Good afternoon. This is the chorus call operator. Welcome to the conference call presenting Hera Group first quarter 2023 results. Let me remind you that all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, a Q&A session will be held. To be assisted by an operator during the conference call, press star followed by zero on your keypad. I will now turn the conference over to Cristian Fabbri, Hera Group Executive Chairman.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Cristian Fabbri. I'm the new executive chairman of the group after the retirement of Mr. Tommaso Tomasi di Vignano. I'm not new to the group because I have been with Hera for 15 years, and I've managed the sales and trading activities of the energy sector with very good results.
We've just come out of the board meeting that approved the annual financial statements for 2022, and here with me we have our CEO, Mr. Orazio Iacono, whose mandate has been reconfirmed for the next three years, and then our CFO, Massimo Vai, and Mr. Hansen, investment relator. We're here to illustrate to you the main results that have already read in the press release issued today. On the first page, you will see that we have very good results with a high increase in terms of capital investment and a notable increase in the financial position. We know that you have plenty of conference calls today, we will try and keep it short so that we have enough time for taking your questions should you need any further information. Let's start with the first figure.
That is our turnover that is settling at EUR 5.75 billion, up 6%. All business areas have provided their contribution to this growth. When it comes to energy, we see the expansion of electric energy segment, it is offset the decrease in volumes due to weather conditions. On top of this, we had very good results coming from the waste business, so higher revenues are due to a larger portion of activities when it comes to special waste. Also, we had very good results when it comes to energy-related services, so a very good picture overall. As you can see in the second box here, you see, the EBITDA went up 9% if compared with the same period last year. Q1 2022, we had EUR 375 million.
We will have the opportunity to comment upon the main reasons behind this growth. Let me now turn to EBIT, which went up by 7%. It settled around EUR 236 million, and this has perfectly set off the higher depreciation and amortization costs. All that increased our profitability, and this bodes well for the future because in terms of payment times and customer delinquencies, the customers in arrears, the situation has remained substantially unchanged. To some extent, the situation has even improved vis-a-vis previous years. Let me now turn to our net profit. This is also growing. EUR 126 million, so up 1% in spite of the increase of the debt leverage, which I'll come to in a minute.
In terms of the P&L account, overall, very positive results across the board. Let me now turn to our investments, to our capital expenditure, which went up. Investments went from EUR 135 million to EUR 205 million, marking a 52% increase. This increase is due to M&A activities which we performed in the first quarter of the year. We acquired a company that is in charge of land reclamation and remediation. I'll come to that in a minute. This accounted for EUR 54 million out of the overall investment volumes, and operating investments have gone up by 21%, which is perfectly in line with our business plan. We also completed the revamping activities of the waste-to-energy plant located in Trieste.
You will remember that last year we performed a very important investment in terms of gas put into storage, and you may want to recall the reasons behind this investment. The idea was to make sure that we could rely on a safe and sure gas reserve ahead of a very complex winter. That investment was almost risk-free because we were buying, again, this gas, and we were planning to sell it at a later time, and all that allowed us to achieve a premium because of this gas storage. You will remember that the gas storage that we had at the end of October was entitled to a premium price. All this allowed us to be very flexible. This was particularly useful because throughout the whole winter, we have seen that volumes went down.
On the one hand, the mild climate, and on the other hand, the fact that many people decided to reduce their gas consumption because of the very high prices. Basically, that was an option which we had, and we have been paid in order to have this option. That was a well worth investment. We also said that we would go back to square one on this investment before the end of the first quarter. Here we are to tell you that again, this investment completely went max. EUR 878 million, then it went down to EUR 504 million during the year, and then it went back to square one, so to zero, by the end of Q1.
This reduction of the investment by EUR 504 million happened within the first quarter. If you have a look at a graph on the right-hand side, you will see that the net debt and EBITDA ratio went from 3.62 times to 2.84 times in Q1 2023, as you have certainly read in our press release, which we issued earlier on today. We have come back to the leverage we are confident with, and this bodes well for future investments. We now have the necessary flexibility to seize all the opportunities that the market is going to provide us with. This flexibility in the past allowed us to better come to grips with the energy crisis, and now we have plenty of flexibility to deal with future challenges.
Let me now go to page three. I would like to illustrate the main drivers behind the growth of EBITDA. In this first quarter, we had very good results in terms of free market activities in the waste segment. We have seen a slight decrease in terms of networks, but this is due again to the economic situation and not to structural reasons. This growth is very well balanced throughout all of our segments. We had the acquisition of ACR, which is a land remediation company. We had a second acquisition in the second part of last year. It was a company that's called Bachelor Materials, and that is dealing with special waste treatment. All of that added up to EUR six million.
In terms of sustainability, we are witnessing a growth by about EUR 40 million, which again derives from decarbonization activities, energy efficiency services that we provide to our customers for safe insulation bonuses. We improve our customers' experience, so we provide more and more value-added services to our customers that are becoming more and more loyal, and this in turn translates into higher profitability. In terms of organic growth, we're doing very well. We're doing very strong. The energy market is doing very well, +106,000 new customers in the energy segment. The waste segment, we have +188,000 tons more, mainly industrial customers. This is a very well-balanced growth. To sum it up in terms of EBITDA, we have stayed our course.
We continued our growth path, looking back at the last quarters, and a large portion of this growth comes from sustainable business activities, and you know that we use shared value as a metric in order to identify the parts of our EBITDA that is not just determining and generating financial results for this company, but is also increasing sustainability. We managed to achieve our objective by year-end last year. Our purpose is to get it to 70% by the end of 2023. Now, let me turn to an analysis business by business. Since I have been with Hera for 15 years and since I've been operating in the energy segment, I will be concentrating on the energy segment.
Then when we had a look at this sharing of tasks among me and the CEO and CFO, then we decided that I will be taking care of energy. So this is basically the only change that we have generated in terms of processes and in terms of the responsibilities within the board. Orazio has been with us for a year now. I've been with the company for several years, so this provides full continuity with the past. Let me now draw your attention to energy. Let me make one step backward. Let's go back one year. The energy crisis was hitting the ground, and one year ago, we confirmed our results. They were slightly increasing, so no decrease whatsoever.
EUR 151 million in 2021, in Q1 2022, this went up to EUR 254 million. Again, from there on, we managed to increase our EBITDA. As you can see, the contribution is hovering around EUR 31 billion. How did we get to this EUR 31 billion? Let me start with the first graph, supply and trading activities. There, again, we had EUR six million positive contribution, which came from the expansion of markets. I'm talking about the free market as well as last resort markets. We have 160,000 new customers if compared to last year, and we are continuously increasing our customer space, and which is hovering around 50 customers. Again, we are almost around 3.6 million.
Again, it's not just economic growth, but this is also an increase in terms of the overall underlying assets in the energy segment. We're not only operating on the free market, we're also operating on all the energy markets, and we are certainly a very important stakeholder in the last resort and safeguarded customers market. This provided again very good results in the past. I'm talking about concept, talking about public tenders, public administration tenders. We've been very active in terms of tenders for protected customers. There again, you have tenders that only used to be issued for the energy customers. Now we have a lot of large companies, and now we only have retail customers in this part of the protected customer segment.
We do expect a lot of tenders coming down the line by year end. The fact that we are operating in all these different markets perfectly offset the reduction of volumes, minus 17% for the gas segment. This is due to the fact that our customers, in general, consumed about 18% less in Q1 vis-a-vis last year in the same period. This is due to the climate on one hand, but at the same time, it's also due to the fact that customers were afraid of prices going through the roof, they tried to reduce their consumption in order to, again, ensure energy efficiency. This effect was more than offset by the growth on last resort markets, or on safeguarded customers markets, and also commercial development.
The business development helped us because if you have a look at the box on your right-hand side, you will see there was an increase in volumes for electric energy. So minus 17%. When it comes to electric energy, we had again, minus 19% on average in Italy, and we only had minus 17%. We are still working on our customers. We're very much focused on our customer space, and we're doing so because we want to seize all the opportunities that the new market scenario is providing us with. We would like to provide win-win offers. What do I mean when I say win-win? Well, within this context, where prices tend to oscillate strongly from 1 month to the next, then, you have more costs to bear.
We have tried to offset all this with sales and trading activities. In terms of commercial offers, we're really trying to optimize our offers so that our customers have full visibility about their daily consumption, with just a one-day delay. More specifically, they know how much they're going to pay, so they know that they can cut down their consumption during the day when prices, for instance, are higher. Customers have the opportunity to save money, and at the same time, this type of commercial offers will have lower modulation costs. This is a win-win situation for us. It's a positive situation for us and for our customers.
At the same time, we are providing fixed price offers, so that our customers again can have more stable prices, and at the same time, we are reducing our modulation costs as a company, which we will have, of course, to turn over onto our customers down the line. We're doing all this for some customers, but for new customers on our already existing customer space. We are providing these new offers to our customer space. In terms of energy efficiency, we did very well. The marginality is doing very well, as I said in my previous slide. We focused very much on customers retail. About 30% of our customers base has bought at least one of our services over the years throughout our business segments. We have more than 7,000 units of such services being sold.
I'm talking about boilers, air conditioning, high efficiency air conditioning systems. Photovoltaic panels, insurance on such systems. Again, we are providing synergies here. Last but not least, I would like to talk about this dotted line. You will remember that we made this investment last year, and we had to introduce this figure as part of our accounting report, so that economic data could be put and posted very transparently in terms of warehouse, in terms of inventory. Otherwise, values would be distorted. Last year, if you have a look at our statutory financial statements, we had minus EUR 93. In this first quarter, taking into consideration this investment activity for the inventory, we're going back to the positive side.
As you can see, we have a beneficial effect of EUR 93 million, and this is perfectly offsetting the EUR 93 million we had last year. If we add up the financial statements of the last two months, we'll now find the very same figure. This is something that we already announced several months ago, and today, I really wanted to say that we have just lived up to our promise. Again, we are perfectly in line once again with our promises. I would like to give the floor to Orazio, who's going to concentrate on waste.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much, Christian, and I will now continue with analysis of the results with the waste business. Here again, we started on the right foot.
The EBITDA was up 11%, so an increase of approximately EUR nine million vis-a-vis Q1 in 2022. What happened? We have seen an increase in terms of volumes of special waste coming from the market. We had a positive trend in terms of prices. A continued positive price trend, more contained than in the past. Again, the energy production and treatment plants went very well. Now the waste-to-energy plant in Trieste is fully operational. Plus EUR five million EBITDA, organic growth. Next to the organic growth, we also have the positive contribution of M&A operations, as Cristian Fabbri already flagged out.
This is basically the missing piece of the mosaic, of the puzzle, and we are now providing a turnkey solution to our industrial customers because we have acquired a leading company in Italy in terms of land and site reclamation. That was a missing piece in our jigsaw, if you will. This is something I will come back to in a minute. This is a partnership we are entering into with the ACR Reggiani company, which will enable us to consolidate our leading role in the waste segment. Again, we managed to acquire the first operator in Italy in terms of global services for industrial waste and land and site remediation. That was a very nice M&A operation. In this segment, demand is on the rise, and so our country needs such services.
Given the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, several funds will be made available for site remediation and reclamation, and we are now well equipped to tap into this potential and to enjoy full growth. This growth also allowed us to fully mitigate the higher costs we are currently bearing in terms of waste collection because of the new concessions. Again, here we are resettling and rebalancing after the last two years. We have a 15-year-long service contract, and there again, we are being penalized to some extent, but at the same time, we are getting good financial results. We are providing integrating services. We are continuing with our efficiency-increasing activities. In terms of differentiated waste collection, we are higher than 70%, so in the areas where we operate. That's a very good result.
That's it as regards now the waste segment. Let me turn to our networks. As Cristian was saying, minus five vis-a-vis Q1 2022. This is due to extraordinary non-recurring factors, the situation is pretty flat. We have district heating that is going down. That is due to the very mild and warm winter season. In terms of, again, higher costs for chemicals, higher costs in terms of outsourcing activities, maintenance activities. We are now running a full efficiency increasing activity in order to have, again, a better situation. In the profit and loss account in 2023, we don't have the inflation consequences which will then be fully taken into consideration in 2024.
In terms of the gas distribution, we see that in Q1 we don't have any update in terms of revenues based on inflation. This will have to be integrated in the next few months, this also applies to electricity distribution as well. There's one thing I can say, we have sped up the entire investment process, as Cristian said. Almost EUR 100 million were invested in our networks, a plus of 30% vis-a-vis last year. Again, the mild climate helped us. This increase was deployed on all our network related businesses and more importantly, to water in general. These figures do not include potential premiums, which are in the process of being defined by ARERA, based on our performance levels.
As you know, this allows us to stay our course and to counter climate change challenges. If you think of what happened in the Emilia-Romagna region recently. Again, we can only expect good results in terms of the award of such premiums, but we will come back to that at a later stage. Here, in this graph, you can see how the Hera's model, and please forgive me if I'm again repeating myself, but I'd like to echo Cristian's words. We are a very well-balanced company with a very well-balanced portfolio. We're very effective. We were able to weather many storms in the past. We are very resilient across the board, so throughout all our business sectors.
In the energy business, of course, there we see our lion's share in the very beginning of the year, and then it goes down, and then it speeds up again towards year-end. After the first portion of the year, networks do play an important role. They're not a physical business at all. Waste, which we have just illustrated, is constantly growing in terms of EBITDA. This business has certainly increased its growth. With ACR, with the new acquisition, of course, this provided us with a nice assist. As it is always the case at Hera, we are always going for mergers and acquisitions that will generate value for our group, and this is certainly the case with the ACR acquisition.
We set out on the right foot, for the entire waste segment, we are well ahead of our business plan in terms of achievement, in terms of results. In the networks segment, well, there we have been investing a lot. We didn't stop investing, not even in 2022. As our chairman said, that was a very complicated year, to say the least, because of all the geopolitical aspects. Still, we continued investing, we continued generating value, thanks to the upside potential that is envisaged in our business plan, because of all the returns that we can envisage due to the new interest rates, which we do expect to come by the end of the year and to be applied as of the year 2024.
Our portfolio is very well balanced, so the risk profile is very well balanced, and as such, we can look at the future with a very positive attitude. Now I would like to give the floor to Massimo, who is going to add some color in terms of financial results.
Thank you. Good evening, everybody. Let me now take you through some of the relevant financial elements underlying the EBITDA. If we start from the graph on the left-hand side, you will see the incidence of the cost of debt. If you have a look at last year, there was an increase, but a slight increase if you consider the interest rate changes which we have been experiencing on the markets for the last 12 years.
Our short and medium- term cost of debt has gone up. We stayed very much focused on our liquidity needs, which we handled and managed very accurately over the last 12 months. We also concentrated on the duration of the debt of our group, and we were capable of optimizing our resources. The cost of debt is still under 3% because of all the activities we put in place. If you have a look at the second graph, you will see the tax rate, which is below the tax rate we had last year.
We derived some benefits due to the optimization of physical activities, which we always try to do, but this is also due to some tax reliefs when we, for instance, we carried out the operations that Orazio has just mentioned. One-off tax exemptions helped us a lot. We have the RE and the RI. The two main indicators, as you can see, the return on investment is paying our ground, again, 8.6% return on the investment. This is way above of the 8% objective. In terms of the return on equity, here we are above 9.4%. That's a reduction vis-à-vis the year 2022.
The financial management impact is being felt here, there again, this is just a Q1 figure. We'll very much focused in order to improve our cash flow, our liquidity, and to reduce again the impact of this bottom line on our profit and loss account. If we now go to the next slide, well, this provides a source of satisfaction because starting from what was the last quarter conference call that was back in November. We were talking about operating cash flow.
We were talking about commodities and as you can see, if you have a look at the graph on the left-hand side, you will see that the operating cash flow that was generated in the first quarter 2023 was enough to cover all the investments that we performed. These are significantly higher values vis-à-vis last year. We were able to perfectly cover the operations, the M&A operations, which we carried out in the first three months of the year. On top of this, we had the reduction in terms of inventory because of the gas storage. We also had a corresponding decrease of commodity prices on average, and that also provided a very positive contribution. As a consequence of all this, we have the most representative figure.
Our debt went down by 11% of the last three months vis-à-vis the year 2022. If you have a look at the graph on the right-hand side, you will see again how extraordinary the situation is. It all came about very quickly. Benchmark indicators starting from the third quarter last year went higher than the three times. We said it will go down, and it did go down as quickly as possible. 3.28 times by year end, and then 1 month ago, we had a 2.84 times. This is far away from our cap, from our threshold. That is three times. EUR 3,778 million. That's it in terms of debt and the BPA ratio.
You will read here under the graph that parallel to this, we also optimized our debt structure. Last year, we were very fast in reacting to the situation. We used the bank leverage in the past in order to come up with some good solutions to deal with the cash flow. As of the beginning of the year, we started again repaying these loans, and we transformed all this into bonds, which is the usual structure for us for long-term investments. Shortly after Easter, we issued a sustainable bond, EUR 600 million. That was a very successful operation. We had orders six times higher than what we had offered. The quality of the investors that have picked up this offer of ours was extremely good. As a result of that, we are now...
we now have access to a EUR 450 million revolving credit facility, which we'll only be using if need be. We will have more margin, more flexibility to reduce our debt and to reduce financial costs and their impact on the P&L. I would like to give the floor back to Cristian for some final words.
Thank you, Massimo. Thank you, Orazio. This takes me to our very last slide, then we'll open the floor for questions and answers. Where do we stand? The results of the first quarter are in line with our expectations, we're doing very well. In the year 2022, we weathered the energy crisis very well, although we are risk, or in spite of our risk aversion and in spite of the soaring energy prices.
In 2022, we managed to continue with our growth path. 2023, we started off very well with very good industrial results, which determined a 35% increase. What does this mean? Basically, we only used up a 25% of our business plan time horizon, and we have already achieved 44% growth out of the overall total. Basically, we are well on track on our business plan. We're doing very well. Q1 has been very strong. In June, we will be paying out our dividend EUR 0.125, which goes back to our results in the year 2022. This is an increase in terms of the dividend. We're getting good results. We started off on the right foot.
I'm very happy to be here today to share with you these results. Our car has started off on the right foot. This is the course call operator, who will now start the Q&A session.
If you wanted to ask a question, press star followed by one. In order to exit the list of questions, press star followed by two. Please use your receiver to ask your questions and speak slowly so that the translation can take place. If you wanted to ask a question, press star followed by one. The first question is from Javier Suarez of Mediobanca.
Yes. Good evening, everybody, thank you for this presentation. I have some questions. The first one concerns the new business responsibilities of the new executive chairman. Was there any difference in terms of business lines?
I was asking if you can help us to understand what is this business expansion leading to. Has there been a change in the commercial policy, in the business strategy of the company? If you could just add some color on this, just to help us to understand how the company managed, again, to weather the storm. Have another question concerning the business lines and how did you achieve this efficiency increase. Are there any indicators that are going down? What do you make with the activity indicators? That's it as regards to the energy business. If we go back to slide nine, I would like to ask you if you could just add some color concerning the breakdown of this EUR 35 million concerning the increase of the EBITDA.
If you could just add some information concerning this. My third question concerns the year 2023. Given that the market consensus, I think that you can expect an EBITDA growth of EUR 30 million-EUR 40 million. In Q1 2023, you already mentioned a EUR 35 million increase. I know that you don't give any guidance for Q2, Q3, but maybe it would be nice to have some comments on this to understand how the remaining quarters of 2023 are going to play out. Is there's a negative pressure from the commodities market or not? Thank you.
Good afternoon, Javier. I hope I have understood your questions because we had some issues in understanding what you were saying due to the quality of the audio. Business expansion. What happened this year?
There are two sides to this coin. In the year 2022, we experienced monthly scenarios that were completely different. We had to handle every month a different scenario with different problems and different issues. As a result, we had to react differently. When it came to energy, our results went up. As you know, energy for our group has margins that are related to sales and trading. In spite of all this, we managed to have very positive results at year-end. We managed to do so because we stayed very much focused on business propositions, on commercial offers, in order to mitigate the risks of inflation.
We worked very much on storage-related activities because we wanted to have the necessary flexibility to offset the negative effects which we could have experienced in terms of gas and gas sales. More importantly, the 2022 year was a nice exercise ground for us because it allowed us to learn how to optimize some of the operations which had never been stretched in the past as they have been over the last 12 years. Basically, we reacted very quickly from day one. In Q1 2022, we started working on our processes. We double-checked everything, and over a period of 1 year, we came up with new processes. In normal times, these processes were already optimized, and now we reoptimized all these processes in light of a new scenario, in light of higher needed efficiency, in light of price oscillations.
Now that the situation has come back to some sort of normalcy, all this, again, is generating good consequences, positive results on our financial statements. Last year, we had to come to grips with a situation where the situation changed completely from one month to another. We had fixed prices and then variable prices, mixed offers, fixed and variables. We launched offers to again, provide across-the-board services. We put in place a lot of services which were very helpful last year in order to offset the situation. This year, the situation is much quieter and we are generating more value as a result of all the strategies we launched last year. The potential was already there last year, but it didn't translate into tangible numbers because it helped us to offset a very negative situation, very risky situation.
Results went up last year, but that machine is now in place and it's revving at full speed. There again, we are very happy. If we consider last resort markets, last year we had the tender for safeguarded customers in the last quarter, and we managed to increase volumes as we pointed out earlier on. Also margins went up because this is a very critical situation. We managed to hedge our marginality, and as a result of that, we derived benefits last year. We're still deriving benefits this year, and it will do so in the year 2024. It was a mixture of different activities which we put in place and which helped us to weather the storm and to overcome all the criticalities.
The criticalities have almost gone away because the general situation has improved, and all this is now giving us the opportunity to derive full benefits. You know that our risk management policy is very rigid. When it comes to hedging activities, well, we never lose sight of hedging activities for every single customer. Last year, of course, we didn't have any bundles, any oscillations in terms of marginality. This year we have volume as a risk element because if you cover all the expected volumes based on ordinary consumption levels, and then that consumption does not come true, then you may find yourself in a negative position because you may have too much or too little to cover the needs.
Again, with these new tools, we are trying to find a solution to limit as much as possible volume-related risks. In terms of energy efficiency, this is very much linked to incentives. There are two main phenomena to be taken into consideration. We still have a backlog of activities. There are still part of the scope of the so-called old incentives, but we are already in the process of launching new business propositions, which can be appealing and attractive, when these incentives just disappear. I'll give you one case in point, one very tangible example. You know, that, again, for small activities, I'm talking about small boilers, I'm talking about air conditioning. Transfer of credit is no longer possible, tax credit.
That was very useful for customers, for end users in the end. This transfer of credit, of financial credit is no longer possible. We have transformed this tax credit into a loan, into a financing scheme that is made available to end users. The overall expenditure is the same, and once then the customer repays the loan and he or she will have access to this tax credit. This is a good solution for those customers that would not have the opportunity to do otherwise. We are also thinking along the same lines for apartments or condos. The 110% bonus scheme that we have in Italy will no longer be accompanied by this transfer of tax credit. The bonus itself, the 110% bonus is also going down.
We are now in the process of finding a business offer that will generate good results for the year 2024. For the year 2023, we're still fully enjoying the good results of the contracts which we signed in 2022, and whose activities are being completed in the year 2023. There again, we're doing absolutely fine for the year 2023, and we are now working on 2024. These activities will be reduced, but still, we do expect to have a whole series of operations to be completed, because, again, for many customers, the tax credit will still be very usual. It will be less usual or less appealing than in the past, but still it will be something very usual and very appealing. We're working very well.
Before I give the floor to Massimo, to talk about the EUR 250 million breakdown, and this goes hand in hand with this EUR 500 million inventory reduction, which is of course the most important aspect of this value. If I have correctly understood your last question, was about the growth of the EBITDA, because you were reading EUR 35 million in Q1, and that was the result that we had envisaged for the full year. Of course, we will not give you any guidance, but we do expect the EBITDA to further grow. We are now in a place where o f course, we're always very cautious about our activities and our numbers, but still, we are getting ready for a winter that could be more critical than we envisaged.
We are ready again to tackle a worst-case scenario. Should that take place again, of course, we will get ready for that. Massimo, over to you.
Yes. Now going back to what Cristian was saying, the order of magnitude is correct. EUR 451 million in terms of net working capital plus storage, EUR 400 million are relating to the inventory. The remaining EUR 51 million is related to variations, debt, and credits, due to the variations in commodity prices and due to investments. We had a reduction of the necessary investments, but in terms of growth, of course, there are additional investments in terms of business development, and this will absorb a part of the net working capital. 90% of this reduction went down as under our expectations because of a reduction of the inventory.
I would like to echo your words, Massimo. You provide me the assist to give you further information on this, to add some color, because as you said, yeah, the inventory went down by EUR 500 million. Massimo said EUR 400 million, you will be asking, where are the other EUR 100 million?
Well, that's very easy. We have basically sold out all the gas which we had bought. The storage year came to an end on March 31st, we have already started storing some gas for next year. Since we are now in a quieter situation, in a more relaxed situation, we are buying less. More specifically, prices are just one-third of the price which we paid last year. We have already factored this in in our Q1 report. The overall investment, I think, will be much lower. We'll come back to this in our future, in our future meetings. Of course, we are providing full support to our customers.
Roberto Letizia of EQUITA, please.
Thank you very much. Just wanted to ask you what you expect for the next three months, if you could just provide us with a snapshot of competition retail.
We're sorry. We're sorry, Roberto, we can't really hear you. We can't really hear you, Roberto. 1`I'll try and take out the headset. If you could provide a snapshot of the situation.
What is the competition level? If you have any visibility concerning margins for the remaining portion of the year, if you expect, again, a contraction of the market. One last question concerning debt. Do you expect any changes in terms of the net working capital? What are the new dynamics for the year?
I'll try and reply, but again, I'm not sure whether I fully understood your question. Let me start with the energy side. If I have correctly understood your question, you're asking if switch rates have increased and if we expect to continue with our growth. Switch rates are absolutely in line with last year. Again, we did not increase our exposure, we don't see any worrisome elements here looming on the horizon. We don't see any criticalities in terms of commercial development.
If we have a look at the last 10 years, we have been enjoying a very stable business growth in terms of customers year-on-year, with values going from EUR 40,000-EUR 80,000 every year in terms of business development. On top of that, we had free market activities, M&A activities, and all the activities connected to last resort activities. That's a track record which we've been enjoying for years now, no matter what market conditions applied. This year, the situation is just about the same or even better, so we don't see any criticalities looming on the horizon.
I'm not sure I got your first question. I'm sorry. What were you referring to? Because we just didn't get it. The waste-to-energy plant in Trieste. Yeah, Orazio is going to take this question.
Right. I forgot to tell you this. This year, we had the full speed operation of the WTE in Trieste. We'll certainly be enjoying +EUR eight million in terms of EBITDA just because of the waste-to-energy plant in Trieste. There again, I'm not going to repeat what I said concerning the ACR operation, but there again, we do expect very good results because it not only fills in the missing piece in our jigsaw, but it will also generate synergies. This is typical of what Hera does when it enters into a partnership with a leading company, and in this case, it's a leading company in the site remediation segment.
Massimo, if you want not to give the guidance on the net financial position.
On net working capital, not on net financial position, just a bit of it. Well, the net working capital is not a marginal aspect when it comes to expectations of the evolution of net financial position, so it's hard to provide any guidance here. What we certainly said in March was very important because it allowed us to shed some light on this very important investment component. This year, again, we will be repeating the same operation, but it will be different because of quantities and because of the price. Basically, we are going back to the new normal, so to speak. This investment in the networking capital will depend on the seasonality, which is typical of our operations, with some trends, some business trends that will again, absorb more cash in certain seasons and less in others.
We do expect to derive some benefits from this. We have business development activities that will also generate a capital investment, a cash flow investment. In terms of the purchase of energy, raw materials, there you know that we have a weekly payment time. Should we now enter into bilateral contracts with longer payment terms, like two months or three months, then of course the net working capital will derive some benefits. More importantly, I believe it is very important that we went down the three times threshold, and now we have all the weapons in place in order to stay our course and make sure that the situation continues as it is in the next few months.
We'll have to see what happens in terms of prices at the beginning of the next heating season. We'll have to see with what Russian gas will be replaced.
Thank you very much.
Next question, Emanuele Oggioni, Kepler, over to you.
I have just a couple of questions. Most of my questions have already been replied to concerning the EBITDA and concerning the guidance, I've heard that you're not going to spill the beans out there. In terms of the cost of that, is there any guidance that you can share with us for the year 2023? Given the refinancing activities which we recently carried out, which was very interesting, but again it is higher than the rate that you usually apply or that you used to apply in 2022.
As regards the regulated markets, if I correctly remember, in your business plan, which you presented at the beginning of the year, you did not included a regulated walk on the rise in 2022, while in 2023, we see that there will be an 80-85 basis points increase, so EUR 25-30 million EBITDA increase. If I remember correctly, this was not part of your business plan. That's an additional contribution to a possible upside. Is that correct? Thank you.
Yes, Massimo.
Well, to try and best reply to your question concerning the cost of debt, I'm going to split up into two elements. When it comes to average interest rates on our debt, the trend here, if we have a look at interest rates, it will increase if you look at the future. We have just issued a bond with a coupon, 4.21%, that's higher than our previous cost of debt. That had a marginal influence on the overall debt, because we had a debt structure that was deriving benefits from liability management operations, which we introduced a couple of years ago. The real weapon in order to counter financial and debt costs is quantity. We're really working very much on this, we are optimizing the quantity of debt available to us. Last year, we opened up credit lines with average interest rates.
Should we not meet these credit lines, then of course we will close them, and in terms of, yeah, financial costs, of course, there will be a reduction. Then we are also trying to optimize long-term solutions, but we'll come back to that once we have completed a project we are currently working on, so that we don't have any sharp turn in terms of increase of interest rates and differences in our short-term medium interest rates. For us, financial costs, of course, are an issue because this is part and parcel of our active management of exposure to risk. We don't want again to have all the deadlines at once. So we tend to spread all the deadlines throughout all the year so that we reduce again the risk.
I do hope I have replied your questions, and I have provided you with enough color concerning the year 2023. It's Orazio speaking. You remembered correctly. Our business plan did not include the benefits deriving from the activation of a trigger generated by an increase in interest rates till the end of this year, until September this year, which would determine an increase of the WACC by 80-85 basis points. EUR 35 million. That's the estimated impact on the EBITDA. Of course, this concerns the networks, energy, this concerns gas, and also water.
Thank you.
In both business segments, so water and energy distribution, although the underlying mechanisms are different, but the estimates are similar, 80-85 basis points. Different mechanism, but a similar context. In 2024, we have a new water regulations scenario, and we do expect a similar evolution of the work. All right, any more questions?
The next question is by Davide Candela, Intesa Sanpaolo.
Good evening, and thank you for this presentation, and welcome to our new Executive Chairman. I just have 1 question concerning the issue of the bond. It's a liability management strategy. Are there any specific deadlines concerning the year 2023? Is this bond issuance aimed at funding some resources for M&A operations? Is this related to a new gas storage operation for the summer? Is this something that you will need for the energy market? Will there be any investments needed? Thank you very much.
As I was saying earlier on, as Massimo Vai was saying, all these activities generated the necessary flexibility that we need. We are creating the necessary space, the necessary flexibility, and we can seize then all the opportunities that are needed. We are now very happy. We are now very relaxed. As you know, we always, again, look at what is happening in the future, and we wanted to be able to deal with complex situations. Next year, of course, we'll make sure that we can be kind of relaxed. Why am I saying that? Because there has been an increase of gas available. I'm thinking about the regasifying plant in Piombino, and this will be again five billion cubic meters more.
We will be able to see through the future. On the supply side, we now have Piombino, so we have more gas supplies, and then other activities were put in place, new gas streams coming from Africa. Then we have the demand side, which was particularly low this year because of the climate situation. If we consider the first quarter, the electricity consumption went down to 5% in our country, and there was a reduction by 30% of the production of combined gas cycle energy production. There again, this optimization of all our co-power plants will be generating more gas consumption. On the one hand, the demand will go down, on the other side, we'll have more supply.
That there can be some critical situations if the winter is particularly cold. We should just have a very relaxed attitude, I think, because we are gearing up, and we will be in a position to be as resilient as possible to again deal with the situation.
Massimo, I'm sorry. I just kept you very long.
Yeah. More specifically. The bond issuance was helping us to fully underbridge the bond, so to transform a bank debt into a bond issuance. As Cristian correctly said. Eni has EUR 450 million revolving credit facility, which will allow us to be very flexible should costs increase.
Thank you very much. That was crystal clear.
For further questions, please dial star, press, followed by one on your keypad.
Mr. Fabbri, we don't have any more questions. Very well. Thank you very much for your attention. Along with Mr. Hansen, we will be planning some meetings to get and meet you in person. We will continue holding conference calls, of course, so you will be in touch with Mr. Hansen. I have already met some of you, but not all of you, and I would love to have the opportunity to meet you in person. Along with our CEO, we will certainly have the opportunity to meet you in the next few months. Thank you very much. Enjoy all the conference calls today. Thank you. Bye-bye. This is the conference call operator. The conference call has come to an end. You may now disconnect your phones. Thank you.