Fugro N.V. (FUGRF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-02-28 12:07:23 ET

Fugro N.V. (FUGRF)

Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call

February 28, 2025 05:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Mark Heine - Chief Executive Officer

Barbara Geelen - Chief Financial Officer

Catrien van Buttingha Wichers - Director, Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Thijs Berkelder - ABN-Amro ODDO BHF

Quirijn Mulder - ING

Michael Roeg - Degroof Petercam

Presentation

Mark Heine

Very welcome to the 2024 full year results presentation of Fugro. A very welcome to everyone here in the room, but also online. Thank you for dialing in. We'll take you through a presentation today as normal. And then after that we open up for questions for the people here available in the room.

So let me start first by giving you a few highlights of the financials for 2024. We improved our margins significantly in the year and Barbara will dive into some of the details showing you the regional split, but I can already say that we're very pleased that three out of the four regions actually produced double-digit margins. So this is good to see. And also good to mention that both Land and Marine have improved actually the margins compared to last year.

Operating cash flow increased by 20% also very good. And obviously as a result of a good net result and cash generation we are very pleased to announce the increase in the dividend to €0.75 per share compared to obviously €0.40 last year.

The strong EBIT improvement also was developed with actually some headwinds in the Americas and the Middle East markets. In the Americas, obviously, we were confronted with lower activity in the United States specifically due to the uncertainties around the elections. In the Middle East, we have spoken about that the revenue was impacted by cautious spending from several oil companies, but also due to the conflicts in the region. Overall, we achieved a growth rate currency comparable of 3.6%.

Some key highlights for 2024. We delivered in our -- or against our mid-term targets. And that's important because those targets were set for 2027 and we already delivered the EBIT margin, free cash flow and also the ROCE the return on capital employed well within those targets.

And the strong bottom-line performance is a direct consequence as our -- yes of our resilient and well-diversified business and I will show you later on how we now split in the different market segments and geographies. Over the past few years, we have significantly improved our performance and financial position. And we're well on track with implementing our new strategy Path to Profitable growth, I will now show -- no obviously, Towards the Full Potential.

Path to Profitable Growth was our former strategy still really embedded in my brain. Towards the Full Potential is our new strategy and we're well on track in the first year delivering on that. We are having a good plan and we'll stick to that plan.

We're also well equipped to deliver on capturing emerging opportunities that we see across our markets and I will also say a few more words about that a little bit later because we have also new market segments where we see opportunities. And that is done all under the, yes, probably we could say uncertain geopolitical environment and for instance also in the light of the setbacks that we see now for instance in the offshore wind in the United States.

The market fundamentals in general for Fugro are strong for the mid and longer term. And with the world population growing by 25% to 10 billion there's a lot of need for food, energy, water and specifically the demand for energy in the upcoming years will continue to grow. And that's for Fugro very important. And I will talk a bit more about how versatile we are to deliver services in the various energy markets....

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