Wallenius Wilhelmsen ASA

OSE:WAWI

Earnings Call Transcript 2020-Q4

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Good morning, and welcome to Wallenius Wilhelmsen's Fourth Quarter Presentation for 2020. My name is Craig Jasienski, President and CEO. And joining me today is Torbjorn Wist, our CFO, who will join us shortly on the stage. Before we even begin, I'd just like to be a little bit proud to present the photograph that you can see on your screens. That's one of the latest vessels to our fleet, Tannhauser. She was delivered in Q4. And the picture you can see in front of you is actually her birth dock in Zeebrugge. We're kind of proud to note that aside from being one of the most energy-efficient vessels that we have in our fleet, she also carried the very first load of Chinese-produced Teslas into Europe on her maiden voyage. So that was, for us, a huge highlight in the fourth quarter. Just before we go further into the presentation, we've stayed true to our purpose and values throughout the pandemic period in 2020. We've held firmly to the principles of taking responsibility for our employees and the communities around us, to be financially prudent to all of our shareholders and stakeholders broadly, to maintain operational stability for our customers and also to protect long-term operational capabilities ready for the future. And talking about the future, also there's going to be a few pictures along the way today to mix things up a little. The picture you can see on the right-hand side is one of our production workers in one of our sites. Aside from being correctly fitted with a mask, he's actually wearing a HoloLens. Since April this year, we've been trialing HoloLenses as an augmented reality way of engaging with our customers on our sites, solving their technical problems from afar. So one of the things that's brought a positive to us during this COVID period in the inability for our customers to move around to our sites, we've actually brought them to our sites through HoloLens. So that's been trialed since April. And we're now in the process of actually expanding that broadly across all of our sites globally. So that's been an interesting learning along the way during this period. Let me talk about, we're, of course, closing off the year 2020. So just to cover that quickly in brief. Obviously, COVID-19 has caused incredible challenges globally. It's been no difficult -- no different for us. We've had challenging market conditions throughout the year. We took early decisions all the way back in March last year. We set aside 32 separate cash-saving initiatives, and the whole intention there was to support our earnings and to strengthen liquidity. So those early decisions carried us well throughout the remainder of that year. Ocean and land-based volumes declined 23% and 27%, respectively, compared to full year 2019. But also throughout this, what we would say, tumultuous period, we retained very close customer cooperation throughout to make sure that we operated effective voyages of the voyages that we're operating at sea and that we also had steady operations across our land-based facilities. So that collaboration with our customers was absolutely key to see ourselves through the year together with them. What you can see in the volumes, and we'll get into, of course, the fourth quarter shortly, is the second half saw a pretty solid rebound. Sales patterns, however, remained unstable. I'll continue to talk about that later in the presentation. But it was pleasing to see a surprisingly better rebound in the second half than we actually expected. We will close the year with an adjusted EBITDA of $536 million, which is down 36% from the full year of 2019. Looking to pictures again on the right-hand side. Very small contribution we've made to improving public health. We had some shipments of freezer units from China, from Shanghai, which we carried on our ships in a RoRo fashion, as you can see in those pictures, and that was just our small contribution to actually carry vaccines into several geographies around the world during the quarter. I will move specifically to Q4. The highlights we have there is, as I just touched upon, a very solid development in ocean volumes. We're actually up 23% quarter-on-quarter and down only 4% year-on-year. So volumes were strong. However, what you've seen in the results, the margin pressure quarter-on-quarter was hard. A combination of cargo mix, activity ramp-up costs and also the market inefficiencies, which typically occur when we have volumes growing back and spiking quite rapidly. When Torbjorn has the floor, he'll talk more of that in detail on how that's impacted the results. From the land-based side, we had an adjusted EBITDA, which was up 23% year-on-year with increased high-margin volumes. So that was quite satisfactory results for that unit. All in all, in the quarter, an adjusted EBITDA of $150 million, very much in line with the previous quarter. And we had a total liquidity at the end of the period of $980 million, which was up $98 million Q-on-Q. So they are our main highlights for Q4. Our agenda is as it always is. I'll talk to a business update now, then I hand the word afterwards to Torbjorn. I'll come back for a market update, and we'll close off with outlook and Q&A. Business update. Just to look at the overall volumes from a broad perspective. Recoveries were spearheaded by unprorated auto volumes. They actually increased 15% quarter-on-quarter. I'll just draw your attention to the high & heavy spike, which is the green line there. Was quite a spike in Q2. That spike was driven fundamentally because of a much lower drop in automotive volumes than we had in high & heavy. So that was an outlier. Where we ended in terms of cargo mix in Q4 was very much in line with what we would consider to be a normalized pattern. Volumes rebounded well, particularly automotive. High & heavy has remained depressed and flat. I'm going to talk about the outlook shortly, which is somewhat more positive. But high -- sorry, automotive volumes did rebound very strongly in the fourth quarter and we see that carrying through. I'm going to move into the details on our main trades. And once again, this picture is just our, what we call, foundation trades. They're our main trading areas. We have a multitude of other trading patterns and cross-trades, but I'll just highlight the main halls here, which are also the trades which drive the biggest shift that we see between so-called trade mix quarter-on-quarter and also year-on-year. Starting on the bottom left-hand corner. Europe/North America-Oceania, I'm just going to focus on the year-on-year numbers, still a decline from a year-on-year perspective. But that was mainly driven by the loss of contracts that we had as we entered this year, we reported on that previously. One major contract, which we chose not to renew because of uneconomical contract conditions, is one of the biggest drivers of that actual year-on-year volume drop to Oceania. If I move around to the cross-Atlantic trade, it's a 2-way trade. We had a mix change year-on-year. So volume is basically flat, but we've had slightly less high & heavy in that trade when we look at it on a year-on-year basis. So automotives were compensating for the drop in high & heavy volumes on a year-on-year perspective. Moving around Europe to Asia, also relatively flat year-on-year picture. Chinese and Korean imports rebounded quite strongly, which supports this trade well. The dip that we saw in Q3 was just the slow import volumes into those 2 markets, but we saw a good rebound in the fourth quarter. Moving over to Asia-Europe trade. We haven't seen a full recovery there yet. There has been some weakness in volumes coming out of Korea into the European market, but it's been quite strong ex Japan in this period. So we're not quite back to the levels we were a year ago, but the trade did rebound in a reasonable way. Moving around to Asia and North America, the trade that actually had growth on a year-on-year perspective. We saw actually quite strong demand out of both Korea and Japan into the U.S., mainly automotive. High & heavy has been somewhat weaker in that particular trade line on a year-on-year perspective. If I sum this all up quarter-on-quarter basis, volumes have increased all around, as you can see on a Q-on-Q perspective. The rapid increase has been pleasing to see the volume in the market. But as we've touched upon, that does come with it some significant ramp-up costs, and regrettably, we don't always see in such a period that the full revenue will wash through into the operating results. Again, Torbjorn will come back and cover that in somewhat more detail after. Moving on to rate pressure. That did continue in Q4 despite the fact that there was a spike and push on volume. There was a lot of utilization of capacity globally. Despite that almost high utilization factors of the global fleet, we did have some contracts up for renewal in the quarter. We had a total of 21, in fact. And as you can see in the main bubbles, the green in the center there, they all sort of hovered around the 0 to negative mark from an annualized revenue impact, and also a number of those contracts in negative territory in terms of rate change looking downwards on the chart. The outlier to the far left was one specific contract where we had relatively okay rates previously. But that was clearly a very attractive contract in the marketplace. We faced very heavy competition and that's resulted in a fairly significant rate drop. But we obviously renewed that business on the basis that we still consider it to be economically sound for us in the trade that we're actually operating that business. But the key point here is that despite that immediate pressure in the market from a capacity point of view, that rate pressure continued. We hope going forward, I'm going to talk about supply/demand somewhat later in the presentation, but one would hope that the pressure on rates will ease, I'm going to use that term, as we look into this year and next, but I'll come back and talk to that. Touch upon our fleet, what happened during the period. We saw a rather large growth in the number of vessels deployed, obviously, based on the volume that was coming at us. So we had at the peak, during the fourth quarter, 22 extra vessels chartered in. At the end of the period in December, we had 18 vessels chartered in. So that's -- they're all short-term charters fluctuating in the quarters -- sorry, in the months within the quarter, but in many ways reaffirming what we've talked about many times over our ability to flex the fleet down in case volume is falling and our ability to flex the fleet up as volume increases. So that's been handled very well broadly throughout the quarter period. You'll note from Q1 2020, there was a portion of long-term time charter vessels there, which have been reclassified as owned, just as a note in the graphs there. When you look at the total vessels of 136 in operation in specifically November, December, we do need to detract the 16 that we have laid up. So these are total vessels on hand that are representing cost. But in this period, we still had 16 ships laid up. During this period of time, it was still economically sound to charter from the market because the cost of capacity, short-term capacity, was beneficial to us compared to reactivation. However, as we're moving into the beginning of this year, given the tight market from a capacity point of view, charter rates are increasing. So it's now time to start to reactivate capacity earlier than we planned, but that's nothing short of good news. We are extremely happy to actually bring our own vessels back into the fleet. We still have 7 vessels remaining after we've made a decision to reactivate 9 now during the first half of this year. That will leave us 7, and we'll make decisions on those remaining 7 during the coming months depending on how the market stabilizes, which is what, for us, at the moment, is a key watch, is seeing that market stabilize and move away from these peaks and troughs month-on-month and quarter-on-quarter. We still have flexibility on the downside, just noting on redeliveries there. Even if we take out all the short-term capacity, should the market get a sudden negative reaction, we don't expect that, but should that occur, we do have flex to still take out 3 vessels during the course of this year and another 4 next year in our fixed fleet basis given the expiry of those existing charter periods. Very quickly on speeds, I might just touch upon that actually. We tend to operate at an average normal of around 16.5 knots across the fleet. We saw in Q2 we were averaging around 13.7 so you can see that we slowed the fleet right down, given the very low volumes that were available in the market. In Q3, we were up to an average of 14.8 knots. And in this last quarter, we were running at 15.9. So we're moving up to an average speed in the fleet, which is more in line with the normal operation. But it's also indicative of how those ramp-up costs are partially driven as we increase speed. With that, I will step aside and hand the word over to Torbjorn Wist, who will talk us through the financials. Torbjorn? And I'll take you through your open slide.

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you very much, Craig, and good morning to everybody. I want to start off by looking at some of the financial highlights for the quarter. If we look at the left-hand side of the chart, you can see that total revenues came in at $822 million, down some $110 million due to the ongoing pandemic. The recovery that we saw in Q3 continued in Q4. And on the back of rebounding auto volumes, revenue is up some $125 million quarter-on-quarter. The adjusted EBITDA of $150 million is down some $44 million year-over-year, but flat since the third quarter. And we did experience some margin pressure on the ocean side in the fourth quarter. In the middle of the page, you can see that operating cash flow came in at $138 million, down some $7 million versus Q3. And this figure obviously mainly consists of the adjusted EBITDA, offset by a negative $13 million change in working capital during the quarter as we saw current assets growing more rapidly than current liabilities. The net CapEx of $27 million mainly relates to $21 million of dry dockings. Our cash position increased $54 million during the quarter and ended at $654 million. Our total liquidity improved $98 million, giving us some $980 million of total liquidity, including $326 million of unutilized credit facilities. And on the right-hand side of the chart, you can see that the annualized return on capital employed came in at 3.1%, up some 0.6% since Q3. The equity ratio is marginally up on the back of profits in the quarter. And then with LTM EBITDA carrying with it almost a full year of COVID-19 related effects, the net debt ended at 6.4x. Turning to the consolidated results for the quarter. The revenues of $822 million that I talked about on the previous page was down some 12% year-over-year due to lower ocean revenues, but up 18% quarter-on-quarter. The adjusted EBITDA ended at $150 million, flat quarter-on-quarter, but down 23% since last year. Developments on the ocean side have affected the results, and I will comment on the underlying drivers for this, both on revenue and EBITDA on the next couple of slides. The net financial expense was a negative $3 million, reduced from $22 million last year with lower interest expense and positive impact from unrealized derivatives pulling down this number. Tax expense was $3 million, yielding a net profit of $47 million or $0.11 per share. So jumping out on the water. Here, revenues came in at $634 million, which is down some 16% since last year. The decline was driven by a combination of 4% lower volumes; lower net freight per cubic meter, mainly on weaker trade mix; lower surcharge revenues; as well as low charter out activity. The revenue was up, on the other hand, 16% since the last quarter, which is a bit less than the 23% recovery that we saw in volumes. And this is due to a more normalized cargo mix, in other words, less high & heavy, bringing the net freight per cubic meter down. Together with flat bunker surcharge revenues as bunker adjustment factors lags the development in fuel prices, all of this contributed to a slightly lower revenue development compared to volumes. Ocean EBITDA was $122 million, and this is down 5% quarter-on-quarter, as the recovery in volumes was offset by increasing costs from a number of areas including the rapid ramp-up activity cost. We saw that a larger fleet in operation takes the net charter expenses up by $19 million and net fuel costs up $23 million due to increased volumes and fuel prices as well as the vessels operating at higher speeds that Craig just talked about. Further, the margins were pressured by the normalizing high & heavy share offsetting the improvement in trade mix quarter-on-quarter. We've also experienced some market inefficiencies during the quarter, particularly in relation to port congestions in areas such as Bremerhaven, Shanghai, San Antonio and Korea. And this has impacted EBITDA with some $7 million mainly related to daily vessel hire from waiting, fuel and tugboats for shifting positions. The ramp-up also led SG&A up by $9 million through a combination of return-to-work payroll increases, removal of various government subsidies, along with year-end closing adjustments. The adjusted EBITDA was down 28% year-over-year. The return of volumes, which was actually only 4% lower than last year, which is quite a feat given the situation we've been in, were countered by pressure on voyage results from the weaker trade mix and increased ship OpEx in percentage of net freight from the delivery of Tannhauser. Year-on-year, SG&A is also up by $3 million for the reasons that I touched on just a minute ago. The short-term charter activities were -- sorry, everyone. The short-term charter activities were higher than last year, and this is mainly due to the sharp volume spikes in the quarter. And this resulted in $13 million higher net charter expenses. And these costs were then partially offset by the positive net fuel price effect of $20 million that we saw. Now jumping on land. Revenues came in at $216 million, and this is up 2% since last year and 23% up quarter-on-quarter. The land-based services benefited from continued automotive volume recovery in the fourth quarter, though still some 8% below Q4 '19. The revenue improvement was driven by resilience in the Terminals segment, in particular, as well as a general increase in higher-value activities. The adjusted EBITDA was $32 million, which is up 13% year-on-year as increased high-margin volumes from existing and new contracts counteracted the impact from the lower volumes. As I mentioned, Terminals led the segment increase year-on-year and they were up some 26%, though volumes remained 6% below the fourth quarter last year. And compared to the third quarter, land-based EBITDA improved by 17%. And again, here, Terminal is the main contributor. We did also see improvements in auto volumes for Solutions Americas, APAC and EMEA, but these were slightly counteracted by volume pressure and fixed costs on Solutions Americas (high & heavy). Some comments on the full year. Total revenue was some $3 billion, a decrease of 24% year-over-year with lower revenues for both land and ocean, and no surprise here. This is mainly due to COVID-19. The ocean revenues were down 26%, driven by the lower volumes, of about -- which fell about 23% year-over-year. And here, again, lower net freight per cubic meter, reduced fuel charge and a decline in other revenue due to lower charter out activity of vessels all contributed to the development. The land-based revenues were down 20%, while volumes were down 27%. And what we saw was that volumes dropped on temporary OEM plant closures and production CapEx as a direct effect of COVID-19 before gradually improving in the second half of the year. Adjusted EBITDA of $536 million decreased 36% versus 2019, with similar percentage reductions in both ocean and land-based. While EBITDA declined more than revenue, the early and decisive actions taken by our company in terms of managing costs, preserve cash, et cetera, this reduced the, call it, the negative impact of the pandemic. So we're very happy that those measures were taken early on. In the second quarter, reported EBITDA was impacted by a $55 million antitrust increase and a loss of $7 million on contracted scrubbers where we canceled the installations. In 2020, the group recognized some $90 million in impairment losses, $44 million relating to 4 recycled vessels and $40 million in relation to our land-based activities and then $5 million in relation to software under development. And the group had a net loss of $302 million for the year. And in combination -- when you look at this loss for the year, in combination with our dividend policy that says 30% to 50% of net profits, the Board will not propose a dividend for fiscal year '20 to be paid in '21 to the Annual General Meeting in April. Turning to our liquidity development. As you can see there, in the quarter, cash and undrawn credit facilities were up some $98 million quarter-on-quarter. As mentioned, the cash increased $54 million to $654 million, whereas unutilized credit facilities were up $44 million to $326 million as we decided to use some of the excess cash we had to pay down on drawn facilities during the quarter. The cash flow from operations, as mentioned in the summary upfront, is mainly a function of the adjusted EBITDA offset by the negative change in working capital. The net CapEx of $27 million relates to $2 million in Solutions maintenance CapEx and $21 million of dry docking as well as some installations of ballast water treatment systems. On the financing side, we had a net debt repayment of $16 million in the quarter, and we essentially had uptake of about $117 million and repayments of $133 million. In terms of the new financing, we had a new JOLCO financing for the Tannhauser vessel of $61 million. We added a $34 million refinancing of 2 vessels, Morning Laura and Lena, with net proceeds of $16 million. In terms of the repayments, we had the repayment on the drawn credit facility of $44 million. And then we had regular payments and installments on bank and lease payments of $44 million in the quarter. The debt repayments were lower than usual due to the negotiated deferral of installments that we had with our banks that was secured earlier in 2020. And it's important to note here that until these deferred amounts are repaid, we are not able to pay dividends because they carry a dividend blocker. It is a clear aim for the company to prepay those deferred installments as soon -- or as early as possible. And any decision to prepay these deferred amounts will be made once the company deems the market and liquidity situation to have stabilized. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter and the year with $7.6 billion size of balance, and this is up about $100 million since the third quarter. And again, the main driver for the increase in the balance sheet is the cash as well as the increase in the current assets that we talked about previously. Due to a change in accounting treatment, 20 vessels have been reclassified from leased to owned because of purchase obligation at the end of the lease, so they're more a finance lease. This does not impact the total balance sheet in any way. It's just a reclassification between accounts. The equity increased by some $50 million, causing the 0.3% improvement in the equity ratio. Net debt is stable at just over $3.4 billion. And as we look into 2021, we have about $108 million of maturing debt, of which you have $56 million in relation to a bond that matures in September; and then we have $52 million related to bank financings, most of which is in the process of being refinanced. And this concludes the financial section, and I would now like to hand over to Craig.

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Thank you, Torbjorn. Thank you. Good. I shall now move to a market update, and I'm going to start off with just looking quickly behind -- back to 2020 at automotive sales specifically and also global light vehicle shipments. I'll start by focusing on the left-hand side of the screen. So as we can see, automotive sales were up 10% quarter-on-quarter, but interestingly only down 0.8% year-on-year. Again, a lot of this has been fueled by China in terms of overall sales. So if I go into the market specifically, I'll just highlight China, North America and Europe for today. But if we look into China, sales were actually up 7.8% year-on-year. So China saw a pretty strong domestic rebound in automotive sales, and that market was up 27% quarter-on-quarter. So having quite a noticeable impact on total global car sales. Interesting drivers in China, a number of things there. Firstly, we've noted actually quite noticeable aversion to public transportation during this period, not unusual in crowded cities. But very much one of the themes that's been driving sales in China is the avoidance of using public transportation systems. The government has been adding license plates. So there's been some stimulus to allow more vehicles onto the road. There was a pent-up demand in China. From the very early part of this year, as we know, China was first impacted at the end of 2019. So that did create a certain lull and that pent-up demand was now catching back during the second half of the year. And there have been noticeably some pretty aggressive discounts across dealerships as well as some strong stimulus packages from the government. So a number of solid drivers there as to what's pushed up Chinese automotive sales in both the quarter, but the rebound throughout the year. Shifting gears to North American market. U.S. -- sorry, North America sales was down 5% year-on-year, but up 4% Q-on-Q. What's an interesting feature in the U.S. now is manufacturers are actually recording higher average prices per unit sold than they have done for some time in the past. So that's indicative of higher-margin vehicles being sold, larger vehicles being sold that the average price per unit has actually gone up. So what we certainly recognize is the condition of the manufacturers coming out of this crisis, they're in a very different situation than they were at the end of the global financial crisis in 2009 and '10 when they were suffering heavily. Stock levels in the United States remained still very low. Current levels at the end of the year at average 55 days. 80 days of stock is more normal in the U.S. So it is a tight inventory. We do expect to a degree that the Biden government will have some impact on local sales or U.S. stimulus, so we'll be waiting to see how that impacts 2021. But also interestingly, the U.S. government have committed themselves to purchase up to 0.5 million EVs during 2021 and going into next year. So there's clearly a strong drive in the North American market to increase the EV stock, electric vehicle stock. Touching on EVs. If I look at the full year effect, total number of EVs sold in 2019 was 1.8 million units globally. That was up to $2.3 million this year despite all the shifts that we saw in the market. So electric vehicles are clearly showing an increase over these last couple of years, but also this very difficult period we've been through. I'll touch upon EU. The total EU market was down 6% year-on-year, but only 1% quarter-on-quarter. We note that dealers have adapted very well to all the restrictions. So there's been -- despite the lull and the low watermark that we experienced in April, May, we can see the dealerships across Europe have been able to adapt quite quickly, both in terms of social distancing and hygiene at the dealerships, but online sales have also increased somewhat and some dealerships are even offering free delivery to bring you car home. So European dealers have adapted quite well to this new environment. So our view on that is, despite the challenges we face in Europe now with the continued intensity of the virus, it doesn't seem to be having the same impact on car sales now as it was back in April, May. We expect a continued EV push in Europe clearly. And the EU has put forward a $750 billion stimulus package. We don't see any of that directly earmarked to automotive, but we certainly expect there will be a positive knock-on effect looking forward. Shifting over to the right-hand side. Global light vehicle exports, really matching the sales pattern, were down 7.7% year-on-year, but we saw an 8% -- 8.6% lift in the quarter-on-quarter perspective. North America exports were down 13% year-on-year, China was only down 0.7% and EU was down 13%. I won't go into Q-on-Q numbers because it's very much behind us now, but they were fluctuating according to the general market trend. I'm going to move over to just a quick look at the share of deep-sea to the total. Following the line in the middle of the graph there is the average number of all the portion of total vehicles sold that are actually shipped deep sea. We haven't seen much of a shift really. We continue at the same general average. We ran it at 14.8% in 2020 as a total year, which is very much in line with what we've seen as the new averages that we've experienced the last few years and what we see going forward. Important to note with this graph, what you can see is a pretty noticeable recovery in automotive sales. It will be 2021 end of this year before we see ourselves back to 2019 levels. So that's quite a fast recovery. But we're well into 2023 before we get back to -- all the way back to pre-COVID levels before 2019. So we do see a stable and steady growth in automotive sales and then the relative increase in deep sea shipments as a result of that. Continuing on automotive. We've talked to this slide before. Really, it's just explaining how production was cut back much harder than actual sales even though sales went down during the second quarter last year in 2020. So we created this lack of supply or reduced inventory, which also resulted in a pent-up demand, too, because of the reduced sales. So those factors coming together resulted in this production spike that we've experienced now during Q4, which is carrying over to Q1, but starting to weaken off slightly. The core question for us going forward, and Torbjorn touched upon this in the way he presented the results, what we're looking for is stability in the market. It's been great to see the volume growth. It's come at a cost to cope with it, as we've recorded in the P&L. But we need to see a stabilized volume going forward. Peaks and troughs are generally not good for our asset-heavy business. It takes us a quarter or 2 to catch up and to get a stable production and a stable cost base. So that's what we're going to watch. Certainly, the recovery is better than fear, I can definitely say that and that we're happy to see. I'm going to use this slide just to touch upon semiconductor shortage in the market. That's been talked about and reported quite broadly in the press. There is a general shortage of semiconductors in the world. The main drivers of that were the -- just the general reduction in automotive sales and activity during the COVID period. Now we see general electronic consumer goods and automotive growing back at pretty fast pace. The manufacturers of semiconductors have not been able to keep up. So they're some of the main drivers. For the automotive industry, specifically, the more EVs we see produced, they have a much greater demand of semiconductors in an EV than we have in a classic internal combustion engine-built vehicle. So that's also driving a spike in demand in the auto industry. The expectation for the first half of this year is a loss of about 850,000 units of production globally because of a semiconductor shortage for automotive. But there is an expectation amongst the observers in the industry that those sales will be caught back in the second half of this year. So there will not be lost sales in 2021, but we'll see an impact in the first half. The pleasing news for us is most of these sales are domestic, domestic production for domestic market. We will have some impact on our North American vehicle operations, where we have seen some production losses. That will be minimal over these next couple of quarters. And given the fact that this is then mainly local production, we see virtually no impact on deep sea. So for Wallenius Wilhelmsen, it's one to observe and to watch, but it's nothing that we see of major concern at all at this point. Moving over to machinery or into the high & heavy sphere. We have definitely seen there was a drop in the high & heavy or the machinery market in 2020 in line with the market overall. But there has been nothing short of an impressive recovery, we must say, as volumes have returned to growth in the quarter. We do see a broad-based improvement in demand. Retail sales are going up. We expect a rebound in most commodities across most geographies. Inventory still remains very tight. Stock levels are low, so that also bodes well for an increase in production and the need to move product out into the market. If we look at manufacturing PMIs, what's very interesting to see is that of the total 30 nations that report machinery PMI, 23 of those continue to report a number above 50. So of course, we're in growth territory for the vast majority of the markets that actually report into the PMI, which we think is good news. We do believe that there -- back to inventory, there could be some hamper-age of the -- from a very short-term perspective in actual sales because of very tight inventory. So that may hamper short-term sales growth. But as long as the sales remain there and the commodity prices remain strong, we should expect a pull on demand going forward. We have always, historically, when we track manufacturing PMIs of machinery, we've seen a pretty tight correlation with high & heavy shift volumes for ourselves, just to draw that parallel. So to go into those in a little bit more detail, and I'm just -- I'm cognizant of time, but I'd like to clear off a little bit around the specifics of the market. We, overall, see machinery sales consensus to see growth coming into this year, so an 8% growth compared to last year and then a further 7% growth going into 2022 for overall machinery sales. Agriculture is expected to be up 10% this year and 6% next. Construction equipment to rise 6% this year and 6% next year, now I'm talking about sales again. And mining, we expect to go up 10% this year and 11% next year. That's the current consensus on how we see those markets growing. To pick them off specifically, construction, there is low housing activity at the moment in certain markets, but we do expect a number of stimulus programs and infrastructure projects to drive construction equipment going forward. But the 2 areas to note even more so is the ag and mining areas. Farm incomes are increasing at good paces. We face very strong grain prices. Earnings on the farm are growing. And users are keen and in the market to replace equipment. So that's a very good signal for agriculture. As far as mining is concerned, commodity prices are continuing to rise at good paces, particularly copper and iron ore. So that's always a very good signal for the mining sector and for CapEx. If we look at mining CapEx specifically, we actually expect that to grow by 19% in 2021, so that's a significant growth. And if we look back a little bit in time and look at total mining shipments, the total for 2020 was $5 billion worth of mining shipments. If we go back to the supercycle, that number was $14 billion. So we're a long way before we get back to the supercycle. We don't expect to get there. What is interesting is we just expect that shipment volume to come back because last year was 25% down on 2019. So with a 25% drop last year in 2020, going into this year with good commodity prices, low inventory, expected CapEx growth, one has to draw the conclusion that we are going to see an expansion in mining equipment shipments. How does coal factor in, I think this is an area we also need to watch. Coal is less and less attractive as a source of energy, and so it should be. We did note that in terms of total machine deliveries during last year, coal represented only 22% of total deliveries of equipment, whereas if we go back to 2017, 2018, coal represented -- used to represent in the 46% to 48% range. So machinery relative to the coal mining industry has dropped significantly just in the last few years. We'll have to see whether that continues or not. But I think the key point here is, even with that drop in 2020, looking at the other segment -- or other commodities and other types of equipment, we do expect to see growth. And lastly, looking at the fleet to look at the supply situation throughout the whole calendar year, we had 24 vessels recycled. There were 5 recycled in the quarter. The order book remains very low for vessels above 4,000 CEUs. So there's only 8 vessels on the order book for what we would call midsized and up. If we take the total order book, it's 17, but that includes then a number of smaller near sea and short sea capacity, which doesn't really drive the deep-sea trades that we're in. Looking then over on the right-hand side with a very low expected fleet growth. With the actions that the industry has taken during 2020 and into the early part of this year, we believe we've been able to take out the excess capacity in the market. Demand growth is expected to rise going forward and that will drive fleet utilization up, which you can see in the bars. We generally, as an industry, and particularly from the brokers that produce these reports, would look at 85% utilization as a balanced market. So what you can see here is in 2022 and 2023, we start to move into what we would consider to be a supply-demand balance across the industry. That has come forward a little closer than we were certainly 1 year ago when we talked about this. So looking forward, with a tightening market, we believe it's positioning us and the industry well going forward. So I'll use that point to circle back to rate pressure. The reason why I mentioned that early in the presentation that we expect that rate pressure to subside is mainly because of this picture. We don't forecast any rate increases at this point in time, but one has to assume with the tightening supply/demand that we do, in fact, see a reduction of the pressure on rates. To close, we're going to open up for Q&A in a moment. But just looking forward to our prospects. Certainly, key market improvements from the low that we had in Q2. Volumes remained below 2019, but they have rebounded quite strongly, which is good. The ongoing potential impact on production is hard to predict. We are clearly not out of this phase yet globally. So it remains to be seen how the current environment affects true sales and production. So we need to look for that stability, as we talked about. Supply/demand, I just touched upon. We expect that balance to improve in the midterm and looking solid going into 2022 and '23. Stabilized markets will give us more flexibility on dividends and investments. It's that stability, as we said, we're looking for. We can't -- we handle the peaks and troughs well from a capacity and a performance point of view, but it impacts our cash flows, as you can well observe. And last but not least, we remain well prepared to work through this unprecedented situation. We look forward to 2021 as a better and a stronger year, but certainly not a year without its challenges. With that, I shall invite Torbjorn back to the stage. We will sensibly retain our businesses and open up for any Q&A.

[Unknown Executive]

Yes. And we've received some questions today. So the first comes from Eirik Haavaldsen. He has 2 questions. The first being ramp-up costs, does that mean that Q1 will see a drop in variable operating expenses, which increased rather significantly from the previous quarters?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Yes. I think with -- because the volume is still pushing hard into Q1 and as long as we have these fluctuations, one can expect that a portion of ramp-up costs will continue into this quarter, yes.

[Unknown Executive]

And the second question, despite the extreme market conditions, your cash flow in 2020 is solid. How do you see that in 2021 and beyond? You mentioned growth opportunities. Are further newbuilds on the agenda?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

I can touch upon newbuilds, if you like. We think it's still too early. The earnings are not there to justify new building programs at this point in time. And we have to also seriously consider the technology risk going forward. So nothing has changed on our perspective as far as newbuildings is concerned. I don't know if you'd like to touch upon the cash flow.

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. No. I mean, of course, cash conversion from our results is always going to be an extreme focus. We're not giving any guidance as to how we expect the cash flow development to be in 2021. But clearly, we do have initiatives that we want to undertake in terms of our strategy. We have a top priority to get rid of this -- of the deferred installments in order to free up dividend capacity. And everything we do is -- in terms of optimizing cash flow is driven towards those targets.

[Unknown Executive]

And second question comes from Lars Bastian Østereng. On contract renewals, how does the average rate on today's contract portfolio compared to the average rate a year ago?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

The average rate of...

[Unknown Executive]

On the contract portfolio, so contract renewals.

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Okay. The -- we don't -- we haven't reported on specific rate development contract by contract or over the portfolio. But we have -- well, we can confirm, as we've seen over the last few years, is just a continuous pressure. So if we look back on the bubble charts that we presented for multiple quarters now, you will see that there is a general trend in the negative territory up until now.

[Unknown Executive]

And a question from Petter Haugen. What is the share of EV compared to ICE in your cargo? How has this changed in '19 to '20? And what is needed, if any, of CapEx from your side to grow the share of EV further?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Yes. Very good question. I actually don't have that ratio number in front of me today. So we'll have to come back to you on the exact ratio number. What does it mean on CapEx? What we've experienced with EVs now is we've -- we would say, is kind of matured from a shipping point of view. It has not resulted in any significant CapEx on vessels because we see the manufacturers are presenting vehicles with plenty of battery power to cover the whole supply chain. So no investments needed.

[Unknown Executive]

And then we have 3 questions coming from Lukas Daul. The first being, besides the volume stability wished for, at what leverage level will you consider dividend distributions?

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Well, I think if you look at the leverage level right now, it's, of course, carrying with it called essentially a full year of EBITDA effects from COVID-19. And we have made it very clear that managing down the leverage ratio is a priority for management. At the same time, we have shareholders who like -- expect dividends. So clearly, it is a priority for us to sort of balance these two and get back to a dividend-paying situation as soon as possible. Clearly, the 2020 was a tough year. Decisions were made to cancel, all prudent decisions in order to protect the liquidity. But as we get back into more stable markets, clearly, it is a priority to get back to paying dividends, but also to manage down the leverage ratio over time.

[Unknown Executive]

And the second question. You talked about growth investments in the Q4 '20 report. You have approximately 20 vessels and the approaching mid-20s in the next few years. How do you intend to address and finance your fleet replacement?

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Do you want to talk about the strategy?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Yes. When we talk about growth investments, and I've already addressed relative to fleet and potential newbuildings, we continue -- as Wallenius Wilhelmsen, we continue to want to expand in different verticals and work as an integrated logistics provider for vehicles across the entire value chain. That is the strategy of Wallenius Wilhelmsen. So when we're talking about growth investments, we have a need to replenish and retain the fleet, clearly. But we're also looking at continuing to expand further into the supply chain and to become that broader partner with our customers across their entire value chain. And that's where you'll see the more attention we'll have on investments going forward. I can draw the example of -- we're now moving on to 2 -- more than 2 years ago now, the investment we made in Keen transportation, for example, in the U.S.

[Unknown Executive]

And the third and final question from Lukas. Do you see distressed tonnage that can be picked up in the current market? Is that an option for your fleet renewal strategy?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Yes. At this stage, there isn't -- because there's been this strong push on demand, there are very few vessels idled now today. So any external providers will see their assets in activity. So at this point in time, we don't see any of those opportunities.

[Unknown Executive]

And one question from Pål Dahl. What is the EBITDA sensitivity to changes in global fleet utilization, using, for example, 2019 utilization as a base.

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

It's not an exact science. One of the things that we talk a lot about that drives our profitability or our margin on ocean is cargo mix, trade mix and fuel cost recoveries. So it's very hard to draw an exact science and give you a key that you can follow going forward. We need to look at it from Wallenius Wilhelmsen's perspective and just focus on our cargo mix and how our trade mix is developing.

[Unknown Executive]

The final question from Anders Karlsen on antitrust. What amount of fines will have to be paid in 2021? And what will it do to the provisions?

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

So we see no change in provisions. And I actually don't have the number in my mind from a cash perspective. You may...

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

No. We can get back to that.

[Unknown Executive]

And that concludes the questions.

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Thank you.

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you.

[Craig Jasienski, CEO & President]

Thank you very much for your attendance, and we look forward to seeing you in Q1 2021.

[Torbjorn Wist, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you.