Magnora ASA

OSE:MGN

Earnings Call Transcript

[Erik Sneve, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to Magnora's Q2 2023 presentation. We're very pleased to announce very pleasant and nice financial figures today and an update on our strategy and megawatts under development.

As you all know, we are a growing asset-light development company of renewable projects, and we have a strict capital discipline. We have a highly experienced team from the investment in renewable energy development industries. And we updated our guiding in Q2 to 9,000 megawatts by the end of 2025 of projects under development. And we continue to see improved cash flow, cash position and near-term cash flow from new project sales and deliveries and potentially in our legacy business and dividends. We have approximately 7,800 shareholders, and we're listed on the main board of Oslo Stock Exchange as opposed to many renewable companies in Oslo.

We established a strategy of The Future is Electric in Q1 2020. We had NOK 50 million in cash on the balance sheet, and we changed the focus to renewables, the support from our top shareholders. In 2021, after 4 investments in 2020, we have our first farm down to OX2 Q4 2021, and we paid our first dividend from our portfolio companies in 2022 in the third quarter. Hafslund also became the largest shareholder in Magnora, and we increasingly see new mutual funds among our top 20 shareholders.

In 2023, we have our first big handover, 126 megawatts in Q1, and we had an exit of Evolar to global leader First Solar in the U.S. at a multiple close to 10x if you count also for the earnout based on the equity invested. We see strong growth combined with return of capital to shareholders and buyback. So far, year-to-date in 2023, we've sold 295 megawatt. And as you remember, our guiding range was 200 to 325 megawatts. We've sold projects in Sweden and South Africa, as you know, and we're looking forward to our sales process in the U.K. for our solar and battery projects.

Key metrics, NOK 409 million in cash, up from NOK 10 million same quarter Q2 2022. Our net profit of NOK 203 million, we had to -- based on IFRS 10, you have to deduct the equity investment and loans and working capital transactions since Evolar was a subsidiary in our cash flow, you see increased cash of NOK 310 million. Our portfolio increased by 10% from Q1 up to 5.6 gigawatts.

On the following slide, you see our development pipeline at the end of June 2023 last quarter. And you see our development portfolio is developing the strongest and fastest within solar and storage, and a lot of the growth has come in Sweden, but also increasingly in U.K. and Norway. We're continuing to source for new land in South Africa as well, and see very strong growth in South Africa as we speak. And we had our first sale, as you know, in July to Globeleq by Norwegian government and the U.K. government.

Our greatest milestone in the quarter was the sale of Evolar, technology company in Sweden to First Solar for USD 80 million and the Magnora owned around 2/3 of the company at the time of the transaction, and we received NOK 310 million at signing, and we have Milestone payments worth up to NOK 265 million, which we hope to be able to close in the near to midterm.

We approved in the Annual Meeting, second dividend from Helios, NOK 60 million. You see that in our cash flow statement, we own 40% of Helios and it's the largest -- and we're the largest shareholders. We also sold 153-megawatt battery storage project to Globeleq in South Africa. And at the end of July, Helios sold another 252 megawatts at the highest price achieved so far in the history of Helios to our largest shareholder, actually, Hafslund, a Norwegian utility who produces around 21 terawatt hours of green energy per year. They have a strong focus on solar these days.

We're also pleased to announce the reintroduction of our dividend, first time in several years of NOK 0.19 per share almost NOK 0.187 million payable on August 23 based on shareholders in Magnora on August 16. Looking at our customer list, it looks more and more impressive. We are selling to AAA companies like Globeleq, Commerz Real, Hafslund, Solgrid, First Solar, Nordics law is a very strong Nordic Danish IPP with very solid financing. We see that these companies do not dependent on debt to buy projects, they are very solidly financed by equity. So very, very pleased with our customers, and we hope to sell more projects to these companies and other companies in the same category.

Our business model, we look for new teams constantly. We don't invest that often. Typically, we invest NOK 2 million to NOK 20 million in our initial investments in the new business and the potential for growth towards ready-to-build should be minimum 5x the invested capital. We have strong partnerships, one with Hafslund. We're continuously looking for new things to do with them. We also have a partnership with TechnipFMC on ScotWind, they own 20% of our ScotWind project, and we also have a framework agreement with DNV.

In the ScotWind project, and we use them a lot within the solar business as well to screen for new ideas. We have a development model that's similar, but a little different from some of the other established players and that is that we sell the project at ready-to-build and the customer takes responsibility for the CapEx and the operations of the projects. However, we offer construction management services, procurement management services, but we don't take the balance sheet risk of these developments.

So main task is to develop landowner agreements, grid connection agreements with environmental permitting, the technical management during the development stage and Magnora staff is always Board member, Executive Chairman, and we tried to develop these companies and projects the best possible way with the best possible team.

Looking at our staff. Magnora can exist without these great people on board. We have done several recruitments in the portfolio companies over the last quarter, but we have people with a very wide background from developing their own companies to running, like, for instance, Hakon has been a key person in South Craft New Energy for the last 20 years before joining Magnora, developing solar, wind, offshore wind, assets Bjørn Drangsholt, the Country Manager of Statkraft U.K. is now heading up our solar business in with Hafslund. So a very mixed background of the staff we have, and this is our key competitive factor.

Our Executive Chairman, Torstein Sanness, he's the founder of what's Lundin Petroleum in Norway, which was sold to Aker BP last summer. So we're very happy to have this team of people with very, very long experience from developing energy and renewable energy projects globally.

Guiding. We updated the guiding in Q2 to 9 gigawatts from 5 gigawatt by the end of 2025. We updated our guiding for sales in 2023 from 200 to 325 megawatts. We're now close to the high end of that range. Most sales and projects are farm downs and Magnora's net share is calculated based on our ownership in these companies. We have -- we typically sell the projects before ready to build. And then we receive a substantial upfront payment. And the rest of the payment and the revenue recognition happens when we transfer the projects when grid connection agreements are in place and all other permits. We guide the range from NOK 500,000 to above NOK 1.5 million, we might see projects above that level and maybe a few projects below that level as well in virgin markets like South Africa for solar only. But when we have hybrid projects, solar battery wind, we're very comfortable with this range, and we hope to see some sales also above this range of NOK 1.5 million. We sold the project this summer, as I mentioned, to Hafslund at the high end of this range, as you see here, 252 megawatts.

So today, we sell in South Africa, we sell in Sweden, and we're going to sell projects in the U.K. in the second half. So from 3 different markets simultaneously. And we have recurring sales opportunities in all these markets. We're very pleased with that, and we hope to have another market ready for sale within the short to midterm as well. So this will be a recurring business for our shareholders and for Magnora.

We have our legacy business as well, and we have -- we expect to receive $8.6 million from Shell in 2 remaining milestone payments, and we also have a design fee from the [indiscernible] FPSO that hole can lasts from 30 to 50 years, and the top side allows it to produce 44,000 barrels per day. There might be redeployment opportunities for this asset as production has come down on that field. We see that 2 others, [indiscernible] have gone to the Gulf of Thailand and West Africa. So strong interest for these very solid FPSO. So we hope this can be another line of growing revenues for Magnora shareholders in the future. So we'll get back to that.

Update on some key markets. In Sweden today, they produce or use 535, 550 terawatt hour per year across transportation, industrial development steel, iron ore and consumption, most of these electricities from 138 terawatt hours from renewables around 55%. However, we see that solar PV in Sweden might have a potential to grow to 30 terawatt hour per year, around 30,000 gigawatt. So Swedish solar trade association as was forecast out. And currently, Helios is around 7,000 megawatts under development and is definitively the category leader in Sweden with dozens of sales to blue chip companies and a very growing pipeline. We look forward to their development pipeline out in Q3 and Q4. We see very strong growth in that market and from the Helios team.

Regarding U.K., we have a very -- we see a lot of activity within floating wind and farmland processes in the ScotWind run with multiple projects, which you can read about in the press. U.K. have very ambitious growth targets for offshore wind up to 50 gigawatts by 2030. They have an excellent geography for offshore wind, very good wind conditions and they have a very well-regarded regulatory regime and very good CFDs, feed-in tariffs on floating wind as we saw last year. ScotWind is really at the forefront of the floating offshore wind development. And they developed the first offshore floating in farm high win owned by Equinor. And later on, they have the largest floating offshore wind farm with Kincardine.

We see strong interest to discuss with Magnora, offshore wind regarding our project in ScotWind. In the U.K., you also see very strong growth, the storage growth capacity, and so our PV growth from -- after feed-in tariffs fell off cliff in 2016, '17. This is developing towards a spot market with very strong growth across both segments. We announced a partnership with Gamcap during July, and they've been working on our first projects with Truman Aspen, and we see that this pipeline is growing quite fast now, and we look very much forward to the first farm-down sales process from the Gamcap team and new land lease agreements, great connections on the back of the strong growth in the U.K. within solar PV and battery as well.

So U.K. is really on the forefront of developing renewable in Europe and have very interesting plans also to develop the grid system nationally, which benefits all offshore wind projects and also our ScotWind project, but also battery storage opportunities and so our PV battery storage, especially as more and more unregulated power come into the market.

In South Africa, we see more and more rolling shutdowns of the electricity system due to constraints from their coal-fired power plants. And we see strong interest from the corporate industrial segment regarding energy projects. We sold our first project now to Globeleq, 153 megawatts. And we see interest for other projects in the short to midterm in South Africa as well. And I think this will be the -- maybe our first corp industrial sales in South Africa, very good projects, very good work by [indiscernible] and the rest of the team in South Africa and Peter naturally. We see strong growth in the auctions, the rebounds, which are called 20 to 30 gigawatt within 2030 basically.

South Africa's abundant amount of land. Most of the projects are solar PV. So we have a strong focus on onshore wind, combined with battery and solar. So our team has a strong background from onshore wind, and this is a differentiator, I think, among many of the developers in South Africa, have a strong focus on solar. So for these corporate industrial customers, they like to have a hybrid combination of solar wind and battery to be independent of the national energy system run by Eskom.

Currently, 82%, I think, of the energy in South Africa is originated from coal-fired power plants. And we see a much, much larger share coming from renewable. As we go into the next decade, we have around 10 employees in South Africa, 2,000 megawatts under development, and we hope to secure much more land going forward as well. So it will be a very interesting market for us together with Sweden, U.K. and Norway.

Over to financial EBITDA of NOK 204 million of the quarter, up from negative NOK 8.9 million in Q1, mainly due to dividend from Helios and divestment of Evolar. All companies where we own more than 50% are consolidated, 100% in the P&L. It makes it a little harder to read the P&L. If you have any problems, contact us or read the notes. Slightly higher development M&A expenses compared to the prior quarter due to the closing costs for the Evolar transaction.

Operating profit landed at NOK 199 million, up from NOK 17.7 million in Q1. Tax not payable due to accumulated tax loss of over NOK 3.5 billion from our legacy business. We have paid in capital of NOK 8.4 billion. So we hope to return as much capital as possible as return of capital as opposed to the category dividend, which is more tax advantages for shareholders.

So cash flow, operating activities negative NOK 18 million, impacted by development costs in Evolar and Magnora Offshore Wind and Magnora South Africa due to the consolidation, as I mentioned, we fetched around NOK 310 million from the divestment of Evolar. And we also had a dividend from Helios during the quarter. The company returned NOK 60 million, as I mentioned, and we own 40% of the company.

We anticipate further dividend opportunities in Helios in the near to midterm and ending cash balance at the quarter was NOK 409 million. Evolar settlement was converted at U.S. dollar now NOK 10.68.

So back to the outlook. We see very, very strong growth and enthusiasm from all our teams in Sweden, Norway, U.K., Scotland and South Africa. We hope to sell projects near to midterm also in the U.K., as I mentioned, and new sales in Sweden and South Africa. We are very pleased by the focus we've had on solar and PV -- solar PV and battery storage for quite some time. And we hope to see battery storage sales not only from South Africa, but also from Sweden and the U.K. in the near to midterm, we have legacy payments, as I mentioned, from our legacy assets opportunities coming down the road, and we have the potential earn-out payments from Evolar as well.

So we have quite a lot of product categories working for us at the same time. And we hope to continuously grow our revenues and earnings going forward. And we've initiated a buyback program, as I mentioned, and we've acquired around 1 million shares last quarter, and we will increasingly pay dividend as we receive more cash from our portfolio companies.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us by e-mail or phone. If you're in the Skøyen area, please come by for a discussion around our business and growth opportunities. We are very pleased with the development we have from first half, and we continue to see very interesting growth opportunities going forward.

We'd like to thank our loyal shareholder base for believing in our business idea and our prospects, and we have a very bright future. Thank you very much. Have a great day.