Earnings Call: Q4 2023

Jan 31, 2024

Quarterly report

Welcome to this quarterly presentation by Cleantech Company Nexum chemical serving the plastic industry. After the presentation, there will be a Q and A and you who is viewing this can ask questions in the live chat. To present, I'm happy to introduce CEO, Roni Tarnqvist and CFO, Markus Nieberg. But before you present, Ronny, how would you describe the quarter as such? Well, it was continuation of our sequential recovery from a difficult situation in the middle of the year, and we're looking forward to a brighter future. So please go ahead with the presentation. Okay. Thank you for having us here today. I will take help from Markus Nyberg, our CFO during this presentation as well, presenting the 4th quarter. Nexam Chemical develops and produces additives to make plastics better and more sustainable. Plastic material is a key material to bring technology forward, for example, for more efficient and safe medical treatments, transportation, energy generation, communication, etcetera. So it's an important material. And Nexam brings a lot of technological advancements into the plastics industry to make good plastics even better. But we're also dedicated to a much more circular use of plastic and try and contribute to reducing the problem of plastic waste by being very active and take a strong role in the recycling of plastics going forward. Our patents, core competencies and products really make a difference for our customers but also for the world. So we are a small Swedish cleantech company focused on products to make plastics better, more sustainable. Our Common Core is chemical solutions through reactive chemistry to modify various polymer materials, and it ends up in very different types of markets. On one hand, we work towards light weighting and miniaturization. On the other hand, we'd work with very advanced plastic material solutions such as high temperature components in jet engines and very hot, very small microelectronics supporting those developments. But we also work in areas that are driven by very strong global megatrends, in particular, Renewable Energy with focus on wind energy and waste and recycling of plastics materials. When I took over as CEO of Nexium Chemical in May 2023, We did a rework of the strategy of the whole company, which has changed how we operate and what we focus on. And towards the customer side, we have decided to split up the business according to the value that we bring to the market, which is really the properties that we can affect for our customers. So these 4 segments are lightweighting, where we mainly focus on PET foam materials that are used mainly in wind energy, but it's broader than that. We can also work with biopolymer foams and other recycled material foams, etcetera. But the main driver here is really wind energy, PET foams in terms of volume at least. Our second area is high temperature where Nexa has been working for more than a decade, where we have found a strong niche position in extremely high temperature resistant plastic materials. They are used in even further. And then we have the area aesthetics, which is really affecting the surface quality, color, durability of plastic materials to suit specific applications. Here, we work mainly on our home markets in the Nordic countries and in Eastern Europe. And then we have recycling, the area which is today still not huge in sales numbers, but it has huge potential and really massive potential for the future because our solutions are unique and bring very strong additional value when you need to upgrade recycled materials. The implications of what we do on sustainability is pictured here by some comments. In the light weighting area, of course, we add to we're in the windmill industry and that is very low emission energy form, of course. In high temperature, our Additives enable more use of composite materials for lighter components in jet engines, thereby, reducing fuel consumptions in them. In Aesthetics, we can combine our technologies that we use in recycling with our long experience on how to modify plastics in order to introduce much more recycled materials into plastic component manufacturing industry. And within recycling as such, we work with upgrading and increasing the value of recycled plastics. And this is done with our targeted materials all over the world really with all our partners around the globe. If I dive in a little bit to each of the areas, I would like to mention that in the PET TFO market that we've been active in for several years now. We have managed to broaden our portfolio of products and our portfolio of customers. And today, we work with all the global PTFO manufacturers, and we provide solutions for today, but we also collaborate with them on their future needs and future materials. One interesting aspect of shares has increased a lot over the last year. 'twenty two was a fairly weak year in terms of order intake in that industry, but The average order intake of some for all the big manufacturers in this business is up by 40% compared to the year before. And according to our experience, in 6 to 12 months after order intake of a wind power station, it results in need for additives for the PET foams. So this is a strong indicator that this business will continue to grow for us. On the longer term, It is also an energy form that is continuously increasing and some of the older stations need replacement. So there is a strong underlying growth of approximately 6% per year over a 10 year period. So we feel that we're in a strong position in this industry. It could also be worth to mention that we are involved in the recycling of the PET materials from wind blades with some early initiatives in that And also that the replacement of other core materials with PET increases the sustainability profile of the wind blades themselves because you replace balsa wood and PVC foams. Our area of high temperature is used then, as I mentioned, in aircraft engines, but also in microelectronics. The reason to go for these kind of materials is that you lower the fuel consumption, if you can lower the weight of the engine itself. A 1% weight reduction leads to about 0 point 75% fuel consumption reduction. And this is the strong driving force behind and we're inside several ongoing initiatives, which is mainly for military aircraft and mainly in North America. But we also have initiatives now working together with partners in U. K.-based program where we look at also spreading these type of technologies into civil aviation. If we look at recycling, it is an industry which is has been growing a lot for the last few years, but is expected to grow much, much more in the years to come. According to OECD, the global plastics use in the world will increase with about 50% in 10 years. And during that time, several regions many, many regions such as the European Union, In North America, in several countries and regions in Asia, the targets for recycling have been increased a lot in the coming 10 years. So it can be expected that a big part at least of this growth will come from increasing recycling volumes. So this whole industry is growing as a whole and very rapidly so and globally so. And our solutions in this are quite unique. We have patented solutions to upgrade the most common materials, PE, PP, PET. And we see a huge interest. We have informed about some patents that have been approved over the last few quarters and this has rendered a lot of international interest from all over the world really. Two examples, maybe like this. I'll go back here. We our initiatives in the recycling business follow the same type of structure that we had, for example, in the PET foam business a few years back that we start with R and D, patents, testing, finding some small customers to act quickly and introduce it and then working with bigger global customers that take longer time to introduce. So there is a time scale, of course, for the introduction of these materials. But some of these, let's say, small fast moving customers have already started. And it's interesting to see we work with a PET sheet manufacturer in the Middle East, And they have increased the use of recycled PET in their films that are used to form packaging trays for food. And their continuous commercial orders from us enable them to save about 8,000 tons annually of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. It also saves them cost and it counteracts down cycling of recycled PET to less valuable applications. And another technical more technical application is a staple manufacturer a staple fiber manufacturer in Southeast Asia. They have during last year, when they started to use our products, saved about 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, also saved money and especially been able to use other sources than food packaging grade recycled PET that would otherwise have been wasted or incinerated and instead use that in their technical products. So those are 2 early examples of what you can do with this and the implications it has for the world. What our customers see It has also been confirmed by some academic studies. We have a group of researchers at Politecnico de Torino in Italy. To see the effect and what you can achieve with this. And this is a kind of technical graph. It shows the viscosity, which is how thick the material is, which is an indication of how integrated material is when it's molten and indicates If you recycle too many loops, the viscosity goes down, it becomes very fluid and it also becomes very brittle. So it's not really usable. But with our additives, we can bring the value of the material back up and they've found out that 4 recycling loops the result of the 4 recycling loops can be achieved after 9 recycling loops if you use our material. Of course, if you use it in every loop, then you will come back to more or less the virgin properties and the degradation will be much slower with several loops. So kind of a preview of what they are doing. We also know about some very interesting other results that they are bringing on here. So we're looking forward to see more of that. Free Color Plus is a kind of a conclusion of the area aesthetics, what we have been referring to as Performance Masterbatch, where we color and improve durability and so on of plastics, very application specific on our local markets and combine that with the learnings from the reactive recycling side, where we then are able to provide our plastic manufacturing industrial customers solutions to use much more recycled material also in, let's say, ordinary plastic component manufacturing, saves lots of carbon dioxide, of course, as always, when you don't need to produce new material. And one interesting happening last week was that both our academic partners Chalmers University in Gothenburg and Scania, the truck manufacturers in Sod Italia, brought us in with our concept Recolor Plus into a national recycling initiative called PTI, Polymer Technist Institute, based in Smola in Sweden. And we're seeing a lot of interest like this from the market and also actually a bit faster development in this area than in the, let's say, more generic recycling projects that are global. So that was an overview, a little bit about the business segments that we have right now, how they are going and their implication on sustainability. For the quarter 4, we have Sales that are up 10% compared to last quarter, but down still 9% compared to the same quarter in 2022. So it was €50,000,000 a bit above. So we're getting back into action. It's still a slow market out there. But thanks to the many initiatives, new projects and so on, we managed to compensate a little bit the slow market with this sequential growth. The gross margin continued to increase. It was 44% in the 4th quarter and 39% a year back. The EBITDA was actually doubled compared to the 3rd quarter and a bit more than SEK1.5 million far above 1 year ago when we had minus SEK1 1,000,000. The savings program that we have been announcing and talked about of in total SEK13 1,000,000 per year, has been now fully executed. It's not visible quite yet in the 4th quarter numbers, but it will be during 2024. We have thanks to our in sourcing, the savings program and thereby lower overhead cost and an increased gross margin. We have a much stabilized financial situation. And ambition is, just as we said last quarter, to finance our own operations and end up with a positive cash flow over the full year of 2024. So Markus will come back with some more details about the financials. Strategic orientation, we have found this new strategic rework and new orientations on the market. And we feel that we live this every day. And it is transforming our organization. R and D, it is transforming our work in operations and also sales. Innovation wise, we have had a couple of patent approvals in Q4 that were already announced as almost approved in Q3, and we're gaining a lot of international attention, thanks to this. And we have this Innovate U. K. That was also informed a quarter of a grant to support our R and D activities to broaden our high temperature applications also into civilian aeronautics. So with that kind of update overview, I would like to hand over to you, Markus, to go into more details on the financial side. Thank you, Oni. I will try to give you some more details about the finance and I will my main focus will be on our available cash. I know that we get quite a lot of questions related to that. So I'll give you some more details on what to expect in the future. But first of all, Looking at a little bit how the SADES is going, we can see that we are really still in a recovery period. We had a really tough spring, but we have improved since then. I think one thing to notice when you look at this chart is that we have much more customers now compared to 1 year ago or even 2 years ago, even if the sales numbers are quite much more on the same level, but we have more customers and that is reduced risk for us. And it also gives us the potential for future growth. And now going to this spreadsheet, like many people for the moment really looking into. I will The first thing I would like to draw to your attention is now even if our sales is only SEK 50,600,000, we still but our EBITDA is SEK1.5 billion. And if we look for the past quarters, is a quite big improvement. That is linked to improved margins and our cost saving programs. We have worked quite a lot with the margins, with the recipes and so on to reduce the cost for raw materials. We can see actually that we expect it to increase even further when we go into the coming quarters. Looking at another thing that I would like to try to give you some more details is Our cash position, we have for the moment SEK 9,000,000 at the bank, but we have also an additional credit facility of SEK 20,000,000. So if we look in it and compare it to the beginning of the year, then our available cash was something around €33,000,000 €34,000,000 And at the end of the year, it was €29,000,000 We are at the moment really working on reducing our inventory levels. It will take some time. So don't expect it already now during the winter, but later on, once we come to spring and more in the summer, we will have that impact. And also when the cost saving program, as Roni mentioned, it will have full impact now in February actually, but the cash flow impact will come later on during the spring for this as well. So even if we understand all of your questions about cash and so on, we are really focusing on this. It takes some time, But I can assure you, it's really on top of my mind every day. So This is how it looks for the moment. I can also see that cash flow from operations for the full year 'twenty three was pretty much close to 0. And if you compare it to 'twenty two, it's quite a big improvement. And now I'm handing over to Roni again. Okay. Thank you, Markus. So outlook, what is coming? We're in the middle of a clear turnaround. As Markus said, we're not quite out of the hole, but we have a very positive look for the year that just started. We are returning towards growth in 2024 and forward with increasing profitability. The cost saving programs and the in sourcing delivers a strong foundation for profitable growth and a very balanced cash flow. We are convinced that we will have more money on the bank at the end of the year than in the beginning. We have this sharpened commercial strategy that focuses all our internal resources on short term and long term growth. I repeat a little bit here, light weighting, substantial market recovery in the wind industry over the last 9 months is a clear indication for us that order levels will go up. We have a positive situation because we deliver to all the suppliers of PET foam for wind turbines or at least all the international ones. So a more robust situation there. High temperature, we have confirmed high order levels for 2024 and plans for the future. In Aesthetics, we have a lot of product innovation and recycling focus that set us apart from our competitors and actually generates quite a good deal of business even though the basic market is slow, but that might also pick up. And in Recycling, we have our 1st commercial breakthroughs that are realized. Growth is now clearly within reach on an international level and we're continuing to push that. I would also like to mention that our intention in the coming quarter is to go towards clearer split up between these 4 segments that we have here. Okay. So that's how we look at it. So in the sum, very positive about the year to come. And I think in the years after that also because we have this global megatrends that are driving our type of business models. And therefore, it's I feel very comfortable being quite optimistic about Nexon Chemical in the coming years. So to conclude, why should one invest in Nexon Chemical? First of all, on the short term, we have a very high ambition and plans that we execute every day for 20 market segments that have a strong underlying growth. So we have substantial growth potential driven by clear customer offerings and good business for our customers. We have patented cleantech solutions that are driven by megatrends within sustainability. And We have this situation that we have done a lot of production capacity investments in the past years that we now can, so to say, harvest the advantages of we can actually double our volume really without any significant CapEx. Of course, there will be minor productivity investments and so on, but nothing big. And we have a really good organization. We have a good set of people with potential to take on much bigger tasks. And we believe that our business model has a lot of potential for targeted future investments, broaden technology wise and geography wise or even through M and As in the later stage. So this is the case where we think you should invest in Nexa. With this, I would like to thank you for your attention and are ready to move over to the questions and answers session. Thank you so much. Very interesting to hear how you improve and great with increasing numbers of clients or customers, Yes. Giving you a good potential for future growth. Yes. And I have one question before we let in Equity Analysts. But like you said, you touched on many of the mega trends. And but your clients are in a huge range of sectors and fields. And so how do you manage to sell in an efficient way to all of this? Yes, the business model in the 4 different segments is very different, right? So to be successful in light weighting, We need to control direct contact with 4, 5, 6 customers globally. So that is handleable, you can say volume of number of customers. In the area of aesthetics, it's many more customers, so we have a broader sales team, of course, in that. But we've been handling those for a long time. The high temperature one is very similar to PET that there few international players that we work with. They're placed globally, but there are not many of them. And we have our network of distributors that can be closed also locally in Asia and Americas and so on. And then recycling, we need to target on what we work on. But you can say that we work on both And we use the Performa the aesthetics sales team to work on the local markets, also with recycling questions. And we use our agent network around the world to work on the international customers. And we use the R and D and the specialists that we have to work on R and D and early projects in that field. So we managed to handle it. But it will of course, When the recycling takes off and becomes bigger and bigger, we need to adapt our organization according to that. But as it is right now, we can handle it quite well. Okay. Interesting. And with that, I will let in Henrik Kinze. He's with ABG Sundal Collier. Please go ahead with your questions. Thank you for that. Let's start off with the cost savings program. Could you just comment on how much of that we're seeing in Q4 already and what remains to be seen in Q1? I think it's a question for me, so I'll address it. I think that you can see that roughly Up to EUR 1,000,000 is to be expected under the Q1. That would be additional saving that we don't have in the Q4. And in the 4th quarter, If you need a number, let's say, euros 2,000,000 during the Q4, I will add one another one to in the Q1. Yes. Sounds good. Secondly, on working capital, You built up a bit of working capital in Q4 here. Could you just comment on what drove that and how we should view this going forward when we can expect this to come down? Yes. Our let's say the challenge that we have is actually linked really back to the history when we expected the PET foam and also during the pandemic that we had some logistics was a big challenge to actually get raw materials. So we are still getting raw materials that is for purchase orders that was placed more than a year ago. And that is still for Omer Test that will be used this year, but it will be used, let's say, after the spring or in the yeah, in a year. So and that's now stopped. There will be there are some minor ones that is still coming during the Q1. But so we are really working on this, but it actually takes some time. So for us internally, it's no surprise that it looks how it looks. And we are really working with this. But expect this when it comes close to the summer, you can see there. And that change will be when it comes to inventory levels. All right. Sounds good. And just to confirm, you mentioned the credit facility of $20,000,000 none of that is utilized at the moment, right? Right. All right, good. And then finally on the wind markets, you mentioned that you saw that this started improving around 9 months ago. And that in H2, I think you saw 40% uptick in orders at your customers there. You also said that there is a 6 to 18 month lag effect for Nexum here. So seeing this started 9 months ago, are you now already seeing an increase in orders from these customers? And should we expect this gradually improve over the coming 12 months or so based on this? Yes. I would say that we see some improvement in that field for sure in terms of volume right now. The effect is not as strong as the 40% increase as was indicated from the, let's say, OEM windmill manufacturers. So we expect that to come later. We believe that this will gradually improve. We see some of it in the order so far, but we don't see all of it yet. Henrik Ginse from ABG Sundal Collier. And we have some questions from the viewers as well. Let me start off with this one. About a year ago, you announced some sort of cooperation with a company with a partner in Japan for What is your status there? It's rolling on well. We're supplying additives to a varnish that is used on microprocessors. And they make millions and millions and millions of these microprocesses, but there is only a small drop of varnish on each, so to say. And we are continuously delivering to that partner in Japan. I think it's every quarter or every second month or something like this that have a shipment of material to them and they continue to use this. One of our colleagues was there to meet them in Japan to speak about this business maybe a month ago. And they have high hopes to be able to expand these to more microprocessing manufacturers, but We haven't seen those new orders yet, but we're absolutely working with it on it together with our distributor in Japan and together with the customer in order to build that business. Here's another question for you. How many ongoing projects do you have within Recycling? And what is preventing these tests to turn into commercial orders? Okay. That's a broad question. And you can what do you define as a project? I would say a project with a fair probability to become a business And of fair volume, I would say somewhere in the range of 30, 40 initiatives that are ongoing with fair volume and fair potential. Some of them are huge with huge corporations that we're not allowed to talk about and some of them are with long, long lead times. And some of them are smaller initiatives that will go faster and survive and become something or die in a shorter phase. So we have the whole range there. And the reasons why they need more time before they can start to buy are various. It's very often that they require very firm results from R and D that are double checked before they are allowed to test it on the big machine lines where they're producing on. And in that process, there is also negotiation process of prices and conditions and so on. And there is also, let's say, Other product problems because it is often that they then want to use lower cost raw material lower cost recycle where we fixed part of the problem, but it might still be dirty or some other problems. So they need to work on other things as well in the sorting of the plastic and so on. So there is complexity in these projects, and we cannot really control everything in it. And but I would say that it is, Let's say, problems outside of our control, priorities, of course, at the customer. And it is assurance that it actually works really well in a continued environment, so to say. So yes, we can come back to more details about that maybe at a later stage. Thank you so much. Development. While we're at products and development. How about pipes, like the project you had with Zibur? Are there other companies and partners that you would do the same with since it was pretty large orders? Yes, that was Fantastic problem with a major flaw. It was with Russia and was therefore stopped. We have a similar type of project that we're working on together with the European customer. But it's not technically sufficiently, so to say approved to be ready to talk about very much yet. But we haven't given up that. But we are and we are working on it. But we're not it's not one of our main activities. We put that into a separate project, and we work on that just to see how well it works. Okay. And here, I guess, a question for Markus. Gross margin has improved from 39 to 44% in a year. Do you still have room for improvement here? Or is this a fair level to expect going forward? We actually expect it to improve during the spring here. Then of course, it comes if we grow quite a lot in a new area, then it's a different question. But otherwise, with the current partner mix, the answer is yes. And you state that you expect strong performance for all KPIs in 2024. Can you somehow quantify this? What we have been communicating so far, and we have indeed in August or September, and that's related to cash flow, meaning that we should be cash flow positive for the full year. And then please pay attention to the full year, it will take some time. And to be able to come to that position, we really need to perform on sales and margins and EBITDA. So But that is still the only target that we have communicated. It might be another one later on. But so we're not quite ready yet to give a prediction of the sales number per quarter going forward in 2024. But I think we've been clear that we expect it to the sequential growth to continue in the coming quarters, Definitely. That is and then concluding from the fully executed cost saving programs and the improved contribution margin. It is also logical that the EBITDA will follow suit. And one more product question, I guess. What do you expect with when it comes to development within PET in, let's say, 1 through 3 years? Yes. If you look at it on the yes, 3 year horizon is good. We have some kind of aggregated growth of that wind energy market of about 6% per year. And we know that new blades are designed with more PET foam inside than the old ones were. There is some replacement coming in. And we have a really strong portfolio for the new versions of foams coming out and so on. So I think if you add those up together, it is likely that it's a double digit percentage number in growth in that area for sure. But we have seen it before, and I assume we will see it again, that business is very cyclic. And depending on political decisions in big countries, China, India and U. S. A, especially. Okay. And if we Take another horizon, let's say, 5 years. How big are you? And how have your various business areas developed. We set internal such target, but We don't want to go out and communicate something that the market will be disappointed by, And we don't want to communicate something that is not very ambitious, so we're still in our internal process to communicate something there. Here and that we have one business area where we do not sell so much yet that can grow a lot. I think we should expect Fair growth from Nexon, yes. When can we expect plants in new areas, new locations? Yes. First of all, we need to double our sales so we can fill the capacities that we have. It is not a priority for organic geographic manufacturing expansion. Or what do you say, Markus, do you have anything to add on that? Yeah. Of course, we have actually invested quite a lot. And mainly in 2022, we had its new credit machine line in Sweden. And that is more or less up and running now since 4 or 5 months ago, and we still have really lots of capacity left. So we have done those and now it's a little bit time to harvest on all the investors investments. But okay, in a Fair amount of time. It is reasonable to think that if the local markets grow to a certain extent, for example, in North America or in Asia, import costs and so on might motivate any such kind of we're not planning anything right now. But we're of course following those trends and thinking about it. Yes. And when it comes to high temperature plastic or components, what do you think how do you think that market will develop for you? I think it will develop well, but it will not be so rapid. The validation process for a new aircraft engine model is very, very long. So the solutions that we are today working on where we're sending samples from us and they're making parts and so on. It will take years before they come into production and its actual production volume. This is also the reason why we have decided in our strategy to focus mainly on be a really good supplier to the customers in that segment. But to do R and D activities that are costly for us with some kind of partnering or funding of some kind. So we don't have to fund all that ourselves because the payback is in the future, so to say. Okay. That was all the questions for today. So Markus and Roni, you so much for presenting and answering all the questions. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Thank you.