Covestro AG

Welcome to the Covestro Earnings Call on the first quarter results. The company is represented by Christian Baier, CFO.

[Operator Instructions] You will find the quarterly statement and earnings call presentation on our IR website. I assume you have read the safe harbor statement.

With that, I would now like to turn the conference over to Christian.

Thank you, Ronald, and hello, and a warm welcome also from my side to our first quarter call. The key financials of the first quarter were as shown on this page.

Volumes developed flattish year-over-year. Sales also came in at stable €3.5 billion.

We've achieved an EBITDA of €137 million, approaching the upper end of our quarterly guidance range. Free operating cash flow shows the usual seasonal dip with minus €253 million and we are reducing the upper end of our EBITDA guidance.

Let us look at the volume development in the first quarter of 2025. The global sales volume was stable with minus 0.4%.

North America exhibited slight growth. EMLA developed flattish and APAC was negative.

The dip in Asia was caused by our portfolio pruning as we cut loss-making or low-margin businesses. Going through the different industries.

Demand in construction and furniture was stable. Auto showed a low single-digit percent decline and electro followed with a mid-single-digit percent decrease.

Taking a deep dive into the different regions, starting with EMLA. EMLA benefited from significant growth in furniture, wood and a slight growth in construction.

Auto and electro on the other hand, had a slightly negative development. Sales volumes in North America also increased significantly in furniture, wood, electro and construction.

Automotive continued the negative trend from past quarters with a significant decline. APAC experienced a slight increase in auto but all other industries showed a clear decline.

We're now on Page 4 of the presentation. Sales for Q1 2025 are stable year-over-year at €3.5 billion.

The negative pricing and flat volumes were partly offset by positive FX. A negative impact of €40 million was coming from 1.1% lower prices.

The prices in the business segment Performance Materials increased by 0.7% and while Solutions & Specialties was affected by 3% lower prices. Volume was flat with minus 0.4% or minus €14 million year-over-year.

Excluding the portfolio pruning, volumes would have been 2 percentage points higher. The Solutions & Specialties volumes increased by 1.2%, while the segment Performance Materials experienced a 2% decline.

The positive FX effect of 0.6% or €21 million was mainly driven by the stronger U.S. dollar and Chinese renminbi.

With that, let's turn to Page 5 of the presentation where we are showing the Q1 2025 EBITDA bridge. As predicted in our full year call, EBITDA decreased by around 50% to €137 million due to costs of €108 million related to our transformation program strong.

Within this amount, €88 million are related to the announced closure of our joint propylene oxide operation with LyondellBasell. However, -- the EBITDA came in towards the upper end of the predicted range of €50 million to €150 million.

Lower selling prices due to unfavorable supply and demand in combination with high raw material and energy costs, especially in Europe, led to a negative pricing delta of €73 million. The volume increase could only absorb a part of the negative pricing delta.

As I said before, we reduced loss-making business, especially in polyols and increased sales in areas with strong margins. FX was positive.

Other items were burdened by costs associated with our transformation program strong that mainly includes the previously mentioned planned closure. On Slide 6, we are breaking down the details for the different segments.

As usual, starting with Solutions & Specialties. In Solutions & Specialties, the year-over-year price decline of 3% was leading to a sales decline of 1.2% despite increasing volumes of 1.2% and positive FX of 0.6%.

Sequentially, sales growth was only recorded in APAC, while North America and EMLA were declining. The EBITDA in Q1 2025 was lower year-over-year due to a negative pricing data.

The quarter-over-quarter EBITDA increase was caused by higher volumes, mainly in our Coatings and Adhesives business after the winter break. With that, the EBITDA margin increased to 10.8%.

Despite the narrowing of our full year EBITDA guidance, we are confirming our guidance for S&S to contribute slightly above the 2024 level. After Solutions & Specialties, we are now looking at the segment Performance Materials.

Year-over-year, sales were stable with minus 0.7%, driven by minus 2% from volumes, flat pricing and plus 0.6% from FX. Quarter-over-quarter, sales in North America were flattish while APAC and EMLA declined.

The Q1 '25 EBITDA of €13 million is lower due to the before mentioned provisions for the joint propylene oxide operation closure. Without this onetime effect the EBITDA would be comparable to Q1 2024.

Sequentially, the EBITDA in Q1 '25 decreased based on negative onetime effects and the negative pricing delta due to higher energy prices, mainly in Europe during the winter period. For PM, we are reducing the upper end of our EBITDA guidance range by €100 million and are now expecting a range from €400 million to €700 million.

On March 18, we have announced the decision to permanently close the propylene oxide styrene monomer joint operation of Covestro and LyondellBasell at the Maasvlakte site in the Netherlands. Contributing factors to this decision were the global overcapacity is on propylene oxide being built up in China, leading to low utilization rates and thus low margins.

Higher feedstock cost and increased imports from Asia made the production of PO in Europe very challenging. As we have announced during our full year call, this consolidation is part of the ongoing transformation program STRONG, impacting our Q1 EBITDA by €88 million.

The overall effect for FY 2025 is expected to be in the low triple-digit Euro million range. And however, starting 2026, there will be a positive mid-double-digit Euro million effect on EBITDA and free operating cash flow.

Our sales will be affected by a mid-triple-digit Euro million amount, mainly caused by the sales of styrene. And this with immediate effect as a plant has already been mothballed since end of 2024.

Covestro continues to support its customers and remains committed to the European market despite this closure and therefore, our existing supply network for PO and polyols we are supporting this. The transformation of Covestro is in full swing, and we are walking our talk when it comes to delivering on our targets.

So let me update you on our transformation program STRONG. Gross savings are now at €152 million, adding €33 million from Q1 '25 to the €119 million achieved in 2024.

With 3 quarters to go until year-end, we expect this amount to rise to about €250 million. However, the flip side are the announced onetime costs of €300 million, of which €100 million incurred in Q1 '25 and a similar amount is to be added during Q2 to Q4 2025.

This means that STRONG with overall burden reported EBITDA in 2025 by around €70 million compared to 2024. As discussed before, the announced closure of the PO production marked an important step in our ambitions for 2025.

It hit our EBITDA with the already mentioned €88 million in Q1 '25, whereas the additional benefits will ramp up over time starting from 2026. Nevertheless, the ambition is clear.

With STRONG, we want to achieve €400 million of annual savings or slightly below 10% of our annual fixed cost by 2028. The program consists of various smaller and larger projects and involves the broad rollout of digitalization and AI and we remain focused on fully delivering on this ambitious target.

The next topic is the free operating cash flow development for Q1 2025. And as you can see from the graph, the free operating cash flow in Q1 '25 was negative with €253 million.

The free operating cash flow is significantly lower year-on-year due to the lower EBITDA and higher CapEx. Working capital typically experiences a seasonal increase, however, in Q1 2025, the impact was relatively lower at minus €172 million, primarily due to stringent working capital management.

Q1 CapEx of €180 million increased year-on-year due to higher investments among others, mainly in efficiency and growth projects of our Performance Materials segment in the chlorine production in Leverkusen, Germany and the Aniline project in Antwerp, Belgium. Despite this increase, we remain vigilant about our spending and confirm our CapEx guidance of €700 million to €800 million for FY 2025.

All in all, the Q1 '25 free operating cash flow is showing a dip related to lower EBITDA and higher CapEx. Let's now look at our balance sheet on Page 11.

Our total net debt slightly increased by €315 million versus the end of 2024. The increase was mainly caused by the seasonally negative free operating cash flow of €253 million and negative others.

The decrease in the net pension liability to €247 million was driven by an increase of the pension discount rates mainly in Germany. This comprises pension provisions of €315 million and net defined benefit assets of €68 million.

Summarizing our net debt position. The total net debt-to-EBITDA ratio is at 3.4x based on a 4-quarter rolling EBITDA of €0.9 billion.

Without the strong provisions of around €100 million in Q1 2025, the increase would be limited to a ratio of 3.1x. Covestro remains committed to a solid Baa2 investment-grade rating that was just confirmed last week by Moody's.

Now we are moving away from the actual business figures of Covestro and are trying to analyze the effect of the tariffs announced by the U.S. government beginning of April.

When looking at the trade balance for our core products, MDI, TDI and polyols, we can see a growing dependency on imports to supply the North American market. This is most pronounced for MDI already since a couple of years with imports of around 500-kilo tons.

These imports are mainly coming from near originating to 70% from China and to 30% from Europe. On TDI and polyols, we see a growing trend towards imports.

However, for TDI, most external supply is coming from Europe to avoid already existing tariffs from China to the U.S. On both isocyanates the tariffs are at 177%.

Import streams on polyols from APAC represented less than 30% of the imports in 2024. The highest share here is coming from Mexico.

Tariffs on polyols are though significantly lower with 52%. Looking at the supply picture of Covestro, we see that our regional production exceeds sales indicating that our production in the region for the region holds true.

We are entertaining 9 sites for local U.S. production with a major hub in Baytown near Houston, Texas with assets for production of MDI, TDI polycarbonates and aliphatic isocyanates.

Despite the vast majority of our products sold coming from the U.S., there is an import volume of around €500 million, mainly being imported from Europe into the U.S. These volumes are to support the region on specialty products, scars products and safeguarding supply of our customers during turnarounds.

In general, we expect market prices to increase on the back of higher import prices. However, there are underlying risks that the tariffs could be having a detrimental effect on the regional GDP development and thus on the global GDP.

Drilling it down into the core industries, we would expect a dampening on the demand in all our core industries, automotive, construction and electro, especially furniture/wood is already impacted by imposed antidumping rates on mattresses and furniture and additional tariffs bear the risk or further slowdown. Next to the implications on GDP, we might see a diversion from established trade flows.

China is the global workbench for electro electronics and other labor-intense products as well as holding the biggest capacities of MDI and TDI. Tariffs, as announced, might reduce imports into the U.S.

So the remaining products might then stay in APAC or end up in Europe with negative effects on prices and margins. Overall, this is a very mixed picture with risk but also with opportunities.

However, there are so many erratically moving parts so that it is almost impossible to have an exact prediction of the outcome. From our side, Covestro remains agile and responsive to accommodate any new developments but we need to wait it out until we see a clear direction, this tariff escalation will take.

We are now coming to the outlook for Covestro's core industries on Page 13 of the presentation. The global GDP expectation is almost unchanged at 2.6% compared to the outlook of 2.8% we presented end of February.

Looking deeper into regional GDPs, we also see a steady growth prediction of 1.7% for EMLA and 3.9% for APAC and around 4.5% for China. However, the U.S.

economy has seen a slight downward momentum from 2.6% to 2.0%. Growth expectations for most of the key industries for Covestro have only seen insignificant changes with the exceptions of a slightly declining trend for furniture and a 2.6% downgrade for electro-electronics but a 3.7% upgrade for the subcategory of appliances.

However, all these growth predictions do not incorporate the effects of the spreading trade war initiated by the tariff announcements by the incumbent U.S. government early April.

For example, the automotive industry is still expected to grow slightly at 2.4% and a stable growth of electric vehicles of 22.4% is predicted. As mentioned before, erratically imposed and then lifted or delayed tariffs are fundamentally disturbing a rational evaluation of the consequences of these actions and in absence of new reliable data, we are sticking to the known facts and remain vigilant to new developments.

Currently, none of the growth indications for our core industries is reflecting the increased uncertainties and risks in the global economy that it is facing and this has been also influencing our guidance for FY 2025. After the economic outlook, let us now discuss the guidance for Covestro, taking into account the fundamentals of the last slide.

Despite increasing uncertainties, it is not clear whether the world or more specifically the U.S., will incur a recession. In the absence of clear indications in that direction, we are keeping our guidance aligned with the currently available data and not draw a doomsday scenario.

However, we see the risks to the global economic development outweighing the chances of an optimistic scenario and as such, have decided to narrow our guidance from the top end by €200 million to now €1.0 billion to €1.4 billion. This narrowed range is due to the consistently low margin level in Q2 whereas our previous assumptions anticipated the beginning of margin recovery from Q2 onwards.

The effects of the volatile environment on GDP and exchange rates are not included in our FY guidance. The April mark-to-market EBITDA is now aligned with the lower end of the guidance of €1.0 billion.

In line with EBITDA, also ROCE above WACC has been narrowed to minus 6% to minus 3 percentage points and the guidance for free operating cash flow and greenhouse gas emissions in Scope 1 and 2 are estimated stable. Due to lower feedstock prices and expected pass-through to our pricing we expect sales now to come in between €14.2 billion and €15.2 billion.

In Q2 2024, we expect an EBITDA between €200 million and €300 million. We expect a slight sales volume decrease due to the shutdown of PO 11 and respective lower sales on polyols and especially styrene as well as a slightly higher D&A of €900 million.

All other KPIs remained stable. Let's now move to the update on the XRG transaction.

The aggregate of shares tendered and purchased by XRG amounts to 91.58% of the total Covestro shares. Additionally, XRG secured 3.44% of shares through instruments end of January 2025, leading to XRG direct and indirect ownership of more than 95%.

The remaining free float represents 4.82%, and our treasury shares are 0.16% of our total share base. Since our last call, we have achieved further regulatory approvals and are at a 67% approval rate.

For the German FDI and the U.S. CFIUS, the formal notifications have been filed and the outcome is pending.

On the European foreign subsidy regulation, we are preparing the official filing, and once done, it will be posted on the EU FSR website. Upon submission of the formal notification, the process takes approximately up to 25 working days, after which the European Commission will either clear the transaction unconditionally or decide to proceed to a Phase II investigation, if further scrutiny is required.

This in-depth Phase II investigation can last up to 90 working days, if not extended. We estimated beforehand that these 3 approvals would most likely be the long-running items.

Significant progress has also been made on the merger control approvals and we are now at advanced to 75% approval rate with more approvals expected to come in during May. Additionally, if we receive requests for information from any authorities, the respective teams are following up on these RFIs to facilitate a closing of the potential transaction within the expected timeline.

We reiterate our closing ambition within the second half of 2025 with a subsequent payout of the €62 per share to Covestro's shareholders. So let me quickly summarize the key points of today's presentation.

In Q1 2025, sales were stable at €3.5 billion with stable volumes due to reduced low-margin business. EBITDA came in at €137 million, approaching the upper end of the guidance range, and it was burdened by negative pricing delta and the onetime costs related to the transformation program STRONG.

The negative free operating cash flow of minus €253 million is in line with expectations. Full year 2025 EBITDA guidance has been narrowed with the lower end of the €1.0 billion reiterated and the upper end reduced by €200 million to €1.4 billion.

And the XRG transaction is on track with additional approvals achieved. And now Ronald and myself are happy to answer any questions that remained open.

And with that, I hand it over to Carsten, who will guide us through the Q&A session.

Thanks, Christian. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question comes from the participant locked in with the telephone number +1 646-758. Okay, this has been pulled back.

Then the first question comes in from Christian Faitz from Kepler Cheuvreux.

Two questions, please. Can you elucidate a bit the rather sharp rise in short-term financial liabilities, which according to your Q2 report, mainly relates to higher bank liabilities in China.

What's behind that? And then my second question is your growth forecast for the electro electronics industry has more than halved.

What's behind that, i.e., do you actually see customer industry slowing down already? Is this tariff discussion related?

Yes. Thanks, Christian, for the questions.

I think there's 2 reasons for the increase on the short-term financial liabilities. One is basically the reclassification just of a bond, which has been moved from the long term to the short term given that we went under that 1-year period.

And the other part is an increase of short-term funding, which is partially from the commercial paper side but also within the short-term market in China as we are balancing the overall financial profile. On the other hand, you have seen the cash also having increased during the same period.

With respect to the topic on the electro industries, it is partially related to the trade flows that would be expected within the overall setup, i.e., a number of the products on the electro electronics do not reside still in China than after the production but are rather impacted by the tariff elements that we would see there. On the other hand, you have also seen that appliances, the subcategory of that has actually been increased, which is then rather related to the domestic demand that we would be expecting in China also linked to some governmental programs.

So I think a tale of 2 cities there within electro electronics.

But overall, your forecast has halved, that is correct, right?

On the total of electro electronics, for us, more important pieces are related then also to appliances here. And therefore, that's for us, I wouldn't say a wash but the halving should not be seen as that significant of an overall impact.

And the next question comes from Sebastian Bray from Berenberg.

I have 2, please. The first is on the development of spreads by chemistry over the last 2 or 3 weeks, it's a little bit difficult to track given the development in some of the raw material pricing but could you talk about if MDI spreads, which look like they were picking up have continued to do so?

And if there are any big changes in polycarbonate to TDI over the last month or so. My second question is on natural gas costs.

When -- how long does it usually take for the higher cost from the start of the year to show up in the P&L? Is it about 2 or 3 months gap between spot and when this appears in the Covestro P&L?

Thank you, Sebastian. Happy to take those.

I will go for the first one, and we'll hand over to Ronald on the second one. With respect to the spreads.

What we have seen recently especially over the last 4 weeks, we have seen a relevant drop in prices on MDI, TDI and partially also on polycarbonates, which was especially related to the Asian market. While EMLA and also the U.S.

are keeping up, U.S. is sometimes even increasing.

So that's the one element of the spread part. With respect to the margin development, given that the raw material costs are not following that fast, and there is some contraction that we see in the beginning of the Q2 but we are now seeing, a; prices stabilizing on those products that you were just asking for.

And on the other hand, obviously, also the reduced raw material costs coming through and therefore, for the remainder of the quarter, we see a more balanced situation there with respect to the spreads development.

Yes. And on your natural gas costs, and I might answer a little bit more broadly on overall energy costs.

So we were the biggest part of the energy consumption we're having is actually buying electricity. And electricity actually, we buy on a daily basis.

So indeed, we have a rather quick, let's say, pass through into the P&L. Natural gas costs are typically a bit more longer, which means we have something like 3 to 4 weeks before we see into the P&L.

So raw materials as Christian mentioned, is rather 6 to 8 weeks, so much longer, energy and natural gas a bit quicker.

So there are no further questions at this time. [Operator Instructions] Good.

So it seems as if everything has been clarified. So with this, handing back to Ronald.

Thank you, Carsten. Is there a follow-up?

No. That's not.

Is there a follow-up question from, Sebastian?

No.

Okay. Good.

Then it's all done. If you have follow-up questions, don't hesitate and contact the Investor Relations department.

Thanks for coming back to that call and your interest and see you then just for the next call, I guess, for Q2 results. Thank you, and goodbye.