E.ON SE Telephone Conference Q1 2021 Essen, May 11, 2021 Statement by: Dr. Marc Spieker, CFO, E.ON SE Please check against delivery.
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E.ON SE Telephone Conference Q1 2021 Essen, May 11, 2021 Statement by: D r. M a r c S p i e k e r, C F O , E . O N S E Please check against delivery.
2/5 Good morning, everyone, a warm welcome from Essen from me as well. After presenting very strong annual results in March, we’ve also had a strong start to the 2021 financial year. Thus we are fully on track. Before I go into detail, here are four key messages: First, all our businesses delivered an exceptional operational and financial performance in the first quarter. Adjusted EBIT and adjusted net income rose by 14 percent and 19 percent, respectively. The return to normal winter weather wasn’t the only factor. In addition, the Corona pandemic’s financial impact on our business was as anticipated and indeed of rather negligible volume. This gives us a lot of confidence for the remainder of the year. Second, this strong operational start to the year enables me to again fully confirm our forecast for 2021 along with our medium-term financial and earnings plan as well as our dividend promise. Third, a significant decline in provisions for pensions indicates that we’re making good progress toward our debt-reduction target as well. The integration of innogy also remains right on track. I can confirm our synergy target of €310 million for 2021 as well as our total target of roughly €740 million through 2022 and roughly €780 million through 2024. Fourth, for E.ON, our responsibility for sustainability take precedence over all of this. We’ve set new, stringent targets and will now use scientific criteria to define the path to achieve them. We’ve pledged to play a leading role in limiting global warming to less than 1.5 °C. And we’ve joined the Science- Based Target Initiative (SBTi) in order for our progress toward our targets to be independently validated. We’re already an industry pacesetter in sustainable financing and are extending this position: • 80 percent of our investments are aligned with the EU Taxonomy • we’re the first company to present a Green Bond Framework that complies with the EU Taxonomy’s strict criteria • we’re Europe’s largest issuer of green bonds. E.ON will be fully climate-neutral by 2040. We’re committed to this. In the first quarter, we again made decisive progress. In a few days, the E.ON Annual Shareholders Meeting will adopt a compensation plan that strongly links executive compensation to E.ON’s progress toward its sustainability targets. Before I talk about our results, I’ll briefly highlight our operating business’s positive performance. Statement by M. Spieker – 1Q 2021, May 11, 2021
3/5 In the years ahead, we’re committed to growing the regulated asset base of our Energy Networks segment, which generates the lion’s share of our earnings, by 4 to 5 percent annually. Given this business’s already significant size, this represents enormous growth potential. We’re investing in connections for renewables and continually connecting large wind and solar farms. The number of residential connections in our network territories is increasing as well, especially in outlying urban areas. We’re therefore very confident of achieving this target. We’re very happy with Customer solutions’ progress. This business is all about digitalization and new, sustainable solutions. First, the migration of all npower customers in the United Kingdom is completed. As you know, less than a year ago we began to radically reorganize and digitalize innogy’s and E.ON’s previous UK business in order to swiftly turn around their business performance and achieve profitability. Today we can report that we’re progressing faster than planned. We’ve already started closing down npower’s old systems. At the same time, the migration of E.ON UK customers is making significant progress. More than 500,000 E.ON customers have been migrated to E.ONNEXT’s customer- friendly, digital platform. We expect this number to increase significantly in the weeks ahead and for the majority of E.ON customers to be migrated by the end of the year. I’d like to emphasize that we’ve achieved this difficult and for E.ON important turnaround in the United Kingdom entirely from home offices. It represents a huge accomplishment by our UK team. In the first quarter, our UK business returned to profitability. The rollout of our new cloud-based digital sales platform for energy customers is making very good progress in Germany as well. We’ve already migrated more than 4.5 million customers. Second, demand for our Future Energy Homes services is growing significantly. These are residential solutions that combine and digitally optimize features such as solar panels, energy storage devices, and efficient heating systems. We sold more than 30 thousand additional units in the first quarter alone. We already have more than 1.2 million active service contracts. This makes us confident that we’ll be able to increase this business’s earnings in the rest of the year to more than €50 million. This is clearly a growth market. More and more households want to take energy into their own hands and go from being consumers to active climate protectors. This market is only at the beginning of its development. Third, our Energy Infrastructure Solutions business was able to fully benefit from the colder weather. The availability of our heating plants was excellent, particularly in the Nordic countries. A good example is Högbytorp outside Statement by M. Spieker – 1Q 2021, May 11, 2021
4/5 Stockholm, which achieved an availability of 97 percent in the first quarter of 2021. Operational excellence matters and is one of E.ON’s strengths. I’ll turn now to E.ON’s financial performance in the first three months of 2021. Adjusted EBIT of roughly €1.7 billion represented a significant year- on-year increase of 14 percent, or €200 million. You may recall that our first-quarter results last year were considerably impacted by a very mild winter. This past winter, by contrast, was fairly typical. Consequently, a return to a normal level of gas sales volume was the main reason for the significant year-on-year increase. Energy Networks’ earnings were roughly stable compared with last year. In Germany, we transported more energy owing to colder weather, which led to higher earnings relative to the prior-year period. This was largely offset by an anticipated increase on the cost side. This segment’s business in Eastern Europe benefited from the initial consolidation of VSE in Slovakia, which we acquired from RWE in the third quarter of last year. Customer Solutions delivered a strong earnings performance by doubling its adjusted EBIT relative to the prior-year figure, an increase of nearly €300 million. Apart from normalized weather conditions, our UK business benefited from our successful restructuring and the complete migration of npower customers to the new platform. We’re therefore very confident that we’ll achieve our target of more than £100 million in earnings for the full year, which would be earlier than originally planned. First-quarter earnings at Non-Core Business, which consists of our nuclear energy subsidiary PreussenElektra and our generation business in Turkey, were down by roughly €80 million year-on-year. The decline is due in part to the acquisition of residual power output rights for our nuclear power stations in Germany. Another factor was that earnings at our generation joint venture in Turkey were negatively affected by a reduction in hydropower output and adverse currency-translation effects. This earnings performance had a positive impact on our bottom line: • our first-quarter adjusted net income of more than €800 million was up 19 percent year on year, reflecting the increase in our operating earnings • economic interest result and our tax rate on continuing operations were fully in line with our expectations. Economic net debt of roughly €40.8 billion was largely unchanged from year- end 2020. The main factor was that provisions for pensions declined by about Statement by M. Spieker – 1Q 2021, May 11, 2021
5/5 €1.7 billion relative to year-end 2020 owing to an increase in actuarial discount rates for pensions and a strong performance by plan assets. Like every winter, first-quarter operating cash flow was very low due to seasonal factors. This alone prevented a significant improvement in economic net debt in the first quarter. Like every year, this pattern will reverse itself in the quarters ahead. This will result, as planned, in a further reduction in our debt. Backed by our strong first-quarter performance and assuming interest rates remain at current levels, we’re on course to achieve our target debt factor of between 4.8x and 5.2x this year and thus earlier than originally anticipated. After a strong start to the year, I’m happy to confirm all our targets for 2021 and our medium-term earnings plan through 2023, including our dividend promise. E.ON is fully on track. Key milestones—like restructuring in the United Kingdom and debt reduction—indicate that we’re making even faster progress than originally expected. Thank you for listening. I’ll now hand things over to Lars Rosumek, who will moderate the Q&A. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements based on current assumptions and forecasts made by E.ON Group Management and other information currently available to E.ON. Various known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors could lead to material differences between the actual future results, financial situation, development or performance of the company and the estimates given here. E.ON SE does not intend, and does not assume any liability whatsoever, to update these forward-looking statements or to align them to future events or developments. Statement by M. Spieker – 1Q 2021, May 11, 2021
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