Welcome to SABIC's 2024 full-year earnings call. This is Sara Al-Zamami acting as a moderator. Please note that the call is being recorded, and a transcript of the call, together with supplementary materials, will be published on the Investor Relations webpage on SABIC's website. Today's earnings call will feature SABIC CEO Engr. Abdulrahman Al-Fageeh, as well as its CFO Mr. Salah Al-Hareky, and IRO Mr. Naif Al-Ayed. Naif will now take us through an outline of today's event.
Thank you, Sara, and thanks to those of you who are joining the SABIC 2024 full-year earnings call. Please note that forward-looking statements will be made in this call are based on certain assumptions filled with risk and uncertainty. These statements are not a guarantee of SABIC future performance. Actual outcomes may differ materially from what the statements imply. Please refer to the disclaimer in these presentations and in our financial reports, which are available at SABIC.com. Our CEO will start his presentations by going over the high-level market context that influenced our industry's performance in the year 2024. This will be followed by a rundown of some key points to bear in mind with respect to SABIC 2024 performance. The CFO will then walk you through SABIC aggregate financial performance with additional insight, specifically on the full year of 2024.
Our CEO will come back at the end to provide a brief outlook for this year, after which we will open the line for Q&A sessions. I ask the participants to limit the topic of their questions to SABIC corporate performance and avoid referring to listed affiliate companies. Now, please join me in welcoming SABIC CEO Engr. Abdulrahman Al-Fageeh.
Hello, everyone. Thank you, Naif, and thank you to those who have dialed in to join today's earnings call. Let us begin with a brief overview of the macroeconomic landscape. The global GDP growth improved slightly in the fourth quarter of last year, lifted by falling inflation rates, more accommodating monetary policy, and decreasing energy costs. Global manufacturing outlook slightly improved, but the Purchasing Managers' Index, the PMI, remained under 50. Overall, macroeconomic indicators point to a tempered increase in market momentum. Let me turn now to the petrochemical industry. Despite the slight improvement in macroeconomic conditions, overcapacity in petrochemicals persists, particularly in polymers. Chemicals' utilization remains below the historical global average. Focusing on the operating rates, as well as the annual capacity and the demand for ethylene specifically, we see a market that has become unbalanced. Capacity growth outpaced demand growth in recent years.
From the year 2021 on, capacity additions were met by slower demand growth. I now would like to highlight six points that demonstrate SABIC's commitment to improving its overall performance. Our total recordable incident rate for Q4 is 0.09, representing an 18% improvement compared to the year 2023. This is a testament to SABIC's dedication and commitment to the health, safety, and security. In keeping with our commitment to SABIC's shareholders, total dividends of $2.72 billion were announced for the year of 2024. Despite the market challenges, SABIC maintained a solid EBITDA margin, demonstrating its resiliency. As part of our efforts to uphold our supply chain operational excellence, I'm delighted to announce the signing of an agreement for rail transportation between Jubail and Dammam in Saudi Arabia.
As a result of this agreement, more than 400 fewer truck trips per day will take place between the two cities, resulting in a faster delivery schedule and improved logistics efficiency. With an Aa3 long-term credit rating from Moody's, we continue to demonstrate our robust financial standing, reinforcing business confidence in our resilience and long-term stability. Earlier this year, it has been announced that SABIC retained its position as the world's second most valuable chemical brand for the fifth consecutive year, with a brand value of $4.93 billion. Delivering on our 2024 commitments, this slide highlights key achievements across announced priorities. First, in the area of sustainable profitable growth, I'm happy to say that the construction of our $6.4 billion Fujian Petrochemical Complex in China is progressing on track towards mechanical completion by the second half of the year 2026. This project reinforces our strategic expansion in Asia.
Our MTBE growth project in Saudi Arabia is also advancing well. We expect it to be completed later this year. In South Korea, we have increased the annual production capacity of SABIC SK Nexlene Company by 40%. The debottlenecking project will drive cost efficiency and expand our regional footprint. The last growth related to developments I want to highlight is the inauguration of our new ULTEM resin manufacturing facility in Singapore, increasing global ULTEM specialty resin production by more than 50%. The new facility enables SABIC's continued growth in high-performance polymers. Turning now to our existing business, I want to mention a couple of ways in which we are creating as much value as we can from them. First, there are the synergy benefits that we have been unlocking with Saudi Aramco since Aramco's 2022 acquisition of a 70% equity share in SABIC.
Those benefits have resulted in $2.57 billion US dollars. At SABIC, we continue unlocking internal value creation, driving greater efficiency and business excellence. Additionally, we have achieved major milestones on portfolio management, and we successfully divested Hadeed steel business in Saudi Arabia, Alba aluminum business in Bahrain, and our Functional Forms business globally. These moves further strengthen our strategic positioning and enable us to focus on our core business. Pursuant to our customer outreach and intimacy, we successfully introduced 135 new products in 2024. Additionally, our unwavering commitment to customer excellence led to a 5% year-on-year improvement in Net Promoter Score, the NPS. This results, or this reflects our strong engagement with customers and our commitment to delivering tailored solutions that drive mutual growth and long-term partnership.
As far as innovation and ESG is concerned, we continue to expand our TRUCIRCLE portfolio of certified circular and certified renewable products in 2024, with some key project developments. These include both the commissioning of a hydrotreater and the mechanical completion of the pyoil plant in our Geleen manufacturing sites in the Netherlands. Also, for the first time, we successfully produced certified circular polypropylene material at our Ibn Zahr affiliates here in Saudi Arabia. In addition, major milestones were reached on our carbon neutrality roadmap: the startup of our e-furnaces, or the electric furnace demonstration plan that we built with BASF and Linde, and the launch of the certified low-carbon methanol, the first produced in a new line of products made from the captured CO2.
Our dedication to sustainability and leadership in innovation has been recognized globally, and in this respect, 2024 was no different than other recent years. We won a variety of prestigious awards, including an EcoVadis Gold Medal, as well as multiple Edison and R&D 100 awards for commercial innovations. We will now take a look at the quarterly demand and sales of the individual end markets we serve. As you can see, demand was stable in the majority of our end products industries, growing only in agriculture and packaging. We expect the demand to remain unchanged in most end product industries in Q1 2025. Demand in transportation, industrial, and electrical and electronics sectors, however, is expected to increase relative to the prior quarter. And with that, I will now hand the call over to our SABIC CFO, Salah Al-Hareky.
He will review the company's financial results and provide additional commentary on segments' performance. Salah.
Thank you, Abdulrahman, and warm welcome to everyone joining today's call. SABIC navigated the challenge of 2024 by leveraging our global footprint to target higher price markets. As a result, we generated $37.3 billion in annual revenue, making only a 1% decrease compared to 2023. This slight decrease was the result of a reduction of sales volume and offset by an increase in sales price. Despite this slight decline, we achieved higher EBITDA, reaching $5.2 billion, a 2% increase from last year. Furthermore, our net income for 2024 stood at $410 million, reflecting a $1.1 billion improvement over 2023. This significant increase was largely driven by the fair value valuation of Hadeed as a discontinued operation. Our cash flow from operation totaled $4.4 billion compared to $6.5 billion in the previous year.
Nevertheless, our balance sheet remained strong, allowing us to sustain our dividend commitment and capital investment with a negative gearing ratio of minus 1.7%. Now, I'd like to build this discussion and focus on how our disciplined approach to capital allocation reinforces our long-term commitment to delivering sustainable shareholder return. At SABIC, strong cash generation is the foundation of our financial strength. It enables us to invest in high-value assets while ensuring stable and growing dividends over the long term. In 2024, we took a major step toward enhancing our dividend distribution process by introducing a new interim dividend mechanism. This change is designed to improve our decision-making process, streamline distribution by reducing time between announcement and payment, and aligned with the global best practices. Looking ahead, our financial strategy remains a clear and disciplined balancing and reinvestment for growth while continuing to deliver reliable shareholder return.
Now, let's take a look at our segment performance for this year. In petrochemicals, we saw an overall price increase of 2% year over year, despite continued supply and demand imbalance. Within this segment, chemicals experienced lower sales volume, whereas polymer recorded a higher sales volume. In total, our 2024 sales volume reached 38 million metric tons, reflecting a 3% decline. In agri-nutrients, we witnessed the opposite: higher sales volume but lower prices. The total agri-nutrient sales volume reached 7 million metric tons in 2024. As I conclude, I would like to highlight that given the challenging macros and prolonged low industry cycles, SABIC is taking steps to ensure its balance sheet remains robust. We continue to optimize our portfolio to improve free cash flow and return, and maintain our approach to sustainable or sustaining dividend and growing our dividend over time.
We have launched cost reduction and capital efficiency initiatives, which we believe will improve our competitive positioning and will afford us to opportunistically grow business with selective investment. This concludes the financial highlight. I will now hand back to Abdulrahman for our year-ahead guidance. Abdulrahman.
Thank you, Salah. As we have mentioned earlier, our guidance for the year ahead is based on the slow economic growth, as reflected in the expected global GDP growth rate of 2.5%. Aligned with our commitment to value creation and selective growth that was mentioned by Salah, our 2022 capital investment is expected to be between $3.5-$4 billion. At SABIC, our long-term focus remains on operational excellence, transformation, selective growth, and, of course, value creation. Over the last months, we have commenced a strategic review of the international business in our petrochemical and specialty SPU. Furthermore, we are currently conducting a comprehensive review of our cost structure to further enhance our operating model and advance SABIC's long-term competitiveness. We will provide further updates upon completion of our review. This concludes the presentation portion of today's call. We can now kick off the Q&A session.
Thank you, Engineer Abdulrahman Al-Fageeh. Audience, please use the raise hand feature on your screen to ask a question and wait for your line to be opened. Make sure to click the lower hand button once the question has been asked. You can also share your questions in writing. Please limit your questions to two to three per participant to allow for enough time for others. The first question we have is from Ricardo Rezende from Morgan Stanley. Ricardo, please come closer to the mic and ask your question.
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. The first one, it's on the margins on the petrochemical segment. If you look at the margins on third quarter.
Sorry, Ricardo, your voice is not clear. Can you please?
Is it better now?
Can you speak now?
Yeah, so the first question, it's on the margins in petrochemicals. We've seen quite a significant decline quarter on quarter. If you could just comment on what has driven this margin decrease in the fourth quarter.
Ricardo, unfortunately, the sound is not clear. If you can type your question, and then we'll take it later.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, Ricardo. The next question is from Waleed Jimma from Goldman Sachs. Waleed, please come closer to the mic and ask your question.
Questions. First, on the current pet chem spread environment, do you expect this current weakness to persist through the first quarter of 2025? And are you seeing any pickup in global margins across your product basket? Second, can you comment on some of the one-offs that took place in Q4? What was their contribution to net income during the quarter, and what were they mainly related to? And on portfolio optimization, what assets would you consider underperforming in your current portfolio after the recent divestments? Could you talk about the parts of your portfolio that could be up for divestments? Thank you so much.
Waleed, I think, if I'm not mistaken, you have three questions. The first one is about global margin. The second one, I don't understand, was related to the fourth quarter, one-off in the fourth quarter. And the last one is about the divestments and the, if I'm not mistaken. So I'll take the first and last, and you take the second one about the fourth quarter. First of all, I mean, you know what we have seen, I mean, what is going to impact the overall margins for this quarter and next one is two things: the global GDP, as well as the supply demand of the petrochemicals, both in the polymers and in the chemicals. Our expectation is that this will remain stable, at least for the first half of this year.
It's still at the low level because of the overcapacity that has been built in the earlier years, and we think this will continue. In the agri-nutrients, I think there is some improvement that has been noticed in the market in this, and probably it might continue, and it depends on some of the seasons for the agri-nutrients and some of the globe. The third question that I think you asked about, I mean, what we are doing in the optimization and in the divestments. Look, I mean, as a continuous for the transformation that is part of the company culture that we keep continuing looking all the time and where is the area that we need to transform, where is the area that we want to improve. Definitely, we are focusing on our core business.
And as you may have seen last year, the company has made the divestments on the steel business of Hadeed, the divestments of the aluminum in Alba, Bahrain. These are non-core businesses, but the core business is going to be the one that we are going to focus on in order to enhance our returns as well as our operational excellence. Salah?
So let me tackle the question around with the one-off accounting transactions for the fourth quarter. The only actually significant was Clariant and the Clariant to the joint non-integral joint venture that we have actually taken an impairment of around $311 million. And this is purely because of the performance of the stock price. And this is actually the major, and not only the major in the fourth quarter, but the major if you compare the whole year. I will also complement our CDR on the portfolio optimizations.
The portfolio optimization is a journey that we have actually taken and started to pursue, and we're looking into our core assets and non-core assets. Of course, it's always very simple to identify non-core assets, and then you actually decide on the next step to ask yourself whether this is part of the competitive advantage for us or not, and we've taken that journey, met last year, and we're actually progressing very well. The objective is not only to divest in the core and non-core assets, but also to restructure some of our core assets and participate potentially to the consolidation that is actually taking place in the market. We haven't made any decision on that, but the focus that our CEO mentioned is really looking to our cost structure and improve, but the outcome, which is very important, which is actually that's the path going forward for us.
We want to actually use this opportunity to recycle our capital, and as we mentioned that we would like to look into opportunistic investments. We want to actually improve our operation efficiency and activity to be more competitive in the market. Third, the second or third is also continue to preserve our intention and our policy toward our dividend. So we will always make sure that we sustain our dividend and not only that, but to grow it over time.
Thank you, Waleed. The next question is from Joseph Valladie from Morgan Stanley. Joseph, please come closer to the mic and ask your question.
Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for the presentation. We have two questions, if we may. The first one is about EBITDA margins in the petrochemical segment. We saw there was some contraction in the quarter, and so if you could provide more color on that. And then secondly, on free cash flows, we saw that cash flows for the quarter were higher than EBITDA, so if you could provide more detail on that as well, it would be helpful. Thanks.
Okay, let me tackle maybe the second part of the question. And then we'll also maybe the CEO can comment on the margin.
So the free cash flow for this year was around $1.6 billion versus the $2.2 billion last year. And I'll tell you why there is actually a variance or discrepancy between those two numbers. One, last year, we've done a lot of work to optimize our working capital by focusing on our inventory. So we work very hard in ensuring that our inventory is actually maintained at a very optimum level. That's actually reflecting in 2023, reflecting in a significant improvement in the working capital or the change of working capital. This year, of course, we started off from a very optimized inventory level. So any improvement, the improvement where we will continue to improve our inventory level, the increase is not actually significant.
In the margin, okay.
As an overall EBITDA margin for the year 2024, actually, it has been improved from 13% to 14%. But your question specifically, Joseph, is about the fourth quarter. Yes, the fourth quarter in petrochemical segments, the EBITDA margin during that quarter is 7.7%. Actually, it has improvement about 1% from the Q4 2023, plus 6.6%. Normally, in the last quarter during the wintertime, the LPG prices as a feedstock for our assets is increasing. So it mainly came from that and the squeeze because of the increase in the feedstock price.
And there's actually a very important point here to mention that as the CEO mentioned, our margin had actually increased 1% during the time for 2024 when actually gas prices had actually increased. So although we had that increase in the energy prices or the gas prices, we've actually improved our efficiencies in the way we operate. And also, very important, the freight cost has actually also increased. Although with all of these reasons, we managed to optimize further and improve our margin.
Thank you, Joseph. The next question is from Waleed Jama from Goldman Sachs. Waleed, please come closer to the mic and ask your question.
Apologies. My questions were already answered.
Thank you.
Thank you.