Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us today at such short notice. We have our CEO, Jochen Eickholt, and our CFO, Beatriz Puente, with us this morning to answer your questions. With this, let me hand over to Jochen. Jochen?
Thanks, Cristina. Good morning to everyone from my side as well. Thank you once more for being here at that short notice. For many, I would assume it's still kind of part of the Easter break. Also in many cases it's rather early, so quite a couple of reasons to be grateful for this. Several events actually on our side bring us, that is Beatriz and myself, here today.
First of all, we wanted to inform you that we successfully reached an agreement on the sale of our development assets. The financial closing of that is expected in the second half of 2022 for our fiscal 2022, with an estimated positive impact of EUR 580 million. That means additional revenue and a bit less given the transactional cost in EBIT.
This is a proof of our commitment to focus the core competencies, but in the end of the day, a milestone which kind of was decided on some one year ago. We have had also the preliminary closing of our quarter two, and I have to say the performance is clearly lagging behind our and my expectations. We of course have to see that there are severe doubts around the targets we have set forth as a company and communicated to the market in earlier days.
Internal challenges in onshore continue to impact our performance, and my first assessment is that those challenges, especially the ones related to the 5.X platform, the so-called 5.X platform, are certainly bigger than previously understood by our company.
In addition, of course, and that is what most people are aware of, the external situation around all the instabilities, supply chain difficulties and COVID, that situation has not improved. The opposite is the case. Taking all these things into account and acknowledging the difficulties of making a detailed assessment of all the variables at such short notice, we have decided to place the existing guidance under review.
As of now, we continue for us with a revenue target that is within the previous range, while the EBIT margin level will continue to be targeted at some lower part of the previous guidance. In both cases, however, we have to see that this now includes the effects of a successfully closed asset deal, asset disposal.
I've spent my first two months listening to our business units, to our colleagues, to our product development people, to our procurement teams. I was visiting many of the European facilities, talking to clients and suppliers. My first assessment is that most of the new impacts or those impacts we see are driven by internal challenges. Though not all are related to the 5.X, most are. Expected milestones have not been met, and that has led to extra costs, as you perhaps can imagine. Since the extra costs are material, still mostly internally driven, it means that we can act upon them and will continue to do so. We will need a little time to further assess these issues, but in my view, right now, the issues can be solved.
As we've said previously, the technology as such does not provide additional question marks. It is understood to be sound, and that's also, in a way, good news. It's been only six weeks, and for me, we probably agree that the market conditions are not the right ones for making quick estimates.
I'm going to ask for a little more time to make further modifications to the targets we gave to the company in January and come back to those shortly. What I can say is that I'm not waiting until any kind of time to implement further actions. We've already started to implement actions on the sales, on the procurement side, and certainly also on the technical side.
We are taking also the first steps with suppliers and clients to come back to what we would call a sustainable wind model in our sense. The industry prospects continue to improve, specifically in Europe. We need to see how much demand comes from all these programs which are announced at E.U. or at national levels. In principle, that makes us positive. With this, perhaps it's time to go for Q&A, and we can open the lines for the questions.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The Q&A session starts now. If you wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. We kindly request that you limit your questions to one per turn. Please be informed that in order to assure audio quality, we recommend that all questions will be asked from landlines. Thank you. The first question comes from Vivek Midha from Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much, everyone. Good morning. Question on the quarter. Would you mind just, if you can, break out the non-recurring elements of the results in the quarter? How much in terms of onerous contract provisions that you've taken in the quarter. Thanks very much.
Good morning. Thank you for the questions. As per also our communication, of course, we provide full details with Q2 results in early May. I'm saying that because it's of course limited review for us. We can tell you that it's quite similar to the previous quarter. I mean, we are finalizing, of course, what goes through the onerous accounting, you know, treatment. It will be quite in line, not far from the figure that we provided in Q1.
Understood. Thanks very much.
Thank you. The next question comes from Mark Freshney from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hello. Thank you for taking my question. Just to be clear, the bottom end, you're still aiming for the bottom end of the previous guidance, but with a roughly EUR 550 million capital gain in there. Is that a fair synopsis from what you said?
That was the message, yes. I don't know if I was cut or not. That's the message.
Thank you. The next question comes from Gael de-Bray from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Good morning, everybody. I have two or actually three questions, please. You've been six weeks in the job now. Can you just elaborate a little bit on your key findings, and what do you think are gonna be the key levers to turn around the business? That's question number one.
Question number two is about the guidance. I know you suspended the guidance for the full- year, but you also said that you're still working to achieve maybe -4% for the margin. If I do, you know, just a little bit of very quick math here, it appears that it would imply an operating loss of about EUR 300 million in the second half.
Now if I, you know, take the underlying performance in the first half, well, it's obviously showing a massive deterioration on the sequential basis, on an underlying basis. Could you just help me try and understand the dynamic which is at play here, and possibly understand what could be the respective contribution of offshore and onshore, in the second half of the year?
Finally, regarding the ramp-up of the 5.X platform, could you just give us a bit of an update on the timeline for the ramp-up, and, in particular, give us some indication on where you are on the design of this turbine now? Thank you very much.
Well, thank you very much. If I may start with the first six weeks. These weeks were rather intensive for me. Please understand that. I've been traveling to quite a number of different sites. I've been talking to our people, as I was trying to indicate. The difficulties which I found are first of all the internal and then secondly also of external nature.
I think the external figures and the external factors were discussed oftentimes. And that's probably, as a total, not too much of a surprise, although the effects are not really stopped but ongoing. We have to see that also material pricing per today is still different than it used to be in January. Yeah. The situation is there.
We've of course fixed all the material contracts for 2022. The outer years are still under negotiations, and therefore not everything in the sense of further effects can be excluded. That's one. The internal issues are more related, in my view, to the technical issues of the design process of the turbine and the ramp-up of manufacturing.
Since there were quite a number of underestimated complexities behind that, most of these elements where we are not on time lead, in the end of the day, basically to delays. The picture we have right now is that we have no further substantial doubts about the difficulties of the turbine as such.
The turbine as such will be good for its purpose and good for the market and or is designed to be one of the most attractive models in the market which you can find. That is confirmed. However, the needed design stability, the needed design maturity, that is what we are on delay with, in conjunction with then ramping up also manufacturing capacities.
What we observe right now is that when it comes to volumes as the sheer output of our processes, if you wish, there we are on delay. There is no very easy response to that. It requires task force approaches. We've put all the task forces in place. It will certainly take quite some time to take us back into where we were supposed to be. That was question number one.
For the question number two, on guidance and some more specifics, Beatriz.
Thank you, Gael, for your question. As you said, guidance is under review for the reasons that we explained. Saying that, we maintain, you know, kind of aiming to work towards that minus four with the contribution of roughly EUR 550 million of Galileo transaction for us. Then, also important to say that we foresee that transaction to be closed by the end of the year, so foresee likely to be fourth quarter.
That is the reason also that the foreseen profitability of the company is fully backloaded to the fourth quarter for that reason. Also because usually, as you have seen in the past, the contribution of service is also always, you know, backloaded to the fourth quarter because of the significant always aftermarket, you know, sales contribution.
We don't provide the breakdown of profitability between onshore and offshore, as you know. But again, you would foresee that roughly onshore and offshore should have like the same, you know, let's say contribution between, you know, third quarter and fourth quarter. You will see if we end up, you know, close to that figure that, you know, our Q3 is still, you know, loss-making and lower contribution when you have a fourth quarter that will be positive because of the reasons I said so.
Thank you. The next question comes from Deepa Venkateswaran from Bernstein. Please go ahead.
Thank you for taking my question. My one question would be, Jochen, in the last six months, sorry, six weeks, you've talked about a number of challenges that you've noticed. Were there any, you know, silver lining to the dark cloud that you've also observed in these six months, or is it all challenges?
No, that's not my view. Of course, looking at the challenges we have ahead of us, these are the kind of near-term or short-term challenges. I have to say that from the principal prospects of the business we are in, I've never, ever been able to work in my entire career in a business space with such positive overall outlooks mid- to long- term.
Right now, many of these developments, they are sometimes mentioned around political instabilities or geopolitical instabilities. We have the constant need for decarbonization. That trend is unbroken, but the opposite is going to be even further supported and speeded up.
All these trends are continuing to be in place and, the wind industry in our context, will be one of the pillars, really, for the solution of all those difficulties. The mid- to long-term perspective for me is really absolutely unchanged. It's just that we all have to overcome the more short-term difficulties.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Katy Zhao from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. I've got a couple. The firstly is on the net debt level you reported at EUR 1.7 billion. Do you see this as the maximum level of debt, or are there other disposals that you believe you could make near term to change that? My second question would be around order intake.
The EUR 1.2 billion, a record low for Siemens Gamesa since the merger. Do you think that the downgrade to below investment grade by both rating agencies that cover Gamesa on a standalone basis has impacted customer behavior in any way, or is this purely related to separate issues within the onshore market? My final question would be that your large U.S. competitor has signaled in their latest capital markets day that cash will remain negative for up to three years. Do you have a similar view? Thanks.
Thank you, Katy. Regarding your first question, EUR 1.7 billion, if that's the maximum, you need to take into account, and if you see the history of the company, that there's a lot of seasonality on the debt, you know, and also on a quarterly basis. As I said, we foresee to cash in, you know, the transaction of the wind farm solution business disposal on the fourth quarter. Still, you know, Q3 will be of course challenging in terms of debt levels. Saying that, we maintain the EUR 4.4 billion of facility limit that we have as of today.
With that EUR 1.7 billion of net financial debt, we have roughly EUR 1 billion of cash and available liquidity of EUR 3.5 billion. Saying that, of course, all the cash needs of the company need to be fully assessed with a new kind of guidance on 2022 and a new outlook for the year.
Decisions are, as you said, you know, related to further asset disposals or other alternatives need to be assessed at that time. Regarding, you know, if we consider that, you know, the order intake has anything to do with kind of a standalone, you know, rating of the company, no. It's clear, you know, maybe Jochen can touch on that, but the reasons are quite different.
Why, you know, the order intake is lower than expected, and also you will see when we provide, you know, Q2 numbers, that there is a significant contribution to that EUR 1.2 billion, roughly more than half that comes from service on a very low order intake for onshore, roughly EUR 200 million.
The reason for that is different. You know, it's mainly related to we strengthen the process on approval new projects because of the situation and, of course, higher inflation than expected to make sure we reopen negotiations that we were supposed to sign.
To make sure that of course, as we have said in the past, the industry need to change and we need to continue working with our clients on building a partnership to increase prices. That for us is critical. Also, of course, the volatility of the order intake of offshore also has significant impact on our order intake. So that's mainly the reasons for that lower order intake in this quarter.
The other one, you know, that you said, you know, regarding our other, you know, peers, considering, you know, kind of the next three years are going to be cash negative for us. Again, this assessment will be done once we have a better understanding of the outlook for the coming years. Of course, because of the situation on the market and the geopolitical reasons, it's more difficult to assess as of today, and we'll provide, you know, further details on that. Jochen.
Yeah, perhaps two or three further remarks onto the order intake. As Beatriz mentioned, one is a kind of standard volatility in the markets we observe. Sometimes a quarter is lower, sometimes a quarter is higher. That as such is not unusual.
What we right now observe, however, as well, is that there is an increasing awareness of the effects of inflation also on the side of our customers. To put it with the words of Robert Habeck, who I attended the meeting with most recently, we still have to develop the instruments for dealing with inflation across the value chain.
That means that after decades of price stability and even reducing prices, we perhaps now have to include the concept of inflation into, for instance, the contracts we have. That means for our customers, oftentimes the bankability of a project obviously is key, as you can imagine. If in that, in this discussion, we have to deal with price indexation of various kinds, then that is not so easy for our customers either.
On the other side, as you can imagine, since we are confronted with increasing prices on our supply chain, we have to find a good and partnership-related approach to dealing with these matters. That typically does mean that of course, we would like to strengthen our relationship with supply chain partners in order to come to more long-term contracts.
The other thing is that we still need to have a kind of, how shall I say, partnership approach-oriented compensation for the increase for the increased cost levels we have. That is what we are oftentimes in current discussions with. We have changed our internal approval procedures. We have introduced various elements of indexation into our contracts. We are now seeking for solutions to these things. That in total then leads to a slightly more difficult situation on the order intake side. We reckon that is not gonna last for long, though.
Great. Thank you for the detail. Just one clarification to make sure I heard the right number. Beatriz, I believe you said available liquidity is around EUR 3.5 billion. Was that right? That compared to the EUR 4.5 billion at the end of Q1.
Yes. That'`s the right figure. It's actually EUR 3.6 million. Compared with September numbers is even, you know, it was EUR 5 billion, EUR 5.1 billion.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from William Mackie from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for the time. I want to come back. You said you've dealt or you've deep dived into business development, procurement and product development. Can we try and tie a question around business development and procurement? Can you give an indication of the level of price increases you are able to achieve with the decreased level of orders that you have booked in Q2?
More specifically, when you look across the supply chain at the multiple pressures for steels and subcomponents and logistics that you highlight, what is the scale, ballpark of the sort of price increases that you would need to achieve to return to the target levels of gross margins for your onshore business?
I suppose that's with you know, keeping in mind that perhaps the current very tight inflationary conditions remain static going forward. What sort of price increases do you think Siemens Gamesa needs to achieve across its onshore sales efforts to fully mitigate the inflationary pressures that you're experiencing? How long could that take? That's the first question.
The second question comes back to guidance. Just simply, at what point do you think you will be ready to reinstate guidance? Is it gonna be on May, in early May with the full results, or do you need more time to assess this dynamic environment? Thank you.
Well, thank you very much. Quite a number of questions. First of all, supply chain related. We do observe for specific materials around metals, as you just said, so steel, copper, others. We continue to observe, let's say further non-decreasing prices. The price peak we kind of reached is kind of still in existence. We have then cases where prices for, you know, elements like permanent magnets used for where we use rare earths, sometimes went up for more than 100%.
The overall level of price increase per project, that is difficult to judge because it's project individual. In total, I would find it rather difficult to specify a bandwidth. We are typically discussing a band, how shall I say? Bandwidths in the range between a higher single digit percentage and perhaps even above. That's currently the discussion we have. Obviously, it's a very individual discussion, and obviously it's not only about price, because you can imagine that sometimes also the cash flow profile is in discussion, where we are right now seeking for additional early down payments. That is the situation.
Regarding our situation internally and by when we have what, also not so easy to judge. Please forgive me, but the first six weeks for me were rather intense. I will continue with that intensity. We will provide an update on the quarterly earnings release, which is kind of in three weeks from now. We try to share then more information.
Right now we are still assessing some of these things which are complicated because of the, how shall I say, the overall complexity of the system we operate in. If we are late in development, just imagine this, please. If we are late in development and then for instance have BOMs, b ills of materials, right now not fully approved yet, then it's difficult to order material according to that revision status.
That means that with something which is not finished yet, we find it difficult to order material, which then translates into the upcoming lead times in the current market. That is a little bit the difficulty we have. It's very difficult given the complexity of our product.
We sometimes have over 4,000 positions of a bill of material to actually judge what can be handled how and under which circumstance we can speed this up. That is the thing why it's getting so difficult. It's more on the technical side and the judgment of a maturity in the very detail of the product.
Extremely difficult situation. Just one follow-up. What is your current assessment of the risk of increased liquidated damages against the outstanding 5.X order backlog?
Well, we have put judgments in place. So far, these judgments hold. We have to see that we now speed up all those detailed technical processes in the end, leading to a higher output of our very own supply chain. That is the thing now which we focus on.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next question comes from Akash Gupta from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everybody, and thank you for your time. My question is on internal headwinds versus external headwinds. In the last quarter, profit warning, and Andreas mentioned half were internal headwinds and half were external headwinds. Jochen, you mentioned that a majority of headwinds are internal.
Maybe if you can help us understand how much of these are internal, which means like design issues or something which is completely in your control, and how much of this negative surprise is driven by external factors such as component shortages, port delays, and unexpected inflation in light of current geopolitical situation. Thank you.
Thank you very much for the question. Not so easy to judge. I think a very helicopter view would lead us to the assumption that 2/3 or so are of internal root causes. 2/3 of the difficulties are of internal root causes.
Thank you. The next question comes from Sean McLoughlin from HSBC. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you. Just wondering, I'm just coming back, I think, to Katy's question earlier. I mean, do you have more options available to further boost cash flow? I'm also curious to know whether the size of the portfolio that was agreed was equivalent to the initial size or that increased during the process.
Secondly, just wondering on your current discussions with customers, price discipline, how important is that to you? Are you walking away from negotiations, as we understand some of your competitors are, or is it the customers themselves that are proving difficult to reach an investment decision with? Thank you.
Well, if I may start with the latter, part of the question. Actually, it's both. Yes, we do walk away from opportunities. Yes, the customers sometimes also are hesitant because also their business cases, as I was trying to say, are pretty much influenced by the questions of assumed bankability. Now, bankability is a difficult one in times where inflation is considerable and precautions are not taken. In that sense, that is correct. Then regarding some of the numbers, Beatriz?
Thank you, Sean. Regarding, you know, if we have other options as the one that we did, we have other alternatives on the small assets, but not, of course, of the size of the transaction that we just announced. Other options, as Jochen said, you know, we're working with our clients on, of course, mainly it's related to the offshore projects, to see what alternatives we have on other, you know, kind of prepayment from clients.
Then, last but not least, of course, to reduce the CapEx, you know, in the coming years. Not, of course, of the magnitude with which significant cash generation comes into play. Regarding, you know, the transaction that we announced, yes, it's the same scope.
We have not changed the scope of the transaction since it was launched to the market. We are very happy to have closed the transaction with SSE. We think it's the right partner for us in the future. As I said, you know, we are very confident that we will end up closing the transaction by the end of the year. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. The next question comes from Henry Tarr from Berenberg. Please go ahead.
Hi there, thanks for taking my questions. The two main ones, really. One is to what extent is the sort of China lockdowns that we're seeing now impacting the outlook here or is it too early to get a read on that? The second in terms of guidance, I think the release suggests that you're still working towards the -4% EBIT margin, including the sale of the wind farm business. Is that right? Or is there presumably sort of more work to do before you come back properly on margin outlook for this year? Thanks.
Thanks very much for the question. The China situation has an impact on a little bit of our overall material flow strategies. We have quite significant business in North America coming with either assembled components or also single components from China. The bigger part of the impact is in North America. In Europe, we don't see so much so far because also in China, the situation is not homogeneous in total.
I will add also that, of course, you know, China effect also has a significant impact on other prices, because of course the lockdown of China, many people, I mean, other players rely on that, you know, so also put a lot of pressure on the rest of the countries and the prices. Could you repeat the second question because, I'm sorry for that.
Sure.
Interruption, if you don't mind.
Sorry. Absolutely. The second question was just whether guidance is effectively still for that -4% EBIT margin, including the sale of the business.
So, we have the guidance to be clear under review. As we said, you know, we aim at targeting, you know, those levels. Yes, within that -4%, you know, it includes the contribution of the Galileo, I'm sorry, the transaction that was Galileo, also internal name, nickname that we use. The contribution of this transaction that we announced today with roughly foreseen EUR 550 million contribution on EBIT, roughly EUR 540 million contribution in cash.
Thank you, everybody. I'm going to hand over to Jochen to make some closing comments. If you have any questions, you know, you can always call our team later on. Thank you. Jochen?
Well, thank you very much, Cristina. Being mindful about the time, thank you very much for all your interesting and very valid questions. We hoped to answer as many of them as possible and as good as possible. We tried to convey the message that the difficulties we're finding ourselves in are not that easy to solve.
However, we have to underline that we have an increasingly clear understanding on how to get around that. However, as it looks now, the solution to the internal difficulties specifically we have is not going to be achieved at too short notice. In other words, we will of course work on this with massive effort and massive focus throughout the entirety of the organization.
The timing to judge right now is not so easy, and we will keep you updated. The external factors we mentioned, that is something we can only speculate about. However, we also think that these difficulties continue to be of rather short to mid-term duration. Long-term, as we just said, or as I was trying to say, we still, we continue to see a very positive future for the development of the company. Having said that, thank you very much and, looking forward to also further discussing with many of you at various other instances. Thank you very much.
Thank you everyone for joining the call.