Earnings Call: H2 2020

Mar 18, 2021

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us this morning. I'm here with Richard Preston, my CFO as well. I'm just going to walk you through the results for the 18 month period, and you should be referring to the slide deck, which I think It's on the website or you can see on screen. So just to start off, I think it's been a very solid year and our commercial partnerships are going from strength to strength. I think despite the COVID pandemic, climate action is now still a number one priority globally, and Saris is emerging as a leader in clean energy technology, and our intention is to establish our position in this sector as it grows. Pleased to report that we've made progress on all our major contracts over the period, and that's driven an increase in revenue and other operating income up to $33,000,000 for the 18 months period. And we're maintaining sector leading gross margins of 67% based on our licensing model, which is quite unique to service in this industry. I will talk further about our strategic partnerships, but we've made good progress, particularly in the last quarter of 2020. And all of this is really an outstanding achievement by the people of Cerro's who've continued to enable this growth despite the pandemic, and we'd like to particularly thank them for their hard work and commitment over this period. Also, overnight, we raised an additional £181,000,000 of fundraising via an accelerated book build. For funding growth of shares at this key time, both on the fuel cell power side and also into the new area of solid oxide electrolysis for green hydrogen. And that fundraise was very well backed by Institutional investors have we oversubscribed and very importantly by our 2 major strategic partners in Bosch and Weichai. So we're very pleased to have completed that. Moving on to Slide 3, just A little bit about why we raised this funding and what we are going to do with the funds. As I mentioned, I believe that over the past few years, we've demonstrated Dacera's technology to become the technology of choice in the industry, And really, we want to consolidate that position and also grow. On the fuel cell power side, We're using about 25% of the additional funding as well as obviously funding we have on hand to really grow this position. We're taking it into new markets and new applications. And overnight, you might have seen another announcement by Doosan in the marine sector, which is a key growth market for us. And we do aim to establish ourselves as the industry standard in solid oxide for power generation. So we're very focused on delivering to our key partners towards 2024 on scale up, and that's a big part of what we are investing in. A new exciting area for us is electrolysis. We've been doing a lot of work on this over the past 18 months, And we now feel the time is right to accelerate this. So 55% of the funds will go into this new area. And we believe we have a highly differentiated technology to access this green hydrogen market. And that could significantly increase the future value and royalty opportunity for Cerro's. And then foundationally across the business, about 20% of the funds are for the core business in terms of We want to go faster on R and D and innovation and maintain that technology leadership and some of it is general working capital for the expanded business. As I mentioned, both Bosch and Weichai fully back the strategy and the fundraise and fully participated, And the book build was heavily oversubscribed, and we're very pleased to have brought some high quality institutional investors onto the register as well. We also had a retail offering as part of this fundraise overnight. So moving on to slide 4, I think with everything that's going on at the moment, it's just Quite useful to reflect, it's been a very busy 18 month period that we are reporting on this morning. And I'm not going to go through all of this progress, but you can see how Cerys has developed our partnerships With time and growing these partnerships and obviously they're very valuable to the business. Obviously, with Weichai, we've From the first prototype system, we're now moving into field trials, and we're expecting to form a joint venture in the middle of the year. With Miura in Japan, that's a very strong partnership, and we've gone all the way through licensing to products on the market now in Japan, which is a key target for us. Doosan is very exciting because it's taking us up in scale, it's taking us up into new applications like marine and also South Korea is emerging as one of the key target markets for hydrogen and fuel cell technology. So we are with the leading player in that market. And then Bosch, of course, is the 1st partner to manufacture our fuel cells outside of the UK in Germany, is a very key strategic partner as we scale up and support this wider commercial application. And then Most recently, ABL is a new partnership, which really helps us as we go into some of these new applications and accelerate some of our business development. So that's summarized in Slide 5. Some key highlights, big milestone with Bosch in December As we target production ramping up to 200 megawatts by 2024 across Germany and obviously High capability from Bosch on both the manufacturing side and the product development side. With Weichai, we are progressing with the Technology evaluation at the field trial stage, and that partnership is now likely to be resulting in a joint venture, we hope, by around the middle of this year. With Doosan, a big license agreement The back end of last year for 50 megawatts of capacity initially on a same time frame as Bosch, and we expect that to grow and also grow into new applications like the utility scale and the marine application I mentioned earlier. And then ABL is a new strategic collaboration, which we expect will bring new business into CERES and will form a very strong partnership on our ability to execute at system level. So that's updated the commercial progress in brief. I'm now going to hand you over to Richard, to talk you through the financial update. Thank you, Phil. So if we're now on Slide 7, I mean, it's just worth reminding everyone that this is an 18 month period. And for ease of reference, the numbers that we show in this presentation For the calendar year 2020 versus 2019, just to get some comparability. In this last period, we've had good solid growth, as Phil said. I think what's really important is that we've maintained Our gross margin up at 67%. I do expect it to change period on period, but actually, it happens to be pretty solid Solid in the period and the last period too. And supporting that, we've grown our order book and pipeline Since the last period, so this is sitting just under £100,000,000 and gives us a lot of confidence for the revenue for the next few years As both the Wood and Wood and Pipe pipeline are contracted revenues as is described in the note there. And clearly, the other highlight is the cash that we've got, which is good for our existing business and for the joint venture. I'll just move to the next slide. And here, Really supporting this, we've got the revenue continuing to grow over the last four periods and keeping maintaining the gross margins. What's interesting here as well is the mix of our revenue changing. So In the last period, we can see the license is increasing and likewise, our hardware supply has increased as we've brought up Our pilot manufacturing facility, but net net, we're at the same gross margin, which is great. And again, I think going forward, we'll see The mix chopping and changing depending on the programs that we're in. And again, I think it's probably worth reminding everyone That the gross margins that we have 67 odd percent 60% to 70% are really sector leading and it's a function of our business model that we're up there at this level and not at the sort of the more usual 30 odd percent that many of our peers have. And just moving to the next slide. So here's a bit more going into the P and L, into the cash flow. What we've told people in the past is our continued want to invest for growth and That's continued over the last few periods as you can see with our cash OpEx increasing and you can see it with the adjusted EBITDA Despite the revenue and gross profit growth, we put the money into the company for future revenues and that's impacted the EBITDA in the period. So we're really building the company to look at future opportunities. And finally, just on this slide, The net cash used in operating activities, it's come off. It's improving Year on year, but in 'nineteen, 'twenty, it's affected by some working capital movements. And really what you'd expect with EBITDA Is that the underlying is slightly worse than that. And then to my next slide, Slide 10, This is an exit of our cash flow, but really there's 2 messages here. Firstly, the cash that we have on the balance sheet today, this is enough for our existing business, the opportunities that we can address today And for the joint venture, the potential joint venture with Weichai that we expect to put in place halfway through this year. Clearly, what Phil has talked about is the fund raise overnight and he talks about that in more depth by the use of funds and the opportunity there. But That really is for new opportunities. It's for electrolysis, it's for additional markets in the fuel cell markets and it's to support Our innovation and the core for the business, so it's the right size for the future. So I'll now hand you back to Phil For the next slides, strategy and outlook. Thank you, Richard. So Just wanted to say a few more words about the strategy and the outlook for the company. Just moving on to Slide 12. I've talked earlier about the 18 month period being a very busy period for Cerro's despite what's been happening with the global pandemic. I think what we're seeing is now a global trend towards clean energy technology to address climate change. On the policy side, we now have more than 20 countries, have dedicated hydrogen strategies, and we're seeing some of the key regions like South Korea, China, Japan have very significant stimulus packages around decarbonization. And we have strong partnerships in most of those countries, Japan, Germany, South Korea, China. So the policy and the trajectory, I think, is set And we are definitely moving towards a very positive environment for hydrogen and fuel cells. The industry, the challenge is still there, and major corporations are now making net zero pledges and having to pivot their businesses towards technologies that can take a pathway towards net 0. And that means that there's a lot of private sector investment going in now into this industry. And with our partnership model, we're well placed to capitalize on that. And then finally, I think this is creating the right environment for investment and we're seeing more and more interest on the ESG agenda into this energy transition. It does represent a huge commercial opportunity and a significant investment opportunity as well. So this, I think, has accelerated the activity towards hydrogen and fuel cells in the past 18 months or so. Just moving on to Slide 13. Our purpose at CERES is to provide clean energy technology to the world's leading partners to address climate change. And we've built the business from the foundation of stationary power and we've been going up in power there. So we decarbonized residential and commercial sector of society With our partnerships with the likes of Weichai and Doosan, we're starting to get into the transportation side for heavier vehicles like commercial vehicles shipping. And then I think with the last part of society, which is industrial decarbonization, we've made this step now into solid oxide electrolysis, because we see demand for hydrogen in decarbonization of industries like steel, ammonia, cement and others. So really, This is very consistent with our purpose for decarbonization across the whole of society. If you go to Slide 14, We're very confident in this step because it's a natural progression for the company. We're building on the same core cell and stack Platform, the same IP portfolio has a lot of dual purpose across both electrolysis and the power side. Most importantly, a lot of the hard work we're doing on scale up and manufacturing actually progresses across from the power side onto the electrolysis side as well. And we have the same partnering model providing scale. So on the power side, we're really at the commercialization phase, high efficiency power generation, Fuel flexibility for hydrogen and ammonia and manufacturing scale up with partners, and we've grown the number of applications. On the hydrogen side, we're now in a development phase where we're developing high efficiency green hydrogen production technology. We are wanting to move ahead with a megawatt scale demonstrator over the next 18 months, and I'll talk more about that. And we see that as a key opportunity in the feedstock for industrial applications, and we will continue to use the licensing and royalty model. Go to Slide 15. If you think about Cerus today, we've been successfully building out partners On the power side, addressing some of these key areas like commercial CHP, data centers, distributed power and now getting into transportation. If you run that same core technology in reverse, you can start to generate hydrogen both for industrial feedstocks and as a precursor to e fuels as well and future fuels like ammonia. So it really broadens out the ecosystem for the application of Cerro's technology and has a key role to play both on the fuel side and on the power side. If we go to Slide 16, just a few words on why we believe solid oxide has a high potential. I think just like fuel cells, all of the different technologies have a role to play, all have different strengths and weaknesses. I think the key differentiator for solid oxide is it's potentially the highest efficiency of the available electrolysis technologies, particularly when you can utilize waste heat. And that's very important because that efficiency translates into a low cost pathway So hydrogen, as over 2 thirds of the energy cost 2 thirds of the cost of hydrogen is resulting from the energy input costs going in. So the more efficient potentially the lower cost of hydrogen you can achieve. So we are using the same Core technology to address this highly efficient application. We're very confident on cost because it's going to be the same broadly the same cell and stack technology that we're scaling now with our partners and it's mass manufacturable. So existing manufacturing partners and new partners could also make SOEC as well as SOFC. And again, we will use the license business model, which we believe is highly differentiates us from other SOEEC offerings. Just moving on to Slide 17, the expected timeline for this, we've spent about a year or so evaluating the technology, talking to prospective partners, etcetera. And now we're at a point where we're going to build this into subsystems and into a megawatt scale demonstrator by the middle of next year. We're going to fund most of that activity ourselves as we want to capture as much of the IP and future value as we can as a licensing business. And then we expect to have a, if you like, a first of a kind demonstrator by second half of twenty twenty two, where we then believe we have a commercial offering where partners will start to join in on this commercialization just as we've done on the Power Systems side, and that will result in a second generation system with 1st commercial systems being by 2025. We have designed the program so that we can actually onboard partners as we go into the first stage, and we are open to that as well, and we have some interest in that first stage as well from partners. This feeds into the business model we have. And as I move on to Slide 18, The left hand side is really building out more and more applications for the technology, and we see This step into salt oxide electrolysis is additive to that as are some of the expansions into areas like higher power for utility scale and marine. And that growth of the application side on systems drives the demand for our manufacturing licensee partners. So we create this virtual ecosystem where we have more partners working on service technology to establish it as the industry standard, feeding the manufacturing base and growing potential manufacturing licensees in the future. Just on Slide 19, just a good example of this of additional applications. This is an announcement overnight by Doosan, Obviously, one of our key partners who've just signed an MoU for a joint development with Hyundai Heavy Industries on shipping for SOFC based on the service technology. So again, that's a good example of an expansion of where our technology can go. It's also a good illustration of some of the work we're aiming to do on future fuels because decarbonization of shipping is likely to be LNG and potentially into ammonia, both highly compatible with solid oxide. So that's a good example of some of the directions that we're going in with the business growth. Just on Slide 20, what it looks like is the same business model. So We've been growing revenue year on year. And as Richard said, the mix is changing towards licensing as well as engineering services and hardware. And then from 2024 from scale up, we expect to start to generate royalties on the Power Systems side. On the hydrogen side, there's obviously a lag. It's a new area, but we reckon in a couple of years' time, we could start to have, again, developments license development fees and license fees coming in. And then royalties would obviously follow behind the Power Systems side. But as you could see, we're creating significant upside value for future royalties and value in the company. So we firmly believe that for this increase in 10% of share capital raised overnight, we significantly increased the target adjustable market for Cerner's. So finally, on Slide 21, the summary and outlook. We're seeing More and more urgency on climate change action, which is just driving demand globally for clean energy technologies. We have the strategy of licensing to global partners. This is a global issue, and as you can see from Our presentation today, we are active in most of the major markets. And therefore, we believe that it's the right time to accelerate the growth of service. Despite COVID, we've continued to deliver on the partnerships and on the results. And again, that's a huge credit to all of our people at SABES for achieving that. We believe that the technology is establishing itself as the industry standard in solid oxide, continued by the backing of our world class strategic partners. And this fundraise We'll really consolidate that position in the fuel cell side and accelerate our activity in the electrolysis side to enable the expansion of both the power system side of the business into the new markets and also into the new applications like electrolysis. As the company continues to grow, we are also planning to move up to the main market probably by middle of 2022. So to summarize, we continue to grow this high margin clean energy technology business, and We're very well positioned for the future. So with that, I'll take any questions. Thank you very much. We would like to start this morning with some questions from the line of Adam Collins from Liberum. His first questions are, are you able to discuss at this point what cash you will need to commit to YG JV in 2021 and 2022. Probably not, but if you could say something. Secondly, will your SOEC Demonstrate incorporates CO Electrolysis or RSOC, where will it be located? Thank you. Okay. So on the first question, no, it's not appropriate for us to comment on that at this time. Like we said, we have the cash already secured for our contribution towards the joint venture, but we are in the discussion stage of that with Weichai. So obviously, we can't share that information with you at this stage. The second part of the question It was quite technical. Really our focus as a first stage on electrolysis is producing Green hydrogen, I think that's a key building block that can take us into some other interesting applications, but I think the first stage is to establish ours as a potential player in solid oxide electrolysis. So that's really our main focus. And in terms of location, we can't say anything on that at this stage, but we'll again, we'll keep you updated on progress. Thank you. We do have one further question from the line of Adam. How will engineering services revenues develop in the next year or 2? Can you talk about how much of your employee build has been to support this? We expect Engineering services revenue will continue to grow. Obviously, we've formed a partnership with ABL as well. So we have more scale because typically when we're Developing new partners and new relationships, the engineering services side is delivering the core engineering capability, technology transfer to those partners. So it's natural as we grow top line revenue and order book with the order book that we have, we are anticipating strong revenue growth this year And some of the increase in our OpEx is recruitment in order to be able to deliver that revenue we've got on the order book. So in some ways, we have to invest slightly ahead of the curve to enable growth in engineering services. But the whole purpose of engineering services is really to deliver more licenses and royalties for the business because that's really where we generate the high value. So I think engineering services will grow, but some of that growth will do in partnership with ABL and really it's all with the aim of increasing license fees and royalties. Thank you. We do now have a question from the line of Lacey Mitchell. Her question is as follows. Can you clarify Exactly how you see the Cerus Hydrogen model working, as I'm assuming there won't be the same cell and stack reoccurring sales here Then there is Empower. Will royalties be generated depending on hydrogen produced? Now we Richard, do you want to take that one? Yes, let me do that, Phil. Yes, Lacy, it's the same model as we have. We anticipate that we in the same way that for the fuel cell side of business, where we get royalties for every unit that our manufacturers make or our OEMs sell, That's the same model that we anticipate. So again, it's actually as the capacity is built is when we'd get the royalty rather than when the hydrogen is produced. And just for clarity, the core fuel cell is going to be extremely similar to the current Fuel cell that's used for sorry, the same hardware, the same stack is going to be the same Roughly the same as it is for electrolysis as it is for fuel cells. So actually our manufacturing partners, we anticipate would be able to manufacture either of the same production line. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for joining today. And as I said, we're very pleased With the progress that we've made in this reporting period and the conclusion of the fundraising overnight, we We're very excited about the future and the position that we now have for CERES, and we look forward to reporting on progress in the future. So thank you for joining us today.