FPRUF - Fraport AG (FPRUF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-03-20 01:08:03 ET

Fraport AG (FPRUF)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

March 19, 2024 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Christoph Nanke - Senior Vice President, Head of Finance and Investor Realtions

Stefan Schulte - Chief Executive Officer

Matthias Zieschang - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Ruxandra Haradau-Doser - HSBC

Graham Hunt - Jefferies

Carlos Caburrasi Ortega - Kepler Cheuvreux

Christian Nedelcu - UBS

Patrick Creuset - Goldman Sachs

Elodie Rall - JPMorgan

Dario Maglione - BNP Paribas Exane

Manish Beria - Societe Generale

Jose Arroyas - Santander

Sathish Sivakumar - Citi

Nicolas Mora - Morgan Stanley

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome and thank you for joining the Conference Call of Fraport AG Full-Year 2023 and Annual Report. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]

May I now hand the call over to your host today, Christoph Nanke, SVP, Head of Finance and IR.

Christoph Nanke

Thank you, Dorian and warm welcome also from my side. I think we have some topic to talk about and explain today. So therefore I’m very happy to have our CEO Stefan Schulte and our CFO Matthias Zieschang at the table and I hand the floor to Stefan to start the presentation.

Stefan Schulte

[Technical Difficulty] Thanks very much and a warm welcome also from my side. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We have had a business morning, so let's go straight into the presentation. My first slide today provides you an overview on our latest developments. Frankfurt Airport, our main site recorded just under 60 million passengers last year. This was one of the midpoint of our full-year guidance, which was a terrific recovery of 80% to 90%. In fact, the second-half of the year showed an even more dynamic development at about 88% of 2019 or 91% for the fourth quarter on a standalone basis.

On stronger traffic recovery, we saw in our international portfolio in total the airports outside of Frankfurt reached 98% of the passenger number handled 2019. Correspondingly, our international portfolio achieved our midterm guidance of a full traffic recovery, which we provided you 2.5 years ago. Benchmarking our results against expectations also shows very good progress regarding our operating results. Our group EBITDA, reached more than EUR1.2 billion and therefore recorded an all-time high and outperformed our mid-term expectations.

In addition to the financial progress, we continued our way to decarbonize the group. During the past year, we amended our so-called master plan decarbonization to include our majority-owned efforts. The updated master plan describes a way on how to decarbonize the individual efforts in order to achieve a CO2 free Scope 1 and 2 by fiscal year 2045. Besides our master plan decarbonization, we also updated our Group strategy Fraport.2030 to include new midterm targets. The new strategy comes along with an updated corporate purpose and a new claim connecting the world with tomorrow, but more on this topic later in my presentation.

Moving on to our financial highlights of the past year on slide four, despite the fact that Frankfurt just recovered to 84% of the 2019 traffic revenues increased on a group wide to just under EUR3.5 billion, at Frankfurt Airport in particular the real estate and parking divisions, as well as the security business contributed to the revenue increase. Internationally, we record more than EUR210 million of higher revenues just from our Fraport Greece subsidiary a strong increase of our very important international operation, but also Fraport Brazil and USA showed higher revenues.

In terms of our Group EBITDA Fraport Greece also helped us to exceed the pre-COVID level at EUR271 million, our Greek subsidiary contributed EUR100 million more EBITDA than 2019. At the Frankfurt site, especially the aviation segment exceeded the 2019 benchmark year. Bottom line, our Group result exceeded the upper end of the guidance for 2023, but remained some EUR20 million below 2019, key drivers for the better performance in our Group result were higher interest received in our financial asset management and the development in Antalya. At EUR430 million, this was our third highest result in our Group history....

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