Wallenius Wilhelmsen ASA

OSE:WAWI

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Good morning, and welcome to this quarterly presentation from Wallenius Wilhelmsen. We're very happy to have you here today and also on the stream. It's a special day for us. This is a record quarter. And for those of you who can see, Torbjorn and myself has put our best jackets on to celebrate this result. And of course, it's color green. That's the color in Wallenius Wilhelmsen, but also that we want to paint this company green. So I'll take this as a sign of green strength when we talk through this presentation today.

Good. So let me start with the RAF program. We will do a presentation, as always. For those on stream, you can write your questions. If you have questions in the audience, please wait for the microphone at the end so that also the people on the stream can hear your questions. And we are, of course, open for any questions you would have. So then let's just jump into it. This has been a historical strong quarter for Wallenius Wilhelmsen, both in terms of revenues and in results. And we had a full year revenue of USD 5 billion and delivered an EBITDA of USD 1.5 billion. We have reduced our debt ratio significantly over the last few years, and we're now down to 1.9x on net debt to EBITDA.

We are proposing a dividend of USD 360 million, which would be 45% of net profit. I'm also very happy to share with you that we have recruited a new Chief Customer Officer in our organization, Pia Synnerman. She joined us 1.5 years ago. Before that, she had a long and strong career in international sales in Ericsson and is certainly well suited for the market that we're in today. Last but not least, we think 2023 also will be a year with high activity, and we'll come back to a bit more details on the prospects as we see it.

So then I'll talk you through the markets, some updates on the business, and Torbjorn will give you the numbers. Started with the market. In general, Q4 was a very strong market for us. And basically, the same story goes, we are sold out. The world is trying to move more goods than there is capacity. On the sea, it's basically vessel limitations. At shore, it's labor limitation. And in general, the world is running at a pace where we are not able to meet the demand with the current supply. Specifically, in the car segment, we saw a strong quarter-on-quarter growth in global sales and a somewhat stronger growth in the deep sea volumes, meaning that there was a relatively larger share of the volumes sent overseas with our vessels.

In general, one can say that we are still on a muted level historically. And this year -- well, last year, 2022, we saw some close to 80 million cars sold -- produced and sold in the world. And this is basically the same level as we had 12 years ago. So at some level, the volumes in the light vehicle segment are still muted. If we were following the trend before COVID, we would have seen significantly higher sales. This is not due to demand. This is due to supply. And we have said many times before, there has been significant issues in the supply of parts to the car manufacturers. And in particular, the semiconductor issue has been a big one. That is slowly improving now.

And when we look forward for 2023, the consensus forecast for the number of cars produced and sold in the world next year is 84 million. And for the first time, and we told this last quarter, there has been a somewhat downgrade due to lower demand. So up until now, this has been a supply-constrained market, i.e., the car sales. We now see that there are somewhat a demand constrained, i.e., that they're not able to sell all the cars that they would intend. But still, we expect significant volumes going into 2023, at least for the first part, and most of our customers tell us that they have still a big backlog of cars to be delivered.

There is a specific reason why we're here in the NIO House. I'll come back to that also later. But the growth of EVs has really surpassed all expectations also this year or last year. And the amount of cars sold are growing much faster than people were expecting. And this is a very good example with a pure-play EV NIO, coming from China, which is the other graph up there, and China has grown significantly in the amount of cars exported. And last year or into this year, they are at about the same export level as Korea. So in other words, China is becoming a major factor in global car manufacturing and in particular, in EVs. So NIO is a good example, both of a Chinese new player and a pure-play EV that is really where we see the growth out of China coming.

The other segment, which is about 20% or so of our volumes, that's the high and heavy. And to repeat that, that's excavator or tractors or whatever is big on wheels. We are serving 3 markets. It's the construction market. It's the mining market and it's the agricultural market. In the construction market, well, all in all, we saw very strong volumes in Q4, more or less on the same level as in Q3 and what we will call all-time high levels. They have never been sold or moved more big equipment and machinery in the world than what happened second half last year. We see a somewhat moderating demand on the construction equipment side.

Construction industry due to the economies in Europe and partly in the U.S. are slowing a little bit down. While on the other hand, we see that there is still strong demand and demand growth in the agricultural sector. So if you look at the graph to the right, for those who are really early awake in the morning, you will spot a small mistake. I'm not going to put you a test, but this should be billion, not million. These are sales -- global sales of high and heavy equipment. So you will see that the number -- the value of sales next year will increase, but this is purely due to increased prices. Volumes, we expect to be somewhat less than 2022, but still probably the second highest year on record for 2022 -- 2023, sorry.

Then moving to the fleet side, where there's been quite some developments since our previous quarter. There has been a strong ordering activity, and we are now at an order book around 24% of current capacity. And just to give you an idea of the numbers, back in 2008 on the previous peak, we had an order book of 50% of the global fleet at that time. The majority of this will be delivered in '24 and '25. Obviously, '26 can still be filled up with new orders, so that we don't know. And we expect that the fleet will grow with some 8%, 9% in '24 and '25. Although in '24, this is mostly [ tuned ] towards the second half of the year. So we will have quite a significant impulse into the market of new vessels.

Despite that, we are expecting solid utilization rates. Now as we said, we are sold out, meaning that we're saying 100% fleet utilization. We expect to get close to that in '23 and also staying above 90% based on our assumptions in '24, meaning that everything above 90% utilization is considered more or less a sold-out market. So even though there are new vessels coming in, expectations on utilization, and this is also a number from Clarksons is expected to stay above what is considered a high level. But -- and to be clear on that, today, forecast anything for 2024, of course, is impossible. Many things can happen.

Jumping a bit more into our business. Talking about the shipping first. We had a really, really strong result in shipping in this quarter, the best on record despite that we had a couple of vessels less in trade due to dry docking and others, we delivered very, very strong number. And rest assured, we will really work hard to keep our #1 position in the shipping segment. We're the largest player. We consider or want to be the leading player in transforming how we transport goods, and we have very strong ambitions, both in decarbonization and in digitalization in our fleet, and I'll come back to some of that.

So then to the numbers, the volumes all in all, were pretty much on the same level, down 2% quarter-on-quarter, mostly due to -- or maybe only due to the lack of capacity. We had a couple of vessels out with planned maintenance. So if we have had them, we will certainly have had the volume to fill the vessels. So this is not a demand weakening. One particular element to look at is the cargo mix, that's the black line, that's been dropping from 32% to 28%. That means the amount of high and heavy and breakbulk cargo in our vessels. We are, in average, having higher rates for high and heavy and breakbulk and the fact that, that's dropping also has an impact on the average rate that we have reported for the quarter at $52 per cubic meter.

The reason why we have less high and heavy is partly due to the trade mix. We are doing less out of Asia. And less into Oceania, where there is a lot of heavy equipment going in. Also that we were prioritizing car volumes because we had commitments that we need to meet before the end of the year, which is a big issue with car producers. So most of these numbers are due to our own planning, not a sign of the market, in particular, in Q4, except for some start of leakage to container. On the breakbulk, that's basically odd stuff that we carry on our vessels. And high and heavy, smaller high and heavy equipment can move to container vessels, and we have seen some of that in Q4, and that could also affect some of the numbers.

When we look at the rate, the average rate for net freight rate that we charged in 2022 was 12% above the average for 2021. And that is due to renewal of contracts. As we have said before, roughly 1/3 of our book of business in shipping is turned every year. Our fleet is quite stable. We are -- we were at 125 vessels down 1 vessel since the previous quarter. There is one change that is that we have bought 1 vessel that we had on TC with a attractive purchase option. And then on the -- and that has moved from the long term to the short term or to the owned fleet and on short term, we do nothing. And this is deliberate. The current time charter market is not sustainable in our business, and we are trying as much as we can not to be tempted to source vessels from the time charter market right now.

We have previously reported that we have had a challenge with congestion, not only us, but all owners. And for the industry, actually, the congestion increased somewhat in Q4 over Q3, but we are very happy that we were able to reduce our congestion somehow, in particular, in Europe. And that means that we have been able to free up more days for trading. And there's been a 30% reduction in number of days that our fleet sits waiting. And this is something that we will continue to work really focused on reducing, although the problem is shifting. And right now, there is an issue in Australia due to the season on bed bugs and vessels are quarantined due to buyer hazard. Not much we can do about it, but that's also an issue at the moment, that causing congestion.

On the logistics, we started the year with rather soft volumes, and we have seen consistently through the years that volumes are increasing. And for those who don't remember, really our logistics business, that's terminals that are basically the interface between sea and land. In those terminals, we have processing centers where we are completing cars or completing excavators. We are doing inland transportation like we do for NIO. I'll come back to that. And we're doing EPCs. That means that we are also servicing equipment. All of this activity is related to the number of units produced in the world.

And as that was muted at the start of the year, also were our volumes. So throughout the year, the volumes that were produced in terms of cars and high and heavy increased, so did the volumes in our business and so did the results. So specifically, we have seen the biggest increase in revenues in the auto segment. That means that we are processing either at the factory or in the ports or other places, processing cars, basically completing them. And the volumes up are very much related to U.S. volumes also related to the fact that the car producers, when they can't produce enough cars, they are trying to produce the most expensive cars, meaning there is a high accessorization.

So we are putting a lot of stuff in, heated mirrors or better Hi-Fi or a better trunk or whatever you need to customize the car to a specific need. We have also seen an increase on the terminal side. This is partly due to big volumes and a lot of storage. Also that the fumigation season, as I said earlier, we have this in Australia. They are really doing everything they can to avoid getting new bugs into their system. And that's why we need to fumigate, kill these bugs before they come to Australia, and that's a good earning for us in our terminals.

And also on the high and heavy, you see that the volumes were up and also then our revenues were up. So we have had a steadily improving quarter-on-quarter performance in logistics through the year. We are still not at what we will call full capacity. But as I said, now the problem has turned from volumes to labor. And in particular, in the U.S., there is a big challenge for getting access to labor and also parts of Europe, for instance, in Belgium. We are roughly 20%, 25% below what we would expect being a normal volume in last year. So if you look on the Q4 in 2019, which was not a particularly strong year, it was a normal year.

And Q4 2022, there is 1 million worth of cars in the North America that was not produced. If they could, they would have produced them and sold them. That's what our customer tells us. The same also in Europe. So even though the supply chain issues are easing, they're not gone, and we're still seeing muted volumes due to this. And we believe that there is an upside if the forecast kicks in on the number of cars sold next year, we have more to do in our logistics business.

So then also linking back to NIO. We have said before, we are much more than just a shipping or just a logistics company. We're also an orchestration company. And what does that mean? Well, that means that a company like NIO, we're sitting in their house, newcomer into the automotive industry, they don't have a lot of experience and capacities in supply chain. Simply told, they tell us, can you please orchestrate supply chains for us. So what we do is that we pick up the cars in China. We clear them out, put them on our terminal. We clear them out on China. We bring them to Europe. We transload them in maybe in Syberg. We put them -- we charter space on another operator into Drammen. We put them on a truck in Norway and bring them up to NIO's distribution center.

And from they have produced a car in China until it appears on the distribution center, NIO has no worries at all. We manage on their behalf. And this is just one example of how we can put all our capabilities together and produce new value for our customers. So this is an area we will try to develop even more going forward.

Quickly on sustainability before I hand it over to Torbjorn. Safety is our priority #1. And I'm very sad to say that during Q4, one of the vessels we have on TC, not owned by us and not managed by us, but still had a crew missing in the sea outside Japan. The vessel went back and searched for 72 hours together with Japanese SAR, but they couldn't find the person, unfortunately. So eventually, we had to continue the journey, and that person is lost at sea. In general, we focus a lot on safety, and I'm happy to see that we have -- in Q4, we improved our statistics on the lost time incident frequency. Although, as you know, with big ships and big systems going, we're also very concerned of high-potential accidents, and we will work really hard to drive our safety performance to a leadership position.

The CO2 footprint were pretty much in line with Q3. In terms of intensity, we increased a little bit due to the somewhat lower volumes. But in general, you can consider that being stable quarter-on-quarter. We are not happy with that. And we are putting in a lot of efforts to drive down our carbon footprint, and we are introducing a lot of different measures. One of them is wind propulsion. Some of you might have heard about the Orcelle Wind concept. And thought, well, nice picture up here, nice concept will never happen. Well, actually, it can happen. And what happened in Q4 was that we got funded by the EU Horizon project with EUR9 million to run a full-scale pilot together with our vendors.

So we are now putting a test sale at shore to do the first test. We will, in 2024, put on board one of our vessels, a full-scale sale. This is huge. I don't know the exact last number, but it's some tens of meters high, maybe 40 meters. So you need to put it down to be able to get in where we need to get in. So there are a lot of things to learn from the technology before we are able to possibly scale it to a full-size newbuilding wind propelled vessel. It would not be fully wind propelled, but in some trades, in good conditions, it could be up to 90% of the proportion coming from wind.

That's my part. So then Torbjorn, show them [ with their ] money.

[Torbjørn Wist, executive]

Thank you. Color is green and money as well, but very happy to be here to disprove the notion that finance people can't be creative in their clothing direction. Anyways, I am very happy to be here to present another record quarter EBITDA for the group. What is particularly encouraging is that this comes on the back of improvement in all our segments, shipping logistics as well as government services. Net profit for the quarter, flat mainly due to noncash accounting technicalities, one, an impairment and the second being a reduction in the put-call value of the 20% option that the minorities have in EUKOR.

The EBITDA margin increased to 36%. We had very strong cash flow generation in the quarter, leading to a decline in the net debt. All of these numbers translate into some good improvements in our sort of key financial targets, and I will come back to that because we are proposing some new long-term targets today. Return on capital employed, 13.7%, which is up some 2 percentage points in the quarter. The equity ratio stands at roughly 42% and the net debt to EBITDA, as Lasse pointed out, is at 1.9x. And as honest and I like to say, when we started, we were at [ 6.4x ]. So clearly, we have been through a very, very good period.

On the back of these numbers, we end the year with a phenomenal result. 2022 is the strongest year for the group ever, leaving us in a very strong position, both strategically as well as financially. Due to that result, we are also proposing a record dividend to our shareholders. This is roughly 6x the dividend that we paid last year. So we are proposing $360 million to the AGM, representing 45% of the net profit for the year. If you were to adjust for, call it, accounting events, that would represent a payout of 42% of adjusted net profit. And if you were to take out the minorities because, as you know, we have a significant minority in EUKOR, it would represent some 53% of profit to the owners of Wallenius Wilhelmsen.

The dividend will be proposed to the AGM, which is held on the 26th of April 2023. We are dividing it up to 2 tranches, the first payable in May and the second payable in November. It will, as you know, be declared in the U.S. dollars and paid in Norwegian kroner is much like the payments we did last year. Looking at the segments, Lasse went through it in some detail. So I'm not going to spend too much time on it. But if you look at shipping, the adjusted EBITDA was up some 13% to $427 million, again due to good performance, and we saw a fairly large reduction in the fuel expenses in this quarter. Year-over-year, shipping has clearly had a nice ride on the back of the volumes that we've seen as well as a repricing of the book.

Moving on to logistics. Very nice to see because as you know, logistics had its issues due to the semiconductor problems. Lasse showed the improvements on the auto side with higher-margin accessorization revenue, increased volumes in the terminal business, both storage and fumigation, improved inland transportation as well as high and heavy activity. So very pleasing to see. Government services doesn't normally move in the same cycles that our shipping and logistics segments do. They tend to move along, particularly with geopolitical events and not surprisingly in light of the conflict in the Ukraine and the shipment of equipment there. We have been transporting rolling stock on behalf of the U.S. government in the quarter, and we saw an uptick in that business.

The EBITDA is once again at an all-time high, and the margins are improving across all the segments. In terms of the quarterly movement in revenues, revenues were fairly flat due to the reasons that Lasse talked about, a little bit less vessels in operation. But the volume and rate effect that we saw on the shipping side was, to some extent, offset by the improvements we saw on the logistics side. If you look at the adjusted EBITDA, we had an improvement across all margins, changing the adjusted EBITDA by $54 million in the fourth quarter.

Cash, cash is king and cash increased by $153 million, driven by a strong operational cash flow. You see just over $0.5 billion in operational cash flow. We had some net CapEx, mainly related to maintenance as well as some smaller intangible investments. In Q3, we showed that we had some $44 million in margins with the banks due to movements in the dollar NOK rate. As you know, we have NOK bonds that we swapped to dollars. During the fourth quarter, the Norwegian krona strengthened so those money were returned. Further, we had net debt reductions due to scheduled repayments on both lease and bank debt.

And then we also paid off the remaining $78 million of 2 bonds in October and December, respectively. At the end of the quarter, we have some $247 million of undrawn credit facilities. We did reduce the credit facility in our solutions financing. And all the undrawn credit facilities we have are available for general corporate purposes, including any new build investments. We end the year with a very solid balance sheet, roughly $8.4 billion. Essentially, the balance sheet position wasn't materially changed. But clearly, with the strength that we have now financial strength, we are well positioned to deliver on both remuneration of our shareholders as well as investments in the business.

As mentioned, the $360 million proposed revenue would reduce the equity ratio by 2.6%. And in terms of maturity profile, we're in a very good place. The next bond maturity is September 2024 and any sort of lease and bank maturities that we have, we will just manage through our general cash flow. So in a good place, balance sheet-wise, with a strong liquidity position. Today, we propose new long-term financial targets, essentially to show that we, as a large group, believe in capital discipline. We know that we are in a cyclical business, but still we want to ensure that we have targets that we work towards a long term or stay within long term.

Up until now, we have regularly reported on our return on capital employed as an externally communicated target. But we also introduced 2 other targets that we will continue to follow and report on as we report to the market. One is the leverage ratio, which is the net debt over adjusted EBITDA last 12 months. And the final one is the equity ratio, which we would like to keep above 35%. As part of setting the new financial targets, we have updated our dividend policy. It hasn't been changed in terms of the payout ratio. But all we're saying is that when we look at the dividends, we will, of course, consider financial targets and any capital needs going forward when we set those levels in the future. But otherwise, no change to it. It's basically just a clarification to that policy.

With that, concludes my presentation, Lasse, and I'll hand it back to you.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Thank you. So before we get into the Q&A, let me repeat and sum up some of the views we have on the markets going forward. In general, 2022 was an exceptionally strong year when it comes to demand for our services. And roughly, we believe that the general market will be in average on the same level or about the same level in 2023 as in 2022. There are quite some significant upsides to the market, both repricing of contracts, a softer economic slowdown than we expected and other elements. And obviously, there are downsides.

But in general, we could say that in 2022, we had a very positive development through the year. In 2023, we see a strong demand in the first quarter and into the first half year. A bit more uncertainty in the second half of the year. So we expect maybe the profile for 2023 to be somewhat opposite where we will see a very strong start to the year and maybe somewhat slowing down later in the year, but still an activity level more or less in line with 2022.

That's our presentation. So then we open for questions. And, remember, if you have one to get a mic. Did you have anyone on the chat, Anette?

[Anette Orsten, executive]

I do have a couple on the chat. Is there any question in the room that would like to start it off before?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Not yet.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. Then from the chat, we have received a question from Eirik Haavaldsen in Pareto relating to fuel costs. And if we look at -- his question is as follows. Fuel surcharges seem to play a major part in the strong development this quarter. How will this difference between your bunker cost and your fuel surcharges develop into 2023? Should we assume a return to historical numbers if bunker costs they flattish here? And I think Torbjorn, would you like to address that?

[Torbjørn Wist, executive]

I guess, first of all, I would encourage you to have a look at the slide we showed in connection with the Q3 numbers. And yes, we had good fuel surcharges this quarter, but the fuel surcharge was mainly similar to the fuel surcharge we had in the third quarter. What really helped us this quarter was essentially lower fuel cost. But over time, the fuel cost BAF tends to be 1:1. So we suspect this will be a little bit more muted as we now move into 2023.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Yes. And of course, we don't forecast the oil price and in an increasing price development, we will see that we lag. And in the falling price, we are leading in terms of earnings. So over time, this will be a neutral effect.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. And we received some more questions from online. This one about rates in our various cargo segments. This is coming from Erik Hovi in Nordea. And he asks, what can you say about the rate premium in high and heavy versus light vehicles. Now that you're likely seeing more competition on breakbulk while auto markets are strengthening. Are we starting to see light vehicle rates on par with high and heavy?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Right now, no. And we're not commenting on the specific freight levels that we have in the different segments. Generally, we can say that in -- from '21 to '22, the rate -- net freight increase in auto and high and heavy were pretty much the same. It was somewhat higher in the breakbulk segment. We did see towards the end of the year that there was some softening in the breakbulk segment coming from the container side. But historically, and we actually looked into the numbers. There is not much leakage on the high and heavy into the container segment. There could be some on breakbulk. But right now, we see that there is a somewhat softer sentiment on the breakbulk side.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. We have more questions from online. We have a question about fleet strategy coming from Frederik Ness in SEB. He is asking us to please talk about your fleet strategy and when do you expect to reach a decision on newbuilds. So, Lasse?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Yes. Well, we said last year that we pushed this decision into this year due to both uncertainty on technology and also not least due to very strong new building markets. We are continuing to following up on the projects, talking to yards, and we will revert as soon as we have something to share. But we are totally committed to replacing our fleet. We will only invest in vessels that can take us to 0. But when and how many still not any decisions made.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. And we have a question on the EBITDA impact of renewing of contracts. And this is coming from [ Haaven Coldskod ]. So I'm not sure which of you should answer this, but the question is, can you quantify the potential EBITDA impact of renewing multiyear freight contracts? And how secure are these contracts if spot rates suddenly were significantly lower than the contract rates? There's the following.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

I can start, and then if you have anything to add. We -- I don't have the direct number for the effect on EBITDA, to be honest, but there should be a quite big correlation between the rate increase and the EBITDA effect. And as we said, in average, net freight charge to customers in 2022 were 12% higher than in 2021. And that is due to renewal our book of business. So that's, I think, the best estimate we can give.

[Torbjørn Wist, executive]

Yes. And in general, we wouldn't comment on the sort of expected EBITDA impact of, call it, rate changes. But clearly, we have, as we've talked about in the past, anywhere from 1- to 3- to 5-year contracts and we often say as a rule of thumb, 1/3-ish of contracts are renewed every year. So clearly, with contracts that may have been set at a -- sorry, unsustainably low levels in the past as they come up for renewal, we clearly renew them from the current market environment looking to get increases in the rates. So clearly, that is beneficial to us as a business.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

And then there was a question also about spot rates. For our vehicles and high and heavy, very limited effect as these are, to a large extent, on at least 1 year or 3 or maybe even 5-year contracts. On breakbulk, it's more spot, and we have more short-term pricing. And that is also where we have seen a somewhat weakening.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And there's a follow-up question that I can answer. And that is, what was the EBITDA contribution from breakbulk in Q4 '22. And we do not split out EBITDA per cargo segment. And there are more questions from online. So let's see if I can keep up with them here. This one is from Frode Morkedal. And it is relating to sensitivity on net revenue relating to your capacity utilization. So the question goes as follows. What is the sensitivity of net revenue per CBM to capacity utilization? What could be the impact on net revenues in your view, if utilization dropped from 100% to 90%, as you mentioned, Lasse. And I think this might be a mix again.

[Torbjørn Wist, executive]

Yes. Look, that's a good question. Clearly, correlation, if utilization were to go down, clearly, that would have an impact on profitability, but it's not something that we would sort of speculate on in terms of likely effect from this podium or in general. But clearly, we are in a situation right now where the utilization is high. We are using that opportunity to redress, call it, rate levels in contracts that have been unsustainably low in the past. And clearly, that is something that we will continue to do going forward.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

And I think in general, to have a 100% utilized fleet is not normal, not sound and not sustainable. That means that we are not able to meet demand. So everything above 90% utilization is considered a very strong market and a very sold out fleet. So still there is plenty of room in terms of utilization before we will see any immediate effects.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And we've received another question on rates and changes in rates over the last year. This is coming from Jonas Shum in Clarksons, and I'll take the first question first. It is, can you indicate how much your shipping contract prices were adjusted upwards in 2022 versus 2021? And do you have any guidance for 2023? And I think Lasse, you already mentioned that our freight rates or net freight rates increased from 12% year-over-year.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Yes. And then remember that we turned a 1/3-ish of our book of business every year. So you cannot translate that straight into rate increases. So we turn roughly 1/3 of the book of business every year. We increased the charged net freight by 12%. What will happen in 2023 will only be speculation. And of course, we cannot do that.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. And the second part of the question is relating to labor shortages onshore. So you noted labor shortages onshore. How do you approach this issue? Do you see stronger wage growth ahead?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Yes. I mean that's a very simple answer. And I think we all do. It varies around the world. In the U.S., we -- the particular -- the biggest issue we have is in the U.S. because we have so many people employed in the Americas in general. As you know, labor markets there are really heated, although slowing a little bit down, I saw a number now last quarter, there were 2 ads for every job seeker. Now I think it's 1.7. So it's slowing a little bit down. But what we see is that our biggest limiting factor in growing the business is to get access to production workers. Same also in Europe. And for instance, in Belgium, where we are -- have a big operation, there is a government-regulated salary increase linked to the KPI, and we know for sure that's going to be significant. So the labor issues will continue, but we have been an attractive employer. So we think we are, relatively speaking, very well.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good. I have...

[Torbjørn Wist, executive]

Maybe may I just add a point on that. I mean, clearly, with input costs like labor in the U.S., which is, of course, a labor-intensive business, it's not like labor cost goes up, margins goes down because clearly, to the extent those input cost goes up, that we will clearly also seek to address in terms of the contracts with our customers. Absolutely.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And I have a few more questions online, but I would like to open up to any questions in the room before I continue.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

No hands.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Then I'll continue with the online questions. And I have a couple from [ Nick Linhan ]. And his first question is relating to congestion and capacity lost due to congestion. So his question is, how is your estimate of percentage of capacity lost to congestion in Q4 versus in Q3? And how does Q1 '23 look compared to Q4 in terms of congestion levels.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

The -- you need to repeat the last one, I didn't get it. But the first one I can answer first. The Q4 versus Q3, world fleet, a slight uptick in congestion based on the numbers we have. For our fleet, we are down some 20% in terms of congestion, basically due to rescheduling and optimizing our trade. But in general, roughly, we can still say that around 10% of the world fleet is sitting and waiting at any given point in time.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And the second part is, how does it look for Q1 compared to Q4 on congestion?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Again, very hard to speculate on that. But as I said, the new development we've seen is that there are increasing congestion in Australia as we speak. This is seasonal because of these bugs that come in, and it's due to buyer hazard and quarantine. This is not fixed as of yet and will have an impact in Q1 in addition to the effects we've already seen. But the actual numbers, we don't know yet.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And a second question from Nick Linhan is, what has been the impact on your business, if any, from the COVID spike in China? And I guess that is for you, Lasse.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

I can try, and then you can stop me if I'm wrong. But in general, roughly 1/3 of -- 1 out of 3 cars sold in the world are sold and delivered in China. So this affected, obviously, the volumes sold in China. Then obviously, also at this -- in part of the year, it affected also the exports out of China, but not as much. And as you saw from the numbers, there was quite a healthy increase in exports out of China. So obviously, the COVID had a somewhat muting effect on the world volumes, but did not affect in average our business that much.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And then I have a final question from online, and it is relating to competition from the container segment. And it is as follows. Are you seeing increased competition from the container segment, both on breakbulk, but also on cars? And do you have an approximate on how many vehicles is transported on containers per year?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

I can start with the last one because I have absolutely no clue. So I can't answer. We see very limited, if any, leakage on cars. I'm sure there is some on used cars in some segments, but that's very little. Also very limited on high and heavy and only for the smaller piece of equipment where we see this can shift. On breakbulk, we are right now seeing that there is a leakage to container. That's not necessarily historical RoRo volumes. Those were volumes coming to our fleets when container was peaking. So I would more say that we are now seeing a normalization of the markets than a leakage of volumes to container.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

And that concludes the questions we received online. So I'll give the opportunity to the room one more time. There seems to be none.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

There's one question.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

There's one question. Very good.

[Fredrik Dybwad, analyst]

Fredrik Dybwad from Fearnley Securities. You see the high and heavy was down to 28% in Q4 as OEMs want to push out their light vehicle volumes. But you also mentioned that the high and heavy segment for mining and construction was down. So do you see the high and heavy share for you guys the sub-30% going forward? Or do you see it coming back up again to historical levels?

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

Well, we don't want to speculate on the numbers because we don't know. The overall volumes, if we had capacity, we're plenty in Q4. So this was a cargo prioritization and a cargo mix issue, not the volumes. We see that the volumes are still continuing into 2023 on all these sectors, but a muting in the construction area. And how do we see that? Well, the order backlog is decreasing. But still, we see significant volumes in at least the first part of the year. So all in all, there are no signals right now that for the next quarter or 2, we will see a market-driven change in our cargo mix.

I think we're done. Good.

[Anette Orsten, executive]

Very good.

[Lasse Kristoffersen, executive]

So thank you so much for coming, and thank you for watching and see you next quarter.