Yara International ASA

OSE:YAR

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q2

[Silje Ingeberg Nygaard]

Good morning, and welcome to Yara's third quarter results presentation -- second quarter results presentation. Our presentation today will be Yara's CEO, Svein Tore Holsether; and CFO, Tore Giæver. A little after the presentation today, there will be an audio conference call at 1 p.m. Oslo time with an opportunity to ask questions. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce our CEO, Svein Tore Holsether.

[Svein Tore Holsether, President & CEO]

Thank you very much, Silje, and good morning, good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you're dialing in from. As always, we're going to start with our safety performance, and it continues to be at a low and industry-leading level. The TRI rate this quarter was at 1.2, which is our lowest level so far and down from 1.3 in the first quarter. And this is thanks to a strong safety culture and the attention and efforts every day from all our 16,000 employees. Our long-term ambition remains 0 injuries.Now let's take a look at the results. Overall, this has been another good quarter for Yara with improvements across a number of KPIs. Our returns improved for the 12th quarter in a row at 9.8% return on invested capital for the last months -- for the last 12 months rolling, and this can be compared with 7.3% a year earlier.For the quarter in isolation, our return on invested capital was 13.8%. Pricing has improved significantly and our realized premiums are recovering, following the rapid increase in commodity prices that temporarily compressed premiums. Finally, our cash flow improved further. And based on this, we will propose an additional dividend of NOK 20 per share to be paid in the third quarter.Taking a closer look at cash flow, you can see that the 12-month rolling total is up approximately $300 million since last quarter, and this is driven by improved earnings and lower working capital. Our strong cash flow improvement trend reflects improvements both bow and below the line, better cash flow from operation and lower CapEx. In addition, the proceeds from our Qafco divestment in third quarter 2020 have added to our free cash flow for the last 12 months.We have recently made new appointments to the Yara executive management team that will further strengthen our transformation agenda. Lars Rosaeg has taken up the role as EVP, Corporate Development and Deputy CEO, and I will come back to the new corporate development activity later in the presentation. Solveig Hellebust has been appointed to the role of EVP, People Process and Digitalization. And Mónica Andrés has taken over as EVP Europe. Thor Giæver has taken up the role as EVP and Chief Financial Officer. And now I will hand over to Thor, who will provide some further insights into our financial results this quarter. Over to you, Thor.

[Thor Giæver, EVP & CFO]

Thank you, Svein Tore. It's a pleasure to present a strong set of results. As you can see, we have positive developments across a number of key measures. Our earnings and our returns are up. And in addition, as you've already heard, we've released operating capital more than $400 million and in total, generated cash from operations of almost $1.1 billion for the quarter.Our EBITDA was up 32%. I'll come back shortly with a closer look at the EBITDA development. Net income and earnings per share increased even more than EBITDA, mainly due to a currency gain of $244 million compared with a currency loss of $66 million a year ago.Our return on invested capital continued to increase both due to the improved results and the operating capital release. A note on the operating capital, we currently have a high level of prepayments from customers, directionally $0.5 billion above a normalized level, mostly in Brazil. And I'll come back to how these prepayments impact some of our metrics in the quarter.Our investments were up 12% from a year earlier, but remain at a low level. For the quarter, these are mainly related to ordinary maintenance to drive productivity and reliability. And our full year CapEx guidance is unchanged.Taking a closer look now at the moving parts on EBITDA. First of all, the volume. As you can see, our overall volume variance was flat. But within this, there are significant variations both between products and regions. On the volumes product-wise, we had lower nitrates and NPK deliveries, but higher urea deliveries. Both in volume and financial terms, these 2 effects were almost equal, but with opposite signs.On the margins, we had approximately $450 million of positive price effects, mainly for nitrates and urea, both of which were up more than 50% year-over-year. And this strong price development more than offset the gas cost increase of $203 million.On currency, we have a smaller negative effect reflecting slightly stronger Norwegian kroner and euro compared to U.S. dollars, increasing our net fixed cost slightly in U.S. dollar terms. Excluding currency effects, our fixed costs are up $51 million.Now as communicated earlier, we have reallocated $100 million from our 2021 CapEx to fixed cost in order to ramp up our farming solutions and other strategic activities. The fixed cost development from quarter-to-quarter will vary depending on both seasonal and operational factors. But overall, our activities are progressing according to plan.Looking at the results by region. Let me first comment on the volumes here as well. The lower nitrate and NPK deliveries that I mentioned on the previous slide are linked to the 16% lower deliveries in Europe. Now Europe had relatively strong deliveries earlier this season. But with the strong price increases during the second quarter, the buying was mostly for direct application, not as you might normally have also buying for the next season.And as a result, we believe stocks in the value chain are lower than normal at the start of the new season in Europe, which is positive for the new season. And actually, overall, for this season, Europe deliveries were down 3%. So for the season as a whole, this is not a large change. And as you can see, the Europe results did improve as the higher prices and margins more than offset these lower deliveries in the quarter. In our Americas region, our deliveries were down 2%. This is smaller, but also a phasing as we had an earlier season pattern a year ago.In Africa and Asia, we saw both improved prices, higher production output and higher deliveries. And it's the same strong story in Industrial Solutions with higher deliveries, improved margins and improved production reliability.For Global Plants, the development was more stable, higher prices here, too, but offset by increased energy prices, currency effects and slightly higher fixed costs. For Yara Clean Ammonia, we delivered improved results with both higher trade volumes and higher prices.Looking at the commercial side, the strong rise in commodity nutrient prices drove a short-term premium compression, especially in the first quarter. However, all prices have moved higher and are strongly positive for our results. In the second quarter, our nitrates and NPK prices have come back more strongly, and our premiums are recovering as expected. For our NPKs in particular, prices do move at a slower pace but with generally higher premiums as they target higher-value segments where prices are more stable than for the spot price commodities. And the NPKs are also sold across a wider range of geographies compared with nitrates.So now looking at our longer-term operational improvement efforts. On the production, we had a continued positive trend for both ammonia and finished products, and this is despite some unplanned stops during the quarter. The same is true for energy consumption, where near term, at least performance is closely tied to our production reliability. Longer term, we also have a number of projects to continue improving our energy consumption.On fixed costs, as mentioned, we are progressing according to plan and in line with our guidance. Now we've had strong progress on operating capital days where -- and here, we do exclude the prepayments I mentioned earlier. The positive development underlying then on operating capital is across all our regions, and it's partly due to targeted improvement activities and partly reflecting a strong market environment and commercial performance.So with the strong cash flow from operations and operating capital release, we have more than funded both our investments and the NOK 20 per share annual dividend that we paid in May and still reduced our net debt by almost $300 million during the quarter. And as a result, we are pleased to propose an additional NOK 20 per share dividend for payment in the third quarter.Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio at the end of second quarter was 1.05. Adjusting for the higher-than-normal prepayment level and the proposed additional dividend, our pro forma net debt to EBITDA is 1.5.We are planning to hold an extraordinary general meeting in early September to approve this dividend, and we will confirm this in a meeting notice, including the date, minimum 3 weeks before the EGM date. We will also consider further cash returns in the coming quarters, in line with our capital policy -- capital allocation policy even.So with that, I'd like to hand you back to Svein Tore for his closing remarks.

[Svein Tore Holsether, President & CEO]

Thank you very much, Thor. At our ESG seminar in December, we laid out our updated strategy and the framework for our ongoing transformation. Our focus now is on executing on this strategy, broadening our core and enabling the hydrogen economy. At the same time, we continue to drive sustainable performance through capital discipline, clear capital allocation and active portfolio management.And in line with this strategy, we're well underway with ramping up new businesses like Yara Clean Ammonia and Agoro, our carbon marketplace initiative. These businesses present significant value creation opportunities grown from Yara's core, and we continue to explore further opportunities in our broad portfolio.For these units, we are developing distinct strategies, driving active ownership and establishing separate legal entities and Boards. For Yara Clean Ammonia, Yara expects to stay the majority owner, while for Agoro, Yara will likely dilute its ownership over time. For Yara growth ventures, we're likely to keep holding minority stakes as part of our innovation portfolio, both through direct investments and into managed funds.For Yara, there is no contradiction between our capital allocation and CapEx policies and growing these businesses. On the contrary, by actively utilizing capital markets and partnership models, Yara will be able to both develop these businesses while maintaining capital discipline.One example of this approach is Yara's contribution in kind structure through its ammonia plant in the Porsgrunn project, valuing Yara's ammonia component at USD 450 million. At our ESG seminar, we also launched clear ambitions that we will measure and report on as we progress towards our strategic targets. We will provide transparent progress reporting across 3 key dimensions: people, planet and prosperity. For us, transparency is not only about what is progressing, but also about where we have shortfalls and what mitigating actions we put in place. I am pleased to say that we're already making significant progress towards our strategic targets. Within the people dimension, our injury rate has decreased further, and we are progressing in our efforts to improve gender diversity. On the planet dimension, we have had the commercial launch of Agoro carbon lines in June and with the first farmers already signed up. Within prosperity, as we already seen, we are delivering strong results, and our production performance is improving.Also during the quarter, our sustainability rating from MSCI was upgraded from BBB to A, driven among other things by the ambition level in our CO2 reduction target for 2030 and our improvements to sustainability governance.After several years of significant reduction in world hunger, we're now moving in the wrong direction. And this was evident even before COVID-19, but the pandemic has accelerated this negative trend. [Audio Gap] people now suffer from hunger, and that's 100 million more than in 2019. That's unacceptable, and we all have a role to play.And Yara's products and solutions make a real difference. When we reach farmers, the most in need, the results can be truly stunning. And I brought a couple of examples that I came across a short while ago based on the initiative from Yara back into last year with $25 million fertilizer donation to several African countries. We've been able to reach several farmers. Here, you see 2 of them, Stephen and Agnes. And as you see, Stephen has been able to -- from his plot, to go from 3 bags of maize to 12 bags -- from 4 bags of maize to bags of maize, while Agnes, single mother of 3, she harvested 16 bags on her plot, and that's up from 3 before.These are 2 examples of 2 individuals. We've been able to reach 250,000 farmers with fertilizers through this initiative, and we've digitally connected with 2 million farmers to give agronomic advice. And when you add all of that up, there's a significant increase in food production. And this initiative alone has grown enough additional food to provide food for a million people for 1 year.So running up then, I hope you agreed that our prospects are attractive. The market fundamentals are strong. And as you've seen in our results earlier in the presentation, Yara is creating business opportunities from resource and environmental challenges. We have a focused and sustainable long-term strategy. And our returns are strong and increasing.So I thank you for joining today's presentation, and I will then hand you back to Silje. Over to you, Silje.

[Silje Ingeberg Nygaard]

Thank you, Svein Tore. And so just a few closing remarks from me then to remind people that we have a conference call starting in approximately 40 minutes at 1:00 p.m. Oslo time. And if you don't have the details to this, you will find it on our web page, yara.com, under Investor Relations. And with that, thank you for attending Yara's second quarter results presentation.