SMTGY - SMA Solar Technology AG (SMTGF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-03-28 23:28:07 ET
SMA Solar Technology AG (SMTGF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
March 27, 2024 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Barbara Gregor - Chief Financial Officer
Juergen Reinert - Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Lasse Stueben - Berenberg
Guido Hoymann - Metzler
Sebastian Growe - BNP
Jeff Osborne - TD Cowen
Mengxian Sun - Deutsche Bank
Richard Alderman - BTIG
Presentation
Barbara Gregor
Welcome, everyone. We very much appreciate that you are taking the time for our Investor and Analyst Call for our Full Year 2023 Results. Today, my colleague and SMA CEO, Juergen Reinert, joins to provide us insights into the most important current business development. Welcome to the call, Juergen.
This conference call is a schedule for up to 60 minutes and will be recorded. The replay will be available for seven working days. After the presentation, we will be happy to answer your questions. Today's presentation is available on our Investor Relations website.
Our agenda for today. First, I will give you an overview of our full year 2023 figures. After that, Juergen will walk you through the current developments on innovations, the latest solutions, our platform strategy as well as fiber strategy, sustainability and investment projects going forward. After that, we will have a look on order backlog as well as our outlook for fiscal year 2024.
I expect the presentation part of the call to last about 30 minutes. And after the presentation, we are happy to answer your questions. I refer to our disclaimer on page 2. So let's move to page 4, financial highlights for the full year 2023. Summary of key financial 2023, 2023 was a very successful year for SMA and one of the best years since its foundation in 1981. We managed to increase group sales by 79% to €1.9 billion, thanks to the continuing high demand for SMA products, high utilization and the normalized delivery situation since the beginning of 2023.
EBITDA also increased significantly and was more than four times higher, reaching €311 million after €70 million in 2022. All three segments could significantly improve our sales and earnings in 2023 and contributed to the positive results. I will come back to the individual segments later. Free cash flow was strong again with about €57 million and order backlog remains at a high level with €1.7 billion despite the high revenue volume.
Let's go to page 5, sales by region and by segments. On the left-hand side, you can see that EMEA, our biggest region, again, increased from 33% to 38% in 2023. More than 50% of the EMEA cells derived from the Home Solutions segment followed by C&I and large-scale....
SMA Solar Technology AG (SMTGF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript