Welcome to the SGL Carbon Conference Call. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SGL Carbon Conference Call on Full Year Results 2024. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touch-tone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Good morning and a very warm welcome to our conference call today. Today we want to give you some more insights about our business development in the last year and our expectations about 2025. The call will be held by our new CEO, Andreas Klein, and our well-known CFO, Thomas Dippold. Andreas Klein has been CEO since 1 January this year, but he joined SGL in October 2023 as head of our largest business unit, Graphite Solutions. He knows the company, the structures, and our most important markets very well. Let's start. I hand over to Thomas Dippold, who will give you some more details about fiscal 2024.
Thank you, Claudia. It's my privilege and my job to guide you through the figures of 2024. First of all, I think we can summarize the performance of the year 2024. We kept our guidance. I think that was quite a bit of a challenge. We precised our guidance throughout the year a little bit, where we said we will land at the lower end of the guidance. This is exactly what we have achieved. You can see it here on this page. We promised sales on the level of the previous year. We almost reached that. We are 5.8% down compared to the previous year, now reaching EUR 1,026,000,000 . This is EUR 62 million less than the year before.
A large part of it is also currency, and we also have some EUR 4 million-EUR 5 million portfolio effects, which we had still in 2023, with some remains when we sold Gardena and Pune business. So there were EUR 4 million still in there. In fact, we are roughly 5% down. All business units except Process Technology had lower sales compared to the year before. This also shows that our business environment in the year 2024 was quite challenging. However, we still made it to keep our EBITDA pre level roughly on the level of the year before. We now reach EUR 162.9 million. As I said, lower end of our range. The lower end of the range was EUR 160 million. We are quite well above what we guided.
Our sales dropped not in the same dimension as the sales did because we anticipated that, and we proactively managed our cost and tried to keep the profitability up. Our EBITDA pre dropped 3.3%, which is EUR 5.4 million. I think that's a quite remarkable achievement given the volatility and the development in the markets. The sales split, which you can see here on the right side on slide number four, remains almost unchanged. Graphite Solutions is by far the strongest business unit in our portfolio. The only thing that may be worth mentioning is, and I come to that later when I talk about the business units, Process Technology is now the third biggest, or if you can turn it around, second smallest business unit.
It has always been the smallest by far, but with their development, which is really, really fantastic and remarkable, they now overtook , which also took a hit because their big and very profitable contract has been terminated. We announced that also in previous calls. To summarize, three out of four business units with declining sales in the year 2024, one with Process Technology really going into the other direction. When you look at the profitability, we come to that. The product mix effects and the EBITDA margin could cap stable or even be slightly increased. We now have an EBITDA margin on a group level of 15.9%. I think this shows that in a difficult environment, how we manage our costs and how we manage our profitability.
Now moving on to our largest business unit, which is Graphite Solutions, there we see a decline in our overall top line with EUR 26.7 million down, now reaching EUR 539 million, which is a decline by almost 5%. When you look back into the development of the year 2024, you saw a positive development in the first quarter. You saw almost flat development after six months. Especially in the second half of the year, sales and also profitability declined quite a bit. What is the reason for that? As we anticipated, as we announced, it is the very sluggish and slow development of our electric vehicles sales, which is the end market, which we supply mainly with our isostatic graphite and silicon carbide products. In the whole value chain, a lot of inventory has piled up.
That was the reason why our customers, which are the chip and wafer makers, were very hesitant to place new orders and give us new sales. We tried to mitigate that by acquiring new orders or new customers in the silicon market and the LED market. However, the profitability there is not as high as it used to be in the silicon carbide market, but still we managed to get at least our capacity filled to a large extent. However, in the end, our semiconductor and LED business declined by 4.3% year- on- year. Industrial also went down by more than 5%. Solar, which is maybe the most striking development, but this is in the end a very small business for us, declined by even 26%. As I said, EBITDA could be kept almost stable. There we have a decline of 2%, which reflects EUR 3 million.
We are now reaching EUR 131 million flat. The year before, we had EUR 134 million. This is a EUR 3 million decline. That also clearly shows a margin resilience in our Graphite Solutions business and how quickly our experts in this business can adapt to changing environments. In the end, the margin even increased from 23.7% to 24.3%. I think this really shows how adoptable Graphite Solutions is to very volatile markets, as we have seen in 2024.
As I mentioned, process technology here, which you can see on slide number six, is really, really on a very good track. They are growing by 8%, which reflects a EUR 10 million growth, now reaching EUR 138.3 million in the top line compared to EUR 127 million the year before. This is just a continuation of the good development that they have. They have a very good parts and service business.
They're good in project business, and they're very good in doing after-sales business with servicing the already installed capacities. They also do it on a global level. We have some footprints in the United States. We have footprints in Asia with China and Japan, but also in Europe. We have a very stronghold, which we are trying to protect. All regions contribute to the growth. This is a really balanced development that we see there. We still live from a very good order book. However, at least since Q3, we see a declining book-to-bill ratio there. We're eating up a little bit now also in 2025, our good order situation. We are also confident and fighting back that we try to acquire new projects and try to penetrate our customers in order to mitigate that.
When you look at the profitability, there you see almost a 50% jump in the profitability. The profitability, the EBITDA pre went up higher than the sales. I think that's really a very remarkable situation. EUR 10.4 million is the increase of the top line. EUR 10.6 million is the increase of the bottom line. That clearly shows what kind of pricing power, but also market penetration, our experts in process technology now really show. We really focus very much on the high-margin service business, but we also won a couple of very attractive large-scale projects in 2024. Now the margin reaches 23.9%. This is only a tiny difference now to Graphite Solutions. This really shows how profitable our products are and how much demand from our customers for products that our process technology experts sell.
Having said this, I come on slide number seven to the problem child of our group. On the 18th of February, we informed you and the whole capital market that we are going to restructure our Carbon Fiber business. Why did we announce that? You've probably also followed us that almost one year ago, it was also February 2024, we announced in the capital markets that we're going to evaluate all options for this business unit. After roughly one year, I think we at least can say that a sale as a whole for the business unit is rather unlikely. This is the reason why we decided to restructure this business unit. This includes the closure of unprofitable sites along the way.
This is exactly what we're going to execute in the next weeks and months because the development that you see in 2024 for our Carbon Fiber business led to a decline in sales coming from roughly EUR 225 million in 2023 to EUR 210 million, if I round it up, in 2024, which is a decline by almost 7%. This is just a continuation of the very difficult environment our Carbon Fiber business unit is in. Almost all markets see declining sales. We see a continuation of global overcapacity, mainly from China. They are pushing heavily their products into Europe. Carbon fiber, in the end, is a commodity. There is hardly any differentiation that you can say. Nobody will identify a carbon fiber spool. This must be the one from SGL, and this is a Chinese product.
There's hardly any differentiation for us, and we see a very negative price range because of the overcapacity. It has just been pushed into the market. As we tried to protect our cash in 2024 to a large extent, we idled a big chunk of our capacity in order to reduce the stocks of inventory that we had. We could reduce inventory in carbon fiber quite significantly by over 20%. You have to bear in mind that the sales declined as well. This was the reason why we idled a lot of capacity, and this fixed cost that comes from that could not be absorbed. This is the reason why our EBITDA took a deep hit and is now reaching EUR -11 million.
You have to bear in mind that in the EUR -11 million, there's already included the contribution from our joint venture with Brembo, where we make the carbon-ceramic brake discs. They contribute with EUR 15.9 million in that. To be very honest, that also means that the operative loss of our Carbon Fiber business stands for almost EUR 27 million. I think this is the clearest sign that we need to restructure this business the soonest as we couldn't sell it, which we tried quite intensively in the last 12 months.
That was also given the outlook for the years to come, the reason why we had to impair, as you remember, because there was another ad hoc message, which we published later in autumn 2024, that we had to impair our assets with EUR 76 million in the Carbon Fiber business because the market expectation and the business case that we had in our business plan seemed to be too optimistic at that point of time. Coming to , our last business unit, there we see a decline in top line by 9% and a decline in the EBITDA by 18%. This is almost in line. Why do we see a decline in sales and also profitability and now reaching EUR 126 million after we reached more than EUR 150 million the year before? That is the aforementioned termination of a very profitable automotive contract in the United States.
This contract has been terminated at the end of Q1 2024. We had some initial sales in the first three months of the year, but since then, sales dropped quite dramatically. We negotiated with the OEM who is behind it a termination fee, which has been paid as we announced end of the year. In fact, it was end of December, and we got EUR 3 million as a one-time compensation payment, which is, of course, reflected in sales, but also profitability. For you, also when you try to put it into your models, this is a one-time payment. This cannot be repeated in the years before. Yes, the auditors confirmed that a breakup fee in automotive is not so unusual. Therefore, it is operative. The thing is, it cannot be repeated. That is the point. This project is gone.
The EUR 126 million that you see here in sales is, so to say, the new normal or the new level where we do business also in the years to come. We still see a stable volume in the luxury car segment where we make carbon composite parts and not carbon-ceramic parts. The overall demand in automotive, and you know that we serve mostly electric vehicles, at least up to now, we see a lot of delays in new models. We see a lot of volatile calls from our customers. It was a difficult year 2024, and it is going to be a difficult year 2025. This is exactly what we see, and this is also reflected in our profitability. However, when you look at the margin, the EBITDA pre margin is almost stable with 14.6%. It even went up slightly compared to the year before.
I think it's a quite remarkable margin what we see there for an automotive supplier. However, the business environment, as for many in this industry, is just difficult. Coming to corporate slide number nine, I think that's fairly easy. I think sales is mainly rent, but also when you look at 2023, there we have also, as I mentioned in the beginning, some remaining sales for Pune and Gardena. This was EUR 4 million, which we put into corporate. If you deduct it, then this roughly EUR 15 million is the new normal. Sales went up in 2024 because in the second half of the year, we already rented out the new building to our BSCCB joint venture in Meitingen, and therefore, they paid some rent. EUR 15 million is more or less the top line. Why did the EBITDA pre improve by almost EUR 10 million there?
First of all, Gardena and Pune also contributed negatively with EUR 1 million, which is no longer the case in 2024. We have significantly lower costs due to our cost optimization measures. We have indirect spend reduced drastically, and our variable bonus provisions for the years to come also have been reduced quite drastically. With that, we now reach EUR -8.3 million EBITDA pre for corporate, which is an improvement by more than EUR 9 million compared to the year before. Here on slide number 10, I think you see our striving for excellence. You remember that we have a Margin over Volume initiative that we have set up in the years before. I think this is perfectly reflected in this slide.
You see how three out of four business units and businesses really go into this direction where we could continuously increase our margin and really make our customers aware of what kind of quality and value for money they get when they buy from SGL. This is the case for Graphite Solutions, especially for process tech, and also , which now consolidate on this high level, which is comparatively high for an automotive tier one supplier. You also see how our Carbon Fiber business operatively is doing where the margin is declining heavily. Why is that? In the years up to 2022, we still had the BMW take-or-pay contract, which was in there, which guaranteed us a certain margin.
After that, you see, yeah, with the exit of the automotive market and without this very favorable contract, how badly our businesses and industries, mainly the wind market, now perform. This is how much this restructuring, which we announced, is needed in order to optimize our results, but also cash flows, especially in this business unit. Last but not least, here on slide number 11, in my section, I would briefly also inform you about our major key KPIs, which, yeah, we have achieved in 2024. Yes, we have seen a negative net result with EUR -80.3 million compared to EUR 41 million the year before. Both years, 2023 and 2024, were affected by impairments, both in carbon fiber. Starting with 2023, I think that's the easier year. We had a EUR 46 million depreciation in carbon fiber in June 2023.
If you take out this one-off effect, then the net result would have been roughly EUR 85 million. In 2024, the EUR -80 million include, which you can see in a comment on the right side, restructuring costs and impairments of in total EUR 118 million. If you take this out, I know this is a ballpark figure, and this is an artificial calculation now, but our operative result, this is what I clearly want to say, is positive. Only thanks to the restructuring costs and the impairments, our net result is negative if we exclude all the impairments and restructuring costs which we saw because also our graphite and old material has been restructured in 2024 with some minor issues compared to carbon fiber. This is, I would not say neglectable, but the dimension is far less compared to the EUR 76 million which we saw in autumn.
Our net result would have been positive by roughly EUR 40 million. We have seen that throughout the year. Every quarter, Q1, Q2, and also Q3 showed positive net results. Only Q4, when the big chunk of the restructuring cost hit us, it became negative. Same as our free cash flow. Our free cash flow is positive. It is roughly EUR 40 million compared to EUR 95 million the year before. This is thanks to the fact that in 2023, we had a net inflow of customer down payments of more than EUR 50 million. This came with the sluggish development of our silicon carbide and electric vehicle business as an end market came to a slowdown as well. This is the reason why it declined in this dimension.
However, a free cash flow of roughly EUR 40 million, given the circumstance that we have, I think this is something what we are very proud of. We could prove to you that SGL is making money. You can also see that, which is, I think, the best indicator for cash generation. Our net financial debt could be reduced. Also after financing activities, our net financial debt went down by 6% and now reaching very healthy EUR 108 million. This is a leverage ratio of 0.7. This is also reflected in an equity ratio then because of the low debt that we show of 41.5%. This is super stable. Our ROCE even increased by 0.1%, now reaching 11.4%. That also clearly shows that we earn our cost of capital. Again, I think I can summarize the year 2024.
Difficult environments, and we did the best in order to keep us above the line. I think we've achieved that quite well. The next task that we have to do is restructuring carbon fiber. Now the determining factors for 2024 for that, I would like to hand over to Andreas to give you more insights on what you can expect from us in 2025.
Many thanks, Thomas. From my side, also a very warm welcome. It's a pleasure for me to be the first time in this call and talk you through the outlook for 2025. We have two major topics in front of us. The first topic is indeed the weakening of the electric vehicle and hence silicon carbide market. The second topic, like addressed already by Thomas, is the restructuring activity around carbon fiber.
This first slide is already known from previous calls, and it shows you on the left side the application split of our biggest business unit, Graphite Solutions accounting for around about EUR 500 million in sales. You can see almost half of that business is driven by the semiconductor and LED market segment. To your right, comparing the years 2022 and 2023, you can see how nicely the SiC business has developed in absolute and in relative terms in that business, growing to 62% share and growing that market segment to more than EUR 250 million in sales. For 2024, this development has now stopped, and we are sidewarding for the market segment, semi and LED. If you look in more detail into the year, it is really a first half, second half split. In the first half, the growth was still intact, and that business was growing.
In the second half, we have seen a reduction of demand from our customers and hence a slower development for the SiC in particular. Why was that the case? You see that in the next slide where we look at the electric vehicle development quarter by quarter for the years 2023 and 2024. As you know, EV represents 70%-80% of SiC demand. It is the key industry or the key driver for our business in Graphite Solutions. We have seen a major drop early last year, falling 26% Q4 2023 to Q1 2024. The recovery we have seen then over 2024, quarter by quarter, was mainly driven by China. In total, we are short of around 2 million EVs per quarter compared to the growth projections the industry and our value chain had two years ago.
With the delay in sales, we see also a massive delay of new EV model launches. That is of particular importance as the SiC, as a new high-performance technology, is heavily linked to new model introduction. That is another factor impacting our value chain and the SiC development. The long-term importance for SiC remains unchanged. The performance is what we will need in the future and what electric vehicles we will need in the future. That long-term outlook is intact. As a result of these developments, the midterm outlook for electric vehicles in that view, the battery electric vehicle, has been adjusted from previously 30% CAGR to now 20% CAGR. On the back of that adjustment of midterm growth outlook, our customers and the whole chain really has started to work on inventories, and inventory management has turned out to be the measure of the second half.
This will be the topic of 2025. Looking at SGL, this inventory measurement on our customer side and the temporary slowdown in SiC means we also have to adjust to these changes. The customers confront us with a lower growth outlook, their inventory management activities, and hence reduced forecasts and orders. The good thing is that we are very well positioned with our portfolio, with, yeah, high-performance products and also with our contract portfolio. We go into these customer discussions in a partnership and long-term oriented approach, but with a strong backing from our market positioning. Nevertheless, Thomas addressed that point already. We go into strict cost management, and we also adjust CapEX spend for new capacity increases as needed depending on the new forecast we receive.
In the mid to long-term run, this development in the SiC market will for sure also bring up new opportunities because the SiC penetration in other markets beyond EV will increase based on a lower cost position of SiC compared to other wafer materials. If we look at the second big 2025 topic, it is for sure the restructuring activities we announced on 18th of February for our Carbon Fiber business. It was not achievable to sell the complete business unit. So we are now going into individual site-specific activities to reduce the loss-making part of our Carbon Fiber business and focus on what we consider the profitable core of that business activity. Included in the site-specific measures we will develop is also the closure of unprofitable assets and complete sites. The expected one-time cash effects are EUR 50 million for 2025 and 2026.
It's important to underline again that the joint venture BSCCB is not included in the restructuring activities of our carbon fiber, although they are part of the business unit carbon fiber. Yeah, with these two major topic blocks and also action areas, if we look into 2025, the slogan is really safeguard sales and profitability. We focus on two dimensions. It's the sales side, looking broader into markets to achieve growth outside the SiC and EV, which is in a temporary slowdown. We scout, of course, for new applications where our premium product can add value to our customers and markets. This is supposed also in the short run to fill available capacities and to generate the necessary utilization in our plants. The second element is cost efficiency. We have already implemented since end of last year very strict cash management and also cost management.
Thomas mentioned the indirect spend reduction activities, but also we work on optimizing our headcount setup and the structures of SGL in total. In terms of the guidance we can develop from this outlook and these activities, we look on the sales side on a slightly below previous year level, and we guide the market with an EBITDA pre for 2025 in the range of EUR 130 million-EUR 150 million. The semiconductor market is expected to remain on a low level in 2025, and the demand recovery really depends on the development of the EV sales numbers and, yeah, also the stock management activities in the chain. Demand from automotive, which is very important also for our business, is associated with high uncertainty from the industry, from underlying demand, but also from tariff discussions, from global trade and regulatory activity, especially in the EU.
For GS, as our biggest business unit, we expect pickup earliest in the second half, depending on semiconductor and EV developments. PT will continue to develop in a very strong way. Nevertheless, we expect sales and earnings to be below the record year 2024. For CF, we started the restructuring, and that will be the key activity. will depend on the automotive industry, like I already mentioned. In summary, restructuring of the business with carbon fibers is a key activity 2025. The remaining business of SGL beyond this restructuring activity is advanced materials with innovative and customer-oriented products. We have excellent market positioning in most of our businesses, and we benefit from megatrend digitization, renewable energies, and climate-friendly mobility. The current slowdown of SiC is a temporary one, and we consider the long-term trends in that important market segment to be intact.
This also means we will continue with selective investments to increase production capacities wherever growth kicks in and wherever we can develop the business further. Thank you very much for your attention. I hand back to Claudia, and we are looking forward to your questions now.
Yeah, thank you. Now we can start with the Q&A. The moderator will give you some more details how to handle it.
Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. If you are using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selections. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. One moment for the first question. Yes, we have the first question coming from the line from Lars Vom-Cleff from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you very much. Good morning.
Mr. Cleff, we can't hear you anymore. Your line is open.
Can you hear me now? Hello?
Yes, but a bit depressed. It's suppressed.
I'm sorry? Depressed?
No, so your volume was a bit down, but now we can hear you.
Perfect. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. I would ask them one by one. The first, you mentioned strict cash management for this year, which does not really come as a surprise. Last year's CapEx, EUR 97 million. Would you be willing to give us a hard figure that we could put into our models for this year already, especially given the muted silicon carbide outlook?
Hi, Lars. This is Thomas. No, the only thing that we really refer to at that point of time is our cash flow guidance, where we said this is going to be positive. This is what we wrote. Andreas mentioned that we have some one-off effects, and of course, you can't consider them as kind of free, but they won't be repeated. Some restructuring cost, cash effects for carbon fiber, which sum up to EUR 50 million over the course of the next two years. Yes, we have some investments to be made in 2024. Yes, we also received some customer down payments that still need to be implemented into capacity. Of course, most of our CapEx isn't just something which can be done in a spot business. The installation of the equipment takes a while.
There will be some major CapEx, but most likely not on the level as we've seen in last year.
Perfect. That's already helpful. Thank you, Thomas. Maybe one question for Andreas, given his background and that he now took over the steering wheel for the group as well. You mentioned in your presentation that SiC importance is unchanged, and I do not doubt that, to be honest. So far, you've been one of the very few companies that have been able to produce synthetic graphite in the purity needed by SiC producers. Now, I assume that Asian competitors are catching up very fast. Secondly, we also see your business partner, Wolfspeed, struggling currently. I would argue that your sweet spot disappears faster than any one of us expected before, while you were not yet really able to benefit from the oligopolistic market structure we saw. Having said that, I would be interested in your view and how you would argue against that.
Lars, thanks for that question. It's indeed a very interesting one. I think it has various dimensions. The first thing is it's really about supplying one-stop shop and the full portfolio to our customers. Because as you know, for the customers, it's a system that delivers the overall performance. It is really, yeah, the quality level and the consistency of products we are delivering, and that goes back to a lot of experience. This is where we, as a long-term established player with strong partnerships to our customers, have for sure a very valuable advantage. The third dimension I would like to address is really the growing requirements from wafer production. We grow together with the customers. We never stop. This is, of course, something we build on based on our established footprint.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
I could not see any more questions in my IT tool. If you have a question, use the opportunity to ask the board about the market or our estimates for 2025. Thank you so much for your participation. If you have additional questions, please contact the investor relations team, Jürgen or myself. You find the presentation and our annual report on our webpage. Thanks once more and have a nice day. Thank you and goodbye.