ECIFF - Electricité de France S.A. (ECIFF) Q4 2023 Results Press Conference Transcript

2024-02-16 12:24:04 ET

Electricité de France S.A. (ECIFF)

Q4 2023 Results Press Conference

February 16, 2024 04:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Luc Rémont - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Xavier Girre - Chief Financial Officer

Nicolas Deblaye - Head of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Nathalie Alonso - AFP

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to this press conference. We will discuss EDF's Annual Performance. Before handing over to Luc Rémont, Chairman and CEO, as well as Xavier Girre, the CFO. A quick video regarding the 2023 highlights of your group. We have a number of journalists connecting remotely. You will have an opportunity to put questions in writing to the speakers during the Q&A, and the Q&A will begin after we've heard from both Luc and Xavier. Enjoy the conference.

[Video Presentation]

Luc Rémont

Hello, everyone. Hello everyone, attending in person or remotely. It's a pleasure to be here to present the EDF Group's annual performance in 2023. We have members of the Executive Board with us today. The video speaks for itself. Clearly, 2023 has been a different kind of year, in terms of the group's history. It was true of 2022 as well. And I would like to review the highlights of the year before I hand over to Xavier Girre, who will discuss the financials.

Here's the first aspect. We started 2023 in the throes of a major operational crisis, because of stress corrosion cracking and our top priority for 2023 was to restore operations to ensure operational recovery. We can safely say at this juncture that thanks to the mobilization of all our teams and the entire industrial sector working with us we've achieved our target nuclear output but other types energy as well but the nuclear output was most affected by this operational crisis. There's been a major recovery throughout the year, with an increase in output of 41.4 terawatt hour, increasing from 279 to 320.4 terawatt hour, which is in the upper hand of our output range.

So, an operational recovery, which is the first major factor, I wanted to discuss today. Clearly, 2023 has also been marked by the energy crisis, which began in 2022, but which peaked some time in 2023. As a result, we've had to support our customers. They were in an extremely difficult to position. So we have different categories of customers and we did our best to support them at the height of the crisis. And we used the government mechanisms that intended to protect customers against this particularly difficult circumstance. But I'll get back to that in a minute.

Of course, we need to -- we needed to lay the groundwork for the future. And for that, we need to look to the future and lay the course for our commercial future. We have a new commercial policy that was formulated in H2 and we're starting to deploy that. We struck an agreement with the government in November, and also long-haul work on all of our activities, particularly nuclear. We have a new organization. And we're still laying the groundwork for that. So, new steps. Obviously, we've had to formulate the broad strokes of a corporate project, but I'll get back to that in a minute.

Let me start by the first pillar. No company can exist or develop. With that we need to support our customers. And our goal has always been to support all of our customers and help them reduce the carbon footprint. That is our corporate purpose. It is our collective objective, we at EDF, and we need to work on every solution we can provide to customers.

First of all, we make available to them low carbon competitive short- medium- and long-term electricity supply. That is the goal of our sales policy that we worked on some time in 2023 and that we are rolling out at a large scale. So this comes in the form of different types of contracts.

Wholesale contracts – on the wholesale markets, we can auction off volumes of electricity over three or four – rather four, five years. We also have medium-term contracts over four – three, four, five years. So we provide electricity with stable prices over time....

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