Solar A/S (SOLARB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to the Solar Annual Report 2021. [Operator Instructions] Today, I am pleased to present CEO, Jens Andersen; and CFO, Michael Jeppesen. Speakers, please begin.

Thank you. A very warm welcome to this fourth quarter webcast for the Solar Group. Together with me here in Vejen, I have my colleague, CFO, Michael Jeppesen. The agenda for today is a general business update with highlights for year 2021 presented by me. Then, I will give you some insights about our ongoing CV investments and our revised target and ambitions. Then, Michael will present our 4Q results, including a high-level cash flow statements and naturally some comments to the year 2021 and our guidance for year 2022. And then, of course, a Q&A session. Next slide, please. With an all-time high EBITDA of DKK 911 million, an increase compared to last year of 43% or DKK 274 million, we can look back on a very strong year where we also slightly exceeded our latest guidance of an EBITDA of DKK 900 million. But I think even more striking also our financial targets towards year 2023. A substantial contribution to this is the execution of our Core+ strategy, but also a strong market, delivering stronger growth rates than we initially expected. I want to thank my colleagues for their continued efforts and dedication that has resulted in 13 straight quarters of EBITDA growth. In all fairness, it needs to be emphasized that we have realized one-off price increases of approximately DKK 150 million, which is on a historical high level. But it also underlines that we are capable to push price increases out in the market, that is very important business strategy [ in turns ] with high leverage. With a return on invested capital, or ROIC, after tax of almost 25% and a year-on-year [ 0.0% ], our cash position is strong. Therefore, at the Annual General Meeting, the Board of Directors will propose a dividend distribution of DKK 45 per share. Furthermore, the Board of Directors asked for authorization to decide on distribution of extraordinary dividend up to DKK 50 per share. Next slide, please. The expansion of our warehouses in Vejen, Denmark commenced in February 2021, with the construction of an additional 11,000 square meters, corresponding to a 25% increase in capacity. During the spring of 2022, we plan to, in aggregate, one of the largest AutoStore facilities in Scandinavia. This will enable us to close several external warehouses in different locations in Vejen, which will reduce our energy consumption, increase product accessibility and provide us with opportunities for further growth. In the Netherlands, our expansion of our warehouse and AutoStore set up in Alkmaar will commence during 2022 thus, centralizing services reducing costs and ensuring further opportunities for growth. As a result, the warehouse in Duiven will be closed. In Norway and Sweden, our operations teams are still evaluating the opportunities for further expansion. Next slide, please. We have identified further opportunities to improve our business and establish a new stronger Solar going forward. These new opportunities means that we are increasing our ambition for EBITDA to above 65% and our ROIC to 20% after tax. Bear in mind that MAG45 is now included in our ambitions. With these changes in our financial targets, we still have room for short-term business development and potentially bolt-on acquisition towards year '23. On all our four strategic focus areas, have shown significant progress in year 2021. Our concept share now totals 22%. The ambition is to increase their share to above 25%. Climate and energy succeeded in growing revenue by 7% in 2021. The ambition is, on average, to grow above 5%. Our industry share now totals to 32%. The ambition is to increase the share to 35%. And then finally, trade delivered a strong revenue performance and double-digit growth in 2021. The ambition is, on average, to grow above 7.5%. Solar is determined to play an active part in the green transition. As a part of our ambition, we have committed ourselves to the science-based target initiative. We believe that a clearly defined binding science-based target is the way to achieve an actual reduction in our environmental footprint. We expect to introduce our targets or Scope 3 targets during year 2022. What we have already now set ourselves a new ambition, and that is to reach net zero, CO2 emission in Scope 1 and 2 before year 2030 -- or latest 2030. So our green journey is really on the rise. I will now give the word to Michael for some more insights to the financials. Please, Michael?

Thank you, Jens. Turning to Page 7. Back in Q2, we saw a substantial trend shift in growth moving from negative territory with minus DKK 0.6 million in Q1 to plus with DKK 8.6 million. In Q3 and Q4, we actually managed this momentum with an adjusted organic growth rate of 7.1% in Q4, similar to the previous 2 quarters. This, in combination with increasing gross margin, more than outweighed the increase in cost, leading to an increase in earnings. Revenue in terms of DKK increased almost 11%. It came out almost with DKK 3.4 billion compared to DKK 3.1 billion last year. If we take a closer look at the segments in Q4, we saw growth within all the main segments, particularly the trade segment delivered a substantial growth rate, as in the same 2-digit growth rates. If we can take a closer look into the industry segment, we're particularly happy to see the growth within OEM, MRO remains at a very high level. And this is also being supported by very strong 2-digit growth rates in Sweden for both of these two very important subsegments. But offshore just managed to hang on during this quarter. But compared to what we have seen in previously, we're very pleased with the development. Turning to Page 8. With an EBIT stack of DKK 259 million, Q4 was actually the 13th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in EBITDA. The main growth driver was, as you can see in the figure, increase in gross profit margin, which delivered astonishing 1.4% increase. This was driven by our Core+ strategy that focus on concept, but of course, also our project Better Business where we take out nonprofitable revenue. We did also realize a positive one-off impact from price increases amounting to DKK 35 million compared to DKK 8 million in 2020, or to approximately 0.8 percent point increase compared to 2020. If we look at the cost level, and please notice that the reference point still is COVID level, external operating costs, which is mainly travel, entertainment, cars and IT still develops as we expected it. There is an increase in staff cost, but this was also more than outweighed by the increase in revenue and gross profit. The main driver of the increase in staff cost is incentives due to the improved profitability, but also the cost of handling the growth. We are really running above capacity, particularly in Denmark. But as Jens also were stating, we are in the process of expanding, which will enable us to grow further. Looking at debtors. Loss on debtors clearly shows that this remains under control. So in absolute terms, earnings, thereby increased from DKK 1,109 million to DKK 1,259 million. Turning to Page 9. Looking at the full year. We actually see a similar pattern as what we've seen in the 3 previous quarters with a strong margin expansion from 5.6% to 7.4%, of which 0.6% can be explained by the result of our Core+ strategy. This, in combination with cost containment, added another 0.3% and 0.3% from external operating and staff, respectively. But of course, we were also supported by one-off price effects that delivered a lift of approximately 0.8%, which in total, led the gross margin with 1.8 percent points. Turning to Page 10. If you look at it in absolute figures, we can see an improvement compared to 2020 of DKK 274 million, which in a simple way, can be decomposed into DKK 187 million from increased revenue, DKK 84 million from increased gross margin from our initiatives and there's a delta of DKK 97 million for one-off price increases partly, of course, set off with increased cost with DKK 91 million. As mentioned previously, a part of the cost increase can be explained by incentives and of course, also cost to handle the growth. If we, for instance, take a look at the external operating costs, we are still both in absolute also relatively speaking, below the level we saw prior to COVID-19. Looking at Page 11, cash flow. We see a positive impact from operating activities of DKK 558 million versus DKK 432 million in 2020, which I'll comment on shortly. Investing activities of DKK 53 million. And the main part of this is simply the investments that we are currently doing in Vejen. This is the main driver of the DKK 53 million, and this will accelerate in the quarters to come. Financial activities of DKK 250 million, the main part being repayment in current interest-bearing debt with DKK 229 million. But if we take a closer look at the operating activities, we see a change from DKK 432 million last year to DKK 558 million this year. The main difference compared to 2020 is that whereas, inventory had a positive contribution of DKK 35 million we, in this quarter, see a negative impact of DKK 145 million. Meaning it's actually a delta of DKK 180 million. Basically, what we see here is a repeating of the pattern that we also saw in Q3. We are still faced with deteriorating performance from several suppliers, and we are, therefore, in a situation where we, in order to secure our performance towards our customer, has decided to increase the inventory. It's important to notice that of the total increase we have seen over the year, 85% of that can be referred to A articles, which means this is the fast runners. This is the most important market for us. So on [indiscernible] having increased the inventory value, we have not increased the risk that we are facing. Looking at the debtors, we see the normal seasonality effect bringing in DKK 221 million. Liability actually increased to DKK 286 million, but it should be noticed that the starting point in Q3 was fairly low. So there's nothing structurally changed maybe except from the inventory level, but at least for the time being, will remain higher. Turning to Page 12. Looking at the net working capital, we see a flat development in Q4 compared to Q3 with 11%. And this is, of course, the inventory. But this time, we managed to offset it with suppliers. Please notice that the net working capital, as we define it here, is not affected by the temporary support packages of DKK 99 million. Looking at the gearing, we see that the seasonality effects actually brings us down to a gearing of zero for -- at the end of the year. But if we look at this at average, it's at the 0.3 range. Please notice that the main part of the investments in Duiven and Alkmaar, that's almost DKK 220 million, remains to be paid. They will follow here during this year and also that we are currently looking into both Sweden and Norway where we do not have any exact figures yet on a potential expansion will drive off CapEx. Turning to Page 13, guidance for 2022. We expect a revenue of DKK 12.75 billion. This is equal to an organic growth of approximately 3%. If we take our project Better Business into, and this is an integrated part of our Core+ strategy, this is expected to reduce our revenue with DKK 200 million. If we adjust for this, we actually expect to deliver an -- for organic growth of approximately 5%. Looking at EBITDA, we expect to deliver DKK 850 million. Compared to 2021, you should see -- we noticed that there is one-off income, net of DKK 112 million. Meaning that if we compare the DKK 850 million versus 2021, adjusted for one-off, we see a strong improvement from DKK 799 million to DKK 850 million. This is actually when adjusted for one-off effects' all-time high.

Thank you. Thank you, Michael. Now it's time for Q&A. So please, if there are any.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. There currently seems to be no questions from the phone lines at this time.

Okay. But -- then, we will close the session and say thank you for listening in and have a really nice day. Thank you.