RWNFF - RWE Aktiengesellschaft (RWEOY) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-03-20 14:09:07 ET

RWE Aktiengesellschaft (RWEOY)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

March 20, 2025, 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Thomas Denny - Head of Investor Relations

Markus Krebber - Chief Executive Officer

Michael Muller - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Peter Bisztyga - Bank of America

Alberto Gandolfi - Goldman Sachs

Deepa Venkateswaran - Bernstein

Ahmed Fahrman - Jefferies

Wanda Serwinowska - UBS

Olly Jeffery - Deutsche Bank

Harry Wyburd - BNP Paribas Exane

Robert Pulleyn - Morgan Stanley

Meike Becker - HSBC

Piotr Dzieciolowski - Citi

Ingo Becker - Kepler Cheuvreux

Presentation

Operator

Welcome to the RWE Conference Call. Markus Krebber, CEO of RWE AG, and Michael Muller, CFO of RWE AG, will inform you about the developments in fiscal year 2024.

I will now hand over to Thomas Denny. Please go ahead.

Thomas Denny

Thank you, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining on the RWE Conference Call on Full Year 2024.

Our CEO, Markus Krebber; and our CFO, Michael Muller, will first guide you through our presentation and then we'll start our Q&A session.

And with this, I hand over to you, Marcus.

Markus Krebber

Yeah. Thank you, Thomas. And a warm welcome to everyone.

Despite some headwinds from a sharp decline in European commodity prices at the beginning of '24, we delivered on our promises. Our robust business portfolio has enabled us to put in a strong operational and financial performance. And we have proven our ability to debt quickly and reallocate capital to our shareholders by introducing a €1.5 billion share buyback program in Q4 of last year.

While the market fundamentals for power demand are promising and significant investments in additional power generation capacity are needed in all our core markets, we are experiencing higher uncertainty in the investment environment. We will therefore be even more cautious with regards to additional investment commitments. We will target the leverage ratio to be at the conservative end of our range to maintain a strong balance sheet in more uncertain and volatile times.

We have increased our return requirements across all technologies and markets. And we will apply stricter investment criteria, especially in the US. Consequently, we have significantly reduced our 2030 investment program. For the years '25 to 2030, we have cut our planned investments by 25%, or €10 billion euro, compared to our Capital Markets Day 2023.

Part of our CapEx optimization is an active sell down and partnering strategy for our offshore portfolio to reduce the burden from capital employed under construction. With 12.5 gigawatt projects under construction across all technologies, our committed net cash investments currently stand at €13 billion. These projects will deliver attractive returns. While our planned investments in '25 are fully committed, we have a high degree of flexibility in our capital allocation from '26 onwards....

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