Nel ASA
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Nel ASA
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Okay. Welcome, everyone, to this first quarter presentation. Welcome, everyone in the room here. Nice to see you. Welcome also everyone that is joining us over the web, whether you're doing it live or during the rerun. We will go through the normal presentation, but we will also take questions. So if you want to post your questions, you will have the ability to do that already now.So the agenda for today's presentation is the following. We'll go through the first quarter highlights. We'll talk about Nel in brief. We will talk more specifically about hydrogen as an opportunity overall and some of the latest developments that we have seen. And then we will finish off with the summary and outlook before we open up for questions.But let's start with the first quarter highlights. The top line developed pretty much in line with expectations, not as big growth as we would expected, but it takes a bit of time for orders to translate into revenue. The Fueling business developed great, saw very nice growth. But the Electrolyzer part is still taking some time to bounce back. On the other hand, we showed a great increase in the number of orders that we were able to take in. We now have an order backlog of more than NOK 400 million at the end of the first quarter. And since the first quarter until today, we actually added another NOK 200 million worth of orders. So that's basically building a very robust backlog for the time to come.So it was quite a busy quarter from that perspective. We raised around about more than NOK 0.5 billion worth of equity in the first quarter. We received 2 separate heavy-duty orders from Shell amounting to more than $13 million. We received a PEM order for hydrogen production for Hyundai from Switzerland. We received 2 plus 2 plus 4 station orders from Korea amounting to around about -- I'll come back to that a bit later. We also got very a important order, 4.5 megawatts from Hybrit for CO2-free steel. And just a few days ago, we got our first order from Canada, which was also interesting. It opens up a new market for us. And lastly, we also participated in the Nikola World Event during Easter. And we'll come back to all of these elements as we go through the presentation.As I said, revenues still lagging. We expect better revenues in the second half. It takes some time for the orders to translate into revenue, as I've already mentioned. EBITDA is improving. However, it will still be impacted by ramp-up costs and other costs related to expanding the business. As you know, we are growing and we are adding cost to prepare for growth in different parts of Nel. And the total nonrecurring ramp-up-related costs amounted to around about NOK 15 million in the first quarter.After the capital raising, we now carry a lot of cash. We are well funded. We have -- at the end of the quarter, we have NOK 750 million worth of cash around about. And then we did the repair issue, which was 3.5x oversubscribed. And we added another NOK 60-plus million. So we have a very comfortable cash position. During the equity raising this time around, we also saw a lot more interest and more participation. So I think we had roughly 3x the number of shareholders on the list this time around, which was great. And we saw more interest from the U.K., from U.S., from Germany. And even from Sweden and Finland, we saw more interest, so people taking interest in Nel but also taking interest to the space of hydrogen, which I think is great.We have to talk a bit about Nel and give you some updates, Nel in brief. We now have 20,000 shareholders. And we actually added approximately 3,000 shareholders from year-end until today. So for some of you that has followed us for a long time, this is maybe some repeat. But since we are adding new shareholders, we want to also spend some time about -- talking also about some of the basics.Now what makes Nel different to many of the -- to everyone else basically in this space is the fact that we have a fully integrated portfolio of products. We can offer various types of electrolyzers. We can offer fueling stations. And we can offer it as an integrated package. So we can select different technology components and put that together. And no one else has in-house technology, which is developed in-house and produced in-house, and are able to deliver that across. And that is some of the key elements to why we have been successful in some of our commercial ventures and why we have closed some of our interesting contracts. That means that we can put together technologies, we believe, in a more attractive way. We can reduce costs. And we can look at the technology across, so we can reduce cost more efficiently also. We are an increasingly global business. We have facilities in U.S., in Norway and in Denmark. And we have people and organizations in what we believe all the relevant hydrogen markets. We have people on the ground in California, in various parts of Europe obviously. We have people in Korea, in Japan, in China. And we are preparing for many of these important markets to really gain even more momentum.We are the world's largest electrolyzer manufacturer. We have installed more than 3,500 systems in more than 80 countries. And on hydrogen stations, we are now working on station #50. And we have installed stations in 50 -- sorry, in 9 countries.As mentioned, we have 3 locations. We have our facility in Wallingford, Connecticut, on the left-hand side of this slide; in the middle, we have our Notodden facility; and on the right-hand side, we have our fueling station facility. Wallingford, 40-plus megawatt capacity; the Notodden facility, which we are currently expanding to around about 360 megawatt; and the fueling station facility in Denmark, where we can produce up to 300 stations per year. Now another element which is unique to Nel is that we have a lot of experience within our different fields. So in PEM, we have roughly 20, 30 years' experience. In alkaline electrolyzer, we have more than 90 years' experience. And in fueling stations, we have 15, 20 years of experience also if you count the legacy business coming from Norsk Hydro.So when you have a lot of experience, and that means that we believe that we can more confidently also develop new technology and look at the technologies across. And that also means that we have a lot of equipment sitting out in the field, which is references for new customers. They can come and actually see a facility working and sitting out in the field.So let's talk about hydrogen then as an opportunity overall. And as many of you already know, the hydrogen market is massive, around about $150 billion every year is produced of hydrogen. And however, the majority of this hydrogen is fossil hydrogen based on -- or produced from natural gas, coal and oil. And as you can see from the pie, roughly 80% of this relates to ammonia and refineries. With lower electricity cost and lower cost of equipment, we are seeing that electrolysis is eating its way into this pie. And at the same time, the pie is growing. And let me point to one recent example, which is the CO2-free steel industry, which would actually result in this pie doubling in size. And I'll talk a bit more about that later in the presentation.So what's actually happening in the steel industry? What's going on? Why is suddenly hydrogen -- renewable hydrogen becoming relevant in the steel industry? Well, today, what is happening is that the steel producers burn large quantities of coal in their furnaces together with the steel to extract the oxygen out of the steel. And when you burn coal, the carbon combines with the oxygen and you make CO2. But you don't have to burn coal. You can burn something else. You can burn hydrogen. You can burn renewable hydrogen. And then you basically produce water as a byproduct instead of producing CO2. And the steel industry accounts for a significant portion of CO2 emissions. Around about 7% of the global emissions come from steel. So this has a big impact if you're able to translate the technology. Now the technology obviously need -- you need to also -- it's not as easy as going for green ammonia, where you basically just switch green molecule or a fossil molecule for a green molecule. Here, you also need to change the production process, the steel production process. So it is a bit more of a hurdle. But it is a very important step. And it also shows that renewable hydrogen is becoming relevant in more and more markets.So if we then look at where we came from and the shift that we are now seeing, we have been operating in niche markets for a long period, various markets related to food industry, glass industry, polysilicon industry, various laboratories, chemical industry, using hydrogen as a cooling gas in generators or electrolyzers for life support. There are two now really important markets opening up. And we've categorized them as mobility and power-to-X, power to where you take renewable power, you turn it into hydrogen and you use that in many industrial applications. And in mobility, it's all about outcompeting petrol and diesel. So cheap hydrogen eventually turns into an application where we compete with petrol and diesel. And in the power-to-X, it's also about making green hydrogen available in large quantities so that you can use these in these new applications.In terms of mobility, a few years ago, we primarily talked about cars. It was all about when are the cars coming? How fast are they coming? In what quantity are they coming? Now recently, we have seen that hydrogen is popping up in many different applications. We have trains, buses, various forms of freight transport, trucks, forklifts, fast and slow ferries and even ships. Some of these markets are more mature than others. Some of these markets are bringing in business today. But they are also very important also for the future.Heavy-duty has developed faster than we expected. And we talked about that also last time. And that is also why we are stepping up our technology development in this area in particular to be able to address these technologies even better going forward. And many of the heavy-duty -- many of the station orders that we received lately is for heavy-duty application.When we then look at the other power-to-X markets, it's basically becoming more and more relevant with green renewable hydrogen. And some of these markets again are more mature than others. Some of them will take a bit longer time. But examples, ammonia, we are working together with Yara. But there are also obviously other ammonia producers which are looking into this space. Refineries, we are working together with Shell. But we are also working with other players on particularly refining biofuels you use a lot of green hydrogen. CO2-free steel. We recently signed a contract with Hybrit. And we will talk more about that. But there are also other players working on that. CO2-free titanium. We see that [ Tizir ] is starting to move. And if they would like support from Nel, we will obviously be more than happy to do that. Green hydrogen in gas pipelines, natural gas pipelines. We have been involved in a number of test projects. But we also see that activities are stepping up in that area. So these are markets that we need to address. And we will obviously like to be early in some of these. Even if some of these markets takes a bit more time to mature, we would like to be there with our technology early to learn as much as possible.And this is the reason why. This is at least the biggest, the most important reason why. Cost of renewables is going down, has gone down a lot the last number of years. This is the graph for wind and solar. If you have low-cost power, you in principle have low-cost green hydrogen. And the reason is that 3/4 of the cost of hydrogen, green hydrogen, relates to the power price. The interesting part is that this will not stop. Cost of renewables will continue to go down, the fundamental cost. And most analysts and the consensus is that the cost of wind and solar will go down with another 60%, 70% until 2050. So green power is going to become available in large quantities. And that's why Nel has a vision unlocking the potential of renewables, unlocking the potential of the renewables. That's the key for hydrogen. We are unlocking the potential of the renewables. You can suddenly then translate and move large quantities of hydrogen in -- of energy in the form of hydrogen and you can use it in multiple applications that we just looked at in the previous slides.At the same time, we obviously are cutting our costs. We cannot only rely on renewables becoming cheap. We also need to do our own homework. So we are cutting costs on electrolyzers quite significantly. We have already talked about the new facility that we are building, where we expect to cut production cost by more than 40%, going into a fully automated operational mode. But we will not stop there. If you scale up even further and if you develop the technology even further, you will be able to cut cost even more. And this is our price road map. And you will see already with the next expansion, we are basically in the middle of the space where we are CapEx competitive with fossil solutions. And hopefully over time, we will be able to outcompete the fossil solutions even without subsidies. So that's good news for the environment but also good news for everyone in hydrogen business and obviously also for Nel.Okay. Let's talk about now some of the latest developments that we've seen since new year. Now since new year, we received 2 very important orders from Shell for heavy-duty application. Or as a matter of fact, this is a combination of heavy-duty and light-duty. Shell continues to support us, which we think is great. Shell is working with Toyota in California. And these stations will fuel both cars, as I said, and trucks. And what is happening is that the cars are arriving from Japan on a ship and they arrive with an empty tank. They come into the port facility. They are then fueled. And they are loaded on to the hydrogen truck. And they are taken up to the dealership or the distributor with the hydrogen truck. So that's the purpose of these stations is basically to facilitate the logistics that Toyota has to undertake when in the port facilities. Basically also underlying the general trend that we see in the market, there are more and more heavy-duty applications coming in. That's why we are speeding up our technology development in that area. We also received a purchase order for a PEM electrolyzer solution as part of a 30-megawatt framework agreement. This was the first containerized megawatt PEM solution that we have installed in -- or that we will install in Europe. So it's a very nice reference to have locally here. In the past, we have sold these units, not the containerized solution, but the open solution to China. The announcement that we had yesterday is actually that we are launching this product officially because we see that there is a lot of interest for these containerized solutions, where -- which is easier to install. You plug and play. You put in -- attach water and electricity and then you're pretty much ready to go. But this particular unit will go into Switzerland to produce hydrogen for Hydrospider and H2 Energy to fuel trucks. And in this particular instance, it's Hyundai trucks. And as you may have known -- as you may know, they have announced that they will deploy 1,000 trucks. As a matter of fact, they actually increased that number now to 1,600 trucks in Switzerland over the next number of years. This framework agreement could obviously then also grow. So we say that it could increase to something in the range of 60 to 80 megawatts. And we are obviously very happy to support H2 Energy in this venture. And we'll support them also if this type -- this case becomes relevant in other European markets.Since new year, we also made quite a lot of progress in Korea. We got orders for at a total of 8 stations, 2 plus 2 plus 4 stations, total value of around about EUR 11 million. And we have now in total sold 9 stations to Korea. So we're gaining traction in that space. The last 6 stations were ordered by KOGAS, Korea Gas Technology Corporation. And if you follow the space in Korea, you will see that KOGAS actually announced a large business. They wanted to invest as much as $4 billion into hydrogen production and hydrogen technologies from now until 2030. So they are very aggressively engaging in the rollout of hydrogen technology in Korea. The Korean nation also has ambitious plans. They have announced that they want to go from 30 stations, where they are approximately today, to more than 300 stations in the time space until 2022. So it could become, and we believe, a very interesting and important market for Nel. We have people on the ground there. We already have a sales team. But we are adding installers and we are adding the people that do the service and maintenance for these stations.We were also awarded quite recently a contract from Canada, the first contract in this country from HTEC. HTEC is one of the leading players that are deploying hydrogen infrastructure. So we're very happy to support them in this venture. This will be installed in British Columbia, Vancouver, which is all the way on the West Coast of Canada and not too far from the border. That means that we have people approximately in the area. So we will use our team over there to support to the service and maintenance of these stations. And we hopefully want to add more business to this region, which we think is opening up, becoming more and more relevant.When it comes to Nikola, let me start by talking about the shift that we have seen. And we are now stepping up technology developments. When you want to fuel a car, you fuel basically 5 kilos of hydrogen in 3 to 5 minutes. When you want to fuel a truck and you want to do the 700 bar, you basically need to fuel at least 50 kilos in less than 10 or around about 10 minutes. So it is a different application. You need to basically scale up the technology. And that is why we were able to attract the grant from the Danish government of EUR 1 million to basically use that as part of doing the next-step technology development for the Nikola stations. At the same time, we entered into an MOU with leading industry players that we intend to develop the standards together, the standards for how does a nozzle look like, how do we basically fuel a truck. And by being part of this group, we are obviously able to then influence how the industry standards are developing, which I think is good for us as we are a technology supplier that will later have to abide by these regulations. This is also what has happened on cars. There, all the standards are already in place. You can fuel your hydrogen car, it's the same station concept anywhere in the world. It's like not like you have a different plug in each country. So that's exactly the same that we are doing here on heavy-duty.We had -- we participated in the Nikola World Event. And we have adopted their slogan, Nel plus Nikola equals hydrogen at scale, because we are taking it really to the next step, building very large facilities, producing hydrogen on site, no transportation cost and building a constant weight in fuel, around about 150 trucks and 200 cars per day per station, 8-ton production, owned and operated by Nikola. That is what we are working towards.The Nikola World Event was, we believe, a great success from their perspective. Obviously, they were able to show and tell what they are doing. Seeing is believing. The trucks were moving around, completely silently pulling loads. So all of the businesses, they had about 2,000 people there, very impressive what they were able to put together. And we were also happy to support them. We have the stands, so we were able to tell about, together with many of the other suppliers, tell what we are doing. And we also supported them in any way possible to explain what we are doing together.The first demo station is installed and running. It is fueling. It is installed next to the R&D center that they have in Phoenix, Arizona. And it is fueling cars and trucks, the trucks that they also launched at the Nikola World Event. And then obviously, we are discussing how do we roll out, what areas do we start with, where are the routes. And everything needs to be aligned with Nikola. Their plans translate into our plans. And it's all great to see that Nikola has now expressed that they have more than 13,000 preorders for their trucks.So I also want to talk about another key -- I want to come back to the CO2-free steel and I want to talk about that contract. But before we do that, we have been allowed to show a little video by Hybrit. Hybrit is a joint venture between Vattenfall, SSAB, LKAB, which is basically building this concept. So are you ready to go?[Presentation]Okay. So let me -- here we are. So this, we think, is important. It's important because it is very important for the globe. I mean cutting CO2 emissions from steel is important. It really illustrates that hydrogen -- renewable hydrogen can be used in very different industry applications. I mean it is important for us because we want to be in there early and basically work with the best. This particular company, Hybrit, is then, as I said, a joint venture between SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall. Vattenfall is a very large renewable energy producer out of Sweden, but they have also other locations in other places. SSAB is one of the leading steel producers in the world, really in the forefront of technology development, making very high-quality steel, various steels. And they want to be in the forefront of also developing next-generation steel producing technology. And as I said, even if this market may be a bit further out in time, it is important for us to be in there early. Our electrolyzers, the 4.5-megawatt electrolyzes that we have sold is going into their pilot plant in Luleå, where they will basically test this out in a slightly larger scale. And when that has been tested out, they can roll it out into more of their commercial operations.And we wanted to also try to illustrate how this -- what this looks like and what these markets look like. And it's kind of been a discussion internally, how do we communicate the potential in a good way? And obviously, here, I need to underline that some of these markets will take some time. In this particular case, we think that ammonia and CO2-free steel at scale will only happen after 2025. But there will be business also for us to do before that. But we wanted to kind of show what kind of potentials we are talking about here if we are successful with the technology development in these areas. And to illustrate this, we took our 360-megawatt facility, which is illustrated by this little purple dot here. That is the 360-megawatt capacity. It's the biggest facility in the world. But in this context, it's still very, very small. If you compare that to the potential in the total ammonia market, you would need 900x this facility to be able to support that market. If you then look at the CO2-free steel market, it's even bigger. It's more than 2,500x the size of that facility. So we see the 360-megawatt will be big maybe today. But in a few years and when we see -- when we think we see some of the developments that we are seeing, 360-megawatt will be very small and we need to think about gigawatt facilities. And that is why also we are trying to make concepts, production concepts which are scalable and where we can basically take it to the next level. And we want to kind of have that ready when the time is right.Okay. So let me round off with a quick summary and outlook before we move into questions and answers. We continue to push these 6 key focus areas to build our company for the future. We want to continue to keep a technology leadership, both in terms of OpEx and CapEx, OpEx being efficient technology, CapEx being cheap and available technology. That means that we also want to have a cost leadership, thus driving scale and other elements so that we can make our technology relevant in more and more markets. We want to be the preferred partner. We want to be trustworthy. We want to be reliable. And we want to be able to offer unique services and products in combination. We are working with our commercial capabilities in terms of understanding the business case. What is the business case of the customer? Instead of just pushing equipment, you need to kind of understand what is triggering them. Why does it fly for this particular customer? We obviously want to have a global presence in all the relevant markets. And we believe that we have a strong financial position at the moment with the latest equity raising that we have done. So that is all good. In terms of the outlook, we see that building a business, expanding into new markets means that you sometimes need to take cost on early. And we see that also in our case. We are out in markets that are not generating a lot of revenue, but we have a belief that they will. And that means that we will have a negative impact on EBITDA short term, which is the same that we have said every quarter and we keep saying the same again. In terms of orders booked, it will primarily take effect as we roll into the second half of this year. You will see better growth in that part. We continue to work on our 10x expansion project on electrolyzer to support Nikola and other customers. We are gearing up our technology development in the heavy-duty space so that we can have a portfolio technology even more relevant going forward to cover these markets. We are developing the next-generation electrolyzer. So we are -- we're cutting cost on the existing platform in steel, but we're also looking at the next generation to support very large-scale ammonia refinery applications. But even today, we see a pipeline which is very, very big. And we're doing a lot of tendering activities in this area. So there is -- as you've seen also from the announcement that we've seen lately, there is a lot of activity out there. And last but not the least, we are continuing to develop our organization, not only on corporate, but we're also building on our organization in the divisions, in the plants to be able to execute on these plants on the plans that we have.So with that summary, I think we will conclude this part of the presentation and open up for questions. I think from experience, it makes sense maybe to start with a few questions from the web so that we can get the ball rolling. And then obviously, if there are someone in the room here that wants to or has something that they want to ask, you're more than welcome to do so. I think we need to wait for the microphone to come around.
Okay. We can start with a couple ones from the web here. There are several people that have asked about Nikola, Nikola contract. One here from [indiscernible]. He asked with regard to Nikola, when will we get more information about the size of the deliveries and the economical part?
The size of the deliveries and the economical part. I guess he is then talking about the commercial stations. And obviously, we have -- we have not -- we have disclosed the concept. It's an 8-cluster electrolyzer and associated fueling equipment, which is going to be the standard kind of commercial station size, 8-cluster electrolyzer adding pressure out from CO2 to 200 bar. We have storage, around about 10 tons of storage. And then you have the cooling and compression up to 700 bar. These trucks are going on 700 bar. So you can use that as a reference if you want to kind of get an idea about the contract size. I don't think we are prepared to exactly disclose the size or the timing. But obviously, when we agree and at what rate, this will become available and publicly known. I don't know how much -- what else we can say in that regard at the moment.
Then there's another question here about the H2Bus project. When will we hear more news about that project?
Preannouncements, that's what the questions relate to. Well, we are continuing to work on that project. And I think we will make some progress in the not-too-distant future on this project. There is a lot of traction on bus applications in general in different parts of Europe. Even in Norway, there are activities related to hydrogen buses. And certainly, in Denmark, in the U.K., in Latvia, there are also a lot of activities. So there will be news coming in the space of hydrogen buses also.
And then we might take another one from the web first before we open up here. There is never a quarter without a question about the RotoLyzer. How are things going with the testing of the RotoLyzer? We have a couple of questions on that.
So we changed the concept slightly from the previous commercial-scale pilot that we were running long-term testing last year. If you remember back, we did a lot of long-term testing during the fall of last year. When you do long-term testing, we see that the quality of the gas, the efficiency of the unit is very good. But you always learn something new. So when you want to make a product, you take the latest and greatest learnings and then you build that into the product. That was the reason why we decided to make a new commercial unit to adapt, mainly related to robustness, mainly related to getting the lifetime of the stack, the cost of maintenance down. So that is all well and done. And we are testing -- we have tested that unit for quite some time. The next phase would then be starting to talk to the market about where is it addressable. And that is obviously key. That's why I also pushed that we are doing a lot of other technology developments because you have to keep in mind, you always have to look at the market. What is the demand? What is relevant? Yesterday, we launched a containerized PEM electrolyzer, 1- to 2-megawatt unit. That is a market that -- that is a product that the market is demanding. So you always have to look at, do you have demand for this particular product? How big quantities can you sell? And then you take that into context. From a technology development point of view, I think we are making pretty good progress. And now we need to kind of test and see, is the market ready? And how big is it? And who will ask for this particular product?
Good. Maybe we open up for a couple questions here from the audience?
It seems like everyone is happy. Do we -- do you want to take one more? We are also running out of time.
Yes. Let's see.
Okay. We have one in the back here.
[Foreign Language]
[Foreign Language] I'll answer in English. So the question was related to products that basically are able to -- capable of not only delivering hydrogen but also capturing the oxygen and capturing the heat. And I think that's a good comment or a good input. We are actually working on those elements because we see the same. As you are pointing out, there is more and more increase in demand for that. The electrolyzer, the reason why you don't have 100% efficiency on an electrolyzer because you generate some heat. If you capture that heat, you basically are increasing the efficiency of the electrolyzer. And we see it from some of the cases that we're working on at the moment, where you want to produce semi-centralized hydrogen around different cities, you always have district heating infrastructure available. And it's very relatively easy from a technology point of view to capture the heat and use that in district heating. When it comes to oxygen, we already are capturing oxygen on some of our products. As you may know, we have electrolyzers even in U.S. submarines that uses both the oxygen side and the hydrogen side. So it's not a fundamental technology hurdle that we need to pass. It's more about finding which product -- sorry, which project is demanding what. And if there is a customer that wants to capture all 3 value streams, we are able to do it. Good? I think with that, I would like to thank everyone for coming. Sorry, there is one more here. Hold on, just wait for the microphone, please.
Okay. First, how many employees are there now in your company? And then last year Q1, how many employees?
So I think we are getting closer to about 300 employees, maybe a bit less. That is what we have on our own payroll. We also engage through contract manufacturing arrangements. We do also engage other employees which is not on our payroll but which we work with partners. For example, in Hungary, we have a contract manufacturing arrangement. We do that also in the U.S. for steel structures, pipes, vessels, which is not kind of the core of our technology, so -- but on our own payroll, we are getting closer to 300 people.Okay. Thank you very much for coming. We'll come back for our second quarter presentation in August. Thank you.