Magnora ASA

OSE:MGN

Earnings Call Transcript

[Erik Sneve, executive]

Welcome to Magnora's quarterly report Q4 2023 as well as our combined annual report this year. I'm Erik Sneve, the CEO of Magnora.

We're still a pure-play asset-light renewable developer, and we will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. We focus on greenfield origination. We secured land, a lot of land. We secure grid connections. We secure permits. And we develop these projects to a stage where energy companies and infrastructure companies [ are ] wanting to take over and buy these projects from us.

We have strict capital discipline. We have a highly experienced team. And I would like to reach out to my team and say that we could have not done what we've done in 2023 without their incredible efforts, their knowledge, passion, and spirit for Magnora and for our clients.

Our land bank is growing rapidly. And in Q4, we reached 7.7 gigawatts.

New for the quarter is that we guide for a land bank of 11 gigawatts by the end of 2025. And we set a new sales target for 2024 of 500 to 625 megawatts for the year.

We have zero debt, low burn, a very solid cash position, and near-term cash flow from project sales, our legacy business and dividends from our portfolio companies. We're listed on the main board of Oslo Stock Exchange with over 7,500 shareholders.

2023 has been an incredible year compared to 2025. We fetched a big payment from Shell in February, $7.5 million. It's still, like, $8.6 million from that deal. And in May, we did an incredible divestment to First Solar, the most formidable solar manufacturer in the world, and we fetched NOK 314 million upfront with potential additional payments of up to NOK 256 million in earnouts. We resumed return of capital in June and started buying back shares as well.

I'd also like to highlight our achievements with our biggest shareholders, Hafslund. We bought 7 projects from Helios in July, in addition to our achievement in South Africa, where we had 3 sales for the year, all to Globeleq, [ a company ] [indiscernible] and we had additional handovers from Helios to Nordic Solar earlier this month. So, we've gone from having basically NOK 0 revenues, '21, '22 to having multiple achievements and major news every month of the year, which I promised at the start of the year.

If you look at the 2023 numbers, you see that we went beyond the guiding from 200 to 325 megawatts of sales to 420 megawatts. Our portfolio grew to 7.7 gigawatts, up from 3.7% at the start of the year.

Cash and cash equivalents at the start of the year was less than NOK 100 million if you reduce for the bank debt of NOK 76.3 million. Our EBITDA for 2022 was NOK 12 million. And for 2023, it was NOK 168 million. Our cash flow was much stronger.

If you look at the capital return and our share buyback, it accounted for around NOK 57 million for the year.

Looking at our portfolio growth from 2021, we have grown approximately 20% per quarter in the land bank, and we don't see that that's going to stop anytime soon. We have a very high focus on origination in Sweden, U.K., Finland, Norway and in particular South Africa for the time being.

If you look at our portfolio, it's mostly tilted towards solar PV, also battery storage, but we have some very interesting assets within offshore wind and, not least, onshore wind in South Africa, where onshore wind is dearly sought after.

If you look at our story, we started out in 2020 after returning NOK 517 million to our shareholders with 4 employees and NOK 50 million in cash. So, in less than 4 years, we've been able to build this asset-light renewable developer with sales in multiple jurisdictions, Sweden, South Africa, now potentially U.K., Finland, Norway, and the farm-downs potentially in Scotland and other initiatives we're working on now.

We have decided to separate the legacy business from the renewable business. And there are multiple reasons for that. One is that we can be included in utility indexes. Our largest shareholders, top 50% shareholders, have been pushing for this for quite some time.

We have strong organic cash flow from both fossil and renewables. Mutual funds have been asking for a split-off to have a higher allocation in our stock. They cannot invest in fossil, a lot of the mutual funds we meet. And we're also able to split the deferred assets, the tax, and [ get ] paid in capital. And there are also M&A reasons for doing this.

So, the new company will be a Magnora 2.0, actually, with a more attractive growth outlook than what we had in -- at the start of 2020.

2024 will also be a lot about revenue recognition as we've had a lot of sales in 2022 and 2023, closing deliveries, enabling us to recognize more of the revenues and more beyond Helios and Evolar for 2024.

We have strong organic growth. We have cash flows across geographies, products, and technologies, and we're working strong on new business development, looking at several countries. We have multiple milestone payments coming from our legacy business from the Evolar sale, from sales being done by our South African operations or in Sweden.

Farm-downs and alliances remain a very real prospect, short to midterm, and M&A-related activities to Magnora and Magnora companies.

We have also a high focus on capital allocation. Having said that, as we receive more cash, we will increase our return of capital, dividend, and we also might consider buying back more shares. We still have a [ power of attorney ] to buy more.

So, we built this from 4 employees, NOK 50 million, to what it is today.

Our business model, to repeat that for new viewers and listeners, we do early-stage development or origination in-house. Typically, we like to invest $200,000 to $2 million (sic) [ NOK 2 million to NOK 20 million ] initially with a very good business plan we developed together with our internal team or with external teams. We set up clear milestones. And we start a partnership basically, and we try to deliver land, grid connections, permits and farm-downs. We add on our experience from constructing wind parks, solar parks, with construction management services or technical management services in the operating part of the business. Our criteria is to have a minimum 5x return on our invested capital.

So, what we do is we develop projects from high risk to lower the risk. And when the risk is low, when it's ready to build, companies like Hafslund, Statkraft or other big energy companies are ready to take over these projects. So, the services we offer are services for landowners, grid connection agreements, environmental assessment, concessions. There's a lot of detail in [ those issues ], and they're increasing year-over-year. And we have the best people in-house and work with the best consultants externally to derisk those issues.

So, basically, due to CO2 issues, climatic issues, there's a huge demand for green energy, and we think it's going to be like that for the next 20, 30 years. And there is very limited project supply due to grid constraints, due to land constraints, regulatory constraints, and environmental issues. And we see that power prices have come up to a higher level than what they've been the last 20 years. And we see falling costs, in particular for battery and solar PV. So, in 2020, I think the price per watt for solar PV models were around [ $ ] 0.40 per watt. And last year, it was around [ $ ] 0.10 per watt, down by a very, very high factor, and especially from the 2000s.

If you look at the energy market on a global perspective, fossil has had around 80% market share since I was a kid, early 1980s, late 1970s. And this is due to the high growth in emerging markets, so using coal or oil and gas or other technologies. Nuclear has a very, very long lead time. And the shortest lead time is around solar PV and battery and also onshore wind in some jurisdictions. So, that's why we have a very high focus on near-term low-hanging fruit compared to many of these bigger projects like floating wind or nuclear, coal-fired power plants. So, this is a very attractive area if you're able to do this with your organic cash flow. So, we have cash and we have cash flow, so we can invest more and more in [ what we succeed in ].

I'd just like to highlight our customers. We don't have any customers really who are dependent on project finance or junk bonds, high-yield bonds. And most of these companies, Globeleq, Commerz, Hafslund, First Solar, they have a very solid balance sheet, and they can buy projects, companies, from us without having a need to have the financing risk or interest rate risk. And this makes sales processes much, much easier. And we're very happy, and we have had multiple sales to several of these companies, truly blue chip companies and truly excellent business partners. Without our partners, as well as our employees, we would not have any profitable business.

So to highlight our business, very rapid growth in our origination in onshore, solar PV and also wind to some extent, in South Africa. We have started our journey with more diversification, a very high focus on harvesting. And a large portion of our land bank is marketable. Remember, we have huge areas in South Africa, for instance, which can easily add on to our land bank if there are known grid connections. So, the grid -- the megawatts we put out is what we think is achievable with the grid connections in the foreseeable future.

If you look at our offshore business, we have a very cost-efficient project in Solgrid, Sweden. We're waiting for incentives from the Swedish government. We hope that that will happen this year.

We have a very attractive project in Scotland. We call the project Talisk. And the U.K. has a very attractive regulatory regime for offshore wind as opposed to many other markets. And the latest CfD level, basically the feed-in tariff, you can build a ceiling for that. It's NOK 3.25 per kilowatt hour as opposed to NOK 0.66 for the bottom-fixed project in Sorlig Nordsjo announced last year.

So U.K., they -- it seems like they do whatever it takes to bring offshore wind to the market. If you look at our legacy royalty business, we have a very long-term prospect for this and very interesting revenue streams, and we're going to make a very interesting company out of that. In order to get -- become part of that business, you need to own the Magnora shares because we will distribute shares in the legacy business, if it's sanctioned in the general assembly. So, this will be [ free shares to earn a ] huge dividend for our investors.

Over to South Africa, what a beautiful country, truly beautiful. If you look at the right side here, you see South Africa's rolling blackouts. And they're increasing year by year to astronomical levels. So, on the Y-axis, it's hours of national power cuts. So, for 2022, it was above 2,000 hours, so close to 2,500 hours. And in a year, it's 8,760 hours, I believe. So, that's 1/4 of the year with rolling blackouts.

So, South Africa has 50,000 megawatts of installed coal-fired power plants. And if you look at the right side here, you see that, from 2016 to 2022, you have had a drop of above 20% in the utilization factor of the coal-fired power plants, meaning they have taken out 100 terawatt hours of electricity supply in the system. And that's what creates such a huge growth opportunity for Magnora South Africa as this privatization accelerates. So, we have a great team there, close to 15 people now, that came from the team leader, Dirk. He worked with WindSim, a regional company, for many years. He knows the regions and the region [ costs ] really well, and he's a South African. He has the best-in-class resources and very stable wind resources to work with. We're very proud to have him and his team in Magnora.

So, we think Magnora South Africa today, not 6 months or 12 months ago, but today, resembles a lot what Sweden was like 18 months ago with Helios. We have the perfect foundation for rapid growth. We have the right market. We have the right team. We have the right business model, and we have the right timing.

So, we think we will have a portfolio of close to 1 gigawatt ready to be marketed this year. And we hope to close many of those transactions by the end of the year. So, it'll be a very, very exciting year for Magnora South Africa. And this market is, as you know, completely disconnected from the European power market.

So, a little bit back to our organization, we're proud and pleased of our Executive Chairman, Torstein Sanness, who was the founder of Lundin Petroleum Norway; Haakon Alfstad, Senior Vice President in Statkraft for multiple years, leading onshore and offshore business; Peter Nygren, who's the Founder and CEO of Arise wind power; and we have [ Bjorn Stein ] and [indiscernible] Espen in our core team who are truly excellent team leaders, sitting on the Boards of all our projects or companies. I sit myself in some companies, but we truly have a great partnership. And we try to challenge it every day at work and our portfolio companies to grow faster, grow more profitable, and have exits.

So, a little bit about the Board and management. We all own shares in the company. Torst and I, we own the most. We take well care of running the business. The Board, our CFO and I, we go over all the invoices in the company and authorize before we pay them. So, we have very good control of costs and always make investment notes on new capital allocations, [ still ] ready for the Board to be approved on very short notice. This is very important in a small, fast-growing company, to have good governance and speedy processes.

On the right side, you see our shareholder list. Hafslund, one biggest utilities in the Nordics, is our biggest shareholder. And we have increasingly mutual funds coming into the shareholder base, and we have a very loyal top 50% shareholder base supporting our strategy and always coming up with new and compelling ideas or challenges [ for us ] in good ways.

Over to the financials just to go over how we report and consolidate. So we use IFRS. And for companies who own more than 50%, you need to consolidate the costs and revenues. And you also see Evolar there because we have also in our numbers still until May last year, and also Neptun, which we sold in Q4 last year. So, if we own less than 50% but more than 20%, we use the equity method, and then you need to account for 40%, for instance, in Helios, share of their cost and their revenues, and for Kustvind or Magnora U.K. So, all our companies, they report IFRS, except for Helios. That we report in local GAAP. And local GAAP in Sweden is more conservative than IFRS, meaning we recognize revenues a little later than what we usually do with IFRS, surprisingly. Helios reporting year starts May 1 last year and ends 30th of April this year.

So, just a little bit about the accounting, we had a small improvement in the EBITDA from Q3, negative NOK 15.3 million to [ negative ] NOK 13.9 million. And our profit and loss before tax was negative NOK 16 million, around $1.6 million.

We have -- we don't pay tax because we have a tax loss of deferred tax assets of NOK 3.5 billion from our legacy business. Some of that deferred tax loss will be brought over to our legacy business. We'll get back to that later.

And we also have paid in capital of NOK NOK8.4 billion. Some of that will also be -- actually, a larger portion of that will probably move over to the legacy business. Sorry for coughing, that time of the year.

Cash flow, very decent, so not much big movements from our cash after the Evolar sale. We have very strict capital control and focus on careful investing.

Outlook, as I mentioned earlier in the presentation, our portfolio, new target, 11 gigawatt, new sales target, 500 to 625 megawatts, up 300 from our target last year. And we have the same price range for sales. Solar PV in South Africa is now on the low side of that range and offshore wind might be a little over. And based on the unit economics, grid connection tariffs, you might be above NOK 1.5 million as well. We have huge deflation in solar PV, so that's a positive factor. And then you've had interest rates costs rising, so offsetting some of that deflation in solar PV.

We think we have a quite large portfolio of marketable projects in 2024. And we also have the potential to farm-down our floating wind asset early next year. So, we're working full throttle on all these initiatives. We might farm-down [ in that floating and before that ]. So, I can get back to you more about that a little later in one-to-ones.

So, for 2023, we were around the midpoint, I think, on that guided range, NOK 0.5 billion to NOK 1.5 billion.

So, 2024 outlook, we're separating legacy business from the renewable. It's about revenue recognition as we cannot revenue recognize all the sales before they're actually delivered, as I mentioned before, and we have a focus on new sales as well. Strong organic growth, multiple, multiple milestone payments, very interesting M&A discussions, farm-down possibilities, and a high focus on capital allocation and return on capital.

So, to summarize the outlook a little bit, we've had a very, very healthy 2023, maturing our investment portfolio. Moving into '24, increasing our sales target. 2025, our land bank is going to go to 11 gigawatts. We're listing our legacy business, multiple M&A options, strong organic cash flow, accelerating sales from onshore and new [indiscerible] businesses, milestone businesses, and dividend. And as you know, we have engaged Pareto to work on the strategic process. And we're still in the middle of that, and we expect to have positive news going forward in some areas. So, I think that summarizes the outlook.

And with that, I end the presentation. You have, always, the opportunity to contact us by e-mail or SMS. We have an office in [ Scandinavia ], in Oslo. Feel free to join us for coffee. If you know landowners or have business ideas for us, always feel free to pitch us with good ideas.

We have the same strategy as in 2020 with the strategy [indiscernible] electric future. This is what we're doing, been doing all the time. And we're going to continue doing what we do, profitable growth for our employees, shareholders, vendors and customers. And I'd like to, again, reiterate my thanks to all our employees, partners, vendors, clients who make Magnora an interesting place to work and a profitable business. Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing from you.