AGM 2019

Mar 26, 2019

Thank you, Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, and I'd like to wish you welcome for the operating management of this company. Dear shareholders, warmly welcome to this shareholder meeting. My presentation will be in Finnish, but you are more than welcome to ask questions also in English after my presentation. As usual, I start with presenting the executive team. Please all join me on the stage. Let's see who are operatively leading this company. So we already introduced Sir Palena Stormenen. The legal counsel team at Tina Tormela is running our Generations department with nuclear, hydropower and all our electrical trade. Marcos Rauramoden, CFO, Arto Rattu, is responsible for Communications and Corporate Affairs. Mikhail Renblad is responsible for the Consumer Solutions. Christo Bentinen is responsible for Strategy, People and Performance. Then we have Bart Langer. He is responsible for the City Solutions division. Aleksandr Chubayev is running our Russian division. And then Arun Agarwal, who's our latest recruit, is responsible for our business technology unit. It's not only the traditional IT, but also strategically responsible for the entire digital journey of Fortum. Arjun is our latest recruit and I want to wish him warmly welcome to the team. Thank you. Now then we move on. The structure of my presentation today has three parts. First, go to our current situation, then for the result main points of the result for 2018 and then strategy and the decades of electricity and power, so our plans for the future. Just to begin with, I will briefly recap Fortu's profile. The basis is our vision for a cleaner world. And just as you could see in the video in the beginning, maybe some of you have seen parts of it also on TV or in the cinemas, Our vision for a cleaner world does not only mean heat and power generation for us and making that cleaner step by step. It also means being efficient in our resources, the reuse of our material and resources. All that normally is understood with circular economy or recycling. So our concept is broader than just the heat and power generation. 96% of our production was emission free, decarbonized in Europe. In heat generation, we're one of the biggest producers globally, and we are growing fast. You will soon see the figures, particularly in solar and wind power. In the consumer business that already was mentioned, we are a clear market leader in the Nordic countries. And currently, we have in total, in addition to the Nordic countries also Poland, where we have about 2,500,000 customers. All in all, we have 8,300 members of staff, mainly in the Nordic countries, Russia, Poland, India, but also some in our service business in some other countries in smaller amounts. So I'll go through the figures, but we had €5,200,000,000 as our net sales last year, which was on a good growth rate for the second year in a row. Circular economy that I already mentioned, I will finally talk about the strategy. So you will see that it has a key role in our future growth as a growth area. As you may have noticed yesterday, we published about the recycling of e cars batteries, and we have a strong position now in the Nordic countries as well as a growing position in Europe in the charging of e cars. But now the ecosystem of e cars will be extended to the recycling of batteries. And with this new solution that we published yesterday, we can raise the recycling level of e car batteries from 50% to 80% so that the nickel, cobalt and manganese that are in there can be very efficiently recycled to new batteries in e cars and thereby strongly diminish the use of natural resources. And here, this is explaining about the yellow box in this slide. About safety, just as the Chairman of the Board already mentioned, is key to us in everything. Safety is a more important target than anything else, and all management team meetings always start with going through the security and safety status of the past month. We go through the close call situations, accidents and try to learn our lessons from them. All in all, we have made a lot of progress. Our LWIF figure measuring lost workday injury frequency per million working hours was in 2017, so a year before, point four. And we set our target to 2.1 for last year, and we got to 1.8. So it was a very good achievement. The occupational safety of our own staff is on a top rate. It was only 0.2, which is a figure considering that it still contains all kind of minor injuries, stumbling and so on, which are extremely difficult to eliminate totally. So it's an extremely good figure. But where we have a lot of work to do still is the occupational safety of contractors. The 1.8 figure that I mentioned covers both our own employees as well as the contractors. But the occupational safety of our contractors, partly due to the nature of the work, is not on the same level as with our own staff. And this is one of our most important targets. When this 1.8 figure is very good, we cannot be happy with the four severe accidents last year, two of which were deaths that happened to contractors, and this is something that should never happen. We have thoroughly looked into these cases. The first one is still a mystery to us. We found a contractor drunk drunken in a water pool near the site. And nobody knew what had happened. The instructions were in place. Trainings had been taken. Still, the outcome was something that should not have happened. The other one was in Lithuania, again, a contractor person for a reason we may never find out, had climbed to a high place on the site. He had all the gear and was attached. But we don't know why when he was moving to another place, hadn't attached his rope and he stumbled and fallen. So here, we can only add training, control and focus greatly on when we select contractors, how we can make sure in the selection process that we can do our best to get into the safety culture of these contractors in addition to taking care of our own staffs. Safety. So this is a continuous development and training. 1.8 is a good figure. But due to these severe cases, we cannot be happy with this year all in all. Sick leaves were two point eight percent last year, so it was on a good level. Despite various flu seasons, it's a better figure than the average rate for this industry. The Chairman also mentioned about the development of our leadership. We have this big project, Open Leadership. For instance, last year, we trade 800 supervisors about leadership today, where a leader and manager has to be open and keep their minds open to new ideas. The world around us is changing so rapidly that you can never rely on the fact that what we do and can do now is enough and that the old practices will also work in the future. And then a word about diversity, which is important because energy sector is a very male dominant sector traditionally. And now we have an Equal thirty equality campaign. It's a broad international campaign with the ambitious target that in a good ten years' time, the energy sector would be fully equal in terms of gender equality in the number of jobs and so on. We are taking determined steps towards a cleaner world. I could talk about this forever, but Fortum has invested since 2016 in new technologies and made investment decisions in clean technologies for the worth of EUR 4,000,000,000 investments and investment decisions since 2016 into clean technology. And here we have just a couple of examples about actually, it's a very long list. So in Sarpedip, Poland, we had a new multi fuel plant with and it will be in full use soon. And that mainly uses waste based fuel because we don't have enough waste for that purpose so far. In Poland, it has 50% of waste and 50% of coal. And when we get more waste, we can reduce the amount of coal. But we have all the latest technology in place, and it reduces carbon dioxide emissions by thirty three percent and eighty percent of the nitrogen emissions and 90% of sulfur. And most importantly, the introduction of this plant enables the shutdown of two old coal power plants. So that will take place very soon after the production has started here. So this is a very big environmental action in Poland. A smaller scale action is the new plant in Kiberla in Espoo, which will enable the shutdown of an old coal boiler in Suomenoya. We have a common target with Espoo about getting coal neutrality in district heat by 02/1930, and we are on a good track in this work, but there's still a lot to be done. We need more data centers in Espoo so that we get waste heat from there. And after all this, I believe that we have good chances of meeting that target. The plastic processing plant in Rihimaki, where plastic recycling is now a hot trend globally, the capacity of this plant was tripled over last year. It's now 30,000 tons per year, and this is the biggest plastic processing unit in the Nordic countries. It takes domestic waste, separates plastic, washes it, melts it and then distributes it according to its quality and makes it back into granulates that goes back to the industry as the material. It's the biggest Nordic plant of this nature, and it's a very promising project. Moreover, we are continuing on our big investments in solar and wind power. Currently, we have our 300 megawatt of solar power, and we are developing over 1,000 megawatts of solar and wind power. You may have noticed in the news yesterday that in Nabir Galax, we won the remaining subsidy system, which is now much more modest than what the heating tariffs used to be. We will now get an opportunity to build a 90 megawatt wind power park in Napier. We're only talking about a EUR $2.03 premium per megawatt if we have a low price, so less than €30 per megawatt hour. So now it will be market based wind power working on market conditions, which is what it should be. As I know, coal in this meeting too will be a topic. So I wanted to show you what it looks like in practice to shut down coal power plants. You may remember that in INCO, we have a very big, over 1,000 megawatt coal plant, and we're now demolishing it right now. So this is what it looks like in practice. The material that we get from this, about 96% to 98% can be recycled, 96% to 98%. So we're making a business out of this. We will have a service business out of this, and there we will make similar projects, do similar projects with our customers and clients, I hope, are all around Europe regardless of who owns these plants. So this is what it means in practice to give up coal. Next, I will move on to the result of 2018. First, a couple of key points. The electricity market was developing in a positive manner. And from the producer point of view, I'll show you the graph. We had a strong economic result. We concentrate on strengthening our balance sheet and cash flow. And I'm also going to dwell in on the Uniper case and on our updated Here are some graphs on the market development. First of all, emission rights, emission right prices, European emission trading system was accepted and updated directive running up to 02/1930. And part of this from the beginning of this year, the market stability mechanism entered into force, and it absorbs the excess capacity from the markets. Then we have the linear deduction multiplier, so how much new trading rights are entered into the markets. And this will be tightened from 2021 on. And this is a good thing. Fortum has actively lobbied in Brussels on tightening the emissions trading system, partially alone, partially together with other similarly spirited energy companies. And the result is a good step in the right direction. It's not sufficient yet, and we have to lobby more, but it's a big step in the right direction. And as a result of this, you see the orange graph here. The price for emission trading has been increasing. That is the right hand graph for the emission allowances, and there is a clear connection to electricity price. The Nordic 2020 term price is the blue graph. And if we remember that €1 is €45,000,000 into our operating profit. And through that result to the shareholders, you can see how significant this matter is. Another thing that also affects electricity price is the hydropower situation. This is seen in the right hand graph, the Nordic water reservoirs. You see the dark green line there and then the dotted gray line, which is the average. The beginning of the year was an on normal level. But then during Q2, Q3 summer months, you see that the dark green line is really under the dotted line because the summer was very dry. As the Chairman of the Board mentioned, the generation of hydropower was much lower than usually, but the higher price compensated it that we were able to achieve a good result and the direction of progress was good, but this affected the hydropower volumes. The situation normalized towards the end of the year. And if we look at 2019, which is the orange line beginning there, we are achieving an average normal level. But we still are according to the latest information, we are still lagging behind by 4.5% in Nordic hydropower. In addition to these two graphs, the electricity price is affected with international commodity prices, gas and coal especially. Gas is the darker line here, and that is affected especially by the Chinese demand. Coal prices were increasing, but it has come down in the beginning of this year. The LNG in America affects the gas prices. The gas prices were increasing strongly during the past year, but then they have decreased. Now when we combine these and then the emission allowances, we get the variable production cost, which you can see in the right hand graph. And you can see a clear connection to the Nordic daily system price, which, of course, varies on a daily level quite a lot, as you can see. But there is a strong correlation between the two graphs. And this is because although in the Nordic countries, we have not that much condensed power, but we have so many transmission lines that the markets are quite strongly in connection with each other. They correlate. The year 2018 was, economically speaking, very good. Our sales grew by 16%, and the comparable profit was to $987,000,000 and the 2016 comparable sales was $6.44 $20.17 $8.11 and now $9.87. So this is a development trend. The other figures are affected by other factors, complicating matters. If I could inefficiently take out all the effect of these different factors and items to make a comparable figure, the final result would be that our earnings per share would increase from €0.74 to €0.8 But this is an unofficial my own calculation. But as you can see, the result is still a little bit under the proposed dividend. We, last year, published the target that we wouldn't have to cut our dividend temporarily, and we have been able to keep this target because the market outlook, as I said, have been progressing in the good positive direction. And therefore, for this year, we will also get our share from the Uniper result, which, of course, supports both our cash flow and our earnings per share result. So we have all reason to be quite satisfied with 2018 results, And this also goes for all of our different business areas. You can see the in size of in order of size generation, six thirty one million, an increase of 32%, especially due to higher electricity prices despite the hydro reservoirs being low. The Russian business area, the comparable operating profit was $271,000,000 and it decreased a little bit because of the weaker rate of the ruble. Then City Solutions and Consumer Solutions units both benefited from the Halfsund acquisition. The City Solutions, 113,000,000, which was plus 15% and for Consumer Solutions, 53,000,000, which was an increase of 29%. So altogether, all units developed developed into a good direction last year. If we then look at our economic position, EBITDA is very important because it is compared to our operating profit. It was 1,500,000,000.0 due to investments, Uniper and others, altogether over 4,000,000,000 per EBITDA was the operating margin was 3,600,000,000.0. And we haven't included here the consolidated nominal amount of Uniper net gearing net debt or their EBIT. If we would include them, then we would be much closer to the target set. Then before moving on to emissions, a couple of words on sustainability and targets. First of all, sustainable development is in the core of Fordham's strategy and has been for years and still is, and we will continue that work for long. Into the future, we are one of the cleanest energy companies in the world. Our five year average of CO2 emissions is 186 grams per kilowatt hour, and our target is to be under 200. There are other key indicators. You can see all of them from Page 32 onwards in the material distributed to the shareholders. There are lots of indicators in our sustainability report. I take one example. Within two years, from 2016 to 2018, we have been able to reduce our particulate emissions by 43%. When we talk about emissions, you have to remember that, of course, CO2 is essential and very important, and we'll talk more about it in a moment. But we also have to look at our sulfur dioxide, nitrogen and particulate emissions. The energy sector's part of particulate emissions is very small, between 45% when transport is around 70%. So the challenge lies there more. But still, even though our share is small, we were able to reduce that even by 43% within two years, 2016 to 2018. We are now preparing a new reporting platform based on the TCDF task force on climate related disclosures. And the target is that this would be the first year when we report on the basis of the TCDF reporting platform. So next in next year's AGM, we will be able to give you the first TCDF reporting. We also talk about science based targets reporting. That as well as CCDF are very right things, and we are now studying on what is the best way to report according to this obligation. The practical challenge here is that our European production in the current situation and for the future years to come according to the Paris climate targets. But in Russia, the energy situation and reality is different. We have been constructing new modern gas plants there, and they are much more environmentally friendly than the cold fired plants we used to have. And we have made long term contracts for these power plants related directly to electricity and district heating, security of supply. And how these should be dealt with in the science based reports, that is not yet quite clear because there's no sense in closing down these modern power plants, it would only lead to introducing the old fashioned more emitting plants into use again. So we, of course, think that Science, Best Targets is on the right track. We want to be involved in this discussion. And regarding Uniper, just a couple of words on that. Uniper is an independent stock list company. And when we report on targets, I cannot do that on behalf of Uniper here in this forum. But despite that, I will comment on the overall situation on Uniper, but I cannot even wonder or think what all legal statutes I would break if I would report on their behalf here, and I hope that you all understand that, that I cannot do it. For to share price development and ownership structure, you can see them here on this slide. Ownership structure, 58%, Finnish state, other foreign investor, 38%, the situation of last year and households 10.2%. You can see too the total shareholder return in the past three years since 2016. The price of share, and you can see the trend and the dividends paid to you. We don't have 2019 upcoming dividend yet on this figure. But nevertheless, the total shareholder return to you, shareholders, from three years was 74%, and from last year, it was 23%. And market capitalization is about €18,000,000,000 for the time being. So my last part on our strategy on coal, Uniper's role and what is linked with that. First of all, there's three main drivers of decarbonized economy. First of all, the climate and environment targets. We support the Paris targets on coal carbon neutrality. And we also want to aim at the 1.5 degree reduction we need to cut on all emissions. One central thing is how we electrify the society. The part of electricity in the end use of electricity is about 20%. 20%, The central and maybe most important thing in order to cut is the 80% electrification. Of course, we need to produce that electricity as clean as possible. So a strong electrification of society. We talk about coal production, coal generation, industry, transport and so on. And very important also is that we more efficiently use national resources. Policies, politics and regulation are very important. The emissions trade scheme is very important because on the sectors that fall under the ET, Us, The directive dictates how many allowances are available and that the markets find the price for the allowance. That is the directive that dictates the amount of emissions, not the companies, although we wanted to. Politics and regulation is very important also. And we've seen also the in this intensive debate about the around the German Coal Commission. Well, the commission is proposing to the German government that phasing out coal would be by 02/1938. No decisions have been made so far. But now the government needs to tackle this and, in that stage, negotiate with companies about the scheduling of shutting down plants. This is very strongly politicized, this debate and But this technologies are developing. Last year, we used more than €50,000,000 to R and D, solar and wind, wind new solutions. Digitalization is very important in order to balance supply and demand in consumer solutions using artificial intelligence, new storage possibilities. They also have an impact on reduction of emissions. Storage is very important in technology. We are in the ecosystem of e cars, e vehicles. And for the time being, in The Nordics, we have some 80,000 electric cars systems in Europe. Our cloud system, which is based on black surfing startup that we acquired last year, we have some 200,000 e car holders. So we are a market leader in Norway, for example, which is by far the quickest and best developed e car market. And this list could be a long one. I can't take everything on this, but different ways to have flexibility in demand so that consumers can also balance their consumption and supply. Then if we look at emissions more strongly, then you can see here the situation in Europe. And this is a very important picture because here somewhere between 4.5 gigaton CO2 equivalent where we transform convert other emissions to CO2, we are around four thousand seven hundred four thousand eight hundred gigatons in Europe. And on the left hand side, you can see where the primary energy comes from, where the emissions in Europe come from, coal, oil, gas and others. And then very importantly, which sector uses that energy that produces these emissions. Power in transport, very important industry buildings and all the rest, for example, agriculture. So here is the whole picture that we can see. One example is that steel alone produces about 9% of the global emissions. Steel industry emissions in the world are equivalent to all emissions in Europe. Concrete, less than almost half. So when we talk about reduction emissions, then of course, our in the power industry, we need to take the lead and responsibility. But this picture needs to be remembered when we talk about the target in Europe or globally that we want to be carbon neutral by 02/1950. And then you look in perspective what sort of a gigantic challenge we are facing here. The EU target is 80% to 95%, but the truth is that the EU emissions trading system and the directive are not even within the sector, around the 80% of those which are fall under the ETS. And if we want to update the 80 up to 100%, then if there are any emissions left, they should be then fixed by carbon sinks. So this shows you the enormously of this problem. So we should need to electrify all individual heatings. We should electrify transport. We need to electrify or, let's say, replace all fuels by electricity or gas in industry in difficult industrial processes. Majority is doable, but they are extremely expensive. So if you think about Fortum's stance on the measures or tools. So for the time being, less than half of European emissions fall under the ETS scheme of the EU. So that should be the main tool to use in the future. The ETS determines how many emissions in a particular sector are allowed. And then the linear reduction factor, which is 1.7574%, then decreases the amount of emissions every year. Then after that, the markets allocate the resources to the most efficient reduction plants. So this is the, by far, most cost efficient and quick way how to advance. So that's why Fortum has been very actively involved. I've been sitting in numerous meetings in Brussels where we want to tighten up the emissions trading system. We have taken one step forward, which is the reduction factor, which will grow to 2.2 by 2021. It should be even tighter, 2.6, 2.8 somewhere there. And after that, the trading system will then guide the energy system and district heating and some other industrial processes, how their emissions are then absorbed by the markets. Has replied to the consultation request of the Commission. The Commission is updating the 2050 Vision. Fortum wants to have front loaded measures in the 02/2040. Targets need to be updated, long framework so that we can invest in a way that the investments are in an environment. And emission trading system should be extended, for example, to individual houses, transport. We would have only one market based system. And the beauty of the system is that it automatically directs the emissions where we want them to be. The better even better if we have a global cooperation under this. During the Finnish EU presidency, the second half of this year is in a good position because then new commission will start working in Europe, And the agenda of the new commission needs to have the emissions trading system. And this is one way that we can influence during the Finnish presidency of the European Council. Many know I'm also heading the Finnish Industry Association. We have the 1.5 targets of our association, also our Nordic sister associations. And I hope that together with the upcoming government next autumn, we will influence the EU so that the commission would be more ambitious. We will we have the Capital Market Day to institutional investments in November, and we updated our strategy on the decade of electricity that I referred to, and we simplified it to four priorities, of which the first one is pursue operational excellence and increased flexibility. Secondly, ensure value creation for investments and portfolio optimization. Why these two? Because we have made some major investments, 4,000,000,000 to other than Uniper and Uniper, another €4,000,000,000 And that is why the most important thing now is that we get a return from these investments. It is more important even than starting investments in anything new. So nevertheless, we want to continue investing in new things. We want to grow in the power value chain. And we also want to build options for significant new businesses such as circular economy on the recycling of factories. We believe that from your point of view, shareholders, this portfolio that we are now constructing and that combined with our market outlook, we have every reason to be optimistic. So there's the profitability, Axel, and then the time. If we look at 02/1930, you can see what happens by then. But this present portfolio that we now have, when we develop it further, either the potential is very good for profits. But then looking towards 02/1930, 2030, in security on political regulation, for example. And I'd hope that by then, there will be new technologies, cheaper ones. And it will be very difficult to evaluate or forecast electricity price by 02/1930. And therefore, it is important that we think big and we think what is our position in a world that potentially has a lower electricity price and the market model is something else compared with tomorrow. Solar and wind will be more important. The production cost is zero. The fuel doesn't cost anything. So this will significantly change the market models, and that is why we are now already building on new business possibilities or options. So these were the four priorities that we have. And then, of course, a big another thing is how Uniper fits in all of this. I repeat what I've said so far. It is a big international power company with a lot of capacity, 33.3 gigawatts by 2018. 70% is low carbon nuclear, hydro, 20% and gas, 50% coal is 30%. And as we've said many times over and Uniper itself says that coal will be phased out in Europe, and it is very important for in order to achieve our targets, climate change targets. It is interesting in Uniper that now that almost all European countries, are important to Uniper and to us at Fortune two, they have published some sort of phasing out program. France, '21, '22 U. K, 2025. France is still debating this. 'twenty one, 'twenty two are the figures that we have. Finland is the only country where we already have a law for 29%, Netherlands 29% and Germany 2038%. So the phasing out of coal in Europe is taking place. And Germany, at the same time, is phasing out nuclear by 2022. It means that hydro, wind, solar and in the Nordics, nuclear is not sufficient, but gas is going to be most important. Its emissions are half on coal, and it is going to be very important for the security of supply. The fact remaining that while we struggle with climate changes, we need to reduce emissions and quickly, societies nevertheless are not yet ready to accept that there are large electricity outages. And therefore, the security of supply is very important, and this makes gas more important when we phase out coal and Germany phases out the nuclear part. Hydro is going to be more important with adjustable possibilities. The blue one with Uniper is hydro, both in Germany and in Sweden, very interesting for us actually as an investment because now that we own 49.99% of Uniper. Uniper is an associate company, and that's why we have no right, I said, we have no right legally to make any statements on behalf of Uniper or commit ourselves them. But when we talk about sulfur and particles, of course, this is on the agenda when we discuss these issues with Uniper. The German government's position is going to be very important. They have said that 2038 is a political decision. So the companies are now negotiating with the government about what this decision means to individual plants and how they are going to be shut down. But this is a negotiation for Uniper, and Uniper is the company who will then make statements concerning these negotiations. Economically, this is very important for us because their operating profit was €1,500,000,000 and expected this year that our share and dividend from Uniper is going to be €160,000,000 And this also supports our earnings per share, of course. And then last, what is the vision of future utility? What are the building blocks that we need for that. If today's utility consists of heat and electricity going through low carbon and digital solutions, we have four other building blocks, which will give us some road map towards the future. First of all, we have pilots that are ongoing in the pipeline. We don't yet know which is our role in the value chain going to be under all these building blocks, and we don't know yet whether we are going to take part in all these four. But they are all important blocks for the future system. Clean gas, I said earlier, when we phase out nuclear and coal, gas is going to be important because it can create a pathway towards clean gas. At least the same infrastructure can be used partially. Then remaining solar can be made into hydrogen, and that can be made into methane, synthetic natural gas, where we can circulate CO2 in the atmosphere in as opposed to creating new. Carbon sinks, we in Oslo, we have a carbon capture project with an on which is sustainable materials, recycling plastics, as I said, and the batteries are going to be recycled as a and as a very important building block. Bioeconomy, where we have some pilots going on, what you can do out of wood in addition to making pulp and building material or that it is combusted for energy. We are now looking for new approaches to buyer economy, and there are very good possibilities there. Chairman, this was my review,