2024-02-08 15:40:20 ET
Rockwool A/S (RKWBF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
February 8, 2024 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Kim Andersen - Chief Financial Officer
Jens Birgersson - President & Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Alexander Craeymeersch - Kepler Cheuvreux
Zaim Beekawa - JPMorgan
Marcus Cole - UBS
Yves Bromehead - Societe Generale
Arnaud Lehmann - Bank of America
George Speak - BNP Paribas
Yassine Touahri - On Field Investment Research
Brijesh Siya - HSBC
Casper Blom - Danske Bank
Kristian Tornøe - SEB
Claus Almer - Nordea
Pierre de Fraguier - Goldman Sachs
Presentation
Kim Andersen
Good day to everyone, and welcome to ROCKWOOL's conference call regarding the results for full year 2023. My name is Kim Andersen. I'm the CFO of ROCKWOOL A/S. Today, I'm pleased to present CEO, Jens Birgersson. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder this conference call is being recorded. First, Jens Birgersson will go through our presentation and give you an update on the results for the full year and fourth quarter of 2023. Afterwards, we will be ready to answer all your questions.
Before I hand over the word to Jens Birgersson, I must ask you to notice Slide 2, which is the forward-looking statement. Please be aware that this presentation contains uncertainties. Now we can go to the next slide which is Slide 3.
Jens Birgersson, I will now hand over the word to you.
Jens Birgersson
Good morning. I would just say a few words to this slide before we move on to the quarter. So when we went into this year, we were a little bit more pessimistic about the outlook. There was a lot of macroeconomic factors and quite big uncertainties. We started off with guiding at a decline of up to 10% on the top line and margins around 10% to 12%. And as we have progressed through the years, we have kind of improved the quarters versus the previous year. And this last quarter was the strongest quarter of the year compared to the previous year and we ended up then on minus 4% top line for the whole year. And around 14% – or 14.3% EBIT margin for the full year. So we are satisfied with that.
Let's look into the next slide Q4. Going through the numbers here is the first quarter of 2024, where we actually had a bit of growth like-for-like currencies we were up 2%. We have quite a few negative currency effects. But – and happy to see that every month of the quarter had growth both in volumes and sales. So that's nice.
Comparing weather, there were some – some weather differences in different regions in some places where they might have played into December. But if you look at the overall temperature where the chart aggregated, it was pretty much the same weather 2022 and 2023 at the end of the year.
The EBIT margin in Q4 landed at 14.4% obviously, significantly up from the previous year, where we still have that race between raising prices and the energy shock that started in Q3 last year or the previous year 2022. That said, considering that we had quite a big one-off in Q4 factory, the biggest one being the factory closure of that factory. We acquired a few years back in Sweden. The profitability was good in Q4.
Looking at net profit that is only basically flat, that's greatly impacted by the unrealized exchange rate losses. But underlyingly on the EBITDA, EBIT, et cetera it's all good. Kim can answer more questions on that later....
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Rockwool A/S (RKWBF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript