Okay. Welcome everyone to this Q2 presentation for Nel. Welcome everyone to everyone in the room and welcome everyone that is following us over the web. We will do our normal presentation as usual and then we'll finish off with some questions. And you can also post your questions through the Internet.
So as normal, I will go through the presentation and let us take a quick look at the content. So we'll go through the highlights obviously. We'll talk a bit about Nel in brief. We keep adding additional shareholders. So we need to keep some of the basic information also.
We need to touch upon the Sherbaud incident. We'll try to keep that brief. We have gathered all of the other developments under a category called key developments. So we'll talk about what happened in the quarter and what happened also a bit after the quarter. We will touch upon the new location that we secured now and that we've been working on for quite some time.
And then we'll finish off with a summary and outlook. Let me start by talking about the 2nd quarter highlights. And the top line development was in line with expectations, not great, but it takes but as communicated and it takes a bit of time before we get the orders translated into revenues. And we have said that we expect more in the second half of twenty nineteen. The fueling business developed very nicely and grew quite nice, but as I said, it takes a bit of time before orders translate into revenue in the electrolyzer piece.
On the other hand, we closed a lot of orders in the quarter. We have now all time high order backlog at SEK568 1,000,000 that does not account the 2 orders that we announced this morning. That is approximately 40% higher than at the end of the Q1. So that obviously gives us a very good foundation for this year, rest of this year and also going into next year. And then we had a busy quarter related to all the rest of these announcements.
To summarize very quickly, we received a purchase order from Shell for 2 additional stations for heavy duty applications. We received a PO for 4.5 Megawatt alkaline electrolyzer for Hybryt. We received 6 stations to Korea, plus 2 this morning. We received a PO for the first station in Canada. We made the contact with Transfer for London on buses and we established the H2 Bus Consortium.
We were awarded the €2,000,000 grant to develop mass production technology on PEM electrolyzers. We launched a new A1000 electrolyzer on alkaline. We closed the agreement with Evofuel and signed the sales and service agreement. We will propose for funding together with Nicolas that we cooperate on next generation heavy duty applications. We signed an agreement in ammonia and we added another 2 POs this morning and we have secured a new location for at Haria and we will touch on all of these things a bit later in the presentation.
Financial highlights, as mentioned largely as communicated. We expect a more aggressive revenue growth in the second half. And as mentioned, EBITDA was negatively affected by the incident and we've taken a provision, a one time provision of NOK35 million related to that. And it was also negatively affected by the more normal, I would say, even though it's non recurring, it's related to ramp up and non recurring costs. So underlying EBITDA in the range of NOK26 1,000,000.
Strong cash position, close to NOK700 1,000,000 worth of cash and we therefore should be in a good position to execute on the strategy and plans that we have in the pipeline. We are now around we now have roughly 24,000 shareholders. So that has grown just in 2019 that has grown by 7,000 shareholders. After the share buyback, we even added another 3,000 shareholders. So and in comparison to 20 18 where we added about 2,000 shareholders.
So that's also why I need to talk a bit about some of the basic elements for the ones that knows Nel this will be a bit of a reputation. But what makes Nel unique is the integrated position that we have. We do cover electrolyzers and fueling stations. We have a range of different products in the electrolyzer piece and we also have fueling station for multiple applications. We do develop this in house, we produce it in house and we can then design a very nice integrated solution.
That's what sets us apart from everyone else. We also are becoming an increasingly global company. We have our production facilities in Connecticut, in Norway and in Denmark. And we also have people and organization in relevant markets like California, Korea, Japan and China. We are the world's largest electrolyzer manufacturer.
We have produced or delivered more than 3,500 systems in slightly more than 80 countries. And we are also leading on fueling stations. We are working on station number 50 and country number 9. As mentioned, these are the 3 locations that we have. We have Wallingford, Connecticut in the United States, PEM electrolyzers, slightly more than 14 megawatt capacity.
We have our facilities in Norway, NordholmHareana, which we will talk about later, where and we have our facility in Denmark, relatively new capacity to produce 300 stations per year. We have a very long history in each of our respective areas and that's also one of the key elements that I think sets us apart. We have 20, 30 years experience in PEM. We have more than 90 years experience in alkaline and we have 15 around 15 years experience in the fueling station business. And we have a lot of products sitting out in the market.
So obviously a lot of references for our customers to go and see and that we see is also a benefit when we talk to new customers. Now let me move over to the incident. And this was covered in great detail in June at the end of June or throughout June in multiple releases. So we try to keep this to a minimum. That does not mean that we do not have more details.
If you require more details, you're more than welcome to go to our web pages. We there have updated Q and A. We have update we have the presentation from that we gave at the end of June. So you will find all the details covered at our web pages, if you think what we do here now is a too short summary. On June 10, we experienced something that we never thought would happen, very sad event, but fortunately no one was seriously injured.
This is an overview of the Sherbore site with the various components and technologies and how they were arranged. And this was the first station of its kind installed in Norway with on-site production of hydrogen. It includes both core technologies, our core technologies and technologies which are non core, which are delivered by sub suppliers. Our core technologies are highlighted in purple. It's the dispenser or the customer interface.
It's the H2 station and it's the electrolyzer solution. And the actual the item highlighted in red is the high pressure storage unit that was the cause of the incident. This unit has also been certified like everything else inside has been certified by 3rd party agents and even the site in total has been certified before it was allowed to open. Now we have a clear ambition in NEL. There should be no incidents at sites that has NEL equipment.
We've been working with hydrogen for many, many years as you know. It's not something that is very new to us. And all of the equipment is designed around the fact that it should be safe. And as I said, the equipment is 3rd party certified, even the high pressure storage unit was certified by Buro Veritas. There are a number of other standards and regulations on this slide, which we need to comply to when we build stations in Europe.
Still, we experience something that we did not expect, a very unfortunate event. Now I'm now going to jump, I'm not going to drill more into what happens and why that you will find on our web pages in great detail if you want that. So I'll go straight to what we are now doing to basically get the stations up and running and to ensure that something like this never happens again. Point number 1, first of all, we need to then inspect all the high pressure storage units in Europe. This is a unique design which relates to Europe.
It's a slightly different design in it's a different design in the U. S. And in Korea. So this is European focus for the time being. We need to verify that the plugs, which was the cause of the incidents are okay and we need to check that all of the plugs is installed in the correct way on all of the European stations.
In addition to that, to make sure that this does not ever happen again, we obviously have already changed our routines and procedures for assembly of these type of systems. We have introduced aerospace standards in terms of verification of torque, documentation of torque and double witnessing of torque with markings on the various plugs to ensure that we don't see this ever happening again. Now we also want to add additional layers of safety. So we add so we also go through and look at leak detection. How can we be able to detect smaller leaks even faster?
That has to do with how we tweak our software. It has to do in some cases, maybe even adding some hardware, but mostly how we basically tweak and how we work with our software. And finally, we look at the site. Is there things we can do with the site? Can we move things around to make sure that we add even another layer buffer, safety buffer?
And this we will do on all of our stations. That's also why what we have done in the U. S. And in Korea. All of the learnings that we have taken, I mean, of the learnings is not really relevant even to this incident.
But when you work at this very intensively with extremely qualified people, you do gain a lot of learning. And we have a long list of learnings, which we will obviously spend time integrating and working on over the next period. We've also shared these learnings with the industry to make sure that nothing is lost. And as I've said a few times already, maybe the only positive thing you can say after this event is that you learn a lot. And if we waste that, then it's all been a waste.
So we need to take care of the learnings and share it with industry. We are now reporting on the timeline to reopen stations in this format. And the stations in Denmark are back in operation. That happened relatively quickly. We're still working on I believe 1 or 2 stations in the U.
S, but the majority of the stations are back in operation. All the stations in Korea have been cleared out. So and the trust in NEL technology has been the trust in NEL technology has been restored as can be seen from the order that we got this morning from Korea. The stations in Europe are in progress. We still have some homework to do in terms of checking the sites and working at the high pressure storages.
In Norway, in particular related to Asco, we are working together with them to get that back in operation as quickly as possible. And the rest of the stations in Norway, we are we still have some homework to do and we also need to coordinate and prioritize these activities together with our joint venture partners. So here I will need to come back later point in time in terms of exactly disclosing what and when. So I hope that's enough on the Sherbaud site. If you need, as I said, more information, please refer to our web pages.
You will find plenty of information there, plenty of details. So let's go to the key developments of the quarter and also some of the things that happened after the quarter. The first thing that happened was that we received an order for from Shell for heavy duty applications. This is a station solution that can fill both cars and trucks. And Shell is working together with Toyota in California.
So this station will fuel the Toyota cars that arrive from Japan empty. They will be loaded onto the hydrogen truck. This is a hydrogen truck that has developed together with Kenworth and the stations will also fuel the trucks and the trucks will then carry the cars up to the dealers and US7 $7,000,000 and it underlines what we talked about a number of times, the underlying trend that we see increasing focus on heavy duty applications. That's also one of the reasons why we earlier this year announced that we will step up technology developments in this area. We were awarded a PO in Canada, the 1st fueling station from this market and opening up a new market for us with Htec.
Htec is a leader in the region and they have the target to build several stations in this area. And as you and this is in Vancouver and Vancouver is on the West Coast and relatively close to the team that we have on the West Coast in the United States. So this team will then help to service and maintain and support the development in this area. So we will keep working with HSTEC to see whether we can support them also for additional infrastructure in the area. Now Korea has overall expressed great ambition in terms of fueling stations.
They have said that they want to have more than 300 stations up and running by 2022. So they are probably the country in the globe, which has the toughest ambitions in terms of rolling out infrastructure. And we have made quite some progress in 2019. So far we received 10 orders or orders for 10 stations, including the ones that we received this morning with a total value of around about €11,000,000 which we're very happy about. Earlier in the quarter into the second quarter, we received 6 station order from Cogas.
Cogas is the Korean Gas Technology Corporation. And if you follow this closely, you will you maybe notice that Cogas has expressed that they will invest more than US4 $1,000,000,000 into equipment related to hydrogen, because they're really betting on taking a position in Korea within the area of hydrogen. We also decided to invest in Hynet. Hynet is a cooperation between Hyundai, Nel, Co Gas and a number of other leading players. And it's very nice for us to be actually part of it.
We are sitting on the Board and we are also a part of this and we are then participating together with these big leading companies. And this morning, we received the purchase order for the first two stations going to Hyonet for the Korean market. And obviously, we are very happy that the trust as for Nell as an equipment supplier has been restored. We've been working for a very long time related to getting this in place and we finally were able to announce the H2 Bus Partnership. Here all the relevant parties are represented.
We have Ballard on fuel cells. We have hexagon on tanks. We have Wright Bus on buses. We have NEL on production equipment for renewable hydrogen and for fueling stations, we have RISE and Everfuel as owner operators of equipment. So we're trying here to establish something that makes it easy for the bus operators.
They don't have to then worry about buying and sourcing all of these pieces of equipment and getting everything to work. They can simply order hydrogen delivered in their bus depot from a dispenser exactly like they do with diesel today. So we hope that this is going to be an attractive solution for many of these bus operators. The initiatives here will also be supported by the funding that we received and announced last year. And we also then closed the agreements with Everfuel, where we will remain a minority investor, but AirFuel will then have other investors as main shareholders.
We have put some of our most competent people to take this forward And, Everfuel will become an owner operator of many other countries around in Europe. The package with Everfuel contains also a service and sales agreement with potential value of up to €100,000,000 And we obviously hope that they will kick off some of these projects very soon and we will do whatever we can to support that venture moving forward. The initial bus project in Europe actually happened in London. It was announced in May. It was an agreement with Transport for London.
And as you may know, buses operate at a slightly lower pressure than cars. They operate at 3.50 bar, cars operate at 7 100 bar. And we are when I say that we are accommodating our technology, we are basically making sure that it fulfills those applications in even better way. And we believe that the market has started to recognize what we're doing here to basically tweak our products to better adapt these various pieces. So we want to make our technology ideal for these different purposes with the same base technology.
The interesting with London is that the Mayor of London, Mr. Khan, clearly has stated that London does not have the electricity grid to carry or to basically implement battery electric buses. The grid is not there. They need to produce the energy or the hydrogen outside the city based on renewable and move it in and therefore hydrogen electric buses are much more relevant in this market. In the U.
K, RISE is our partner. RISE is the owner operator. They're also working on other cities in the U. K. And this particular project, the first one had or has a value, total value of €2,500,000 We also applied for DOE funding, Department of Energy Funding in the United States together with Nicolas and we will propose for award.
Here, we will basically develop next generation heavy duty stations that even is even better adapted to what Nikola wants to achieve, basically very fast fueling of trucks. We're currently working to finalize agreement with DOE and we have a very good dialogue with Nicolas. We are working to define the exact rollout plan of their stations. But it will still, we believe, take some time before we kick off PRs related to the full scale commercial stations. Now let's move away from mobility and over to industry, because the opportunities within the industry may be even bigger than we see within mobility.
Let's start with the hybrid agreement. Now 7% of the world's CO2 comes from steel production. Steel producers today burn coal to remove oxygen and instead of burning coal, they can burn hydrogen and then they can make water instead of CO2. And we are therefore extremely excited to be able to be part of this early phase development by signing a contract with Heberit. Heberit is a joint venture between SS Abe, Elko Abe and Battenpau.
And they are really taking pushing and taking the first step into producing CO2 free steel. SS Abe is a leading steel producer, very advanced in technology and have a portfolio of advanced steel products in the market. And Hubit, the joint venture is then developing a pilot in Lulyo in Sweden. They will base that on renewable hydrogen produced out of our electrolyzers and then they will test and verify the technology downstream in terms of producing CO2 free steel. Obviously, the potential in this industry is enormous and we've talked about that already.
If we look at our 360 megawatt capacity, we will have to run that flat out for 2,650 years to be able to cover only the steel market. So it is a huge very, very large market and that tells us 2 things. It obviously tells us that the potential is there, even though it will take some time, but it also tells us something about our existing capacity is not very big and we need to think maybe even bigger if we're going to address these markets going forward. And last week, we also announced another great piece of news. We think we've been working very hard for a long time to get all the details in place related to Yara.
And we signed this last week. Yara has clear ambition to produce CO2 free ammonia and fertilizer. This project we will implement, we will develop value chain together. We will obviously focus on the electrolyzer. Yara will focus on the downstream pieces.
And here we intend to develop the next generation alkaline electrolyzer, which is addressed for even larger capacities. It will hopefully address even a lower cost level. It will have higher flexibility and it will be installed at Harjo in the Yara's facility at Harjo. So we will have a relatively close proximity also to this facility, which is nice. Now this electrolyzer unit will only represent 1% of the demand of the Haria Yara's Haria plant.
So you can see that there is quite a lot of potential on this plant, but obviously also thinking why they're about the ammonia market longer term, there's a huge potential in that market. And half of today's hydrogen, more than half of today's hydrogen produced on fossil based goes to ammonia production. And obviously, this needs to change. It is very important for Nel to be part of these early developments in steel, in ammonia and in other of these early moving markets, because we want to learn and we want to be able to tweak and adapt our technology to make it fit perfectly for the end customers. Now then I need to cover another piece of news from this morning.
We were able to secure future location for even better suited for low cost production and high capacity for electrolyzers, which we are very happy about. We've now been working for some time trying to get this in place and we think we want to think big and we wanted to really find the ideal location in that context to be able to manufacture even larger scale. Now why do we do this? Well, first of all, we get access to world leading industrial complex with state of the art infrastructure in place. We have very competitive terms.
We have proximity to big partners like Yara, but also much easier logistics. We are then located in the area with decades of industrial production experience. So it should be attractive for current and future colleagues. And we have a facility that provides us with the opportunity to go bigger and to scale up to more than 1 gigawatt. The initial target would still be to start with 3 60 megawatt and obviously ramp up will be aligned with customer requirements.
Noototen will remain for everything else than production. And as you know, that area, there is a lot of engineering competence. At Haria, there is a lot of production competence. We're basically drawing the best from both areas. That makes a lot of sense.
And also to underline that we have received a lot of good support from North Holland municipality in these discussions. We've had good discussions, good support during this challenging process and I want to thank them for doing for a very constructive process in that context. This is the building that we are talking about. It's a relatively new building. It's a very complex building in terms of the infrastructure which is available.
It was originally constructed by REC for production of large volumes of solar wafers. So we have all the chemicals related, power related systems already in place. It has been sitting there idle waiting for us. And it really is ideal for our purpose. We will start by focusing on the part which is furthest away.
It's basically 2 factories, which are next to each other. So we will start focusing on the one which is further away in this picture. And we also have an option to take over the piece which is closer in this picture. And we've been through our pre project and preparations. We've been working with suppliers to see how much capacity will we be able to fit inside of these facilities.
And as you can see, we should at least have room for 3 production lines, which should be equivalent to more than 1 gigawatt of production capacity. Now we're also working on opportunity to adapt the production line to even more advanced production. This could potentially allow us to take out a lot more than the 1 gigawatt. But here, I will have to come back to you guys. It's not very often that I say that, but we have to come back and talk more about the details related to that plan, potential plan a bit later.
So with that, I think we have covered some of the main important topics. I'll try to summarize with a brief summary and outlook before we open up for questions. Focusing on a rapidly growing NOK1 1,000,000,000 company building that, We have introduced a new key parameter, obviously, leading and safety. That means that we need to highlight this even more going forward. We should not see any incidents with NEL equipment or sites with NEL equipment.
We still maintain that we want to have a technology leadership both related to OpEx and CapEx. And we want to continue to launch products like we did in the Q2 to drive demand in various areas. We want to maintain our cost leadership and basically cut production costs as fast as we can. And that will, number 1, protect our future competitive position, but it will also open up new markets when cost is basically able to offer unique services and products to the customers. We want to obviously maintain a robust financing and that's why you see that we are where we use the opportunity to ensure that that is in place when we have the chance.
And we are working to develop a global market presence. That doesn't mean that we should be everywhere, but we need to be in the relevant markets, where there is a lot of momentum on hydrogen. In terms of outlook, all of many of these initiatives growing the company, adding more capacity, adding employees, training new people will obviously cost money. And we have said repeatedly that that will have a negative effect on EBITDA. We continue to develop now state of the art safety procedures, and we continue to work on our 10x electrolyzer development, capacity development.
We are leveraging on heavy duty the trends that we see in the market to really tweak our products and take steps in technology development there. We are working on next generation alkaline electrolyzer. We're also working on very exciting things on the pen side. We are engaged in a large number of tendering activities and as we have a very strong backlog, but the pipeline is also extremely strong. So and the pipeline is basically what are the projects that people are working with that can later turn into orders.
And that is obviously an important for us to constantly monitor and look at the pipeline and see that is how that is developed and that is currently very, very strong. And then we obviously continue to develop the Nel organization to ensure that we are capable of executing on all of these plants. So with that, I think we have covered the formal part of the presentation. We have the ability to take questions both here in the room and over the web. So please feel free.
Bjorn has the microphone. He will wait for the microphone, please, before you
Okay. Let's start with some questions from the web. Have a question here from Knutteil Lawson. Question is, what timeline can be expected for the next generation electrolyzers under development?
So we have together with the Ara plan to get this into operation during 2022. We obviously already have and I believe I saw the picture last year. We have a smaller scale unit that has been running, but the big scale unit will be implemented in 2022.
Then we have a question from Philip Sites. He asked why is the Nikola order not included in the backlog?
What we said related to the backlog is that we only include orders that has a fixed price and a fixed order point. And that is basically we take a cautious approach there. We don't want to so we do take X what is where the price is defined with all the terms and conditions defined, all the penalties, delivery terms, everything is defined. That's what we put in the backlog.
Do we have any questions from the audience? We have some extra from the web. There's one from Thomas Kebes. He asks, could you talk a bit more about the timing and share of NEL from the 100 stations planned by Hynet by 2022?
I think that we need to be a bit cautious in terms of trying to publicly say things there. But obviously, we are a part of a partnership and we do discuss these things internally. But I think we need to leave those discussions between the partners. We don't participate there if we don't expect to get something back. And we have strong ambitions in Korea because we believe that our product fits very nicely.
And we see that we have gotten quite a lot of traction in that market. So we want to take a significant market share in that market. And we have kind of set up our organization with the sales crew, with the service and maintenance installation crew to be able to address that market efficiently, we believe. So I think that's as far as I can go in terms of this.
Then there is a question from Tor Gullver. Is Nel involved in ongoing maritime projects in Norway?
There I can say that we are definitely. We are we had our joint venture with Hexagon and Powercell, Haion And they have a long list of projects that we're working on. It's traditional ferries, it's fast ferries, it is fish farming, it is container ships, it is hydrofoil ferries and they're involved in 2 different pilot air projects. So yes, we are involved through our joint venture, but obviously we are also involved in terms of talking to partners about production capacity of hydrogen in what format and in what locations.
Daniel from Pareto. I was wondering if you have any estimates or range on what fraction of your operating expenses goes toward things that could really be considered investments such as R and D or brand building in terms of marketing or whatever? Thank you.
It's a good question. I think we are working on trying to find a format that basically elaborates a bit more on these things, because we do realize that we could spec our income statement a bit better to make this easier to basically do this kind of analysis. So far, we have tried to group what is non recurring and 1 up in the category called non recurring and ramp up cost. And we have made a definition on that, which we use every time. And there we, for example, include not branding and marketing costs.
We don't include that because then we think that's a piece of the normal business. Maybe we could isolate that. But we do include kind of when we employ a crew early before they start to generate revenue, we say that this is ramp up cost, because they will start to deliver, maybe they need 3 months, 6 months training before we deploy them in a particular area related to a facility that we're expanding, as one example. So I think what the format that we have now is what I can give you, but we have made a note that we will try to kind of split out and give a bit more information so that you can do you can answer questions like the one you're presenting in a better way. Okay, do we take one more or should we wrap up?
I think we can have one more. There is a couple of questions here regarding the facility, the new facility at on the costs related to it. And they're both regarding what we can say about the costs of moving into that facility compared to the initial plans.
Well, there if I had mentioned anything about costs, if there was a big difference between what we said before, I would have mentioned it. So there is no big there is no fundamental difference in what we said before and what we're saying now. I also said that this is attractive terms. So obviously, we believe that we have a very good support from Harria Industrial Park. We've been working with them for a long time on this.
And we think the total package is very attractive, including making things ready for us. And since we are in many ways, it will be easier, because there is a building which is ready. So it will be quicker and easier instead of doing reconstruction and integrating 2 buildings. And since it's a separate site, you can actually focus on getting that up and running and then you can keep what you need to have running until you're up and running here. So the whole transition will be easier by doing it this way.
Okay. One more question from the audience here.
Sven Erik from Norde. Could you say something a bit about how you plan to develop your organization going forward? A bit more details, maybe can you quantify maybe the number of employees you plan to be adding or similar?
So this is a bit site specific, obviously. We have a good strong crew up in California. I needed to kind of take some examples. So California is pretty much done. So we don't need to add a lot more.
In Korea, we are still adding a few more people. Wallingford, so far, we have what we need. Pretty much. We need to add some confidence, but not to the grid. We have done a lot of recruitment in Hanning and we still do that because we see what is coming and we're preparing for that.
But the vast the big numbers I've covered. When it comes to everything that we're doing in Norway, we have the big numbers ahead of us. We haven't added those people yet. We have obviously started working. We've added a lot of people and we've added a lot of good people, but related to the scale up that will come.
So that's maybe the area where that we see now, which we'll see the biggest change going forward for the next foreseeable future. Okay. I think that's it. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to see you all.
Thank you very much for following us during over the web and look forward to seeing you again relatively soon for the Q3 presentation. Thank you.