2024-02-08 20:03:11 ET
Outokumpu OYJ (OUTFF)
Q4 2023 Results Conference Call
February 08, 2024 08:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Linda Hakkila - Head of Investor Relations
Heikki Malinen - President & CEO
Pia Alexandra Aaltonen-Forsell - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Ioannis Masvoulas - Morgan Stanley
Anssi Raussi - SEB
Tristan Gresser - BNP Paribas Exane
Patrick Mann - Bank of America
Maxime Kogge - ODDO BHF
Bastian Synagowitz - Deutsche Bank.
Moses Ola - JP Morgan
Presentation
Linda Hakkila
Hello, all, and welcome to Outokumpu's Full-Year 2023 Results Webcast. My name is Linda Hakkila, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations here at Outokumpu. With me today as our main speakers, we have our CEO, Heikki Malinen; and our CFO, Pia Aaltonen-Forsell.
Year 2023 was good for us. We delivered a strong cash flow and kept our balance sheet strong. Today, as per usual, we will first present to you some slides. And after that, we are happy to answer your questions. Before we continue with the presentation, I would like to remind you about the disclaimer as we might be making forward-looking statements.
But now without any further comments, I would like to hand over to our CEO.
Heikki Malinen
Thank you, Linda. Good afternoon, good morning to everybody. Welcome also on my behalf to Outokumpu's 2023 and Q4 webcast. Great to have so many of you join us today.
Well, as Linda said, 2023 was a good year for Outokumpu. We made a lot of progress on many fronts in terms of executing our ambitious strategy. And today, I'm really pleased to share with you the main sort of conclusions and outcomes of all the work we did in the Outokumpu team.
Obviously, we know all that we are living through fairly turbulent times in history, but in spite of this volatility and turbulence, Outokumpu as a corporation made good progress moving forward almost like a freight train.
Now, then, moving on to the slides. So let's start with the first slide showing the main number. And as you can see, our adjusted EBITDA for the whole year was EUR 517 million. If we put this into perspective, we had the 2 COVID years, where we made over EUR 1 billion in EBITDA. But looking further into our past, over the last 10 years, this was the fourth best year. So overall, a good outcome.
Year 2023 was a story of really 2 halves. The first half of the year was still fairly robust. The economy was still moving forward. But in the second half, we could clearly see monetary policy starting to bite. High interest rates were starting to really slow down the economy. And of course, we saw that in the demand for our products.
Now, if you look at the year given the economic backdrop, we have had our own challenges. But I have to say that as a company and as a team, we've taken decisive and swift action to take corrective measures, particularly when it came to managing our costs, managing our own production and really trying to activate sales and marketing as best as we could.
And so I think overall I'm really pleased with what the team, Outokumpu team, was able to accomplish. And as I said, as an outcome, good result, strongest balance sheet in the industry. Especially in these times when financial markets are -- when monetary policy is tight, interest rates are high, it feels very good to have a balance sheet where net debt is negative. I really don't need to worry about refinancing like I did some years ago when we were -- when we had over EUR 1 billion in net debt.
Our safety performance was extraordinarily good. I'll come back to that in a moment. And we also made good progress on many dimensions of sustainability.
Then moving on to the next page, a few words about the markets. On the left-hand side, you can see the usual slide on market prices. Again, let me remind all of you this is based on CRU data, so it is directional. And I think you should not look at the -- I think the actual data points, but more the direction and the different elements of the curve....
Read the full article on Seeking Alpha
For further details see:
Outokumpu OYJ (OUTFF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript