2024-03-22 14:20:19 ET
SGL Carbon SE (SGLFF)
Q4 2023 Results Conference Call
March 22, 2024 05:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Claudia Kellert - Head, Capital Markets and Communications
Torsten Derr - Chief Executive Officer
Thomas Dippold - Chief Financial Officer
Jürgen Reck - Senior Manager Investor Relations
Conference Call Participants
Andreas Heine - Stifel
Lars Vom-Cleff - Deutsche Bank
Thomas Junghanns - Berenberg
Lukas Spang - Tigris Capital
Sven Sauer - Kepler Cheuvreux
Presentation
Claudia Kellert
Welcome from SGL's side as well. Today, we want to present you our financial 2023 and give you more details about our expectations for the upcoming years.
Today, we have our CEO, Torsten Derr, attending the call.
Torsten Derr
Good morning, everyone.
Claudia Kellert
Our CFO, Thomas Dippold.
Thomas Dippold
Hello.
Claudia Kellert
And our colleague, Jürgen Reck, from the accounting -- Jürgen Reck from Investor Relations.
Jürgen Reck
Good morning.
Claudia Kellert
So, thank you. And now I hand over to our CFO, Thomas Dippold.
Thomas Dippold
Good morning. This is Thomas Dippold. I would like to guide you through the full year figures for the year 2023. Apologies for my voice. It should last at least for this call. I suffer a little bit from a cold, but my very best to guide you through that. First of all, and most important message, which you can see on this slide, SGL has reached its targets we once set at beginning of the year for 2023. So, we've reached our guidance in a very challenging environment and with some ups and downs, which I would like to show you a little bit through. On the overall performance of SGL, it looks exactly as we described it as a kind of a stabilization year. And later on, when we look at the investments also into an investment year where we do major investments.
And I think this is exactly what we performed. You see our sales declined by 4%, and our EBITDA pre-declined by 2.5%. This is more or less in line with what we said and is well within our guidance. However, if you take a closer look, underneath these general and overall figures, then you would see that three out of four business units that we have in our portfolio, which is GS, Graphite Solutions, Process Tech and also Composite Solutions, have the highest sales, the highest EBITDA and the highest EBITDA margin ever. So, the only thing that hindered that to show that is the performance of our Carbon Fiber, and I think we'll touch that throughout the presentation later on.
Graphite Solutions grew quite a bit, is 52% of the overall turnover that we have now. Carbon Fiber declined heavily and reaches just 20% of the overall sales that we have. And when we look at the profitability and the sales and we just exclude Carbon Fiber, then the businesses -- the remaining three businesses would have grown 10%-plus in sales and 20%-plus in EBITDA. I think that's a remarkable development of our core businesses, which we clearly pointed out. It's just hidden with the poor performance of Carbon Fiber. And again, we talk about our plans as Carbon Fiber throughout the call quite a bit.
On the next slide, you see the performance of our largest and most -- not the most but very profitable business unit, which is Graphite Solutions. Here, in the turnover, we see a sales increase of 10% now reaching EUR565 million, coming from EUR512 million the year before. So, it's a remarkable increase. And even more remarkable is the development of our EBITDA pre....
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SGL Carbon SE (SGLFF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript