VEOEY - Veolia Environnement SA (VEOEY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-14 14:49:10 ET
Veolia Environnement SA (VEOEY)
Q1 2024 Results Conference Call
May 14, 2024 02:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Estelle Brachlianoff - Chief Executive Officer
Claude Laruelle - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Arthur Sitbon - Morgan Stanley
Ajay Patel - Goldman Sachs
Olly Jeffery - Deutsche Bank
Jenny Ping - Citi
Alexandre Roncier - Bank of America
Juan Rodriguez - Kepler
Arnaud Palliez - CIC Market Solutions
Philippe Ourpatian - ODDO BHF
Presentation
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Veolia Q1 2024 Key Figures Conference Call with Estelle Brachlianoff, CEO; and Claude Laruelle, CFO. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded May 14, 2024.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Ms. Estelle Brachlianoff. Please go ahead.
Estelle Brachlianoff
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining this conference call to present Veolia's results for the first quarter of '24. And with me is Claude Laruelle, our Chief Financial Officer.
Our first quarter results are, once again, excellent. They are perfectly in line with our annual objective and enable us to start 2024 with great confidence and fully confirm our guidance for the year.
And I'm on Slide 4 where you would see sales came to €11.5 billion, up 3.9%, excluding energy price, which are essentially pass-through for us, as you know.
EBITDA has increased by substantial 5.7% on a like-for-like basis to €1.624 billion and current EBIT by 11.1% to €843 million. Net financial debt is well under control and in line with our target of leverage ratio below 3x at year-end. These results are the fruit of our unique positioning as the world's leader of environmental services, which, combined with the sustained effort and professional efficiency enables us to deliver both resilience and growth of our results. The last few months have confirmed the choices of our next strategic program, GreenUp, which, for instance, the critical importance for both cities and industries of deploying solutions to tackle water scarcity and onshore water quality, those challenges where Veolia has a leadership position, as you know.
I'm on Slide 5. And you can see we registered very solid revenue growth of 3.9%, excluding energy price, fueled in particular by Water and Waste, which grew by 6.5% and 5.5%, respectively.
Regarding Energy, as anticipated, lower energy price has weighted on our top line, but our Energy revenue has been flat, excluding the effect of energy price and has even grown by 1% if you exclude negative weather effect in the first quarter.
As you know, our Energy margin as in EBITDA is well protected from the ups and downs of energy price, which showed again in the first quarter. Actually, we expect 2024 Energy EBITDA to remain at the high level we reached last year despite lower energy price.
How is that so? Veolia is quite unique in the energy market since we operate in local energy only as we explained last January during our deep dive dedicated to energy....
Veolia Environnement SA (VEOEY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript