Nel ASA

OSE:NEL

Earnings Call Transcript 2019-Q3

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

Welcome everyone to this third quarter presentation for Nel. Welcome, everyone in the room, and we have a slightly bigger room today, so hopefully, it's a bit more comfortable. Unfortunately, we don't have [indiscernible]. I know that Bent and Bjørn has been running all over Oslo to try to find some. Welcome, also, everyone, following this over the web. As usual, you can post your questions and we will try to answer as many as possible at the end of the presentation. As usual, we will go through the third quarter highlights, the financial highlights. We will talk a bit about Nel in brief and also other key developments of the quarter. We wanted to share a bit more information with you related to our capacity expansions that is currently in progress at Herøya, and then we have summarized a lot of the general industry news, some of the industry news in the section called Industry Updates. And then we finish off with summary outlook and Q&As at the end. In terms of revenue, we are very happy with the development that we've seen this quarter. It's all-time high revenue for any given quarter and close to 30% up from same quarter last year, which is good. That means that a lot of the hard work is actually finally paying off, translating the orders into revenue. The order backlog is also all-time high, even though it's only slightly up from last quarter. But if you compare to the same quarter last year, we are approximately 50% -- 80 -- 58% higher backlog compared to the last -- same quarter last year. That means that we have a good, good backlog also going into next year, which is -- which makes us quite comfortable. In terms of other highlights, we had a relatively busy quarter again. We launched in the beginning of the quarter our new A1000 electrolyzer, which we'll talk a bit more about, alkaline electrolyzer. We closed the agreements with Everfuel and with the H2Bus consortium. We were proposed for DOE funding, Department of Energy funding, together with Nikola. We also signed an agreement with Yara on the development of their green ammonia project. We got 2 POs for stations from Korea. These were the first stations that -- orders that we got after the Kjørbo incident, so that was quite comforting. And then we secured a new manufacturing location at Herøya that is capable of taking up to 1 gigawatt of production capacity. We signed also an agreement with the International Energy Company for a 3.5-megawatt electrolyzer. And lastly, we were awarded for Enova funding, and I will touch upon all of these highlights as we go through the presentation. But let's start with the financial highlights. As I said, we are very -- we are happy with the revenue development that we've seen. It's in line with our expectations. We said last quarter that we would start to see revenues picking up in the second half of this year, and that is what we are seeing. We would also expect revenues next quarter to be relatively on the same level as this quarter. That means that we also see improvements on EBITDA, which is good. But still, we are -- we do have the ramp-up cost related to expansions and nonrecurring order costs, and that we need to continue to expect going forward. Keep in mind, we are building a company which is growing. We are expanding into new regions and that means that we need to carry these costs also going forward. In terms of cash, we have a very comfortable cash position, roundabout NOK 650 million which means that we have a good capacity to -- financial capacity to undertake the plans that we have talked about. Nel, in brief, for many of you, this is not news. But we keep repeating some of the same messages, largely because we are getting more and more shareholders. Now we have close to 24,000 shareholders, I believe. So that's more than 7,000 additional shareholders in 2000 -- in this year alone. What makes us unique is the fact that we have this integrated approach. We are able to deliver electrolyzers in all different size and shapes, and we are able to deliver fueling stations. And these are 2, what should I say, legs, that we stand on, which can operate in separate projects. But there are some cases, we do put them together and we would then be able to approach projects and win projects that other companies will not be able to win because we have these -- we can combine these 2. This is technology that we have developed in-house. So we have all of the competence in-house, and I think that's also something that makes us quite unique. We are increasingly a global company. We have, as you know, production facilities in Norway, in Denmark and the United States, and we also have organizations and people in other relevant places like California, Korea, China, Japan, et cetera, et cetera. We are still the biggest electrolyzer company in the world. We have produced more than -- or delivered more than 3,500 systems in more than 80 countries. On fueling stations, we say that we are not the biggest, but we are one of the leaders. And we have -- we are now working on station #50 in country #9. So that's a short overview of where we are. This is the production facilities that we have in Wallingford, Connecticut, U.S.A. We have roughly 40-megawatt PEM capacity in Notodden and Herøya in combination. We are building -- we currently have 40-megawatt-plus, and then we are expanding to 360-megawatt. I'll talk more about that later. And then we have our fueling station facility in Denmark, where we have the production capacity to produce 300 stations per year. Another element which is quite unique for Nel is that we have very long experience in each of these areas. So in PEM, we have 20, 30 years’ experience. In alkaline, we have more than 90 years’ experience. And in fueling stations, we have roundabout 15 years’ experience. And that is quite unique. You don't find that in our competitors. And finally, I would like to say, point out one thing, which is very important, when you talk to customers and you are able to point to a lot of equipment sitting out in the field, that's also quite useful. We have happy customers in many places around the world. So if a new customer comes and says, "I would like to look at the facility." we can always find an equipment standing and operating and delivering services for our customers around the globe. So all of those elements makes us unique and hopefully, we are able to take that uniqueness and run with it faster than others can do. Key developments of the quarter. We have to go through that, and we have to, I think, start with Korea. Let's face it, Korea is going to be an important market for Nel. They have a very clear ambition, probably the clearest ambition that any country has expressed, 300 stations by 2022. So it's quite aggressive. We have had a very good start in Korea. We've had a long ramp-up because you need to be there, and you need to work with the standards and the players. But in 2019 alone, we have received orders for 10 stations. And the last 2 station orders came in Q3, had a total value of roughly EUR 3 million, something that we are quite happy with. We also invested in a joint venture, HyNet. HyNet is a joint venture not only with Nel, but also with many of the other leading players like Hyundai, KOGAS and other leading industry players in the region. And HyNet has the ambition to establish 100 stations, 100 out of the 300. So that's the Korea part. We also announced the H2Bus consortium. H2Bus consortium is consortium between all the relevant parties that needs to be there to be -- to get fuel cell buses to fly. We have Ballard on fuel cells. We have Hexagon on tanks. We have Wrightbus on buses, and we have Nel on electrolyzers and fueling stations. And then we have both Ryse and Everfuel on being owner-operators. So that means that when Roto 5, 6 years ago wanted to establish their bus depot and hydrogen buses, they had to get into all of the technical details. Where do I get the bus? Where do I get the fueling stations? How do I put it together? How do I operate it? Now the bus operators can simply call H2BusEurope Consortium and say, "I would like to have x number of buses." And we will be able to set up the equipment in the bus depot, the fueling station, so that the operator can only buy fuel per kilo. And like they do today, they buy diesel per liter. So that's the benefit of this setup, we think. And we will also be able to cut costs quicker on buses. We have received the funding for deploying 600 buses around Europe, and that will be done by our partners, Ryse and Everfuel. As you remember, we also signed the agreement with Everfuel, where we have a minority interest and which is going to be an owner-operator of infrastructure for bus fueling. And we also have a sales and service agreement with Everfuel that we can supply equipment up to EUR 100 million. So we are all working very hard to get this off the ground and start to work, and we hope to see some more news from that part going forward. We applied for DOE funding, together with Nikola. DOE is Department of Energy in the United States, and we got awarded or we got proposed as it says, for a $2 million funding for developing the next-generation fueling station for Nikola. Nikola wants to fuel faster and more, and there are technology elements that needs to be developed and which we are working on. And this will help us to basically undertake that development, so that is encouraging. We are working together with Nikola to finalize the agreement. That's the way it works with DOE. They propose you for funding and then you need to finalize the agreements together with DOE. We are also in good dialogue when it comes to the rollout of additional stations with Nikola. We are working on the details of the spec, on the locations and the rollout plan, and we hope to come back to you in a relatively short time frame with more news related to the Nikola rollout. We signed an agreement with Yara. As you know, Yara is aggressively pursuing CO2-free ammonia, CO2-free fertilizer, probably one of the fertilizer -- one of the companies in this category that is basically pushing this the hardest, and we are very proud and happy to be their partner on this venture. As you know, we have the common DNA, we have the common history, we were part of the same company in the past. So it's very nice to be back and working together on that. And if we are also moving to Herøya, you know that we will have be -- physically very close to each other, so that is also nice. In this particular project, we will implement the next-generation alkaline as we -- even though we push costs and capacity aggressively on existing platforms, we also have to think about the next platform. So this is basically exploring what could be the next platform, and which we hope we'll be able to give us even lower costs and even more flexibility, et cetera, et cetera. So purposely made for this application. There is a massive potential for green -- for electrolysers in the ammonia industry. We -- they are currently today, the biggest consumer of hydrogen -- fossil, hydrogen, everything. We need to exchange that out, and it's a very, very large market. So this is an early start. And it's also good for us to be part of these early developments, as I talked about also before, because then you understand what the customer wants. And so we need to kind of work closely with these partners. Lastly, before the end of the quarter, we announced the agreement with a large international energy company for a 3.5-megawatt electrolyzer system. We have, for the time being, not be allowed to disclose the name. So we need to come back to that. The reason is that we are also working on other stuff, so we need to pursue that before we go out with more details. On this picture, you see a picture of our new A1000 electrolyzer unit, and this is going to be our standard building block going forward. This will be a lean, mean hydrogen production machine that we will make out of Herøya. And this is a 5-megawatt unit, and you can build this into -- 4 of them will make a 20-megawatt unit, and you can also build them into a 100-megawatt unit. They are purposely designed to be able to more easily be assembled on-site, more easy to transport, and we think that this is going to be very -- or should I say, robust building block for us when we expand our capacity at Herøya. And speaking of capacity expansion at Herøya, we wanted to provide you with a bit more information related to that topic. Initially, we thought we would expand to 360 megawatts. That's, after all, 10x more than we have and we thought that would be enough for a while. But we realized that we maybe have to think bigger, we have to think even longer term. We see that in the month where electrolyzers is going to expand even beyond that. We need more capacity. And if you remember back, and this is maybe some details. Initially, we said that the old line at Notodden and the new line at Notodden would together, be able to deliver 360 megawatts. With the new design, one new line will deliver 360 megawatts. So we have an improvement there. Then we said we want to find a location that can hold more, that have even better logistics. Here we are close to a port, close to partners, have a long tradition for industrial, 24/7/365 manufacturing. We want to have infrastructure in the area, in the building, which can support higher production volumes, et cetera, et cetera. And all of that we found at Herøya in combination with very nice, attractive terms for us to move into this location. So we then have a location that is able to cater for much bigger capacity. We can still start with 360 megawatts, which makes sense and ramp that up together in connection with customer demands, but then we can add additional lines and get up to at least 1 gigawatt or more. Notodden will remain the R&D and engineering hub, simply because there is a lot of engineering and technical competence in the area. We have them already located there, and is a relatively short distance between Notodden and Herøya after all. So that's the setup that we intend to run with. When it comes to the grant, we received -- we applied and we received a grant from Enova to make an even more advanced production line. And here, we will come back with more information in the beginning of next year because this engineering piece of work is now continuing, and we will know more at the beginning of next year. But this will be implemented as part of the expansion. It's not something new. It will be implemented as part of the expansion. And it means that we will be able to get even more out of each line. And we will save energy. There will be more energy investment. Costs will go down even further. And that will allow us to take the 360-megawatt line and push even more material through that same line. You see a picture there of some of the elements. We're talking about fully automated with robot cells and a fully automated chemical line. And we think that this is going to aggressively cut costs and make renewable hydro relevant. I mean our target is basically to outcompete the fossil, and that's what we are basically setting up this facility to do. So we will give you a lot of more details in the first quarter sometime next year, and hopefully also show you some 3D renders and stuff like that. So we made tactical industry updates where we basically gathered some of the news that we've seen, which may be interesting also for you throughout the quarter. Let me start with the CMH moving into Nikola. We think this is a really great milestone. Obviously, Nikola is also making their business case more and more robust and derisking it every day because they are extremely well at tying up with different partners that are leading in -- within their field. CMH is going to invest $250 million into Nikola in the D round, which is great. And CMH owns IVECO. IVECO is a European truck manufacturer. And that means that Nikola and IVECO together can also help each other to roll out a technology here in Europe, which I think is also going to be -- which is also great news, and basically commercializing -- supporting Nikola to commercialize also here in Europe. That means that Nikola and IVECO are really putting the pressure on the other truck manufacturers like Volvo and like Daimler, which for the time being, are very focused on maintaining their diesel. Additionally, we've got the news that both Bosch and Hanwha invested in the previous round $230 million altogether, which I think also is a great example, Bosch, if you open up the hood of a car, you see Bosch on every second part. They are extremely into all the nitty-gritty supply elements of the automotive industry. And Hanwha is obviously one of the leading solar companies in the world. So this is just another example of great partners that they're adding to the list. Other interesting developments. We have said before that heavy-duty is moving faster than we expected, and we saw some elements of that also last quarter, last month. Not too long ago, we got the announcement for Renault. Renault is implementing light trucks -- sorry, vans medium-sized and heavy and large vans for running on hydrogen, which I think is great. Toyota is moving into Europe with a bus concept. They're tying with the Portuguese bus manufacturer. We saw also a new truck model from Hyundai. Hyundai is actually starting now to deliver hydrogen trucks into Switzerland and are going to deliver a substantial number of trucks into Switzerland next year. And then we saw an entirely new segment, which not many of you probably have thought about before, illustrated with the joint venture or the joint initiatives between NG and Anglo American. Anglo American is a huge company that does mining. And they are going to translate their diesel-electric dump trucks, huge trucks that consume -- that are today diesel-electric. They will rip out the diesel engine and stick in a fuel cell instead and make it hydrogen-electric, and be able to then run it on renewables instead of on fossils. Very large consumers of hydrogen and I think you'll see more news related to this also -- these activities going forward. I think it's interesting to note that this is another example of an area where hydrogen is very relevant compared to batteries because these obviously need to run 24/7 and they use a lot of energy. Although we see a lot of developments on heavy-duty, we also see developments on light duty. We -- if we -- if you think about the number of cars at the end of '18, it was roundabout 11,000 fuel cell cars. It's a substantial number, even though it's low. But then you have to add the almost 30,000 fuel cell trucks -- sorry, forklifts, fuel cell electric forklifts, which is today running 24/7. This is still estimated to be expand significantly. And the estimate is that in -- by 2030, there will be 2.5 million fuel cell vehicles on the road. That is 223x where we are today, so it's a huge expansion. And why is this important? Well, all of these vehicles need stations, and obviously, we are in the station business. So hopefully, we'll be able to participate on that journey. The estimates today is that the number of stations needs to grow from below 400 or to more than 4,000 in this same period. We saw some great announcements also from car OEMs, car manufacturers. We saw the BMW NEXT, which is built on the X5 platform. Which we think makes a lot of sense, because it's a heavy car and it's supposed to move far and then it makes perfect sense to use hydrogen to electrify. The i3 will obviously not be hydrogen. That can perfectly well be a battery-electric. And I'll get back to why we see these trends, but it has to do with range. When you want to move far, suddenly it becomes cheaper and you achieve things easier using hydrogen, if you want to electrify. We also saw the new Mirai, which is going to be commercially launched already next year. So here, Toyota is moving fast, they're making it cheaper, they're making it more efficient, and they're obviously making it much more attractive to look at. It's a nice car, really, this new Mirai, which is coming to the market. And in Norway, we very often get the question related to fuel cell and battery, and I kind of wanted to give you a new perspective. Because the car OEMs are still aggressively working on fuel cell cars. And why are they doing that? When you listen in Norway, we think that the battle is already won by battery-electric. You think that they will take over all the markets. So why are the car OEMs still pushing it? Well, this is the reason. And the trap that many falls into is to compare watermelons with bananas. You cannot compare a very small production scale volume of fuel cell vehicles with the battery electric, which is ahead in terms of number of years. But if you compare the long-term targets, which we have done here, we take DOE, the Department of Energy in the U.S., we take their numbers, you take the long-term targets for battery-electric. How far down can the costs go? You take the long-term target for fuel cell electric. How far down can the costs go? And then you start to see some interesting numbers. Especially when it comes to range, and we have put that into this calculation for you. Here, you see, in the middle of the screen, and let's focus on the 1,000 kilometers, you can look at the details in your own time, but let's focus on 1,000 kilometers. If you want to have a 1,000 kilometer range, what is more cost-effective? Is it going with battery or is it going with hydrogen? I'm not talking about physically being able to put all the batteries in the car, which may not even be possible, I'm just talking about costs. And here, you will see that hydrogen-electric, when you talk about range, is going to be much more cost-effective. At the end of the day, the car frame, the wheels, are going to cost the same. It's the fuel cell system and the battery system which is going to be the distinguishing factor. And hydrogen electric system is going to be much more cost-effective when you talk about long range, illustrated with these numbers here. So that's something to keep in mind when you get into a good discussion at some point in time, really, to hydrogen electric versus battery electric. IRENA, International Renewable Energy Agency, came up with a report in September. I think it's quite interesting reading. It summarizes a lot of the developments that we have seen here. It summarizes some of the things that we have also covered. But it reemphasizes the fact that if you're going to decarbonize some of these industries that we are talking about, hydrogen is the only solution you have. I'm talking now about green renewable hydrogen. In 2050, they estimate that 16% of all electricity produced will be consumed by electrolyzers to produce green, renewable hydrogen, to be able to decarbonize ammonia, decarbonize steel, decarbonize a lot of other industries. And that means that we will need to expand and build a lot of solar and a lot of wind in the years to come. We actually need to build probably 10x the amount that has been installed today -- to-date, by 2050. You will also see that political community and the energy analysts are increasingly agreeing with the report here that hydrogen is going to be a key component to be able to decarbonize and do the energy transmissions. And we, Nel, we call it green hydrogen, unlocking the potential of renewable. That's basically what we are trying to do. So that was the main part of the presentation. Let me quickly move through the summary and outlook. In terms of summary, we still are focusing -- or we introduced a new element, which is going to be our guiding star going forward, is world-class safety. We should not see any incidents that -- on sites that have Nel equipment. And that is going to be critically important for us. We want to maintain the target of being a cost leader. We have to be able to outcompete fossil, and we have to be able to continue to drive costs down to -- not only towards competition, but obviously to be able to open up new markets. We want to be a technology frontrunner. What does that mean? Well, it means not only OpEx and CapEx are important, but also being able to launch new products on a regular basis to drive demand. We also want to be the preferred partner. We want to be open and honest with our customers and find solutions and packages and put things together that is attractive for our customers. We want to make sure that we have strong financing, so that we can actually execute on our plans. And we also are building a global presence, not everywhere, not every market is moving, but in all the relevant markets, we want to have a presence. So that's the key focus areas for us that we can continue to push. And in terms of the outlook, you will recognize many of these points before. I have to remind again that as we push this company to grow, we will be -- we will have to carry some costs, which will negatively affect EBITDA. We could stop and turn this profitable very quickly, but then we wouldn't be the leader in a few years. So we have to keep growing, and we have to keep pushing to develop this company into -- continue to maintain our leadership. And that means that we need to keep also accepting that we will carry some costs that will affect the EBITDA in the shorter term. We want to continue to develop our -- the state-of-the-art safety solutions. Obviously, we want to continue to build on the expansion at Herøya, and we'll come back with more information on that. Heavy-duty is going to be one of the key areas still. We need to adapt our technology and our production to that. We cannot forget next-generation electrolyzers. It's going to be also important for these new markets. And then we still see a lot of activity for tenders. That's probably where we spend the most amount of resources at the moment, being able to sift through requests for projects, find out who has funding, who is too far out in time and try to find out where do we spend the time, so that we are able to participate in all -- in many of these interesting projects. So hopefully, we'll see more news as we move forward related to many of these activities. So with that, I think we have finished the formal part of the presentation, and we would be able to open up for some questions.

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

We have a microphone here. So if there is someone in the room that has a question, either for me or for Bjørn or for Bent, we can do -- usually wait for the microphone. Otherwise, we also have some questions, I guess, from the web. Should we -- yes, there is one over there.

[Kai Engebretsen;Maritime Innovation;CEO]

Okay. My name is Kai Engebretsen. I'm CEO for Maritime Innovation. We are naval architects designing boats. I see that you have a lot of information about the car industry, but what's going on in the maritime sector? Can you talk about that a little bit?

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, we could do, but we also have our gentleman here, Tomas, who is heading up Hyon, which is basically our joint venture that we have together with Hexagon Power Cell and Nel. And Hyon is supposed to be the one-stop shop that is basically works towards marine applications. So Tomas, please feel free.

[Tomas Tronstad, Managing Director of Hyon]

Thank you. I could expand just very shortly on that. There are actually quite a lot going on there. We are speaking about short sea shipping, of course, in the first term. That's -- ships that go in fixed routes from one place to another, typically a ferries, high-speed ferries or kind of short sea transportation, typically between North Europe and the continent This will be the first movers because of the easy way of setup of the infrastructure by way of all the Nel plants. And the large -- there's a smaller volumes of power and storage in the beginning.

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

So please connect with Tomas Tronstad, who is heading up the Hyon, so he can give you more. I mean they are working on how many projects, 10, 15 projects at the moment? Some of them are PILOT-E. They are working on 2 PILOT-E projects. But there is a lot of initiatives. And here, I think it's a very good example of where Norway really can be the frontrunner. I mean we can build a really distinguishing competitive position compared to the other shipbuilders around the world and the ship designers. So I think you are touching on some very interesting -- I mean, this is really an area where we can run away from the rest of the world, if we address this in a smart way. We make fast ferries, traditional ferries, boats running on renewable hydrogen. We can offer this to the world before anyone else is able to do so. Any other questions from the room or should we move to the web? Bjørn, do I need to run to the...

[Bjørn Simonsen]

I'll only have to look at it. So we -- there's never a quarterly presentation without a question on the RotoLyzer. So what is the latest and greatest on the RotoLyzer?

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

So the latest and greatest on the RotoLyzer is that we spent 2,000 and -- if you remember back, last year, we did long-term testing on the RotoLyzer. We do -- we did expect -- we need to make the technology robust. So what we've done this year is that we have turned -- made some changes to the stack, to the way that it's basically set up in the structure to make it more robust. And we are now starting testing again to see whether that is verified. And I love the RotoLyzer. I think it's a very exciting product. There are some fundamental elements to it. But don't be blinded by only looking at this technology because you see the projects are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So yes, it could address a niche market, certainly, clearly very interesting in many of those applications. But when it comes to the really big stuff, you don't want something very large rotating. Then you want it to sit still. And you're not so concerned about space because it's a big industrial site. So there, I think some of the things that we are doing at Herøya, where we're cutting costs by close to half and -- et cetera. Those are really the key drivers. So a brief update on the RotoLyzer. What -- any questions from the room? Or should we take another one from -- we have -- our hydrogen stations are not certified for Japan, except the one that has been licensed by Mitsubishi. We have a licensing agreement with Mitsubishi Kakoki Kaisha. That is basically -- but we are not going to change our product -- the main portfolio of products to adapt up to the Japanese regulators because we think that they are not very cost-effective. They have regulations that makes fueling stations 3x more expensive than they are in Europe and in the U.S. because they have special alloys. They need to have special distances, et cetera, et cetera. And so that, we will wait and see how regulations turn out. The same goes for China when it comes to the fueling stations. Keep in mind, China's primarily focusing on heavy duty, buses, trucks, lorries, vans, that's their key area. When it comes to electrolyzers, we already sold a lot of electrolyzers to China through our agents and to our local office over there. We keep pushing that. Whether we move in more aggressively, we still haven't decided on the strategy. That is to be -- something that we're working on, but it needs to be done in the right way with the right partners to be able to protect IP and all of those questions. Any more questions in the room?

[Claes Fredriksson]

Good morning. I'm Claes Fredriksson with a company called Liquid Wind.

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

I think it's working. It's more for the external audience.

[Claes Fredriksson]

Okay. I'm just curious about the Nikola trucks. When do we see them on the road? I mean how far away is that to happening?

[Jon Andre Løkke, Chief Executive Officer]

You should probably ask Nikola that question. But you already see them in the U.S. I mean they have these -- they have 2 -- they launched 2 prototype trucks, which are -- I mean, they look nice. They look like they are finished products, and they're driving them around on the streets, on the test track, to different shows, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't think I'm the one that should answer the details on their ramp-up, rollout plans. But they have made certain statements. I'm sure that you'll be able to find that. Okay. If -- it seems like everyone is happy, and there are no more questions, then I would like to just thank you for your participation and for the fact that you're here. And we hope to welcome you back again for the fourth quarter presentation. Thank you very much.