Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Arise Audio Cast with Teleconference Q4 2021. Today, I'm pleased to present Per-Erik Eriksson, CEO, and Linus Hägg, CFO. For the first part of this call, all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and afterwards, there will be a question and answer session. Speakers, please begin your meeting. Thank you very much. Good morning, and welcome to our Q4 presentation. I am Per-Erik Eriksson, CEO of Arise. Let's start with slide number two, a brief introduction on the key numbers on the right. Arise was founded in 2007, listed on Nasdaq in 2010. We are some 30 employees in the company, a bit more. We have a project portfolio which is larger than 2,600 MW. We have own wind power operations of 139 MW in 10 wind farms. We have some wind power under management corresponding to about 1,400 MW, roughly 1.4 GW. Internal, 139 included in that, but the main parts are external wind farms that we are managing for our customers. We have some construction projects ongoing corresponding to 473 MW, two larger projects. In fact, this is a record level for us in terms of construction projects in progress. With that, I hand over to Linus. Yeah, turning to page three. We released our quarterly numbers, the year-end figures, early this morning. As you may know, I think we have seen a pretty dramatic price increase in terms of the electricity pricing, and obviously that's sort of what characterized mostly this report. We saw an increase in our sales from SEK 26 to SEK 79, and that increase is large, to a very large extent driven by Production, and despite lower, you know, production in terms of the gigawatt hours, the pricing impact simply offsets that and more so. Most of the growth comes from the Production side in this quarter. Naturally, this also trickles down to the EBITDA level, where we converted a lot of that improvement to EBITDA. We had a non-recurring item this quarter for the Production, and that relates to a period between 2013 and 2016 when we leased out wind farms to a client, and we had a commercial agreement that there were some risk associated to that, and that has finally been adjusted, and that was SEK 40 million. Comparable EBITDA before such item was SEK 46 million. Comparable EBIT was 31, and the reported EBIT was 17. Looking at earnings before tax, we came in at 21 before recurring items. In addition to the item I mentioned, as we have disclosed in every quarterly report since we have euro loans, we always have a non-cash impact, either a gain or a loss, depending on how the euro has moved against the SEK. For the quarter, it was SEK 1 million. Reported profit after tax was SEK 13 million, corresponding to some 33 öre per share, before and after dilution. Looking at the cash flow position, we had a cash flow of, an operating cash flow, I should say, of SEK 23 million. But that also includes the fact that driven by a higher power price environment, we also have more working capital related to production. Obviously that will convert into cash in January. Looking at the position in September, you know, the working capital for production was lower because of lower power pricing and now higher, basically. Nothing dramatic. In addition, we have some working capital accumulation in the Ravakarsalta project. If you look at cash flow after investment, it was negative at SEK -10 million, and that is an operating cash flow, less investment, and those investments was largely driven by Kölvallen, where we entered into a grid connection agreement and made a down payment to the grid provider, Ellevio. Obviously that payment was made, or we signed that agreement to make sure that there was no uncertainties regarding the grid connection for Kölvallen, which we look to sell later this year. Moreover, we had some investments in the GE fleet that also impacted the CapEx line item in the cash flow. The biggest component of the investment for the quarter is related to grid in Kölvallen. As I mentioned, production came in at 82, which is lower than budget, basically due to weak wind. And average income, which is the big driver this quarter, came in at SEK 812 per MWh compared to 202 last year, so obviously a nice improvement. So that helped to shape production sales up to SEK 67 million. And we'll come back to the market in September, but obviously it's been a volatile, extreme market and you know how long that lasts, we don't know, but I think it's a clear sign that we are moving into territory or a place with higher electricity prices going forward. Turning to page four. As you know, Fredrik was appointed CEO, here representing today. We've also employed a new CEO and have a recruitment process for a new CFO on the way. I already mentioned the one-off item that impacted the numbers. With that, I'm handing over back to Fredrik, and we're turning to slide number five, please. Thank you. Yes, project pipeline, as said, we may have a project pipeline which we think is strong. About 2,600 MW, 2.6 GW. Looking at the late-stage development projects, I would like to mention Kölvallen. Linus mentioned Kölvallen as well. It's a quite big project, 277 MW. We are in late-stage tender process, and we also initiated a sales process. We expect to have a financial close late or end of Q2, that's our target. We also have in the pipeline in the short term the Lebo projects, which is a quite small project, some 30 MW. We are in the same stage in terms of tender process, late-stage tender process, and we expect or plan to have an investment decision by end of first half this year. We plan also in that case to finance that project by the company. We also have a Fasikan project, where we have a permit in legal force, some 15 turbines, just below 100 MW. We are awaiting a network concession. Hopefully we will have it before summer, we expect so. In such a case, we will prepare for a sales process regarding in that project as well. We also have a project called Finnöberget, some 25 turbines, some 150 MW. In that case, we are still in the permit process. We have an appeal process ongoing. Lastly, we also have the Tormsdale project in Scotland, where we now have filed the permit application. We are in the permit process, and we will have filed the application for grid connection. That is ongoing. All in all, we are talking about some 600 MW in the short term for us in the pipeline. Looking a bit on the earlier stage development, I would like to mention Höteskogar, the last one, more than 1,500 MW. We signed an agreement with the landowner long before summer 2021, and we are in process to develop that project. We are planning for the coming activities, which will be bird service that we already contracted and will start up during spring. We are also in process to have a structured information to all stakeholders in the municipality, in the concerned municipalities. With that, I think we can flip over to slide number six. Some additional comments on the portfolio expansion. We also have ongoing dialogues in Norway in addition to the one on the previous slide. We are discussing different greenfield projects in Norway. In the U.K., as a consequence of the updated strategy that was communicated last year, we are working on a large-scale solar greenfield project in the U.K., some 200 MW plus. If we manage to do this, it will be one of the largest in the U.K. On top of that, and also a consequence of the new strategy moving into different geographies and also into different technologies, we are also looking into projects in Poland, where we are in discussion with a number of smaller developers in the purpose of securing solar power projects. The projects are primarily in an early phase, and we are doing that together with a partner. With that, we flip over to slide number seven. As you all have experienced or know, we had a quite special market during Q3 and Q4. We had a quite strong price momentum in the market, which was very much driven by geopolitics, Russian gas, basically. That also had a quite big impact in the Nordic markets. It has very much been gas-driven, but it has also been supported by Emissions Trading System, where we have seen CO2 been trading up to EUR 100 per ton. Also on top of that, we have had a bit of a deficit in the hydrological balance in the Nordics, which also supported the high prices we have at the moment. One thing to mention as well is the price differences between different price areas in the Nordic market, which been very much supported by the bottlenecks we have in the transmission system north-south in Sweden, but also between Sweden and Norway, which led to the fact that we had extreme differences between different price areas in the Nordic market. That has also developed a bit in beginning of this year. We can now see that SE4 is trading closer to system price. It was a huge gap during Q3, Q4, but now the SE4 is trading closer to system price, and that is very much driven by the interconnectors out of southern Norway. You could say that southern Norway is keeping up, supporting the system price in relation to SE4. We still see that SE2 and SE1 is lagging behind in terms of pricing. That is very much due to the bottlenecks I mentioned. Also, in the long run, we will see a significant increase in electricity consumption in northern part of Sweden due to industrial initiatives that has been announced in terms of battery factories, green steel production, and also new hydrogen production facilities. German prices has softened somewhat during earlier this year, especially in the front, but the forwards are keeping up a bit still. German price is a bit lower, but still on a very high level. I think I stop there regarding the markets. Move on to slide number eight. Looking at the historical perspective on market and also our realized prices, you can see in the left graph that we have some quite extreme prices at the moment or end of 2021. Also you can see that the hedges we had were quite much lower what was versus what the price, the realized, the market price. That was due to the fact that we had hedges that we had on a record level that we actually were quite pleased with, but still the market was on a higher level. On top of that, you have had an extreme market in terms of price differences during a day, between hours in this extreme market, which means that the capture price was a bit lower versus market price on a daily basis. But all in all, we had hedge, we had revenues on record levels from our production. Looking at the Production to the right, you can see that in 2021, if you sum the quarters up, you're in 282 GWh, which is some 18% lower than our budget of P50, which mainly was explained by the fact that we had a low wind year in 2021. If you compare to 2020, you had a very different situation when we had higher winds than normal. Looking on the hedging portfolio for this year, 2022, you can see that we have hedged around 40% of P50, and the price level hedged is about 80 EUR per MWh, which we are quite happy about, which will secure a good cash flow during 2022 from the production. We are also looking into 2023 now. We can see that we can hedge on high levels 2023 as well. We have started and we'll continue on that as well. That's it, I think, on markets. Then we are on slide number nine. I think Linus already mentioned that the change of service supplier, the quality issues connected to that. We had some CapEx during 2021 and some additional CapEx during 2022. On the other hand, we expect to have that compensated by the previous service provider. That's an ongoing process. Linus mentioned the non-recurring cost of 40 million SEK due to the leasing arrangement that we had between 2013 and 2016. Basically that was a contractual arrangement and we bear our portion of the cost. Yep. Moving on to slide 10. Some brief update on the construction projects. All in all, 473 MW, as mentioned earlier. Skaftåsen projects, civil works and grid works are finalized. We had some cost increase on grid connection. We have a delayed turbine delivery. We expect to have the project finalized or taken over by Q3 this year. Looking at Ranasjö- och Salsjöhåjden, 240 MW projects that was sold in July 2021. We have started up the construction works and we have planned for completion Q1 2024. Maybe one could mention on the Skaftåsen as we wrote in the report, we will not recognize any further profits, but the variable consideration payable to Arise upon completion, which was targeted to EUR 6.5 million, is going to be lower than that EUR 6.5 million, but there will still be some we expect that will reflect the recognized profits so far. No further profit recognition, but still some payment expected when we complete the project. Thank you. We move over to slide number 11, key activities for 2022. We are proceeding to establish a Green Financing Framework, which we will come back to in the coming slides. We have planned for an investment decision regarding Lebo, first half this year, 30 MW, as a part of our new growth plan. Initially, it will be financed by the company in order to maximize flexibility and also value creation. We are aiming for finalizing the sale of Kölvallen, close to 300 MW, towards the end of Q2. We have high expectations on that. We have a strategy to farm out the existing Production. However, we have a decision-taking to benefit from a strong underlying cash flow, as you see the prices we have discussed earlier. For now, we are keeping the production facilities. We will start when we have the network concession in place for Posickan. We will start preparation for that project as well, a potential sale during this year. We are working according to the new strategy to secure a project pipeline in Poland, but also we are working with the projects we have in the U.K. as well. That's on the way. That's it, I think. With that, I'll leave the word to you, Linus. Thank you. Turning to page number twelve. As you may have seen this morning, we announced that we had established a Green Financing Framework, and we thought it would be good to put that in the perspective of our strategy. As you know, we're on a path to diversify the company, both technologically but also geographically, where we are looking into solar opportunities across the U.K. and Poland, obviously, with a continued focus on wind and other phases in the Nordics, et cetera. An additional market may come, you know, as we are successful in the initiatives that we now are ongoing. We believe we have a solid financial position and a track record to make this happen. Under that strategy, we've communicated that we wanna increase the pace and realize some 3-5 terawatt-hours of new green electricity production by continuing to have financial partners investing into our projects but with an increased flexibility to, you know, sell projects outright, retain stakes but also like Lebo, finance the build and then maybe flip it at a later stage. We also see an opportunity to take an even higher margin on the project portfolio by de-risking our offering towards the investors that come into our projects. If we de-risk projects further, we expect a yield compression and a higher project development margin. Obviously, that also comes with a higher capital allocation. For instance, if we have a project that we sell, we typically sell it what we call ready to build, and then basically the investor finance the build, and we have some risk during construction, but it's linked to our profit. It's not sort of a, it's not the entire construction risk in a sense.. We are looking into opportunities to basically being able to sign binding agreements with investors, but we only we do that at the point in time before we commit under the construction contract. Basically, a binding agreement with investors to buy the assets, but then we finance the build and go to financial close once we have reached completion, basically, of the project. Arise would finance the build. It would take no more decrees because it has signed a binding agreement before the construction phase. By handing over or basically offering an investor, you know, an operating wind farm, we believe it could create yield compression and ultimately higher profit for us. That's basically how this Green Financing Framework fits into the picture where we see that, you know, this could be part of financing, you know, equity, or bridging equity needs during construction in projects that we sell. Of course, it could also help to accelerate the pipeline growth that we're looking at. It also, when we come back to sell or not sell on the operating fleet, it also allows us flexibility to retain that capital recycling option. Basically, if we sell this production, we will get a lot of cash. Basically by doing this, we can sit on that and recycle when it is needed and when we so decide. All of this ultimately comes down to what we communicated in the spring that the company is in really good position financially. We have a solid pipeline and how can we maximize value from here. That's basically how it ties in. Turning the page to number 13, this Green Financing Framework, well, for once, what we do is mostly green, so it makes a lot of sense for us to obviously go the green route, and to have that as a foundation for our future value creation. I can I won't spend much time on this, but I can just state that the Green Financing Framework has been awarded dark green shade from Cicero Shades of Green. Very pleased with that, of course. I think I'll stop there, and we can hand over to Q&A. Thank you. If you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing zero two to cancel. We have a question from the line of Anas Abrahamson from the same company name. Please go ahead. Can you hear me, Anas? Please go ahead. No, I have no question. Okay. Just as a final reminder, if you do wish to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. It seems we have no audio questions, so I'm handing back to the speakers. Okay. Now, I think if there are no questions, I mean, you know, thank you for listening. Yeah. Thank you. This concludes the conference call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines.
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