Very good morning to all of you. Welcome to Hexagon's Q2 presentation 2019. We've just completed our strategic update. I would like to spend the first section of this presentation on giving or sharing with you some of the highlights. David will take you through the Q2 numbers and the outlook for the rest of the year. The backdrop of our strategic position. We will just allow the latest to arrive. Good morning. May not be the brightest for the globe, but for Hexagon, it represents major opportunities. In our assessment, the shift to clean energy alternatives has now passed the point of no return. There is a growing concern, I would say, in most layers of the populations around the world, and an acknowledgement that the climate changes are real and also true concerns about local emissions.
In the last couple of years, we've also seen financiers, to an increasing extent, preferring Environmental Social Governance papers. Capital today is readily available for good investment opportunities in direction of improved environment. Regarding our sector, there is a significant push now for green transportation. Short to medium term, in our terminology, that is the next five to 10 years, we are of the strong expectation that natural gas will be a major source, and the environmental impact will be improved further by renewable natural gas or biogas. While, at the same time, we see a technology shift towards electric drive. Electric drive in itself has efficiency advantages above combustion engines.
We think that longer term electric drive will be the solution for the drivetrains, but the jury is still out on whether it will be battery electric, whether it will be fuel cell electric, or whether it will be hybrids, and potentially hybrids between gas and electric drive. Some very significant challenges in infrastructure development, less so with hybrid solutions, because then you could potentially generate the electricity on board the vehicles. We see that the center of gravity, especially for the hydrogen development, is now shifting towards Asia, East Asia, China, Korea, Japan. We see that light-duty vehicle projects in Europe and in North America are getting delayed. I will come back to that. We also see a shift to heavier vehicles.
While the focus a couple of years ago primarily was on the light-duty side, we see now that there is considerable attention to the medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles. The sum of this is an expectation of significant growth. Probably that is a strong understatement. If we take a look at the forecasts for the global vehicle sales, it is predicted to grow by approximately 1% per year. In 2018, there were a volume of 97 million vehicles sold on a global basis. That, if growing by 1% per year, will reach 110 million by 2030 and 134 million by 2040. KPMG, they release a report annually, and they estimate that by 2040, 77% of new vehicles sold will be clean fuels and hybrids, 77%.
If we use some math, in 2018, Hexagon's estimated combined addressable market globally was approximately NOK 4 billion, corresponding to 0.4 permille of the new sales of vehicles globally. If we assume that by 2030, 10% of the new sales will represent an addressable market for our products and systems, that conservatively translates into an addressable market of NOK 600 billion. That may be deemed extreme if you look at the relative growth. If you look at it as a step to solve the problem, it is probably extremely disappointing because 10% is not even the incremental growth of the sales of vehicles from now until 2030. If one truly believes that this emission challenge needs to be solved and needs to be solved fast, then 10% is far too low by 2030.
I will not take the risk of making a prediction, but I do assume that Hexagon will meet very strong growth in the years to come. If you take a strategic recap and go back to 2014, then I think many looked at Hexagon as a shale gas play. We had a strong presence in North America and shale gas entered the market at very competitive terms. We had the oil price collapse late 2014, and we repositioned Hexagon shortly thereafter to become an alternative clean fuel systems supplier. We merged part of our business with Agility in 2016, taking the step from product supplier to system supplier. We later acquired our main competitor, Xperion, consolidating the industry, and we reorganized and established Hexagon Purus as the main vehicle for hydrogen sales globally. We last autumn acquired Digital Wave as a step towards digitizing our offering.
Late last year, we also announced the purchase of the remaining shares in Agility, acquiring that 100%. With these steps, we feel we now have established a very strong platform for pursuing the g-mobility and e-mobility opportunities going forward. If I say that in 2014, on a scale from one to 10, our confidence level was between four and five. Today it is at 10. We are now fully convinced that the strategic steps that we've taken were the right ones in order to position Hexagon for the future. With these steps, we now have engineering hubs in North America and in Europe. We worked over the last year in particular in order to combine these and to establish joint processes, and be able to position for further opportunities.
We, today, can broadly divide our business into g-mobility on the one hand, CNG and RNG, hydrogen electric, and battery electric under e-mobility. As we have mentioned a couple of times, in Agility, we've run a program to develop systems capability for battery electric, medium duty and heavy duty. It's important to underline that we are not a battery producer. We will probably never be a battery producer. We are integrating battery technologies with electric drivetrains and are able to upfit trucks and medium duty vehicles to battery electric drivetrains. Also we have the capabilities to combine and deliver hybrids. That is a bit premature. We don't see a lot of hybrids between battery electric, hydrogen electric, and natural gas, biogas at this stage. It is our expectation that also that will come into the picture in the coming years.
There will not be one and only solution. There will be a combination of several. The hydrogen momentum continues to build up strongly. We announced a few weeks ago that one of the programs that we have been working on has been delayed indefinitely. It may seem a paradox that we are then stating that the momentum is building up strongly, but it is an important message there. The reason why these light-duty programs get delayed are twofold. One, the technology development is very challenging, and the OEMs are working through those challenges, and they experience some delays. More importantly, by moving hydrogen up their strategic agenda, they are taking a step back, looking at the vehicle platforms, looking at their long-term strategies, making adjustments to get it right. The latest to announce that they are targeting the fuel cell space is BMW.
They have been late in entering the party, but they also then, a couple of weeks ago, confirmed that they want to be in the market from the mid-2020s with the serial production. Germany. In Germany, the German government has followed Japan, Korea, and China, and expressed that they are targeting global leadership in development of hydrogen technology. Also Cummins, one of the major players in the combustion technology space, recently announced that they want to acquire Hydrogenics, and also then taking an important step from the combustion technology platform into the electric space. China, having been a forerunner in battery electric development, now is shifting to fuel cell electric. The government there is targeting 1 million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2030.
As the father of electric cars in China has expressed, we will sort out the factors that have been hindering the development of fuel cell vehicles. Very interesting development coming there. Somewhat under the radar in Norway is the development on renewable natural gas, this is maybe the hottest topic for the time being in North America. UPS, a major customer of ours, has already been a forerunner in promoting alternative fuels, they recently announced their target of 40% alternative fuels by 2025. They also made a record RNG deal, so renewable natural gas, biogas, if you like, of 170 million diesel gallon equivalents. The illustration to the right on this picture shows the impact on CO2 emissions by that deal.
As we've discussed before, RNG can have a net CO2 reduction impact as it ties up methane and converts it to fuel and replace fossil fuels. Volkswagen's program to promote CNG and biogas as a main part of their strategy continues. They now have 19 passenger car models on the market, but also a number of bus applications, and also have a truck solution. As you will see from the numbers, the development of that particular business is very satisfactory. Going forward, we will leverage our established leadership position and pursue even stronger growth. We will step up our R&D activities further. We will put major emphasis on developing a world-class organization.
We have a strong organization, but we have to deal with some of the most sophisticated, large corporations in the world, being used to the light-duty OEM standards, and we need to develop our organization to fully meet those requirements. We are strong in North America. We are strong in Europe. We have a weak presence in Asia. To establish and develop an Asian footprint is high on our agenda. From some of the commentary, we see that some investors and maybe also some analysts look at Hexagon as a value stock. That is slightly surprising to us. I want to be clear that as much as we like to make money and feel that we have a track record of showing that we are able to do that, we also need now to balance the short-term profitability with continuing our establishment of long-term positions and organizational development.
In a way, our dream is now coming true, and we are going to step up our efforts significantly further in order to take the right strategic positions, and take our fair share of growth opportunity, which we think is pretty formidable. On that note, I will leave the floor to David, and then we'll take some questions later.
Thank you, Jon Erik. Exciting future. I'm going to just take you through the second quarter financials. We'll also touch the near-term outlook that is second half of 2019. Starting with Q2, our newly acquired division, Agility Fuel Solutions, acquired at the beginning of 2019, continues to have a strong performance, 44% growth year-over-year in this quarter, particularly strong on refuse truck. Extremely strong developments in the CNG light-duty vehicle volumes. We have Volkswagen, as Jon Erik mentioned, pushing the CNG agenda in Europe. We were contracted by Volkswagen then to triple our annual production volumes in 2019 over 2018. We already see some of that new demand coming through. Towards the end of Q3, we will be commissioning the extra capacity. On Mobile Pipeline, relatively soft volumes.
The one positive was that we've been quite dependent on North America, but we've seen some good deliveries into the U.K. Good to see a pickup outside of North America. On LPG, very solid sales volumes there. Profitability is still lower than last year. Again, as we've seen in Q1, impacted adversely by mix factors. As Jon Erik covered there, the hydrogen market continues to be extremely dynamic. Aside from the delay in one of the hydrogen light duty projects that we have, there's been a lot of activity, particularly on the heavy duty, and we will cover the H2Bus Consortium that Hexagon joined also in the quarter. Firstly, from left to right, let's go through the financials for the quarter. We recorded revenues of NOK 882 million, versus just under NOK 367 million same period last quarter.
Of course, in 2019, we are now consolidating Agility Fuel Solutions. Agility delivered NOK 450 million of that top line growth, the rest then coming from CNG light-duty vehicles. On the EBITDA side, we recorded NOK 62 million in EBITDA versus NOK 73.6 million the same period last year. In the middle, you'll see a block in the lighter color there. We're just adjusting for the NOK 40 million accrual reversal that was to do with the obligations on our purchase of xperion that were no longer required. When we adjust like for like, the comparative figure then is NOK 33.7 million, we see some very good growth up to this quarter this year. Agility contributed NOK 38 million net of that. That's net of NOK 7 million of transaction impact. The hydrogen dilution, again, hydrogen is very much a future play. We do have to invest significantly today in that.
The dilution in 2019 was NOK -30 million. Same dilution last quarter at NOK -20. A little pickup in dilution there as well. When we go over to the right, we made a net loss of NOK -27.3 million versus the profit last year. Here we do have to include the depreciation and the amortization from all the goodwill posts from the Agility transaction. In addition, we have obviously higher interest costs. We've issued a bond to finance that transaction year-over-year. Some leasing cost increase. Those are cash. However, we've had unfavorable currency movements year-over-year of NOK -30 million. That contributes to the effect year-over-year. Those, of course, are non-cash. Of course, a positive tax impact of NOK 10 million given the lower results. Of course, important to look at the business outside of hydrogen, how that is doing.
This picture to the right shows our results from the left, and then in the middle, the hydrogen results. You can see they're quite dilutive to the group results. To the right-hand side, we would've recorded all the rest of the business outside of hydrogen, should I say, would've recorded around about NOK 857 million in revenue and about NOK 92 million in EBITDA for a 11% margin. The dilution is four percentage points for the hydrogen business in the quarter. Otherwise, recording a solid double-digit EBITDA margin rest of the business. Here we look at the revenue split in our segments. On the left-hand side is 2018. Here we include pro forma numbers for Agility and also for Digital Wave, a small acquisition we made at the end of 2018.
You can see the extreme growth there in Agility from NOK 313 million in 2018 to NOK 450 million this quarter. We'll talk a little bit more about Agility on the next slide. Having a look at the next area, Hexagon Purus. That combines our hydrogen business and our light duty vehicles business. In 2018, that recorded NOK 67 million. 52 of that was CNG light duty vehicles. This quarter, this year, NOK 150 million, which NOK 125 million was CNG light duty vehicles. The run rate coming out of Q2 for CNG is a NOK half a billion business unit. A very impressive growth there, and one to look for going forward. For Mobile Pipeline, fairly flattish as you see, NOK 131 versus NOK 129 revenues this year. For LPG, slight reduction on NOK 191 last year.
That was very close to record sales last year. NOK 175 million is a pretty solid performance for LPG in this quarter. As Agility is our largest division, we'll just take a few more minutes to concentrate on Agility. Here's the five-quarter picture on the right-hand side. Starting with quarter 2 2018, if we cast our minds back, the market was waiting for the low nitrogen oxide, low emissions new Cummins 12 liter engine, and that was actually launched towards the back end of 2018. After that launch, you can see quite a pickup then, particularly in the heavy-duty truck volumes in quarter 3 and quarter 4 2018. We've continued that momentum through 2019, both for quarter 1 and now quarter 2, recording revenues of NOK 450 million in the quarter. A lot of that growth year-over-year in Q2 was due to refuse truck.
I would say the refuse truck orders are more skewed towards the first half of the year and will be lower the second half of the year. European transit in particular, very much accelerating, so we continue to see that trend. You will see there is a margin reduction in the quarter to 8%. 1.5 percentage points is from those purchase price adjustment I mentioned previous slides, and that was an effect of minus NOK 7 million in the quarter. That's about 1.5 percentage points there. Otherwise, some adverse mix and also Agility is ramping up their EV program as well. Hence a slightly dampened margin for the quarter. Very importantly, it continues to be self-funded, meaning it doesn't need any group contribution, so it's working on its own cash, and it's strongly cash generating.
We issued the bond basically on the back of that investment, that's very important to note. On the balance sheet, no real changes. We have remain a 45% equity ratio, which is good. Net interest-bearing debt going slightly above the level of the bond we issued in the quarter. That is mainly driven by some adverse working capital. We had a working capital draw of minus NOK 65 million in the quarter. Otherwise, pretty stable conditions. Just jumping to near-term outlook. As I say, we can, unless otherwise stated, that's the second half of 2019. Starting with Agility, we expect more of the same in 2019 second half. Certainly the cleaner air directives that were introduced and adopted in Europe is having a significant impact to the focus in heavy duty bus in cities around Europe.
That is definitely stimulating demand, and it's going to be more of a question of us having capacity to continue to supply demand. Very exciting segment there. I mentioned that refuse truck will be more skewed towards the first half and a little bit low on the second half of the year. Overall, for the full year of 2019, refuse truck is on very high levels and growth year-over-year. Low and zero emission heavy duty trucks, we will speak a lot about RNG. We have already and we will continue to do so. RNG, renewable natural gas or biogas. Those initiatives together with CNG are really helping our stakeholders achieve sustainability commitments.
In the previous picture, you saw one of our largest customers, UPS, who have been extremely aggressive on sustainability targets and have, I believe, extended those out to 2025 and increased the level of alternative fuel vehicles that will be in their fleets. Very good news also for Agility going forward. As I mentioned, battery electric vehicle programs will remain on track. We have a very strong anchor customer there, so that's paid development. Of course, in addition to that, we do have some extra costs in order to keep competitive in that growing area. Hexagon Purus, at least the hydrogen part of Purus. Talk a little bit about the H2 Bus Partnership. Certainly a lot of interest in heavy duty on the hydrogen side. The H2 Bus Partnership, we're in partnership with companies like Ballard, with Nel, Wrightbus, amongst others.
Here the goal is to deploy 600 buses by 2023 at a good and competitive total cost of ownership. Hexagon ourselves, we will provide the fuel solutions on these buses and also the distribution trailers. That's quite important. With Agility Fuel Solutions and systems competence, we have quite a competitive package now, especially when we go into the heavy-duty sector for hydrogen and then combining our distribution and Mobile Pipeline expertise, it's quite a formidable package, we feel. Geographically, as Jon Erik mentioned, certainly China and Korea are expanding. We see a lot of interest currently and expect it to grow in the future. As Jon Erik mentioned, that will continue to mean organization ramp-up. When we look at the other side of Purus, on the light-duty vehicle side, as I mentioned, very strong demand here in Europe.
Our order intake is at the all-time high. As I mentioned, the capacity investment contracted with Volkswagen to triple our volumes, that should be commissioned by already end Q3. Hope to supply even more from that point on. Volkswagen are targeting not only Germany. Germany, they have a target of 1 million CNG vehicles, light duty on the road by 2025, but also adjacent markets in Europe. Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Czech Republic, for example. These are all interesting areas of growth also hopefully for Hexagon. When we look at Mobile Pipeline. Mobile Pipeline, there's still strong underlying drivers, but we know Mobile Pipeline very well. It's going to be challenging near term. The challenge is really in its lumpy project-based nature. That means that demand is fairly variable, sometimes unpredictable.
We have low order visibility generally, and that will be how we see the rest of 2019. I will say that North American oil and gas and industrial users over the last two or three years, this has been really the main area driving volumes. Continues to be high activity. That is good. What is really interesting as well is back to RNG. We're getting initiatives that will also help us diversify our revenue streams and applications. If we look further down, we were awarded a RNG contract for $4 million recently from a leading U.S. utility, and again, enabling reduction of agricultural carbon emissions. We hope to see many more of those projects. It's a little bit too early to see the size of that total market segment. Certainly an interesting one both for Hexagon, also for the climate.
Pleased to see back on the industrial and North American side, we had a new order from Certarus for NOK 7 million. Going into Canada and mining sector, for example. On Regasco LPG. We tend to refer to this in Regasco as a step-by-step development. We will continue that step-by-step approach. Second half of the year, as you know, is seasonally softer. That's because the first half of the year is very heavily targeted to the European barbecue season. Q3 and four does tend to be lower. Saying that, we see continued opportunities in Bangladesh and sales there. That's been our largest market this year, a market that we've opened up over the last couple of years. We're still gaining some traction. We have seven pilot programs in the U.S., so those remain ongoing.
We were happy to announce a new market in the quarter, our first sales into Bulgaria. Step-by-step for LPG. To summarize, the group outlook for the second half, we will have weak profitability in quarter three, but it's looking pretty strong for Q4. In Q3, unfortunately, when all our major divisions have their softest quarter of the year at the same time, it does have an impact on the profitability. Of course, the reverse is also applicable. It will be fairly variable, a low Q3, higher Q4. Agility, CNG, LDV, and LPG will remain strong contributors. LPG, as I mentioned, will be seasonally lower, but a fairly solid rest of second half of the year. CNG, LDV continues to grow, and Agility is well poised.
I think for Agility, we will have some softness as well in Q3, but it's probably its strongest quarter expected than in Q4. Underlying drivers remain strong. That's the key for Hexagon. We are a long-term play. As the push for greener mobility only increases, this is exciting times for Hexagon. On that note, I'll ask Jon Erik to join me for any questions rather from the audience or web audience.
Yeah.
Oliver Nygaard from SEB. You gave some details on the lost hydrogen contract. Could you say something, the risk for additional contracts within the hydrogen segment being pulled?
Being pulled, we don't see any significant risk. Delays, we see that the development that needs to take place in this whole technology evolution entails risks. We see a risk for delays also in other, maybe more on the light-duty side. We see much more upside potential than downside potential. Our overall estimate for the future years is higher today, significantly higher today, than it was, for example, six months ago.
Are we talking months or years for the delay?
It's very hard for us to comment on that. As I said, these are huge programs, massive resources spent by the OEMs, and they will have their strategy reviews. It's now moving, as I mentioned, high up on their overall strategic agendas. I think they are first and foremost focused on getting it right. While they maybe, two, three years ago, some of them at least were more tipping their toe in the water, now they really see that this needs to be part of their portfolio. Their plans are 10, 15 years horizon. I think it's in the nature of that development that there may be hiccups in the development, which will then, in consequence, also affect us.
On the guidance for second half, and the comments for weak Q3 and a strong Q4, is it possible to quantify how weak the weak Q3 will be? How confident are you in a pickup in Q4? You mentioned your scale of four to five and 10. How confident are you that Q4 will be a stronger quarter?
Yeah, I don't want to quantify, be so precise. It'll be the weakest quarter of the year. That, as you know, tends to happen. LPG is seasonally weak. If the other divisions just have a relatively softer quarter, then there's less profit to cover the dilution of hydrogen. I think Mobile Pipeline is something that is low visibility, so it's hard to predict. We always have that risk, of course. Yeah, Q4 in the bigger divisions, I'm looking at backlog and real orders, so fairly confident then on the strong Q4.
You mentioned that you're stepping up efforts now based on what you see and especially within hydrogen. Does that imply that the hydrogen EBITDA dilution and CapEx, will that be changed from what you earlier have communicated?
Yeah, we will come back to that and give more guidance as we quantify our plans. The short answer is yes, maybe not near term, but going into 2020, we will want to step up the efforts, and you should assume a higher dilution than what you've seen so far this year. It's not only the hydrogen program, it's also the battery electric vehicle program, which is dilutive. It's also the geographical expansion projects. We are spending quite significant, relative to our size, resources now on mapping, analyzing, doing due diligence, et cetera. That is also a cost factor. We want to continue and increase all of these efforts. Maybe most importantly, we want to prepare for really significant growth.
We need to look at our organization, and we need to look at every process on the manufacturing side, on the R&D side, on our systems side. We need to ramp up all of those parts and to create a truly world-class organization in order to meet the expectations that we know will be there for us in two, three years from now. That investment needs to be taken now, and that's what we're talking about. The answer is yes. We will probably give more guidance, but fairly significant step up in the efforts to prepare for the future.
All right. Thank you.
Viggo Nilsson, Carnegie. First off, a question on the Agility. Since Q2 2018 now, we've seen margin fluctuation from 5% towards just north of 12%. In terms of revenues, it looks to be as you're delivering according to at least analysts' estimates. On the margin side, you're coming in slightly weak. I was wondering whether you could elaborate a bit. Is this normal seasonality? What kind of going rate margin should we expect long term? Interim seasonality is of course very interesting, and given our lack of history for this division, it's difficult to estimate. We have quarters like this, and then possibly Q4 coming in much better. I was just wondering if you can elaborate there.
I can, maybe take that. Firstly, we set a minimum requirement of the double-digit EBITDA margins. That's what we look to target. Agility certainly looks to target that. Long-term target will still be in the 15% with a minimum target of 10%. Obviously, if you break down the divisions within the Agility portfolio, there's a couple of things. Jon Erik mentioned the EV program. That is dilutive by margin percentage, just by definition. The second area, if you remember in 2018, Agility bought 2017, something called the, what we call the powertrains division. It's the medium duty propane. That's more or less on a startup phase. That is still looking to break even in 2019 and then start accelerating and giving good growth. Whilst the medium duty is in that growth phase, you do see some drag on the margins.
As that improves into 2020, naturally you'll get a more improved margin. On seasonality, I'm afraid it's not predictable in that way. How we explain it internally is that there will always be one quarter that's weaker. It's not predictable which quarter. We like the relative stability of Agility. Hopefully the EV, the profile on medium duty will help explain some of the margin drag. Fluctuations will be also caused by mixed factors within the business units.
All right. Lastly, on the g-mobility and e-mobility market, which you calculated to NOK 4 billion in 2018. Are you able to say what kind of market share you held in that market in 2018? How you eventually see the competitive landscape develop towards the possible NOK 600 billion market in 2030?
I can at least comment on it. Our estimate is that we are comfortably above 50% of that market today. In the near term, we don't see a lot of significant players being attracted. Certainly as more and more companies get their eyes open to the opportunities and as the OEMs figure out what their future supply chain needs to look like, we should assume that there will be several entrants and several worthy competitors entering the space. That's what we are preparing for. We have an advantage. We need to build that organization to withstand the competitive pressure that we should assume. We think that we will be competing on knowhow, on flexibility.
I think in this transformation of the whole sector, the fact that we are relatively small, we have a light structure, is an advantage and we intend to leverage that starting point.
All right. Thank you.
Are there any more questions from the people in the room? Just a second, we will check the web audience. The first question from web audience is from Berlic at Berenberg. How is the Hyon partnership developing and is there any outlook?
By and large it's a very constructive cooperation, so targeting the maritime opportunities. We've had some successes, but that is a longer-term play. We're thinking in terms of two, three years from now. There was an article in one of the Norwegian papers as late as yesterday discussing the fast ferry sector, which is now ready for serial production. That's the type of opportunities that we are addressing, and they will materialize. We shouldn't expect a lot of revenue from that partnership in the next two to three years.
Thank you. The next question is from Harald Havnen from CARN Capital. New orders in Class 8 trucks in the U.S. are significantly down year to date, down -60%, pointing to deteriorating Class 8 truck retail sales through second half 2019 and first half 2020. What impact will this have, if any, on Hexagon's order intake in the Agility segment in the medium term?
If any impact, we believe that will be positive because the very high activity in the truck market has made capacity availability constraints. The truck OEMs have naturally prioritized the serial production of diesel trucks. There has at times been constraints and also in the rest of the value chain there have been constraints. For us, it's much more important that the main transporters like UPS now make a firm commitment to alternative fuels. That is what we believe is going to drive our market.
Thank you. There are no further questions from the web audience today.
Any further questions in this room? Seems not, thank you very much for sharing this morning with us and have a good rest of the day.