Magnora ASA

OSE:MGN

Earnings Call Transcript

[Erik Sneve, executive]

Welcome to Magnora's fourth quarter presentation. My name is Erik, and I'm the CEO of the company.

In the fourth quarter, we saw stronger interest in doing business with our portfolio companies than in all previous quarters. And today, I will take you through some of our key operational highlights from the quarter, our strategy, our targets, our financials and a brief outlook. And please also read our press release carefully. The presentation will not be followed by a Q&A. But you can ask for a meeting with me at any time or call one of the analysts calling the company.

2022 highlights. We leave behind us another great year for Magnora with strong development of our portfolio supported by a favorable market environment. Our portfolio under development has more than doubled through the year and our work to diversify and derisk our investments is showing its effects.

We have accelerated growth across all regions, technologies and projects, and it leaves us with a significantly lower degree of uncertainty than before. Over the last 3 years, we have transitioned the company from a few early-stage investments to a growing and maturing portfolio set for farm down and cash generation as projects approach the ready-to-build phase.

In 2020, we started with NOK 58 million in cash, and this has transformed into a solid and cash-generating business set for further growth in the years to come. We're now well positioned to deliver systematic returns over time. Our legacy business continued to support our cash position, our portfolio expansion and new ventures. We're also noticing high market interest in our companies and projects and the sentiment for new project is, in general, increasing.

Our position to capitalize on the green transition has been nurtured over the years, and we're very excited about the future.

Pure-play renewable developer. Magnora is a pure-play renewable developer with a focus on early-stage investments and developments. We're growing an attractive portfolio of projects, including on and offshore wind, solar and energy storage and most recently, hydrogen and ammonia with Troms Kraft in Norway.

The development is supported by a strong team of very experienced professionals, cash flow from our legacy business, and in our fourth quarter, we also saw income, substantial income from our legacy contract, the Penguins. Magnora has been the driving force and development for decades, and we will continue to do that.

We sold off all our assets related to oil and gas and restarted our company in 2018 to start originating, developing and investing in clean energy companies and projects that can benefit from the combination of funding and support for development and growth by our executive team.

Now less than 3 years later, we have 10 companies in our portfolio. The latest additions to the portfolio are Hafslund Magnora Sol, where we will pursue pure development solar parks in Norway together with Hafslund and Helios. And Neptun, where we are venturing into development of green hydrogen and ammonia with Troms Kraft and Prime Capital.

Rapidly building a significant and profitable renewable portfolio well financed for growth journey ahead.

In January 2020, we started out with NOK 58 million in cash on our balance sheet, as I mentioned. From our first investment in the first half of 2020, our net share of put forward capacity has grown more than tenfold over the 3 years until now. In the fourth quarter, we continued our momentum and ended with a total net share of almost 3.7 gigawatts, of which almost 250 megawatts of solar PV projects have so far been realized. Just to remind you, net share reflects total capacity megawatts multiplied by Magnora's ownership share, including farm down projects.

Diversification is key. Our current almost 3.7 gigawatt portfolio is spread across technologies and regions. Our solar development projects represent more than half of our portfolio. This is currently the fastest-growing renewable segment, and we are present in South Africa, Sweden, the U.K. and Norway.

We're pursuing the solar PV opportunity in Norway with an ambition of reaching 1,000 megawatts together with Hafslund and Helios. Hafslund is the second biggest utility in Norway and one of the biggest green utilities in Europe.

Offshore wind remains highly attractive in addition to the current projects Magnora Offshore Wind has, we have entered cooperation agreement with Helios Energy for participation in the upcoming leasing round for floating offshore wind projects in the Celtic Sea, targeting exclusivity for a 1,000-megawatt project.

Within energy storage, it's becoming an important part of the renewable shift to provide stability and more variable energy sources being connected to the grid. We're currently developing 100-megawatt hour with a strong partner in the U.K., and we see an attractive opportunity going forward. We'll get back to that later this year.

Our onshore wind exposure in South Africa and so is the majority of our overall development portfolio there. The region represents an attractive opportunity as South Africa plans to develop minimum 20 to 30 gigawatts of renewable projects over the next decade to decrease the current power shortage.

The government is continuing to invite private investments with the 100-megawatt limit for corporate and industry projects now being removed and permitting processes are under evaluation to become more efficient. There's a high interest from investors experienced and different strategies for Magnora in South Africa under consideration.

Going forward, we expect positive developments within onshore and offshore wind, solar as well as storage solutions within battery, green hydrogen and green ammonia in South Africa. South Africa is a very exciting market with all its inhabitants and over 80% of the energy produced by coal-fired power plants today.

We're continuing to develop renewable projects and looking for new origination opportunities and bring these projects to the rentable phase. Our ambition is to invest in early-stage companies or projects together with strong partners -- with strong partners we mean experienced partners, and we derisk and mature the projects all the way through farm downs and sales.

At the ready-to-build phase, we seek to optimize the ownership of the assets to suitable owners for long-term ownership and operations. We have some guiding criteria for our investments being made, and the initial amount is between NOK 2 million and NOK 20 million, and we'd like to see more than 5x return on these investments over time.

To give you an example, together with the founders of Helios, we have invested over NOK 30 million since the start of 2020. We have now sold over 600-megawatt of projects in Helios in 2021 and 2022, and we're very satisfied with that.

Our business model, we see large and growing return potential in the developing phase of the projects and bring these projects to the ready-to-build phase. In this favorable environment, we're eager to get in the projects early and develop them to the ready-to-build phase, as you see on the graph.

Then we try to find suitable owners to hold these assets over the lifetime of these assets, which can be up to 45 to 60 years. In the development phase, we have limited financial risk as we do not have operating assets on our balance sheet. We add value through derisking our projects through land origination, grid connection agreements, energy yield assessments, procurement management, project unit economic assessments and contract management both for the development of the projects, but also the technical management of the project after operations.

In doing so, we're working with highly competent and reputable strategic partners such as Hafslund, TechnipFMC and DNV. After sell-down and at ready to build, we know the projects very well and we can offer services like construction supervision, technical management, as I mentioned, of the operations. It's basically impossible to sell these projects without these services combined.

We have a strong team to support our development with long track record from the energy renewable industry. As many of you know, Haakon Alfstad led the Statkraft renewable and new renewable energy division for many, many years. Peter Nygren started Arise Energy. [indiscernible] was the country manager for Statkraft in the U.K. during the development of [indiscernible] . And Trond was the business development manager in the U.K. with Bjørn. Trond was also the project manager for the Fulton projects in Norway together with Haakon.

Our most recent engagement is with Stein Bjørnstad, who is an employee now of Magnora, is an assistant professor at the University -- sorry, at the Norwegian School Management BI, where he is -- where he has a focus on economic history and entrepreneurship.

We have a proven model with clear opportunities for further growth. The continued growth will be supported by a dividend from project sales in our portfolio companies and cash generation from our legacy business. In Q2 last year, we set the target to sell 150 to 250 megawatts by the end of the year. We ended up just above 230 megawatts at the very top end of our guided range. We have set a new target for 2023 from 200 megawatts to 325 megawatts of sale of projects for the full year. And we'll increase the high end a little bit, and we do not exactly know where the development margin can go because we see very favorable market conditions. But for the farm down projects in 2022, we saw average sales prices just slightly below the midpoint of our range, which was NOK 500,000 to NOK 1.5 million.

Over to financials. In the fourth quarter, we had revenues of NOK 79.9 million, mainly from the royalty income from our legacy business, amounting to USD 7.5 million. We hedged this amount at around USD, NOK 10.30 in I think it was Q3. The license agreement on Western Isles generated just NOK 2.8 million in the quarter, which was slightly lower than the previous quarters due to lower offloading volumes and technical problems. Our adjusted EBITDA came in at positive NOK 71.9 million, up from negative NOK 1.6 million in Q3 2022.

The deviation from our reporting EBITDA of NOK 6.4 million was development and M&A expenses of NOK 3.5 million and noncash option expense of NOK 2.9 million. Our operating profit was NOK 61 million, negatively impacted by a loss from associated companies of NOK 4.5 million. Pretax profit came in at NOK 62.6 million, and we don't have any tax because of our deferred tax assets -- payable tax, I mean. As a key takeaway, we maintain low and stable operating costs that support our scalable business model as we grow our portfolio and revenues going forward.

Looking at the cash flow from the quarter, we had operating activities accounting for approximately NOK 19.8 million of the reduction. This was, to a large extent, impacted by development costs in our portfolio companies of Evolar and Magnora Offshore Wind, which are consolidated since we own more than 51%. On the investment side, we purchased assets for NOK 4 million in investment in associated companies of NOK 2.5 million. We ended the year with a cash position of NOK 171.9 million. This number does not include the NOK 77 million cash payment from our legacy contract, and we received that money in February a week ago.

Now let's look at our outlook based on the strong position we've managed to build over a short period. The outlook looks very promising for 2023 and beyond. As stated, we have, over the last 3 years, built a diversified and derisked development portfolio of about 3.7 gigawatts, including a farm down of 231 megawatts in 2022 at the very top end of our guided range.

We are strongly positioned for accelerated growth and maturation of our portfolio and expect to farm down another 200 to 325 megawatts in 2023. We expect and lift the ceiling on our range. So it will be interesting to see where we land on the midpoint in 2023. As such, we're entering a new phase for the company, we are farmed down and our portfolio increasingly generate more cash.

We have previously stated the portfolio development target of reaching 5,000 megawatts by 2025. Given the recent accelerated growth, this target will potentially be upward adjusted in the coming quarters. Magnora ended 2022 with a strong cash position of NOK 172 million. This number excludes the shell payment in last week of NOK 77 million.

To summarize, Magnora has scaled 2022 transition from having an early-stage investment portfolio supported by legacy contracts to now being in a position to realize gains from farm downs and sale from a maturing portfolio.

As the company drives accelerated growth going forward, our renewable portfolio will increasingly contribute to cash generation and earnings for the company. We have high expectations for value creation in Evolar, Helios, Magnora Offshore Wind, Magnora South Africa and Magnora U.K. in the coming quarters. We have very high activity for the moment.

For more information about the portfolio companies and specifics, please read our quarterly report or get in touch for a meeting. I'm very happy to work with the team we have in Magnora today. And this is absolutely the best quarter I've been presenting for Magnora since the start of this journey in 2019.

I wish everyone a good day and hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.