Good afternoon. This is the Collins Call Conference Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Fiera Milano Results at the 5th of June, January 23rd conference call. As a reminder, all participants are in listening-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal with Operator Professor Stark and Vera on the telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Vincenzo Tritter, Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Welcome, thank you for joining us today. This is Vincenzo Tritter speaking, Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability, and I'm here with Francesco Conci, CEO, and Massimo De Tullio, CFO of Fiera Milano. The purpose of the call is to provide you with an update on Fiera Milano's H1 2023 results. The presentation will be structured in four sections. During the first section, Mr. Francesco Conci will give you an overview of the business and 2023 outlook. Then, Mr. Massimo De Tullio will go through the revisional results and financial figures in greater detail. On a final note, an update on sustainability will also be provided. At the end of the call, you will be invited for a Q&A session with management available for your questions. I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Mr.
Massimo De Tullio, recently appointed as new CFO of Fiera Milano. Mr. De Tullio has been working in Fiera Milano for five years as Group Planning and Control Director. Previously, he held the role of CFO for both U.K. and Belgium legal entities at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for over five years, with a primary focus on planning and control activities related to sales and commercial areas. His professional profile is further complemented by previous experience in the consumer division of Vodafone and a tenure at leading auditing firms. At this point, I'll make the floor to Francesco Conci for a general overview of the quarterly results. Please, Francesco, go ahead.
Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining the call today. On behalf of the company, we wish Massimo the very best of luck in his new role as CFO. Just to introduce a few messages regarding the very positive set of results of this first semester. As you may have read from the press release, the first semester of 2023 showed solid results and improvement in performance compared to the first semester of 2022, with 32 exhibitions held, 61 congresses events, more than 800,000 sq m occupied, revenue of EUR 132 million, and EBITDA of EUR 42 million.
The very positive results of this semester were mainly due to the good general performance of the annual exhibition in the tourism and fashion sector and of the multi-annual exhibitions due to the presence of TuttoFood, with performance above expectation for higher penetration of services, and ITMA, one of the most important world exhibitions of spinning and weaving technologies. Excellent results reached by the congress division, with the Allianz MiCo Congress Center proved to be increasingly competitive in strengthening its international attractiveness and confirming Milan as an international hub capable of offering a unique platform for relevant hosted events of global relevance. During the second half of the year, Fiera Milano will continue, in line with forecasts, with the implementation of the strategic plan Connect 2025.
This will involve a dedicated focus on executing technological and digital transformation, expanding our digital and traditional services offerings, and fortifying our exhibition congresses portfolio. Furthermore, we will actively engage in creating alliances with strategic partners and introducing new exhibition concepts, with the aim of reinforcing our market presence and developing the business internationally. Although the macroeconomic scenario expected for 2023 continues to present elements of uncertainty based on the results achieved in the first semester, which already confirm a well-established post-pandemic recovery, we believe we can improve the previous estimate by forecasting the achievement of the 2023 year and the results positioned in the upper part of the EBITDA target of EUR 78 million. At this point, I will leave the floor to Massimo for the business and financial review. Please, Massimo, go ahead.
Good evening, everybody. Massimo De Tullio speaking. I'll start with the financial section of the call, bringing you to the divisional results. If we move to slide number seven of the document, we can start commenting on the Italian exhibition business. We had revenues for the Italian exhibition business amounted to EUR 110 million, which represents an increase of EUR 9 million compared to the first semester of 2022. Let me say that this is a good result because if we consider that this semester was affected by a less favorable seasonality compared to last year, this increase in revenue is the result of a very good performance and shows also the result of a price increase strategy that we started last year.
If we go ahead also commenting on the Italian exhibition business, we can also highlight that we scored an EBITDA at EUR 33 million compared to EUR 35 million in each one to 2022. This result is clearly affected by the positive increase in revenues, which has been completely offset by some, let's say, one-off costs that we incurred because of the reorganization that happened during these last three months. Clearly, the Italian business has been also affected by the increase in the cost of energy that all the industry has been facing during this period. If we move to the congresses results, clearly, we had very, very good results. We had revenues at EUR 24 million, which represents an increase of EUR 6 million compared to the H1 2022.
We had very positive results from at least three very important congresses: the EURO-ARC, the Rheumatology, the Urology one, and we had also some very important and good results from very important corporate events like Salon de l'Espagne and Salesforce events. We need to highlight also that these positive results compared to last year are due to the fact that in 2022, the congress activity was affected by, at least in the first three months, by some suspensions because of the COVID situation. In this moment, in this year, where we did not have any particular issue related to COVID, we showed the full potential of this division. Regarding the foreign exhibition business, we see a EUR 3 million revenue result, which compared to EUR 2.4 million in 2022.
We have a slight increase due to the results we had in the exhibition hosted in South Africa, the Industry Cape Town Outfair, and the ExpoSec exhibition, which took place in Brazil. The EBITDA is increasing compared to last year, and this is mainly because the JV in China in this moment is showing, let's say, positive results compared to last year, where because of the COVID impact, basically we had no event shown which took place last year in China. Now, moving to the consolidated results, basically we have an increase in revenue compared to last year from EUR 116 million- EUR 132 million, which, again, as already shown, is basically due partially to the good performance of the exhibition, of the Italian exhibition, and partially to the good performance in congresses.
At EBITDA level, we have EUR 41.6 million, which represents an increase of EUR 2.1 million compared to the EBITDA scored last year. Again, we have a positive variation, which is driven mainly by the increase in performance of Italian exhibition and congresses exhibition, which has been partially offset by higher operating costs, as already stated. We are speaking specifically about electricity costs and the reorganization costs. At net result level, in this moment, we are showing if we do not consider the impact of the TuttoFood operation, we are showing EUR 9.2 million of net result, which compared to EUR 5.3 million achieved in H1 2022. Basically, we are increasing by close to EUR 4 million the net result. If we consider then also the impact of the TuttoFood operation, we score a EUR 25.7 million net result compared to the EUR 5.3 million scored in H1 2022.
Now, if we move to the balance sheet, we can comment shortly on the net working capital, which is increasing from EUR 72.4 million at the end of December to EUR 98 million at the end of June 2023. This increase in the net working capital, which clearly is negative in this moment, is due to the dynamic of the advances payments related to the host exhibition, which will be hosted in Milan in October 2023. Also looking at net financial debt of prior IFRS 16, we can comment on a very positive figure. We are showing currently a EUR 64 million approximately net financial position, so cash availability, net cash availability, let's say, compared to a net financial position of close to EUR 30 million at the end of December 2022.
If we look at how these results, how these variations, so this increase has been generated, looking at slide 12, we can basically see that part of this increase in net cash is due to the EBITDA, which is EUR 42 million. For sure, we have to consider the impact of the rental, let's say, that we pay for the building, which amounts to EUR 26 million. We then have the positive impact on the working capital, already commented and mainly driven by the advance payment dynamic, which amounts to EUR 25.6 million.
We have capex for the period for EUR 2.6 million and other impacts for EUR 4.8 million, of which one of the, let's say, one of the elements is the security deposit with the energy supplier, and the other one is the advance payment we did for the operation with the partner regarding TuttoFood. Now, regarding the outlook for 2023, as already commented by Francesco Conci, the result of the first semester and good expectation related mainly to our organized event cost allows us to foresee basically a result, an EBITDA result, which will be close to the higher range or the higher part of the range we communicated previously. Basically, we are very close to the EUR 80 million, to be very clear. We are in a good shape in this moment. We have no signal that these results cannot be achieved.
In this moment, I will pass the mic to Vincenzo regarding the sustainability part of the call.
Thank you, Massimo. Just a closing remark on sustainability. We are pleased to share with you that for the third consecutive year, Fiera Milano was confirmed as a top of the integrated governance index. The index will certify the capacity of companies to integrate sustainability in their business model. Fiera Milano has been awarded a COG identity leader in the top five extra 100 category, which is the category reserved for mid-cap. Most appreciated aspect of the Fiera Milano COG strategy for this award has been corporate governance, distinctive initiatives in the industry aiming at reducing carbon footprint of the event, and stakeholder engagement process. I believe we have concluded with the presentation, and we can start with the Q&A session. Thank you.
Excuse me. This is the Carus Call conference operator, who will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on the touch-tone telephone. To remove yourself from the question queue, please press star and two. Please pick up the receiver when asking questions. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question is from Emanuele Galazzi of Equita. Please go ahead, sir.
Yes, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. I'll start with a couple of questions on the guidance for 2023. I understand that you expect to be in the upper part of the EBITDA range, but can you provide some clarity on the factors contributing to this more positive outlook? In particular, I'm interested in understanding the impact of the, let's say, the lower than expected energy cost versus the overall business performance. You mentioned some good performance expected for hosts in the second half. The second one is still on the outlook. Is on the net financial position, as you reported, the stronger cash generation in the first half? Can you just guide us for the year-end, so give me a target for the net financial position by year-end? Thank you.
Thank you, Emanuele, for your question. Clearly, there is a positive impact of the current rate of the energy. When we approved our budget in December, back in December, we calculated the negative impact of the energy cost by EUR 30 million compared to our original plan. We can say that in this moment, that increase has been probably divided by two, so even more probably. We are scoring probably less than EUR 7 million worsening in our costs due to the energy impact. This clearly is helping our guideline and our EBITDA guideline to increase and to reach the upper part of the range. There is the positive impact of, as you mentioned, of hosts and other hosted exhibition, which are helping also to offset some negative other impacts like the reorganizational one.
The one-off cost that we incurred in this semester, which were not part of the original budget. All in all, I think, as I already stated, the EUR 80 million will be probably achieved by the company. The second question was about the net financial position. We think that anyway, because of the seasonality of this business, we will end with a lower net financial position at the end of the year, which should be higher compared to the original one or the one forecasted previously. We basically expect to land in a region of EUR 40-45 million of net financial position.
Clearly, this will be lower also of the net financial position we are scoring in this semester, but this is due to the fact that we have already basically all the advance or most of the advances from some exhibition that will be hosted in the second semester, like Host. We have also some cash out regarding the TuttoFood exhibition and the new nature of this exhibition as well as the event, which clearly implies that we will have to repay Fiera di Parma with all the advances that we got from the customers.
Thanks. Very, very clear. I have other two questions more on the operating business. One is on the Italian exhibition business. Can you just provide some more details on the performance of the ancillary services, in particular the sun seating business, just to understand your market share and the overall performance of these services? The second one is on the congress business, which continues to be very strong even in the second quarter. Can you provide an outlook for this business for the second half, maybe based on the current level of bookings? Thank you.
Thanks, Emanuele, also for this question about the services, which basically allow us also to highlight that clearly both the, let's say, traditional services and the digital media one are scoring very positively this year. What I mean is that these services are bringing to the company in this moment a higher level of revenues compared even to 2019. We have something like a 20-25% increase in the revenues related to these services. If we consider that compared to 2019, we are in this semester something like 20% back in terms of square meter sold, the fact that we are higher in terms of revenues from services naturally implies that we are gaining market share.
All the services, from sun seating to the catering and restorations and technical services provided to exhibitors like the advertising or the digital ones, are all positively increasing and scoring compared to the previous edition of the exhibition or even last year. We have a very positive impact of the revenues from services, which we foresee will continue also in the second semester. At the end of the year, year-end, we expect to be anyway 20% higher in terms of revenues from services compared to the pre-COVID situation. Regarding congresses, we expect also the second semester to be very positive. We see a confirmation of our capacity to attract international events.
If we look at what happened in this first semester, we were able and capable to host three main big congresses related to the medical topics, like the one dedicated to the rheumatic disease, EULAR, the one dedicated to nephrology, and the one dedicated to urology. On top of that, we were able also to host very big events, very big corporate events. We confirmed for the second year the Salesforce Convention. On top of that, we hosted also the Salvadoris Panel, which is one of the largest events dedicated to the management industry. We were able also to host a new concept of events, which is basically like the Padel Trend Expo, which clearly is a complete novelty also for the mid-quarter congress.
The other point, which is very important to stress, is that congresses, the congresses business, compared to the, let's say, exhibition one, has shown a complete recovery of the pre-COVID performances, both in revenues and almost also in EBITDA margin. This is very positive news for us. Clearly, this will allow us also to plan a further development of this line of business.
Okay. Thank you. If I may, just the very last question is if you can provide any comment on the EUR 15 million investment you announced today for the congress business. I know that it's split between you and the Fondazione Fiera Milano, but any comment on this?
Yes. This, let's say, is also related to the congress business. We are aiming to have our mid-quarter congress center and to have this congress center become one of the leading congress centers in Europe. The investment that we announced today is going in this direction because it will provide this congress center with one of the most outstanding technologies and infrastructure for data transmission and broadcasting transmission. Clearly, this will open for our congress center opportunities in the corporate event sector, which is one of the sectors we are trying to exploit and to develop. We are very keen to start the investment we communicated today. I think there are also some additional development and opportunities related to this investment that probably will become more clear in the next months.
Okay.
Thank you very much, Emanuele Galazzi. Thank you.
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