Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Investor and Analyst Conference webcast regarding Gurit's recent acquisition of Fiberline. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be immediately followed by a Q&A session, where questions can be posed via the ongoing conference call. As an analyst or investor, you can receive, the necessary details in registering by investor@gurit.com. Registered participants may then ask their questions by pressing star and one on the telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. Speakers today are Gurit CEO Mitja Schulz and Fiberline CEO Lars Fuglsang. In the Q&A, Gurit CFO Philippe Wirth and Fiberline President Thomas Thorning will also participate.
At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mitja Schulz. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much, and good morning to everyone. After our most recent M&A activity, we want to provide today additional information on the background and the strategic rationale of the acquisition and how this impacts Gurit's 2025 long-term plan. Also, we want to introduce Fiberline as well as the management to our shareholders, investors, and analysts. We have foreseen the agenda as you see here on the slide. We will start with me giving some background on the transaction, followed by Lars, CEO of Fiberline, who will explain and introduce Fiberline and give a little insight in the technology background and the carbon pultrusion market in general. Again, followed by me in a conclusion on the strategic rationale and the link to Gurit's 2025 strategy.
We will then end the session with the Q&A. Let me start by providing a couple of details on the transaction in general. We acquired on the 27th of April a 60% share of Fiberline Composites and last week we successfully closed that transaction. ABN AMRO has the Sustainable Impact Fund, and they were an owner, a minority owner before. With that transaction, they obviously and consequently stepped out. Now Gurit holds 60% of the shares and the Thorning family is the remaining 40%. Gurit and Fiberline will form a strong player in the wind turbine blade industry.
I will show you that a little bit more in detail, but apparently one of the major reasons for why this whole transaction makes a lot of sense for us is that Gurit has invested in global presence and global footprint, and on the other hand, we see a strong pull for the products Fiberline Composites is producing. Matching those and leveraging customer access, global footprint, and technology capabilities, we feel makes really a lot of sense to the industry. Organizationally, Fiberline will operate as a separate company until 2025. We have a dedicated board where Gurit has the majority, and I actually, since last Friday, I'm Chairman of the Board and took over from Peter Thorning.
Internally, Fiberline will report into Gurit as a new business unit called Structural Profiles. We anticipate synergies in multiple areas. Again, I will come to that in a few slides, but this is obviously related to operational footprint, purchasing, customer, and technology. I think a highlight is that we already, in the H2 of this year, will manufacture the first carbon spar caps in our new plant in India. This is what we really think is a strong signal towards time to market of this transaction. The integration of Fiberline we will manage internally through a dedicated post-merger integration structure.
We on purpose say, "Let's integrate what makes sense, otherwise keep the strengths and the agilities of both parties." Also to add here, last week was the biggest composite show, the JEC in Paris. We used that opportunity to talk to most of our key customers and business partners, and I can say we unisono received a positive and encouraging feedback and already dove into specific project requests with certain customers. Overall, the feedback was highly positive from the market so far. Few more details on the transaction, nothing which you haven't seen in the announcement. Purchase price for 60% was CHF 58 million. Fully consolidated, we acquired a debt of CHF 22 million.
What is important to add here is that we also have an option to purchase the remaining 40% from the Thorning family in the year 2025, based on predefined commercial conditions. We fully debt-financed the deal, and now also, again, not mentioning too much because Lars will obviously introduce Fiberline and also sales development, but last year, roughly EUR 100 million sales for Fiberline. Last message here on that slide, we will review Gurit's guidance, and also the impact the transaction has on Gurit's guidance together with the half year results in the middle of this year. Now, let me look a little bit more into synergies as I already promised.
Again, we see a multitude of synergistic points, which we are now in the PMI structure I highlighted are going to capture. Let's start with technology. The ones who know us know that Gurit is an innovation technology company, and Fiberline is as well. A part of the selection for us to conclude on this transaction was that we perceive Fiberline as a leader in carbon pultrusion design and manufacturing, engineering. This again is a perfect fit also culturally to Gurit's DNA. We feel that this will enable us also technologically to jointly develop new, highly integrated products. This is also what we hear from our customers. This is what they want.
They want competent suppliers who are able to solve problems with them instead of, I would say, waiting for specification where a problem is already solved. Footprint-wise, I will show you in the next slide a visualization of the footprint. I already mentioned we are planning a rapid expansion of Fiberline products by leveraging Gurit's global footprint, in particular in the regions which are highly relevant for the wind industry, which is India in particular, and Mexico. We both have a pretty good and long-standing relationships to the major Western wind customers. Some more with one customer, some others more with another customer, that this will be purely complementary. I mentioned already, we saw only positive feedback from those customers.
Gurit is also strongly engaged with Chinese OEMs, which is today not the major focus of Fiberline. Again, we see here an opportunity as well to penetrate products from Fiberline's product portfolio through Gurit's sales channels into China. Purchasing majority of the purchasing volume on Fiberline side is obviously carbon fibers. They have well-established relationships with major carbon suppliers. Gurit also buys carbon less than Fiberline. As nevertheless, we see opportunities here by jointly procuring in key commodities, also not limited to carbon, resin systems, glass fiber, and also in the whole area of indirect purchasing. Finding synergies through joint purchasing activities, again, will be one of the top key synergy projects we are going to start as we speak.
Lastly, Fiberline is focused today on wind 100%. Gurit also has a sizable and strongly growing position in the marine and in particular industrial segment. Competitors of Fiberline also sell, for example, glass fiber pultruded profiles into the transportation, the construction or the civil engineering industry segments. We see also here an opportunity to cross-sell and leverage Gurit's sales access into these segments and by doing that, driving sales and profitability. Let me now go to the footprint slide, which I just mentioned, we have prepared for you. You see the orange circles. These are the two plants Fiberline has today.
The major plant for carbon pultrusion and the headquarters of Fiberline in Middelfart, Denmark, and there is a facility focused on glass fiber pultrusion in Tianjin. Gurit has a facility in Tianjin as well. Gurit has four other facilities in China. Of course, we are now looking into how we can create footprint-related synergies for the Chinese market. More importantly, I want to highlight the green circles which we have visualized here, beginning with India and Chennai. As I said, we already have both teams on the ground in Chennai preparing an industrialization. We're targeting SOP of carbon fiber pultruded profiles, spar caps for a specific customer already in the H2 of this year.
We are in joint discussions already with other customers in the North American market to also here leverage Gurit's footprint, and considering decision is not finally done, but considering to also launch manufacturing in the H2 of 2023 in Mexico. That sums up a little bit my introductory part here, and I will now hand over to Lars, CEO of Fiberline, to introduce Fiberline in a little bit more detail to you.
Thank you, Mitja. Good. Fiberline is a Danish company founded in 1979 by the Thorning family. We have Peter Thorning here with us on the call, the former chairman, now member of the board. We are just about 300 employees. A turnover of around CHF 100 million. As you saw on the map before, we have production facilities in Denmark. This is also where we have our quite significant R&D, and we have a production facility in Tianjin, China as well. As Mitja said, we are serving most of the major Western customers. It would be customers like Nordex, Siemens, Vestas, LM. Our, say, the service that we provide is really pultrusions. It is carbon pultrusions and glass pultrusions, and it is split into three main product groups.
We have the carbon pultrusions, which last year was around 75% of our business. Wind turbine structures, around 5%, and blade root reinforcement, which is around 20%. Where we clearly see the growth is in the carbon pultrusion market, and we have growth in general. Last year, we were looking into 40% growth year-over-year, and we will also be seeing significant double-digit growth in 2022. A little more on the products on this slide here. When we say turbine structures, it is platforms like what you see here on the back of the nacelle. It is lightweight, corrosion-resistant structures. This is what we call the Helihoist. We also have flooring for nacelles. We have tower internals as part of this product group. We have also the root connections.
The different types of root connections. The one shown here, you see the blue graphic there, which is really pultruded segments sitting between the bushings, creating a solid and good connection between the bolts and the blade structure. Then we have the carbon pultrusion, which we will look into more details here on the next slide. What you see there to the left is, say, a pultrusion. It is really a plank. It is around five millimeters thick, up to around 200 millimeters wide, and then it can have any length between 100 and 400 meters, so quite long. The pultrusion process is rather complex. It entails everything from getting the carbon fiber wetted, the chemistry, the temperature profiles, the curing, the shrinkage, and you need to, say, create a stable geometric form without defects coming out.
All that is happening within a, say, tool of around one and half meters. A lot of physics going on, and a rather complex process with a lot of IP embedded. As I mentioned, the pultrusions come out, say, somewhere between 100-400 meters, and in order to be able to ship them, we coil them as you see here on the center picture, and we ship it to the OEM's blade workshop. At this blade workshop, the coils are decoiled, they are cut into length, they are stacked, they are fused together in order to form the carbon spar cap. The carbon spar cap is the main load-carrying element of a turbine blade. The key with carbon pultrusions is that it enables the turbine manufacturers to design a blade that is longer, slender and stiff.
The reason why it is meaningful to, say, substitute the low cost glass with carbon is really that you can deliver the same energy from this blade with less load on the turbine structure. Less load means that you can save materials in the hub, in the nacelle, in the tower, and the foundations. The net sum of this is that the savings are bigger than the incremental money that you spend on the carbon in the turbine blades. It is a good business case, and that is the reason why this is the prevailing and winning design process that all the main OEMs are applying today. This is what we see here on this market slide. We have onshore to the left, we have offshore to the right.
If you look at the most left table there, the yellow part is the glass infusion, which is the conventional technology, and the green is the carbon pultrusions. You can see that today we are looking at somewhere around 60% going towards 90% of the market being carbon pultrusions in 2029. This is by the way numbers from Wood Mackenzie, so it's not our numbers, it is Wood Mackenzie's numbers. What you have in the second graph there is who are the OEMs that are using carbon pultrusions. The blue on the top is Vestas. They have been using carbon pultrusions for many years. Also you have Nordex, which is the dark green. These are the two trendsetting OEMs.
What you see here in 2021, 2022 is that the other big OEMs like GE and Siemens are also, say, emerging or coming into this technology, followed by the Chinese. This is really the, say, story behind why we see growth in this market. Offshore is the same, even, say, to even more, 100% carbon pultrusion is the prediction, which is really related to the fact that carbon pultrusions is becoming even more, an improvement when you go into the very long offshore blades. On the OEMs in offshore, Vestas, same thing. They've been using it for quite some time. Then you see, Siemens Gamesa and GE transitioning right now to, carbon pultrusions and, say, bringing in significant scale, and we have the Chinese, OEMs following. This is the technology trend.
This is the market numbers, and that is why we in Fiberline being part of Gurit see that we would have a potential to grow to with a revenue of more than CHF 300 million yearly. These were the words. Mitja, back to you.
Thank you, Lars. Let me now continue and conclude with a view on strategy. First of all, to summarize what we just learned and to translate this now in an updated Gurit's product offering, we feel that with adding Fiberline's capabilities, we will enable the Gurit group to offer the most complete and comprehensive product portfolio to our wind blade customers. We have access to all wind OEM, so everyone who was just on the chart before, as well as 90% of the global wind blade manufacturers, and we spoke about footprint already, so we feel this is a pretty strong offering to the market. When we go to the next slide, we try to put that a little bit more also into numbers.
Let me clear that slide for you. On the right-hand side, you see in that circle our understanding of the cost distribution of a 80- 90 meter blade into the different value streams. On the left-hand side, that's a new visualization in what value streams Gurit is today already active and the blue circled ones are the ones which now Fiberline brings incrementally to the table. Long story short, we could theoretically offer up to 50% of the blade value to our customers if we would supply every component which Gurit has in the portfolio into one specific blade type.
I mean, obviously this will not be the future average, unfortunately, but I think it just demonstrates the capabilities Gurit now has and brings to our customers. I think what is more or equally important, I would say, besides critical mass and global reach combined with local manufacturing, is that we now also enable us with the R&D and design and technology knowhow both teams bring to the table to work on new, higher, and more modularized integrated product solutions. We see that today, due to the sheer size of wind turbine blades, customers already asking for prefabricated parts which they can then lay into the molds and no longer doing all the mold layup by themselves.
That means you need to combine certain composite technologies, core materials together with a glass fiber infusion, probably in combination with the spar caps. New, highly advanced root systems. Again, combining these technologies does not only mean scaling through just an extended product offering, but also the capabilities to further integrate and work on new product solutions together with our customers. Let me now come to the final slide. This is a review, a slide I've shown to most of you already last year during our capital markets day, where we introduced the highlights of Gurit's Strategy 2025. I just, in a few words, want to explain how we think the acquisitions we most recently did will play into Gurit fulfilling the Strategy 2025, which we have created.
Just let me start with the industry segments. You see we crossed out the aerospace business. We were subcritical in the aerospace business. We found a better owner for that business, and we are now focusing on the one hand to be a world-class supplier to the wind industry with a very strong portfolio, as you just heard. But we are also going to further grow and strengthen our marine and industrial business because we want to strategically have a stronger second leg, if you will, supporting Gurit's growth going forward. Technologically, we highlighted last year lightweighting, Industry 4.0, sustainable products, but also a further trend for modularization and integration.
Just on the slide before, I explained to you that we feel now with having more engineering horsepower and more capabilities, we can also here support our customers even stronger than we do today. When you look into the different markets where we are active today, then I can say we probably did a lot already over the last 12 months in establishing a global one face to the customer wind organization with supporting, for example, a strong China team and being dedicated in China with a separate organization. We put more focus on the industrial segment because we see that this is from our perspective strongly growing. The acquisition of Fiberline again will on the one hand, I think benefit from that wind customer access.
On the other hand, as I mentioned already, offer incremental cross-selling opportunities in non-wind segments. Lastly, we try to quantify our ambitions for 2025. I would now say, we were a little bit more cautious last year by saying we want to grow mid-single digits plus acquisitions. To put this a little bit into perspective, I think considering the market developments and what we've just also seen with Fiberline, that CHF 750-CHF 800 million top line for 2025 should be absolutely in reach for Gurit. This is what we are aiming for, and this is what we are going for. This in line with the other KPIs as we have outlined here.
That more or less concludes the presentation, the slides we have prepared for you. Again, just to summarize, we feel that with our strategy we are still on the way to achieve what we've outlined. We feel that the acquisition of Fiberline, or 60% of Fiberline, will really pay in the fulfillment of the strategy and ticks a lot of boxes here. Now I'm really looking forward to your questions, and I'm already thanking you for your participation.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Pre-registered participants can now ask the question by pressing star one on the touchtone telephone. Questioners are requested to use the handset only and to turn off the volume of the webcast. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star two. Anyone with a question may press star one at this time. The first question comes from Markus Mayer from Baader Helvea. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good morning, gentlemen. I have two questions, if I may. The first one is on the synergies. Can you quantify the synergies or at least tell us what it is in terms of acquired revenues, cost synergies and also the split of the synergies cost versus sales synergies. I understood that there is a kind of a sales portion that you basically can leverage your platform, but at the same time there are also purchasing synergies, so more flavor on this would be helpful. The second question is on the remaining 40% stake of Fiberline. Are there any options to purchase this remaining 40% stake, and if so, at what terms? Thank you.
Okay. Let me first start with the synergy question. We are from today's perspective not probably able to fully quantify the synergies which we are aiming for. As I said, we just started a post-merger integration phase. We have structured that to go to focus on basically all relevant business areas, purchasing, meaning comparing conditions, looking into leverage opportunities by combining volumes, for example. We see on the customer side, of course, opportunities, and also here we are comparing our framework conditions jointly and develop certain strategies out of that. Operationally, I mentioned that already.
We are going to anticipate synergies, but this will be then rather, I would say, cost avoidance related because Fiberline will be able to industrialize, for example, in our plant in Chennai, where I would say most of the legwork has been done already. Obviously, they do not need to hire a fully fledged plant organization because that is available. This will certainly help us to overall make the location in China more competitive. Sales wise, also here, as I alluded to, we are at a very early stage still to evaluate what product opportunities, for example, outside of the wind segment we have to cross-sell into industrial applications, for example.
It's still too early to come out with, I would say, really tangible numbers here. We have given ourselves the goal to work in this PMI structure now for the next three months. Obviously starting from day one already to go for synergies which are identified. I would now anticipate that in the next couple of months we should have a better, more quantified, a more tangible view on the financial impact of those synergies. To your second question-
May I have an added question to the first one? As I understood, this could be basically really a step change for your company. Are the potential synergies more in the range of, let's say, 3% of the acquired revenues, or is it more akin to where we have sustainable and structural shifts in the chemical industry, which are more than over 6% of acquired sales or even higher, up to 9% of acquired sales synergies? Would you see this kind of acquisition on this range? Maybe this would be helpful to more
Yeah. As I said, please give us a little bit more time to come back with tangible numbers. You can imagine that obviously in our own business plan and part of the acquisition, we factored in synergies, which we see, which we feel are realistic. But today, I think the major focus will be now on better understanding not only how much, but also when will we be able to really go for those synergies. I ask you for probably a couple of more months patience.
Okay.
Happy to shine more light into that topic.
Okay, great.
To your second question, as I outlined, and as we also communicated, we have the option to buy the remaining 40% from the Thorning family. There is a straightforward mechanism defined between us, based on certain financial fulfillments and conditions. This is then the baseline for this will be the year 2024, and this is also why we are saying once the results of the year 2024 are available, then we can call that option. This is also our intention to do that obviously, and to fully take over the business.
Okay. Thank you so much.
The next question comes from Jörn Iffert from UBS. Please go ahead.
Yes, thanks very much for taking my questions. The first one would be please, to the selling family, if I may. Why is the selling family not taking, for example, an equity stake in Gurit, in particular considering the strong growth prospects of the wind industry in the medium to long term? Why not remaining committed, to the overall business beyond 2025? The second question would be, please, can you comment on the EBIT margin development over the last couple of years, of Fiberline? And when do you expect it to be attractively profitable, maybe in line with the medium-term targets of Gurit, and what does it need? Does it need 30% more volumes, or does it need cost efficiencies, that to get a better feeling about the profitability and development of the target, please.
The last question, if I may. You highlighted by 2025 you want to reach sales of CHF 750-CHF 800 million. Let's assume in 2022 you're ending up around CHF 500 million, ±. This would imply quite strong organic sales growth for the next three and half years. What is giving you confidence here? Has the wind market outlook changed to 2025, or do you have any concrete signs now that 2023 will be much better? Just to learn more about the basis of this assumption. Thanks a lot.
Let me start with the third question. You broke up a couple of times, but I think I got your question. It was a little bit related to the confidence level we have in the 2025 sales number. I think two things to consider here, and just referring back to the presentation from Lars. You see there are, I would say, two determining factors impacting the sales growth. One is obviously the wind market, and I think we all read the same publications from the WoodMacs of this world, and we also hear the same comments from our key customers, the Western key customers, as well as Chinese key customers.
I would say the global picture here is right now that probably 2022 and 2023 will be rather flattish on or below a 2021 market level for Western customers. China was about to do better this year. Now, I think everyone is a little bit cautious what now really happens, driven by the COVID impacts and the strong regulations and impacting life and business in China. I think everyone also foresees, with stronger offshore beginning mid-2024, end 2024 that there will be an incremental market impact. Yes, market will certainly, at least in 2024, 2025, help, driven by a stronger offshore penetration.
Secondly, I think we need to consider, again, referring to last slide, that we see a technology change, totally independent from, let's say, the overall market volumes, that blade designs gradually integrate more carbon, more carbon spar caps. Lars gave the technical explanation for that, driven by the growth of the turbine. That penetration is also strong, as we've seen, and also as third-party market institutes like WoodMac communicate. This will obviously also help, and we've seen that we feel that it is realistic to grow the Fiberline business to a range of CHF 300 million. When you add that up, then we feel with the range I've given that this is ambitious but realistic for the year 2025.
With profitability, I think that's also a good question before I hand over to Peter. Profitability, the business is right now just driven by the extreme growth trajectory we have ahead of us. The business currently has, and also the profitability, probably more startup character, yeah? Why is that? Because we are scaling, we are investing in new production sites, ramping up, that means additional people, additional structural investments, working capital financing.
We anticipate that longer term, so let's say, once the next two years are done and these investments are being made in India and in China, we anticipate a longer-term profitability, which we think will be on the level of our kitting profitability, because the business model is quite similar. It's conversion business with actually a pretty high share of carbon in it. We feel that the anticipated EBIT or margins will be probably on the lower end of what you typically know from Gurit's range. That said, I'm coming to your first question, and I would hand over to Peter.
Yes, thank you. Well, I think the family remains very committed with a 40% share. We had 65% until this transaction. Now 40% of a significantly growing business. We will not rule out at all that we will remain invested in this kind of activities also beyond 2025. We think this will continue to be a growing market also beyond that time, as you could see. I don't think that our integration into Gurit, which is the right thing to do for the company, says anything about our commitment to the wind business.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for answering the questions.
The next question comes from Daniel König from Mirabaud. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you, Daniel.
Yes. Hi, good morning. I had some basic questions, how the market share is of Fiberline in this carbon pultrusion market, who the other market participants are. I was wondering how pricing has developed of the product, because from the graph I looked at, it seems like Vestas is pretty much the dominant customer, and if there's only one dominant customer, it normally is not good news for prices. I had a third question on raw materials, like, can you tell me how raw materials have developed at Fiberline? Is that exploding as well? Or just give me some kind of indications what to expect. That's it for the moment.
Okay. Daniel, also let me start with the third question before I then hand over to Lars, who can certainly say something about the market share of Fiberline and let's say the development of pricing with carbon pultrusions over the last years. Obviously, we are part of the same value chain than everyone else. Yes, also we see inflationary impacts for energy, for raw materials, for transportation and so on. Absolutely. Yes, this is also absolutely impacting us. We are able to push portions of that to our customers through either let's say more or less automated contractual agreements or through individual agreements which we are negotiating with customers.
Classically, those agreements are linked to, let's say, for example, raw materials and commodities which are somehow publicly traded or where there is a certain transparency. Classically, you do not have automated acceleration or escalation models to your customers for things like energy or gas, right? These are things we are discussing individually with our customers, and these are tough discussions, in particular with the wind customers. I mean, everyone has seen also how those guys are doing right now. Yes, it's absolutely a topic for Gurit as well. The teams are working super hard here to mitigate and discuss with our customers as well as with our suppliers, and to further reduce energy consumption and gas consumption, for example.
Yes, there is clearly an impact also to Gurit. Would be awkward if it wouldn't be, right? That said, I would probably hand over to Lars. Question was on market share and probably price or cost development for pultrusions.
Yes. Let me maybe start with the price development question. It is true that the launching partner here of Fiberline was Vestas, followed by Nordex. We have not seen a decline in price development. On the contrary, as you also saw on the market share graphs that we've shown here, the need for pultrusions is increasing. The capacity available is rather limited. For that reason, we have been able to keep price, and also we have been able to pass through the major part of the, let's say, material inflation that we have seen lately.
The carbon market in general is, say, impacted by energy prices, but not to an extent where, let me say, it is perceived as a massive roadblock. We have two main categories, material categories that are, say, impacted. It is resin, and it is carbon. We have good pass-through clauses on both, which is part of the way that we drive our business. Peter, would you have, say, a comment on market share, or for Fiberline?
No, you can comment on market share, obviously. Sure.
I don't have the recent figures, actually. I'm actually not able to.
Okay, Lars. I have the figures here in the overview. I will quickly pitch in here, Daniel. I mean, as we had seen, Fiberline is today supplying to all the major customers. The market share is in the neighborhood of 20%-25% today. We feel that this can grow further because we see that there is a stronger penetration now, particularly with the offshore segment. Here, Fiberline is pretty strong. That is, let's say, probably also going forward, a reasonable expectation, somewhere between 20% and 30%.
This is what we also have in the strategic plan for the next couple of years. Hope that answers your question.
Thank you, Mitja.
Okay, thanks.
As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one. Gentlemen, so far there are no more questions.
Okay. Then, I want to say thank you very much for attending. I wish everyone fantastic remaining week. Sunny here in Zurich. Talk to you next time. Again, thank you very much for your attendance.
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