Hello, everyone. Welcome, everyone on the call dedicated to financial results of the Warsaw Stock Exchange Group for the fourth quarter of 2020. Today, meeting will be in a traditional manner. First, we will present you all the numbers, and then we will move on to Q&A session. We have all the members of Warsaw Stock Exchange Management Board on the call, happy to present everything to you and then move on to the questions, as well as commodity house. I will hand over now to the speakers. Thank you very much, Joanna. Hello, everyone. My name is Marek Dietl. I'm CEO of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. If I may ask you to flip the presentation to page three, where we presented the highlights of 2020, except for the financial results which were excellent. Izabela and Piotr going to present you with the excellent financial results. Beside of that, we were very active in introducing new products in the financial markets and also in our derivatives market. We also worked on simplifying our structure of bond issuing, with making one central place for non-governmental bonds and the other place for government bonds trading. We were doing a lot of core strategy, especially in agricultural market, with the issuing of new products, where we also improved our IT tool to service the product. We also collected almost 40 authorized warehouses, and 28 other warehouses for the agricultural market are pending for the authorization. We have three brokers, what is good enough for running this new business line. We've been also doing a lot in the technology space, mainly through our GPW Tech, our subsidiary focused on the technology, on the communication of technology. We developed through or completed development of three products, the TCA Tool, analytical tool to estimate implicit-explicit cost and market impact of the trade. Very handy tools for us as managers, brokers, and also for exchanges. We are now busy testing this with our clients in a cloud-based model. The client already testing that. Some retailers also check the market potential for that. We were also working hard on our blockchain-based tokenized assets exchange, where we received research and development grant for building up that. We were also very successful in gaining new customers for our data services. It's mainly due to our new old product. For us, that is new. It is a Polish LIBOR called WIBOR. Our subsidiary, GPW Benchmark, got the full BMR authorization for this key interest rate benchmark. We are very actively marketing this money market benchmark from California to Tokyo. We were very pleased with our virtual roadshow with Asian-American investors. For obvious reason, we changed our plans from offline roadshows to online roadshows, but it really played out quite well. We also started last year the process of acquiring majority stake in Armenia Stock Exchange. It's small exchange, but quite profitable and currently on a signed term sheet and currently with help of EBRD advisors from the EBRD. We are building up the business plan for the Armenian Capital Market. We also acquired 28 new clients for our information services for all our business lines, including GPW, what is equity trading and corporate bonds, but also for BondSpot, what is government bond and TGE, what is commodities trading. We have now centered the sales of the data services and looks like its performance or sales performance has improved in this business line. For more details, I would like to hand over to Izabela for business update and later to Piotr for financial update. Thank you. Hello. Izabela Olszewska, Member of the Management Board in charge of Business Development and Sales. I would like to focus in my part of today's result presentation on more detailed information related to the trading volumes and our investor activity. Let's start with an international perspective. We are on the slide number four. In 2020, the Warsaw Stock Exchange was the European leader in terms of the dynamics of equity turnover growth. The change of equity turnover value year-on-year reached the level of above 56%. It was a better result than the result achieved by the global exchanges such as Nasdaq Nordic and Baltic, Deutsche Börse, SIX Swiss Exchange or Euronext. On slide number five, another market indicator, turnover velocity. The average value in 2020 was 59.8, but in two months, in October and December, the Warsaw Stock Exchange was ranked on the top among European stock exchanges. In October, we were the most liquid exchange in the whole European Union, measured by velocity. In December, we took a second position right behind Deutsche Börse. We are on slide number six. In Q4, there was a significant increase of trading volumes on the main stock markets by 129% year-on-year and 63% quarter-on-quarter. The entire year was really good in terms of turnover, and the total turnover value reached a level of almost PLN 300 billion. We believe that there are a few main reasons of such growth of turnover. One is the persistent high activity of our retail clients, and the share of retail clients in total turnover reached 25%, and it was the highest level since 2009, when this parameter was on the level of 27%. In 2020, the number of individual brokerage accounts increased by more than 84,000. The other factor was the high trading volumes connected with the debut of Allegro. Just to remind you that it was the second biggest debut in Europe and the ninth in the whole world. The value of the offer was PLN 10.6 billion. Allegro accounted for around 21% of the total turnover in Q4, and average session turnover in Q4 was PLN 384 million. We had very high trading volumes on another company, CD Projekt company from gaming sector. And here increase in turnover took place after the release of the new game, Cyberpunk, in December. The rises are of 2020, in terms of turnover growth, was our NewConnect market, which is the SME platform. NewConnect is the market where retail investors are dominant, and they were active mainly on the companies which we call COVID winners. From gaming sector, biotech, fintech. The trading volume reached the level of more than PLN 5 billion in Q4, and this was as much as almost 1,200% more than a year before. Investors were also active in other segments of equity market, on structured products and ETFs. As of the end of 2020, we had available around 2,000 products, structured products, and seven ETFs. It's worth saying that at the beginning of this year, the new ETF was launched based on Nasdaq-100 index, and we are expecting another one based on S&P 500 next week. In the previous years, numerous sales and education activities were carried out by us, especially we promoted gaming on the Warsaw Stock Exchange gaming sector and also the sector of innovative small companies. In Q4, we organized a quarterly roadshow dedicated to our foreign investors. Market liquidity is supported by market makers, also the participants of our two programs, High Volume Provider and High Volume Fund. The share of HVP and HVF participants in equity turnover was 11.1% in Q4. Now let's go to slide number seven, this is about our derivatives market. Trading volumes on derivatives are always connected with market volatility, and in Q4, volatility was higher than in Q3, but below levels from the third quarter of the previous year. The trading volumes on derivatives market increased by 96% year-on-year and 42% quarter-on-quarter. The future contract based on our blue-chip index, WIG20, remained the flagship product, and this contract accounted for over 50% of total trading volume. I just want to also underline that we have some other derivatives and especially a promising category of products, the single stock futures. We have already informed the market that as an exchange, we are ready to add new single stock futures as soon as there is such a demand of market participants. In October last year, four new single stock futures were launched. Our High Volume Provider program covers also derivatives market and the share of HVP in total trading volumes was above 12%. Now, on slide number eight, we try to summarize the achievements in individual segments of our market. In fact, one conclusion is appropriate here that the previous year 2020 was a great year for our financial market. Market conditions were favorable. However, just I would like to underline that much has been done, I would say, to help that. The new products were launched, new derivatives, ETPs, structured products. We organized numerous sales and educational activities. We had an active program, research coverage support, which included 51 companies and 13 broker dealers. We started with the new program dedicated to issuers and potential issuers. It's towards being a listed company. In this program, we propose several educational activities for the companies. Plus, also, we did some pricing activities, especially for the companies that suffer on COVID last year. Let's go to slide number nine, and this is about ESG, which we think is one of the most powerful trends which will shape the financial markets globally, but also in Poland. We looked at the ESG, I would say, through business lens. We know from our roadshows that this is very important. Also, the ESG is important topic for our global clients. If our issuers fail to comply with the reporting requirements, they will be blacklisted by global investors, and it means lots of business for the exchange. It is why we try to support our issuers to adapt to this trend. We have a twofold role. First of all, as a Warsaw Stock Exchange as a public company. We need to adjust ourselves as a public company to the new expectation of regulators and investors. In this role, we have prepared a to-do list. However, we have been already producing integrated reports for two recent years, and these reports included also non-financial factors like social environment and also governance factors. The second role is the role of the organizer of trading platform. Here, together with EBRD, the exchange is involved in the project aim at creation of the guidelines for listed companies. The selected advisors would recommend to our companies what and how to report in every category of ESG factors. We also became last year a member of UN Global Compact organization, and we want to show from their experience and knowledge. Last but not least, we are involved in product offer development. We offer already a WIG-ESG, but also our daughter company, GPW Benchmark, is working on some other indicators like green, WIG indices family, and also some low carbon indicators. That's it from my side, and I would like to give the floor to my colleague, Piotr Borowski. Thank you, Izabela. Good afternoon, everybody. This is Piotr Borowski. I'm in charge of operations, regulations, and finance on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. We are on slide number 11. As Izabela explained, the very good activity resulted in excellent financial results in 2020. We had a record high sales revenue, record high EBITDA in the history of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and also very high net profit at the level of PLN 151.4 million. It was, in many respects, record year in 30 years of history of our stock exchange. On the slide number 12, you see the source of revenue quarter- by- quarter. It was a year-on-year increase of 34.4%. We had very healthy EBITDA margin of the level of 65.6% in the last quarter of last year, and also very good net profit margin at the level of 40.3%. These excellent results were mainly due to the very high activity on investors on financial market, in equities, but also in derivatives as well. Slide number 13. Trading revenue. It was higher by 118.7%. This was the result of activity of all groups of investors, especially the retail investors, but also very active market makers in this period. We observed sharp increase of average turnover in shares per session on the main market, and this resulted in this excellent level of revenues. Slide number 14. We also enjoyed the increase of listing revenue by 21.5%. Despite the pandemic and difficult time, the IPO market was very active. We had the biggest ever IPO of Allegro company, but also some smaller IPOs in the fourth quarter. Altogether, five of them on the main market and three new listings on NewConnect, it resulted in higher listing revenues by 21.5% in the last quarter of last year. Also, there were SPOs, the existing listed companies also issued shares altogether in the value of PLN 2 billion. In this respect, it was very successful quarter for us. Slide number 15. Information services, market data segment is also evolving very well. It was a year-on-year increase by 13.3%, we are very glad with this because we see the increase in all the investor groups. We have new subscriptions for market data, new distributors. It looks really good. That's all for the moment from me, I hand over to Adam Młodkowski, Deputy President of Polish Power Exchange. My name is Adam Młodkowski. I am the CFO of TGE. I will present you a few slides about situation on commodity markets. Let's go through the numbers on slide 17. In the fourth quarter 2020, the volume of electricity traded on TGE amounted to 60.7 TWh, compared with 66.7 TWh in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 53 TWh in the first quarter of 2020. This represents a decline by 8.9% year-on-year, and increase by 14.6% quarter-on-quarter. Finally, the year-on-year decline is a result of high level of yearly instruments open interest that was established in previous quarters. There was also still a significant impact of possible removal of the exchange obligations, since it could concern delivery years starting with 2021, hence affected trading on underlying instruments of the electricity forward markets. The volume of natural gas traded on TGE totaled 40.2 TWh, compared with 40.7 TWh in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 35.2 TWh in the first quarter of 2020. Similarly to the electricity market, ISIN trading volumes were extraordinarily high in the first half of the year. Despite declines year-on-year in the second half of 2020, the annual volume of natural gas and electricity traded on TGE exceeded 2019 volume. Hello again. Adam Młodkowski here. We will continue presentation. We were at slide 17. On the green, I will concentrate your attention on the second part of this slide. On the green certificates markets, we note slight growth year-on-year by 1.4%. With trading volume 6.3 TWh. There was a bit bigger growth regarding the whole 2020 by 4.1% and quarter-on-quarter by 6.2%. This seems to be a result of increased level of certificate redemption obligation and high volume of certificates issued. We still observe a drop in the liquidity on the white certificate market. The supply of these certificates is still relatively low, which keeps prices high. At the end of 2020, there was a decline in an overall volume of white certificates issued that amounted to 46.5% year-on-year. In the fourth quarter 2020, the volume of white certificates traded on TGE totaled 29.2 kt, compared with 20.81 kt in the first quarter 2019, which means a decrease by 63.9% and 24.9 kt in first quarter 2020, which means an increase by 70.3%. I would like to say that this situation was predicted in our financial plans in 2020. On the next slide, we can see that the revenue from trading on electricity markets in fourth quarter 2020 increased by 8% year-on-year to PLN 5.3 million. The increase comes from a rise in the spot market trading fees, and these markets give high volume. Fourth quarter 2020 was, as I mentioned before, the best quarter of TGE's story on the spot electricity market. The revenue trading on natural gas markets are stable. In the fourth quarter 2020, they increased by 0.6% year-on-year to PLN 3.4 million, despite the lower overall trading volume. It's the result of high spot market volume that has a bit higher fee than gas forward market. The property rights market revenue dropped in fourth quarter 2020 by 9.7% year-on-year to PLN 6.1 million. It comes from the significant decrease of white certificate trading volume, revenues from property rights were PLN 0.5 million higher than in third quarter 2020. TGE has stable revenues from other resources than trading fees. In fourth quarter, they amounted to PLN 3.3 million. Finally, the last slide of my presentation, revenues from clearing. In fourth quarter 2020, there was an increase in revenues from clearing by 2.6% year-on-year. They amounted to PLN 12.7 million. This growth is a result of high volume from spot markets regarding both electricity and natural gas. Natural gas spot markets has relatively high clearing fee of PLN 0.08 per MWh. There was also an increase of clearing fees on electricity spot markets in our clearing house, in line with TGE's action. The revenues from operating the certificates of origin register amounted to PLN 5.5 million, which means a growth by 8.7% year-on-year. It is a result of postponing the time of certificate redemption by the President of the Energy Regulatory Office from first quarter to fourth quarter 2020. That's all about the commodity market. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Adam, this is Piotr Borowski again. Jump to the slide number 21, operating expenses and financial expenses in Q4 2020. We observed the increase of operating expenses by 21.5%. It was mainly due to the higher employee costs. Employee costs were higher because we hired new staff. Seven persons are working on our strategic projects, and that this was extremely successful final half year. We created additional provisions for the annual bonus for our employees to share the success with them. Also, external services were slightly higher by PLN 1 million. It was due to the higher cost of IT, but also the higher cost of promotion and education. We observed a sharp increase of the retail investors in trading on the stock exchange. Due to this fact, we have to spend more money for the education of the market because we want these investors to stay with us for a longer term, for a longer time. Slide number 22, share of profit of entities measured by equity method in last quarter of the last year stood at the level of PLN 4.8 million. It was much higher year-on-year, also the quarter-on-quarter, and it was mainly because of the contribution of KDPW Group. It's a national depository for securities and CCP on the Polish market. They had also very successful financial year 2020 because of the market activity, they enjoyed the increase of revenue from clearing fees, settlement fees, and depository fees. They contributed to our success as well. Slide number 23. Consolidated balance sheet. You can observe, we have a very healthy, good liquid position. We have a lot of cash generated during the last year, we observed the increase of assets and of the liquid financial assets. Thank you very much for your attention. It was the last slide during this presentation. I hand over to the organizer of the conference. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is Paweł Wieprzowski from WOOD & Company. I have a few questions. First of all, thank you so much for the presentation. It has been very insightful indeed. There was a miss versus the consensus on the post-quarter results on higher than expected operating costs, and these were salary and external services, to be more specific. These two categories by roughly PLN 2 million higher than the one I entered into my forecast. Could you please elaborate if that high salary and external services cost should be sustained in this year? Or if were rather inflated by some one-off? That is my first question. Here's Marek Dietl. In a nutshell, when it comes to salaries, simply our bonus system is very progressive and very great. Personnel performance we had last year resulted also that we have to pay higher variable compensation. Personally, I'm very happy, because it's a clear sign that we had a great year behind us. Also we were rather moderate in last year when it comes to salary increase. This variable compensation comes in the good moment when the team was really working very hard on transferring our organization from centralizing one building to decentralize due to COVID constraints. It's very timely bonus, and hopefully it will stay with us, this bonus. Next year we gonna have also some results, but you never know. Our business is extremely volatile. When it comes to external services, simply the more we develop the technology, the more we have external services related to the third party subcontractors and also some IT specialists, which are not well-paid. IT specialists, they are sole entrepreneurs, they issue us invoices every month. They are, in terms of accounting treatment, as external services, and they usually work only for us. This is the nature of the Polish IT business. It will go rather stabilize on this level because we do not expect that much new hiring related to our services. It definitely will not withdraw that fast on the spending. First base is rather going to stabilize or increase in moderate pace. Piotr, as the CFO, would you like to add something? Not really, because I lost connection. Sorry. Oh, okay. That's done. Okay. One only one factor which caused increase of the external services. One more, it's a promotional cost. We postponed all the events through the year to the first quarter because of the pandemic situation. Thanks to that, you can see the increase of the promotional cost also in first quarter. Okay. Exact other factors as, for example, personal cost and IT cost. Okay, thank you. My next question is, you recently held a Public Investment Conference, and last year you've managed to launch a few ETFs. Do you plan on launching further ETFs this year? If so, what will be the benchmarks? On equity indices or also fixed income ETFs? Izabela, if you can deal with this question. Yes, sure. As I mentioned during my part of presentation, we had just launched ETF based on WIG Index, and we are expecting the new one based on S&P 500, and the debut is next Monday. According to the information that we have received from the ETF producers, we can expect the ETF based on our WIGtech index. Again, based on stocks, but from technology sector probably this year or maybe next year, there will be another approach to ETF based on fixed income. This is the plan. Of course, we cooperate not only with one ETF provider, but also with other providers, and let's hope that they will decide also to launch their product to our exchange. Because some of the foreign ETF providers, they just decide to stay with only global exchangers. We hope that one or two perhaps will decide also to list ETFs on our exchange. This is the plan about ETFs. Perfect. Last year, you announced a collaboration with EBRD on promotion of ESG ratings. Could you please elaborate a bit more what are the plans for this year for this cooperation? Do you plan, and do you expect any events, and could you please just run us through the pipeline, if there are any projects on the table at this stage regarding this initiative? Izabela, again, question to you. Yes. To be honest, we cooperate with EBRD, with the project, which is focused on preparation of guidelines for our issuers. We want to have prepared very detailed and practical guidelines because currently our issuers could be potentially lost how to properly report ESG factors. There are some regulations, it's very difficult to measure all these factors and prepare the relevant information, especially to global investors. We want to offer them the guidelines. About ESG ratings, we cooperate with another partner, which is Sustainalytics. Sustainalytics prepare for us some ratings for the purpose of creation of WIG-ESG. They prepared the ranking of the companies which are included in WIG-ESG index. This is a slightly different cooperation. I think that this is my explanation of the cooperation with EBRD. Thank you. Maybe two more questions. In 2020, the most pronounced event that happened on, or one of the most pronounced events that happened on the Warsaw Stock Exchange was a significant spike of retail investors activity. Do you think that this level of activity should be sustained or can be sustained in 2021? Who is going to answer? Izabela, continue. You are doing just very well. I believe that in 2021, we'll have also the high activity of retail clients and what are the reasons that I think that it will be also the continuation of the trend from the previous year. First of all, in Poland, we have still record low interest rates and the National Bank of Poland announced that they are not going to change it. I think that Polish citizens, they look for alternatives to multiply or even protect their capitals. One of the interesting possibility is the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Also, I think another reason is the IPO pipeline. Now the IPO market, I think it's very active and promising, and we have a lot of questions from the potential issuer side. There are five prospectuses in Polish FSA. Also a lot of companies that want to go to NewConnect market. Also, I think that there will be some new opportunities for retail clients to invest in good companies from interesting sectors. Also, I think that our offer is more and more interesting. The offer of structured products and these structured products that allow, especially our retail clients, to go short and to earn on a market of a particular commodity underlying for some structured products to earn money, because the short selling it's not so open in the Polish market for retail clients. The structured products and also ETFs. I think that we managed to bring the attention of retail clients. I also follow what some analytics and our broker dealers just comment in the public domain, and they all think that this trend of active trading of retail clients will be continued this year. Okay, perfect. That's very clear. My last question regards the dividend policy. Well, 2020 results are stellar compared to the previous years. It seems that the strong equity volumes will stay with that in 2022, which are essentially the most important contributor to your top line. Roughly 35% of your top line comes from the equity trading. It seems that this year should also be not that bad. Hence, do you expect any possible positive surprise on the dividend from your financial forecast? You outlined the dividend policy growth path, which assumes that you should pay at least PLN 2.5/ share dividend from 2020 profits. Can we expect anything more than this PLN 2.5/ share? Piotr Borowski speaking. May I deal with the question? Okay. The idea was that we increase by PLN 0.10/ share, was that we have a stable dividend policy. Our investors know what to expect, is the minimum. The bottom is PLN 0. 10 + every year, and this is the minimum. We do not intend to change our dividend policy. It's too early to talk about it because it strongly depends on many other factors than our profit or cash position. When can we expect the dividend proposal to be released? We usually Piotr, when we do? We usually would release that somewhere in March, don't we? Yeah, before general meeting of shareholders. It will be. Yes, the final decision about the recommendation. When do we plan to do this? For the recommendation, usually May. May? Okay. Soon to come. Every May. Yes. Okay. Perfect. That's all from us, I think. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for the participation in this conference call. I would like to also thank Warsaw Stock Exchange Management Board Members for participating and presenting these results. Congrats to the entire team for delivering such strong 2020 figures and let's keep our fingers crossed for also very different set of results in 2021. Thank you so much. Have a great weekend to everyone. Thank you. Bye-bye.
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