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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Q2 2023 Analysts and Investors Conference Call of Klockner & Co SE. For your information, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Felix Schmitz. Please go ahead, sir.
Thanks, and welcome to our Q2 call. With me today are our CEO, Guido Kerkhoff; our CFO, Oliver Falk; our CEO, Americas; John Ganem; and our CEO Europe, Bernhard Weiß. They will guide you through the presentation. And afterwards, we are happy to take your questions. With that, I hand over to you, Guido.
Yes. Thanks, and welcome also from my side to our Q2 call. I'd like to start straight away with the highlights of this quarter in which we once again demonstrated our ability to perform also in a difficult market environment. Shipments came in below previous year's levels due to the challenging macro environment and the muted demand in light of significantly declining prices in Q2. Prices, however, seem to have bottomed out now and stabilized now. So it looks like the trust is now behind. Sales went down year-over-year as a result of the overall lower price levels compared to last year's quarter. Gross profit decreased due to the less pronounced pricing dynamics compared to last year's quarter. Back in Q2 '22, we benefited from significantly positive price effects.
Despite the aforementioned challenges and the significant steel price corrections in Q2, we achieved a solid operating result with a forecast guidance and an EBITDA before material special effects of EUR 63 million, with a particularly strong performance of our U.S. business. Once again, we proved our resilience and ability to perform in any market cycle and any underlying economic environment. At the same time, major parts of the risks are now mitigated while prices seem to stabilize again. Driven by our solid operating performance and underpinned by our consistent net working capital management, we generated a significantly positive operating cash flow of EUR 31 million. In total, we generated an operating cash flow of EUR 96 million in the first half of '23. Accordingly, net debt came down significantly year-on-year as we further derisked our already solid balance sheet. Let's now focus on the strategic achievements in the recent months, starting with our HVAC progress in North America. Over to you, John.
Thank you, Guido. Very excited that we were able to execute the closing the acquisition of Nation Materials of Mexico. Yesterday, in fact, I'm sitting here in Hermosillo, Mexico getting ready to visit our new teammates this morning. National Materials Mexico is a pure HVAC play. We feel Mexico is positioned to be the major beneficiary of deglobalization, as it is the clear epicenter of reshoring for manufacturing supply chains back to North America. We fully expect that the growth potential in Mexico over the next number of years will see that of most other countries, including even the U.S.
National Material and Klockner are highly complementary businesses that will generate strong accretive growth strategies when fully integrated. For example, NMM's strong position in automotive and electrical steel opened up significant opportunities across the entire North American and even global organization. The same can be said of Klockner's growing expertise in fabrication and its leading market position on plate processing. Turning over to American Fabricators. We've recently relocated our major fabrication business in Nashville. We're in the process of relocating should be completed by the end of September, and we're moving into a much larger and more modern facility.
This will immediately eliminate severe capacity constraints and allow us to meet the rapidly growing customer demand for higher value-added fabricated parts and components. Excited to announce that we've -- we are moving forward with our new facility in Brandenburg, Kentucky, which has now received all necessary environmental approvals and should be operational by year-end. This new facility not only expands our market leading plate processing capabilities, but also further strengthens our long-term partnership with Nucor. Similar to AFI, this investment will be squarely focused on higher value-added processing and services, and we'll be uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new core mills highly differentiated production capabilities.
And finally, production of our -- our new structure leveling facility on the campus of Nucor's Berkeley, South Carolina sheet mill is quickly ramping up the capacity. Not only does this new line give us the ability to meet the growing needs for laser flash sheet from our OEM customer base, it is also providing critical support to the rapidly growing fabrication activities across the wider KMC network, which also require the same laser flat sheets that we can now produce and supply internally. Thank you.
Yes. Thanks, John. Now let's turn our attention to our European business. We are about to deeply transform our European distribution business and to improve our underlying profitability based on substantially expanding our exposure into higher value-add business. In the recent months, we achieved important milestones to accelerate the transformation of our warehouse into leading [HVAP] centers. One element is the continued investment in the state-of-the-art laser capacities. This is also in response to the increasing demand of innovative and leading-edge services to accommodate prospective growth. We are currently establishing our second industry leading laser center in Duisburg, Germany, close to our company headquarter and to centralize leading [Indiscernible] end capabilities.
This center complements our existing laser services in [Indiscernible] The total laser capacity will be significantly increased by investing in 3 additional lasers. Moreover, we have invested in a new flatbed laser in Kassel, Germany. The investment also marks the entry into the thick plate market segment in Europe for us and significantly extends our service portfolio. With that, we are targeting the mechanical engineering industry and focusing on agricultural, machinery, truck construction and rail transportation in particular. All these investments are growth-oriented expansions. Furthermore, we set our first automated vision guided robot for deburring steel into operation in Bremen, Germany in Q2.
This robot is the first of its kind in Europe, demonstrating our leadership role in Europe and significantly increasing our capacity for post plasma cutting processing. Now speaking on behalf of the Swiss colleagues, we closed an M&A deal in Switzerland on June 1 and acquired the [Indiscernible] for a mid-single euro million number. [Indiscernible] creates digital fabrication models for sanitary and heating, ventilation as well as air conditioning application scenarios. We are gaining access to innovative knowledge to create 3D plans by developing digital working and installation planning via digital twins and participating in a strongly growing market. It's a perfect fit to our strong position in the Swiss construction market and our well-known expertise in prefabrication and will accelerate joint growth. With that, I would like to hand back to you, Guido.
Thanks, Bernhard. In addition to the aforementioned progress, we continued our strong track record of executing our sustainability strategy. This quarter marked a significant milestone for our customers with the launch of Nexigen data services. We're convinced that innovation technology and new business models will enable the successful decarbonization of the steel industry and its customers. After many discussions with our customers and partners with a goal to decarbonize the value chain we've identified 2 key challenges.
First, customers need to determine the emissions data for the products they purchase. Our Nexigen PCF Algorithm launched in the beginning of this year is addressing this issue successfully. This innovative tool enables us to calculate individualized Product Carbon Footprint for nearly all of our 200,000 products fully to have aligned.
The second major challenge our customers face is to identify opportunities for optimization and emission reduction. What material is available when and how much can I say. To help our customers tackle this, we took the next step and built together with front-running customers, Nexigen data services for smart digital management of carbon product emissions. We leverage the potential of big data and provide a clear and transparent overview in one place, bringing together the carbon emission history of all products procured through Klockner and giving our customers precise items about what's next, allowing them to directly see how they can potentially reduce their carbon emissions compared to previous orders. By using an open energy-efficient blockchain technology, we're once again demonstrating our leadership role as an innovator. The blockchain enables a high level of data integrity and seamless transparency along the entire value chain. Nexigen data services and our services under the Nexigen brand are complemented by an extensive partner network.
In Q2, 2 [additional] partnerships were established to increase the access to carbon-reduced material in the short and in the long run. The launch of Nexigen data services together with the extension of our partner network once again demonstrates our role as a leader in the sustainable steel industry and consolidates this position further. Now let's move on to the financials.
Yes. Thank you. As Guido already stated, we achieved a solid operating performance with an, again, positive cash flow generation despite the ongoing challenging market environment. Our proactively enforced inventory reduction over the second half of 2022 mitigated large parts of the significant steel price corrections in quarter 3 and 4, 2022; and recently, again, in quarter 2, 2023 when prices dropped sharply. However, prices bottomed at the end of quarter 2 with strong and promising signals of a sustained stabilization Therefore, we are confident that we are through the trough now with a very lean inventory situation in our warehouses. As a result of our consistent net working capital management, we also expect a strong and significantly positive cash flow for the full year 2023.
Cash flow generation was and will be key for us going forward. Additionally, I would like to point out again that we substantially derisked further over the recent quarters, with net debt reduced by over EUR 300 million year-over-year. Moreover, we will also continue to focus on our consistent cost management going forward. Our efforts in digitalization and automation certainly are huge assets in this regard. Digital quotes for instance, that is quotes automatically handed by the Kloeckner Assistant more than doubled year-over-year in the first half of 2023 and benefited strongly from the implementation of the e-mail to quote feature in the last year. Therefore, our digitalization and automation initiatives continue to free our sales people for manual work and let them focus on higher-margin business.
Let's take a look into shipment sales, gross profit and gross profit margin for the second quarter. Shipments were 5.5% below the previous year's level due to the challenging market environment, especially in the European markets with a reluctancy to buy because of the downward price correction. Sales decreased from EUR 2.6 billion in quarter 2 '22 to EUR 2.0 billion due to the overall lower average price level. Gross profit came in at EUR 335 million, after a gross profit of EUR 508 million in quarter 2, 2022.
Gross profit margin went down from 19.7% to 17% year-over-year, however, only down slightly by 0.2% points quarter-on-quarter. We will now focus on the EBITDA for the group. This quarter, we achieved a solid EBITDA performance despite the challenging market environment and the negative price effects due to the significant steel price correction in quarter 2. The EBITDA before material special effects was at EUR 63 million. Reported EBITDA came in at EUR 62 million. We saw a negative volume effect of EUR 28 million year-over-year due to the challenging macroeconomic environment, especially in Europe. The negative price effect of EUR 145 million year-over-year resulted from the overall lower average price level in all segments year-over-year. and a significant steel price correction in quarter 2.
OpEx was down year-over-year, driven by lower personnel expenses, mainly bonuses and expenses for shipments as well as operating supplies. Lastly, we had marginal positive FX effects and negative material special effects of below EUR 1 million, respectively. We are now coming to the cash flow and net debt development. We had a net working capital release of EUR 35 million, substantially driven by our consistent net working capital management. Taking into consideration interest and tax payment of total EUR 30 million, as well as other taxes and VAT payments, cash flow from operating activities came in at EUR 31 million in quarter 2 2023. Including net CapEx of EUR 25 million, cash flow was at EUR 6 million. As a consequence of our dividend payout, partly offset by our positive free cash flow, our net financial debt increased quarter-on-quarter from EUR 539 million to EUR 596 million. However, we deleveraged significantly compared to prior year levels.
I now hand over to John to have a closer look on our end markets in North America.
Thank you, Oliver. Looking at North America and specifically the U.S. through the first half of 2023, the economy has clearly outperformed expectations, and it now appears that the risk of recession has been significantly reduced or at least most likely delayed until sometime in 2024. While most indicators point to an economy that is slowly decelerating, the continued strength in the labor markets, improving consumer confidence and a downward inflationary trends are combining to make the elusive concept of a soft landing a real possibility.
Turning to our expectations for steel demand. Overall, for 2023, we continue to forecast a slight increase in steel demand, although the development will vary significantly depending on the industry segment. Looking at construction, the downward pressure in construction is milder than previously expected as the situation in residential, while down from peak levels reached in 2022, has stabilized that what we would categorize as a fairly healthy level from a historical perspective.
We also continue to experience consistent and stable demand from all nonresidential sectors and expect to start seeing tangible positive effects from increased infrastructure investment as we get later into the year. Looking at manufacturing machinery and mechanical, in the first half of 2023, we have experienced slightly higher demand from the heavy equipment and machinery segments, which has helped offset the weakness in other manufacturing segments. While many forecasts predict some pullback in heavy equipment as the year goes on, we currently see no evidence of this in the current forecast coming from our larger OEM customers. As such, we expect a generally stable development through year-end.
Looking at transportation. Clearly, a major driver behind the still positive outlook for year-over-year demand growth in North America is coming from the auto sector, where the easing of supply chain constraints, improving dealer inventory levels and resilient consumer demand resulted in strong auto production increases over the first half of 2023. We see this trend continuing for the rest of the year, although growth rates may moderate from the strong numbers experienced year-to-date.
Looking at household and commercial appliances, not surprisingly, the negative development in residential construction has weighed on the appliance and HVAC segments where first half production levels have been negatively impacted by destocking and the rebalancing of production with actual demand. Again, the development in these sectors has actually been modestly better than we previously expected, thanks to the relative resilience in residential construction noted earlier.
With the destocking like cycle at these key customers likely close to complete, we are assuming a more stable outlook through Q3 with normal seasonality factors in play later in the year. And then finally, looking at energy, while we still see the overall energy sector trending higher in 2023, recent drilling activity has been somewhat subdued and below expectations. This is being clearly reflected in the currently lower rig count trends. However, the weakness in drilling is being offset by what we see as strong growth in both the Transformer and Renewable Energy segment. This is especially true in both solar and renewable energy storage where Klockner has benefited directly from new opportunities and rapidly expanding activity. So in summary, excluding normal seasonal factors, we remain cautiously optimistic for underlying second half demand, albeit with some moderate downside risk. Transportation, renewable energy, nonresidential construction, infrastructure and heavy equipment should continue to offset the negative pressures coming from residential construction, appliance and other general manufacturing.
Specific to Klockner, we expect to continue delivering positive year-over-year growth in North America as we benefit from our highly diversified business model, which is not dependent on any single industry segment. Additionally, successful business development activities in higher-growth market sectors, as well as the continued expansion of our higher value-added product portfolio should support further market share gains. And of course, starting in August, our overall development will be even further enhanced by the immediate accretive contribution from the National Materials of Mexico acquisition. Thank you, and I'll turn it over to Bernhard.
Thanks, John. Coming to our sectors in Europe. The construction industry, we see, of course, that interest rate hikes continues to affect the demand, especially in residential infrastructure projects, however, are expected to partly compensate with a special focus on green materials. In manufacturing, machinery and mechanical engineering, we still sense a reasonably filled order books with our customers with no negative trend aside and the risk of production disruptions has been mostly mitigated. In transportation, distinguishing between automotive and shipbuilding in automotive, no major change since the last call. The general consumption remains stable, and the risk of supply chain constraints is still present in the form of delivery issues from major mills, semiconductors and other electric vehicle specific components such as rare earth. We are following these developments, of course, very closely.
In shipbuilding, the Commercial segment is still under heavy pressure whereas in the gray ship area, we are currently active -- in active talks for projects where we believe to have very good chances and the impact should be visible from 2024 on. And also in commercial appliances segment, which is with marginal impact on our European business. However, we expect a stable development for 2023. And last but not least, in the energy industry, there are also no significant changes since the last call. The positive market trend, however, for greener energy generation continues and this represents, of course, a window of opportunity for us to accelerate green steel offerings.
Yes. Let's now come to the financial outlook for the third quarter and the full year '23. As John and Bernhard pointed out, some uncertainties will persist in the second half of the year, even though the trough seems behind us. Prices continue to stabilize, and we expect a sequential recovery in demand. Further, we expect the U.S. economy to remain resilient that the overall macroeconomic conditions will improve over the course of this year.
For the third quarter, we forecast another solid EBITDA before material special effects of EUR 40 million to EUR 80 million. Against the background of our assumptions of an improvement of the macroeconomic conditions, we expect a sequential recovery in demand, the remainder of the year and forecast shipments to slightly increase in full year '23, including NMM. We continue to expect sales below the previous year's figure in '23 due to an overall lower average price level and EBITDA before material special effects of EUR 220 million to EUR 280 million despite the challenging market environment. Moreover, we expect the operating cash flow to come in strong. We're now happy to answer your questions.
[Operator Instructions] [Indiscernible].
So first of all, thank you for the presentation and for taking my questions. I would have 2 questions. The first one is on the guidance range. So I'm wondering if you could maybe tell us a little bit more about the assumptions regarding the steel prices and the inventory management, the guidance for the third -- for the third quarter. And also the full year is based on? And what are your expectations for the regional earnings split in the second half of the year?
And the second question is on the Kloeckner Assistant. So I'm curious about how you're getting on with the AI tool and if there are any further efficiency gains already visible and also maybe about the full potential after the full rollout of the tool you are expecting in the future.
Yes. Thanks for your questions. Let me start with the guidance range and the assumptions. I mean, on the prices, as I've outlined, we think we see the trough now and the stabilization. So our expectation and our guidance is based on this assumption that we have, and we've given that for Europe and for the U.S. On the net working capital, I mean, you've seen now throughout the whole cycle, tonnage wise and price wise, we've been very cautious, and we continue on that one going forward. And that's both is the basis for our guidance. Regional earnings guidance, we have never given and we won't start, please. Please understand us there. So we're doing it overall. That has to be [Indiscernible]. On the Kloeckner Assistant, look, Kloeckner Assistant, as we've said, we continuously develop it, and it helps us, and we've changed our even our KPIs, how to drive it. We focus a bit more on quotes now and the number of orders, so to increase indeed the performance.
So we went out with the e-mail connection and we have some additional features we're currently developing to include it way better into our ERP and other systems so to increase the efficiency and acceptance internally, externally towards the customer it works very well. But it's not only the Kloeckner Assistant; I mean, you've heard about our Nexigen data services as well. So now this is another tool towards the customer front end, where customers they have to pay for it. But they have the service that they can see how much the carbon emissions from the last order is, and what we can offer to drive it down. So another offer out to the customers on a fully digital basis where they can see how they can optimize. So we're trying not to be just on the connection of the Kloeckner Assistant. But now with services around this green topic to help our customers to see what they can get over time. And again, that, I think, is a big offer out there for customers to connect to us.
At the moment there are no further questions. [Operator Instructions]
Well, if there are no more questions, we're happy to take your questions after the call as well. Just call Felix or his team or us, and we're looking forward to the questions. Otherwise, we think we seem to have presented everything in total. So thanks for dialing in and listening to us.