Hello and welcome to Ebusco Folio results 2024. My name is Rushdie, and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded, and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero, and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Mr. Christian Schreyer, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Ebusco Folio 2024 webcast, now that we have released our Folio 2024 results and annual report earlier this morning. My name is Christian Schreyer. I am the CEO of Ebusco, and as you know, I joined Ebusco only in September 2024 at a very critical moment in the midst of a massive and urgent turnaround, operationally and financially. With me here is Jan Piet Valk, our Interim CFO. We will keep our presentation short and concise to explain as clearly as possible the current situation of Ebusco. On the next slide, you will find the disclaimer. Jan Piet, over to you.
Thank you, Christian. We would typically not talk about this slide, but we would like to point out one thing in particular, which is that our financial statements are not yet audited. The reason is that the very challenging business circumstances that Ebusco has gone through in the last months, and those which we continue to face, and the transformation the company is going through, including its refinancing and restructuring efforts, have placed significant demands on the time and resources of the entire company. As a result, the drafting of the 2024 financial statements and consequently the external audit process have experienced delays, which prevented completion of the audit within the expected time frame. This means that the financial statements included in both this presentation and the annual report and press release as published today are unaudited.
Thank you, Jan Piet. The agenda is reflected on page four. I will first give you an overview of 2024, which was a year of transition. Afterwards, I will give a brief management update, present the operational review, including the year-end audit book. After that, I will hand over to Jan Piet, who will talk you through the headlines of financial review. After that, we will open the floor for questions.
2024, as I mentioned, was a year of transition. Let's start a statement regarding our financial results on slide five. As you all probably have seen in the press release published this morning, our annual results for 2024 are extremely disappointing. Reflecting on the full year, we have experienced major challenges. Production came to an almost standstill, and we received various order cancellations, both in the second half of the year. Due to our accounting policy, these cancellations led to a reversal of revenue recognition. This reversal of revenues, in combination with costs assumed for our turnaround plan and the restructuring plan, which we announced in December 2024, has had a corresponding impact on our financial result over full year 2024.
2024 has been a challenging year, to say the least, and 2025 will continue to be very challenging, especially from a financial perspective, which we will talk about later in this presentation. Despite these challenges, we have made good progress on different operational fronts, including the change in our production strategy, where we now outsource our production to our contract manufacturers. We continue to receive positive feedback on our buses, and the market fundamentals continue to be strong on the back of key drivers such as government regulations and incentives driving the shift to electric buses throughout Europe. Opportunity remains. The biggest challenge we face currently is access to liquidity, which has complicated our ability to finalize the production of our buses and to ship and deliver these buses to our clients on time.
That brings us to the next slide, which is an update on the items that we, as a management team, are currently very much focused on. First of all, our turnaround plan. In 2024, as you are aware, we announced to shift the production strategy from an OEM to an OED model, in which bus assembly is fully outsourced to contract manufacturers. We have actively worked with both existing and new contract manufacturers to streamline processes and align contractual agreements, and have made significant progress with the optimization of our product footprint. In order to maintain full flexibility, we have now decided to also have the options to produce CASCO monoparts at one of our contract manufacturers, while at the same time maintaining the ability and therewith the option to operate the full CASCO production in-house at our own facility.
In addition, we announced this morning our intention to consolidate our two facilities in the Netherlands into a single facility. The decision has been made to reallocate the Venray facility to Deurne and this is all part of the overall cost reduction program and our aim to have a lean organization. Another key focus area is the management of our liquidity constraints and also the emerging refinancing. I'm therefore now handing over to Jan Piet for some additional information on this slide. Jan Piet.
Thank you, Christian. As you may remember, in February 2025, we entered into a loan agreement of EUR 22 million with various lenders. Unfortunately, of the EUR 22 million, which was fully committed at that time, excuse me, we are waiting for the last EUR 5 million to come in, which also has an impact on our ability to make use of the letter of credit facilities of our banks. The consequence is that this now constitutes a material uncertainty for Ebusco to continue as a going concern. In addition, the same February loan, of which EUR 12 million may be converted into shares after our June AGM, and the outstanding LC utilities must be repaid by mid-August.
Within this context of the short-term liquidity constraints and the mid-August refinancing, we've now started preparations for the legal separation of our bus and energy operations, and we'll explore strategic options for both businesses in the coming period. We are naturally also exploring options to address the mid-August refinancing, and we put significant efforts in addressing our near-term liquidity constraints. As we have published our annual report today, we also want to briefly look back on 2024. Therefore, we will take you through our operational review on the next slide. Over to Christian.
Thanks, Jan Piet. As already mentioned, we have made progress with the implementation of our OED model. Throughout 2024, we have delivered 157 buses, and despite the difficulties associated with the various cancellations, we have been able to relatively quickly reassign 74 canceled buses to other customers, including a number of existing clients. For us, this is an important proof point of the quality of our product. We ended 2024 with an order book of 581 buses, which secures a production until into the end of half year 2026. On slide 10, you will find our complete order book split out in the categories you are familiar with. From the outset, it may feel to you that we have lost a large number of orders.
The fact is that we have made an adjustment by taking out the options for the Ebusco 2.2 buses that we previously presented in our order book, and we have done so based on our assessment of a low likelihood of these options actually converting into fixed orders. With this adjustment, we aim to provide a more accurate picture of our order book, taking into account the situation the company is in currently. I would now like to hand over to Jan Piet again.
Thanks. Thanks, Christian. On this page, we show three key line items from our full year 2024. Clearly, not a result we're proud of, but Christian has explained well what has caused this. 2024 has been a year of transition in which we experienced major challenges. Production came to an almost standstill, and we received various order cancellations, both in the second half of the year. Due to our accounting policy in relation to revenue recognition, these cancellations led to a reversal of revenue that we already recognized. This reversal of revenues, in combination with costs assumed for our turnaround plan and the restructuring plan, which we announced in December 2024, has had a corresponding impact on our financial results over full year 2024. We also reported some write-downs of inventory, goodwill, and some equipment and machinery, which obviously also had a negative impact on our results.
The same applies to some settlement expenses that we incurred and that were related to the earlier referred to contract cancellations. For our detailed financial results, we refer to appendix five of our press release, which contains a financial review and the unaudited annual report. Christian, over to you.
As a closing statement, I want to say that we are very disappointed with the financial results of the year 2024, but we continue to believe in our people, our product, and the underlying market, and are fully committed to address the short-term liquidity constraints that we discussed before. I would use this opportunity to thank you, Jan Piet, for your support and guidance as Interim CFO until today, which will be your last day at the company. You have played a key role for the company in this turbulent period, and I was very lucky to have you by my side. Thank you for that. Operator, back to you to open the floor for any questions.
Thank you, sir. As a reminder for our audio participants, if you'd like to ask questions or make a contribution to this call, please press star one. We'll pause for a moment to assemble a queue. Once again, for our audio participants, star one to ask a question. As there are no questions from our audio participants for now, I will hand you back to your host for any additional remarks.
Thank you. If there are no questions, I would suggest to close the call. Jan Piet, what is your opinion, or should we wait one more minute?
Yeah, we can wait a few more minutes to cool up a bit. Obviously, we're also open afterwards for any questions as well. Let's close it.
Okay. I thank all participants, everyone who listened in the call. Thank you, and have a good day, everyone. Bye.
This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect.