development at Process Technology. And this also is very beneficial for our bottom line when you look to our profitability and our guiding KPI, EBITDA pre. This increases, more than doubles from EUR 2.0 million in the first 3 months of last year to now EUR 4.9 million. This is really a great achievement. We almost reached a 15% EBITDA pre margin compared to sales. Some 2, 3 years ago, we were around breakeven, and this is really a nice development that we see there. What is boosting the higher margin and the profitability increase? We have a high utilization. We have a strict cost management, and we're also making very sure -- you remember our margin over volume strategy. And I think Process Technology is really a role model in there. They really -- if the margin is not sufficient, they simply don't take the project. And we also make sure that we only have a very good product mix, which is boosting the profitability. Our kind of problem child in the first 3 months of the year is Carbon Fibers. And to a certain extent, we knew that it's going to be a difficult year, 2023, because this is a year without the BMW contract. And this is what we have taken into consideration. And starting into the second half of the year 2022, we were very happy that we found the wind energy market as a compensation, which took all the quantities that formerly were sold to BMW, and we could sell it into the wind market. And this was really -- this was good for us, that we found this alternative market, which was somehow capable of taking all this amount. However, the wind market sputtered a little bit in Q4, but now especially in Q1 2023, we see completely a stoppage of deliveries that are really burdening our top line development. And we are down by 27.4% compared to the top line in the first 3 months last year because the wind energy at the moment, we really see a lack of demand. We have a very slow permitting processes that we see and everything came to a kind of a standstill, because the projects that once were offered and acquired, some have to be recalculated because of higher raw material and energy costs. And at the moment, the parties, the suppliers and the customers, are somehow fighting for, yes, prices, margin and when to deliver what. But at the moment, wind energy is very slow. So you probably have seen that with the other listed wind customers or wind companies that are somehow dealing in this, but Torsten will tell you a little bit more about that in a kind of a special section of this presentation. And with the downturn of our sales development, so goes our EBITDA pre. When we lose 27.4% in our top line, our EBITDA pre also gets hit by 20%, so from formally EUR 5.4 million profitability or EBITDA pre in the first 3 months of 2022, we are now at EUR 4.3 million in Q1 2023. And also to be very honest with you, if you deduct the equity result of BSCCB, our Carbon Fibers business unit would have been slightly loss-making or, let's say, a kind of a red 0 if it's translated literally, the German phrase, compared -- yes, we would be loss-making on an EBITDA pre level in the first 3 months. We think that this might change in the second half of the year, but again, Torsten will tell you a little bit more about that in a special section. Last but not least, our last operative business unit, which is Composite Solutions. They are growing here, on Slide #9, you can see that, by 11.2% in the top line from EUR 35.8 million last year to now EUR 39.8 million this year. This is an increase of EUR 4 million. This is even more remarkable if you take into consideration the sale of the Gardena business, because the business of Gardena is something that we sold in Q1 this year and none of the contributions in the top line are in the Composite Solutions business unit shown. Why is that? Because we deal it as an asset held for sale. And you see all the results, I'll come to that later, in our Corporate business unit. So last year, in the first 3 months of the year, Gardena stands for EUR 5.7 million top line effect, and they were able to overcompensate that and grew by 4% on top. If you add both together, then they are growing with over 20% of a like-for-like basis in the automotive business, and this also shows the strong demand from our customers and the good development that business unit is taking. Same in profitability. Last year, first 3 months, we are EUR 6.3 million, now EUR 5.9 million, which is EUR 400,000 less compared to last year. But if you take into consideration that we in the first 3 months last year, we had a one-off kind of a breakup fee from a contract we've been awarded, but the customer didn't want it anymore. So we received some EUR 2.4 million for that as a compensation payment, plus EUR 0.9 million from the contribution of Gardena in the same time frame, with the first 3 months of the year, that they have to overcompensate, then you also see the very strong development of our profitability in our remaining automotive business that we see in Composite Solutions. Last but not least, the development in Corporate, there you see an increase in sales, which is kind of unusual, but don't be affected, EUR 4.9 million increase, from EUR 2.5 million to almost EUR 7.5 million, can be explained to 100% by 2 effects. One is the sales, the remaining sales until the closure of our Gardena, the closing of our Gardena sale, which is EUR 3.5 million. And we also sold our site in India, in Pune. And this also stands for EUR 1.3 million. Both effects almost 100% explain the sales increase, which is nonrecurring. So in Q2, you won't see this effect anymore. It's no use to take the EUR 7.4 million and take it times 4 for the full year figure. The EUR 2.5 million from last year is the more, yes, recurring sales that we have for some rental income and some charging of internal services to other parties. Our EBITDA pre is also affected by the sale of the Gardena and Pune business, with 0.6. There's also some effects with the so-called [indiscernible], which is a kind of a one-off payment that the tariff parties negotiated, that every employee receives some EUR 3,000 net, and we did that also in our Corporate business unit. And this is a kind of a onetime effect that was paid out in Q1. So there were a couple of one-off effects in Q1. And therefore, the increase of EUR 3.1 million in our EBITDA there is not a recurring effect. We tend to go back to the level of, yes, what we saw also in Q1 2022, with a kind of a normalized result that we also should see in the later quarters. Last but not least, a look on our other KPIs, and you see that our balance sheet tends to stabilize in a certain way. Our net result, we are quite happy with EUR 15.2 million. Why are we happy with EUR 15.2 million, where last year was EUR 21.8 million? In last year, we had a one-off effect with the sale of our Griesheim activity. There was an idle site in Frankfurt-Griesheim, and we were able to sell it and some of the effects already came in, in the first quarter 2022, with EUR 8.5 million. If you take this in account, then the EUR 15.2 million a decent development that we see there, and we are happy with this figure. Our equity ratio has reached almost 40%, 39.5%. Hardly any currency effects; hardly any interest rate effect. This is just the net result, which stands for the increase. And we could achieve that with, let's say, flat net debt figures, our leverage is still at a very healthy 1.0. Our ROCE reached 11.5% and has slightly improved. I think it's a solid start into the year 2023 that we saw so far. And having said that, I would like to hand over to Torsten.

Thomas, thanks a lot. Next slide, please. I would like to explain you what happened in our Carbon Fibers division. And for those of you who followed SGL longer, you know that SGL stepped into carbon fibers to serve BMW with carbon fibers to build special car models like the BMW i3. And exactly this model, which was supplied by SGL Carbon was discontinued by mid of last year. And the carbon fiber which we are producing, is the so-called heavy tow fiber. And this fiber only goes into cars or into wind energy. And we are working with our R&D department on special types of this heavy tow fiber to bring it into hydrogen pressure vessels and also to aerospace industry. But for the time being, we only can serve the wind energy or the car industry. And as you know, BMW will not return and no other car manufacturer copied the way to produce automotive chassis by carbon fiber. So we went into wind energy and compensated. It was our carbon fibers. And on this slide, an illustrative value chain is depicted. And you see on the left-hand side, our carbon fiber, this is heavy tow carbon fiber, delivered on spools and blades of wind turbines, which are longer than 100 meter, need exactly our heavy tow carbon fiber. But we don't sell it to the OEMs, to the wind turbine manufacturers. We sell it to converters and they produce something which is on the second picture, which we call belts. And the belt consists of a lot of carbon fibers with some resin, which glues it together. And those belts have the same length as wind turbine blade. And you can see in this sectional view, on this cut view of a blade, that there are 2 belts in, which gives the blade stability that the wind pressure cannot destroy such a belt. And above 100 meters, you cannot construct a blade without carbon fiber. So the converters and the companies which are active in this conversion business are Chinese companies like PGTEX or [indiscernible] and also European companies like Fiberline. They sell the carbon fiber belts to the wind turbine manufacturers. And you know some of these companies, for example, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, Nordex or GE. And they produce the wind turbine and sell the wind turbines to their customers, which are the wind park operators. And on this fourth value step, it came to a standstill. The investment in new wind parks was in 2022 on a 10-year low. And this is really a paradox. If you look into the European Green Deal, there should be a much higher investment. And exactly this is depicted here. The European Union set itself a target of additional 31 gigawatts every year. And you can see in this diagram on the left side, the reality. In 2020, the European Union invested half, 15.1 instead of 31 gigawatt hours. '19 and 2021 and last year was only EUR 10 million investment in new wind parks. And also for '23, for the first half year, we see no improvement of this situation. So we need wind energy. We have a target of additionally 31 hours every year, but the wind park owners are not investing in wind energy. What is the reason for this? You know about inflation and increase of raw materials and the raw material cost for wind turbine increased in 2022 by almost 40%. And -- and if you look in -- to the P&L statements of the OEMs, of Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, they either make losses or were close to 0. So very, very bad profitability of those OEMs. And they increased the prices for wind turbines heavily. So an average price increase is between 20% and 30%. Additionally, we have long-term permitting processes and European Union promised to speed this up. The biggest obstacle were -- and we call it here on this slide, uncoordinated government intervention measures into the energy markets. As you know in Portugal, in Spain, in Germany and Austria, everywhere, governments tried to find a cap for the gas and the electricity price. And in such situations, when you don't know what the long-term energy price will be, it's very difficult to do a long-term investment in a wind park because you cannot judge if the investment will be profitable or not. And this is again negatively fueled by rising interest rate. And this together brought the investment in wind energy to a 10-year low. So are we worried about this? Short term, yes, the situation is not nice for us, but long term, all signals are on growth. And you have read, for example, about the Ostende Conference, which was 2 weeks ago. And the state has decided to double the increase of offshore wind energy, which means that the European target of additionally 31 gigawatt hours, maybe will be boosted to 40 gigawatt hours or above. So midterm, we expect double-digit growth in carbon fibers for wind energy, for offshore and onshore wind energy. And this is only the European part. There's also the Inflation Reduction Act. And in U.S.A., lines to transfer the electricity from offshore wind energy, which will be supported heavily by tax cuts, the lines to transport the energy are supported with a grant of USD 1 billion. And U.S. also staffed their admin departments to speed up the permitting process. So we expect a strong growth in wind energy in Europe, in China and via the Inflation Reduction Act also in U.S. So short term, bad messages; midterm, we will come back to double-digit growth. Okay. This was our explanation for our carbon -- business unit, Carbon Fibers. And I would like to conclude with our summary. What you have seen, stable sales growth with plus 4.7%. EBITDA has grown over proportionally with 9%. And we confirmed our guidance, sales on prior year level and EBITDA between EUR 160 million and EUR 180 million. Our business is pretty stable for 3 business units. GS is really benefiting from the semiconductor industry; our business units PT and CS are running very, very well with a large order backlog. We benefited from a product mix effect and shifted some of our graphite business into the semicon industry, which has higher margins. And we invested 1/3 more CapEx than in the prior year to fuel the rising demands in graphite business. The markets, silicon carbide is growing, and we will participate with our graphite products in the silicon carbon markets. And I would like to use this occasion to invite you to a talk which we give on May 24. Claudia will send you an invitation, where we talk 1 or 2 hours about our role in the silicon carbide industry. The title is, 'The Future is Silicon Carbide', and you are all invited to this call. The call-offs, especially from automotive industry, are very solid, and we have explained to you the temporary dip in wind industry. With this, I would like to hand back to Claudia.

Yes. Thank you. Now you have got the ability to ask questions and I'll give it back to the operator to explain the technical details.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Andreas Heine with Stifel.

I have several. I would like to ask them one by one. Starting with the carbon fiber, you have elucidated on the wind energy part. Could you spend some words on how the textile market, which is also quite volatile, developing Q1 and how you see that going forward in 2023? That's the first question.

Yes. Thank you, Andreas, very much for this question. So with textile, you mean the textile industry, for example, for clothes and garments. This is what you call textiles, right?

Or basically, how is your Lavradio business?

Okay. Okay. Okay. For all who are not so deep in this, we run a factory in Lavradio, where we operate 8 lines. And 2 of the 8 lines produce precursor molecules or precursor fibers for the Carbon Fibers business. The remaining 6 lines go into the textile industry. And we are -- yes, we are positively surprised. This business is running pretty well or stable compared to the first quarter of last year. But we tried to shift this textile business to higher-margin business, and we did some interesting investments into pigmented fibers. And pigmented fibers are special textiles. It's a niche market, a high-margin niche market, where we go, for example, into sails for sailboats or sun protection and there you need chemically-bound dyes, which we call pigmented fibers. And we already converted the first line of the 6 remaining textile lines to this pigmented fiber business to lift up the margin again. But to your question, textile business in Lavradio is running stable currently.

And then on your site screening. So you have done 2 disposals, one in India and the other one, Gardena in the U.S. Is there more to come? So are you in the midst of the screening process or more at the end?

This question can be answered easily, Andreas. I think we -- for the time being at the end. I think we've done our homework and with all the requirements that come to us with minimum taxation, with ESG and everything, plus the profitability and the investment needs. Those 2 sites were the one who we would like to get rid of also business-wise. And with that, I think we are more or less done for the time being with our site screening. We've seen some inefficiencies, which we would love to overcome. However, we all know that SGL has formally been built up in a buy-and-build strategy and the cost, because we are a very fixed cost burdened company, to shift production or to move something is very costly and the paybacks are simply not there. And therefore, yes, we see some other potential, but not in a profitable way that where we can -- where the synergies and the cost savings would overcome the one-off cost. Therefore, this is not in a good -- yes, there's no good ratio. For the time being, we're done.

Okay. Next question is on the Graphite Solutions. Could you outline a little bit more in detail what your CapEx projects are and how you debottleneck and expand capacities in an efficient way for the growth in silicon carbide specifically?

Yes, Andreas, I give the same answer which I gave last time. We invest into the whole value chain. We are not opening another new site, and this is low-cost debottlenecking on several steps in the value chain affecting most of our GS sites. And I invite you to our presentation on the 24th, and there we will go more into detail.

No, that sounds good. Then I have to be patient. It's not my strength, but I will. The very last question is on Composite Solutions. You have really strong growth there. The last capacity addition, I think, was in Arkadelphia for not much more than USD 4.5 million. I wonder whether you get close to your capacities again and whether you might look for also not CapEx intense capacity additions for this nice small segment.

Yes, Andreas, you are right. We invested into Arkadelphia. But Arkadelphia I would call more an assembly plant. The main production which we have in Composite Solutions is in Austria. There we have 2 production sites in the cities Ort and Ried. And both run pretty well. The one is for large-scale solutions where we produce, for example, leaf springs or the battery cases for big American automotive suppliers, which are later on assembled in Arkadelphia. The second one, our small-scale solution business, there we produce, for example, carbon fiber parts for Porsche. And especially the very expensive cars, they run at capacity and the call-offs from the expensive carmakers are boosted by 50% or more. And we also run there at capacity. And so it is a very, very positive development. And currently, we see no end of this development. And you are right. If another big project would drop into the business unit CS, we have to think about a bigger capacity expansion.

What -- you rightly said that Arkadelphia was an assembly unit. If you expand Ried, which I guess would be...

No, no, Ort.

Ort, the last one. Okay.

Ried, there's a lot of manual work. And we do, for example, for Porsche, the aero kit, which is the wing or different parts which are made of carbon fiber and glass fiber. There, we still have some room to expand. Our bottleneck is more in the Ort plant, which is highly automated -- automized. And there, we are limited by -- by the building and also by machinery. We had to invest in both. And these are large-scale projects which are not yet on the horizon that we can talk about. But if this comes, we talk about a significant investment.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from the line of Lukas Spang with Tigris Capital.

Maybe coming back to the last question of Mr. Heine. So first of all, thanks for the good expectation management in terms of the Wolfspeed contract. I think that was very helpful. But did I get you right in the short term, we should not expect similar contracts, but going forward, there -- it's not -- you do not rule out further or similar contracts like with Wolfspeed, is this right?

Yes. I think you are right. I'm not 100% sure if I understood your question, because at the beginning, you were saying you were trying to go back to the last question of Andreas Heine. The last question was on Composite Solutions. Your question...

Okay, sorry.

Never mind. You're talking about Graphite Solutions. If you're talking about Graphite solutions, we -- you are right. And this is exactly what we said. We invest more than maybe the years before, but only because of the fact that we get customer down payments. And you are right. Wolfspeed was definitely a significant one that we received, but it's also true that we received some customer down payments also from other parties, and there's more to come.

But more to come in short term or more on the midterm perspective?

In the short term. And you are also invited on the 24th of May to listen to our silicon carbide presentation. But to show you our double cushion, which I see. First is we are doing this kind of deals with quite a lot of customers. So we are not relying on the performance of a single customer like Wolfspeed. If Wolfspeed has a weakness, we can compensate with other customers where we have similar agreements. Second cushion is we don't deliver silicon carbide. So if the silicon carbide business is in a weakness, we are a graphite supplier. And my sentence is, "Graphite is graphite." If silicon carbide is not buying the graphite, we can shift back to LED industry, to solar industry or whatever. So we are double secured in this business and I feel pretty relaxed.

Okay. And then on Graphite Solutions as well. In your full year outlook, you have this significant -- slightly higher revenue outlook, which is up to 10%, but Q1 was above this level. So do you see any reasons in the coming quarters that demand or revenue growth or growth momentum will go down, that we will see a single-digit growth number for the full year?

The problem we see here a little bit -- I wouldn't say a problem, but there are some overlaying and compensating effects. You know that sales is always quantity times price, and we already increased the prices in the second half of the year, which boosted also the profitability, especially in the last 6 months of 2022 already. And the closer we get to the relevant time frame there as well, then additional price increases in 2023 were very hard to implement and then you don't have the price effect anymore. In Q1, the price effect was definitely there because we also shifted again a lot of capacity out of wind -- not out of wind, sorry, out of solar into semiconductor in general and silicon carbide in particular. But one day, it's very difficult that you -- you can't ship more than 100%. And therefore, this will sooner or later come to a kind of a flattening also margin-wise. And therefore, this -- maybe we might be a little bit higher, but we didn't adjust our guidance for the individual business units on Q1 now because I think there's still a lot of months to go in the year 2023. So far in our overall guidance, we stick to what we said, but this might vary in the course of the year for the individual business units.

So could you give us a rough indication how much of the 17% were price increases?

The most is product mix effects. This is what we can clearly say. I would say, less than a single digit -- single-digit effect of the growth is a price. Most of it is a product mix. And the rest is expansion, because this doesn't -- as Torsten was saying, we are investing heavily, but these investments take some time. That we get it, it's all specialty machinery, it takes a lot of infrastructure. And again, until you really have the start of production and then it comes to the next bottleneck. This is really a lot of balancing the relevant CapEx project that we have there. And there are many sites of our Graphite Solutions there, but this would be roughly the split. So a single-digit percentage, I would say, is price, a large extent is product mix and yes, maybe the same level as price is also expansion.

Okay. And then to CapEx, is Q1 a good run rate for the coming quarters?

We are running on full steam, Mr. Spang, absolutely, and you can -- the way we get the down payments, it's the way we scheduled it and again, maybe you call it expectation management, I think it's a good run rate, yes.

The next question is from the line of Sven Sauer with Kepler Cheuvreux.

Hello, thanks for taking my questions. I have 3, 2 of them regarding the Graphite Solutions segment. I will start with the third question. You bought back some convertible bonds in Q1, if I'm not mistaken. I was just wondering what your plan is for the remaining year in this topic.

Yes, that's an easy one. You are right. We are sitting on a lot of cash, and you know that we took first part of our refinancing was last year in September to issue a new convert in the same moment we bought back a large portion of our existing convert, which would have expired September this year. And some -- for whatever reason, some EUR 30 million, nobody wants to offer us at that point of time, despite we issued a new convert with a far more attractive coupon, but never mind. With the EUR 31.2 million that were still outstanding, we were able to force it and squeeze it out, and this is exactly what we did on the 31st of March. At that point of time, we kind of called the remaining quantities of the convert, and it's now fully paid back at 100. So the convert, which was due to expire in September '23, is fully refinanced and fully paid back by us. And therefore, there's also nothing more to come in the course of the year because this is over. Our new convert runs for -- I think we have a good maturity profile -- runs for another couple of years. So no need to already touch that. Our next challenge after we already set up and kind of not refinanced, but prolonged or extended or amended, increased our RCF, which is good. The next big thing we have to refinance is our corporate bond, which expires September 2024, but we've still got some time to make up our mind on how to tackle that one.

Okay. That's clear. Okay. Then maybe moving on to the Graphite Solutions segment. So it's now roughly 50% of group sales and of course, will become even bigger because you're investing in this segment. I mean is there some kind of number that you have in your heads, what you are targeting as a percentage of group sales in the next, say, 5 years? And on top of this, I mean this has probably been asked over the past quarters, but have you -- I mean would this be a consideration, selling one other -- one of the other business units to even expand more in the Graphite Solutions segment?

Yes. Sven, we have currently no plans to sell any of our businesses. We are pretty satisfied, and we are sure that we can turn Carbon Fibers around. And we have no sales target because we expect growth also in the small business units, but especially the silicon carbide business, we want to grow significantly, and we give you more details on the 24th. Sorry to give you the same answer.

Fully understand. Fully understand. Great, I'm looking forward to it.

And I hope at least you 3 will show up.

No, I will definitely tune in. And the last question on the GS. I mean if you can answer it, then yes, maybe then in 2 weeks. So I mean you don't speak about your clients, right, in the semiconductor business, which I understand, but I think it's fair to assume that you probably serve all of the major semiconductor suppliers in the world. And I mean apparently, there are some of these semiconductor suppliers that are able to produce or actually have the entire supply chain for the production of silicon carbide chips in-house. And I was wondering, do you see this as a risk, even a slight risk, for other players also pursuing this vertical integration or other entry barriers just too high?

Yes. Sven, for this, you have to understand the value chain. And for us, of biggest interest are the so-called boule manufacturers. They make the crystal which is used for cutting the wafers and then in the next step, producing the chips. And we deliver graphite parts to the first step of the value chain. And the more players are active sales, the better for us. The more scarcity we see in graphite, and I can tell you the producer of those boules, of the single crystals, they are pretty nervous to get enough graphite to fuel their production plants. So the more players in the market, the better for us. And we are not in contact with everyone, but I would say 80% of the industry is buying from us.

The next question is from the line of Andreas Heine with Stifel.

One follow-up, please. I asked this already a quarter ago, but now we are more in -- more of 2023 has passed. Maybe you can update us where you stand in a year-on-year comparison on energy costs and what you see from the raw material cost trend.

Yes. Andreas, I'm sorry, I don't know the figures by heart, but you know we have to secure energy at a certain point of time. We cannot go with our semicon downstream business in a situation where we purely rely on spot business. And this is why we did some hedges by end of last year as the first downturn of energy prices was visible. So we are only benefiting for 20%, 30% from the very low spot prices. So maybe we hedged too early. And the decrease of energy cost is for us, not as big as you might think. The raw material cost, in general, they stay on the same level as end of last year, but now a decrease is starting, and we knock on the door of every of our suppliers to decrease the cost. We see a very low utilization, especially of the chemical industry. And they are in a process to negotiate with us some price decreases. So we expect something for the second half of the year, but currently, raw materials are a little bit below the level of last year.

But on energy, I do understand that hedging is complicated, you never will be always on the right side by doing so. But from what you said, I can assume that the energy cost 2023 will be lower. Maybe not by much, but they will not be higher than -- will be lower than last year.

Yes. I think in the total effects, our energy costs are higher than last year. This is what I think was an average. But again, there is another -- there is another 8 months to go from -- there is another 8 months to come for this year. But I think in total, if you look at the mix and the level that we hedged, it's higher. You have to bear in mind we are securing, we are hedging in order to secure our production capabilities, that -- because it's so cost intensive and so capital cost intensive, we have to make sure that we can produce by all means. This is the utmost prerequisite that we have. And therefore, we have a schedule which we follow. And as I said, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And I can't give you the exact number, but energy costs, being electricity and gas, is a little bit higher than last year.

The next question is from the line of Thomas Junghanns with Berenberg.

Good afternoon also from my side. I didn't want to interrupt you. So if you would like to keep on with your explanations for Mr. Heine, please go ahead.

No, Thomas, everything is fine.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I have a few questions. The first question is a really short one with respect to Process Technology, what is the book-to-bill ratio?

Book-to-bill ratio is above 1. It's currently 1.1.

Perfect. And the second question was with respect to the customer concentration in the Graphite Solutions business unit. Maybe you can elaborate on this a little bit, what percentage of sales in the semiconductor business do, for example, the 3 largest customers account for? Could you provide us a little bit more color on the customer concentration here?

I'm not 100% sure if patience is also your biggest strength, same as Andreas, but this time, I take the answer from Torsten, but please have a little bit more patience and wait until the 24th May, then we can work on that a little bit more together. There, we -- I think we give you a comprehensive overview of what we have in our silicon carbide business and where we're trying to develop that into. Thanks for understanding.

There are no further questions, and I hand back to Claudia Kellert.

Yes. Thanks, everyone, for your participation. You will find today's presentation on our web page as well as our Q1 statement. And if you have further questions, please call the Investor Relations department, to Reck or myself. Thanks a lot, and have a fantastic weekend. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded and you may disconnect your telephones. Thank you for joining and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.