Earnings call transcript: Cloudberry Clean Energy Q3 2025 shows strong EBITDA growth

Cloudberry Clean Energy reported robust financial results for the third quarter of 2025, highlighted by a doubling of EBITDA compared to the same period last year. Despite this strong performance, the company’s stock price fell by 3.67% in pre-market trading to 12.60. The decline followed the announcement of a realized power price of NOK 0.61, well above the system price, and a 58% equity ratio, reflecting a strong balance sheet.

Key Takeaways

• EBITDA doubled year-over-year, reflecting strong operational performance.
• Stock price fell 3.67% in pre-market trading.
• Power production increased to 177 GWh in the commercial segment.
• The company achieved a NOK 110 million gain from portfolio consolidation.
• Cloudberry Clean Energy is expanding its renewable energy projects across Scandinavia.

Company Performance

Cloudberry Clean Energy demonstrated significant growth in Q3 2025, doubling its EBITDA from the same quarter last year. The company reported a realized power price of NOK 0.61, significantly higher than the system price, which contributed to its strong financial performance. The company also consolidated its Fortuyt Energy portfolio, resulting in a NOK 110 million gain. Power production in the commercial segment increased to 177 GWh, showcasing the company’s expanding operational capabilities.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: Not specified in the earnings call summary.
• EBITDA: Doubled compared to Q3 2024.
• Equity Ratio: 58%, indicating a strong balance sheet.
• Power Production: Increased to 177 GWh in the commercial segment.

Market Reaction

Despite the positive financial performance, Cloudberry Clean Energy’s stock fell by 3.67% in pre-market trading. The stock’s decline may be attributed to broader market trends or investor concerns about future challenges, such as the proposed resource rent tax on small hydro projects. The stock is trading lower than its 52-week high of 13.94 but remains above its 52-week low of 10.2.

Outlook & Guidance

Cloudberry Clean Energy intends to continue its strategy of developing and acquiring renewable energy assets. The company is exploring potential expansion into Finland and monitoring the impact of the proposed resource rent tax on small-scale hydro projects. With increasing power demand from data centers and industry, Cloudberry is well-positioned to benefit from these trends.

Executive Commentary

CEO Anders Lenborg highlighted the company’s milestone of surpassing 1 terawatt hour of production, emphasizing Cloudberry’s strong operational capabilities. CFO Ole-Kristofer Bragnes noted the importance of capital discipline and capital recycling in maintaining the company’s financial health. Lenborg also mentioned Cloudberry’s strategic positioning to capitalize on its strong balance sheet.

Risks and Challenges

• Proposed Resource Rent Tax: Potential impact on small hydro projects.
• Market Dynamics: Uncertainty in power price projections.
• Regulatory Changes: Possible implications for renewable energy projects.
• Competition: Increasing activity in the Nordic renewable energy market.
• Grid Limitations: Limited new grid projects in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

Q&A

During the Q&A session, analysts inquired about the M&A market conditions, Cloudberry’s stance on the proposed resource rent tax, and power price projections. The company addressed these concerns, highlighting its strategic positioning and commitment to capital discipline.

Full transcript - Cloudberry Clean Energy As (CLOUD) Q3 2025:

Anders Lenborg, CEO, Cloudberry Clean Energy: Hi, and welcome to Cloudberry Clean Energy’s presentation of our third quarter 2025 results. My name is Anders Lenborg. I’m the CEO of Cloudberry, and I’m joined here today by our CFO, Ole-Kristofer Bragnes. We have, as always, prepared a presentation for you, and we will go through that in a few seconds. Please also use the Q&A function and send questions, and we will open up and try to answer as many of your questions after the presentation. Before we dive into the details, the agenda is also known for many of you. I will take you through the highlights. Ole-Kristofer will take you through the financial numbers, and we will also comment on the price and the market and a summary. Let’s start with the highlights.

Solid figures in a quarter with less production than we hoped, but we have managed to increase both revenue and also double the EBITDA from the same quarter last year, and much thanks to a realized power price that is much higher than the system price. With our realized power price of NOK 0.61. That is, of course, a result of our merchant exposure, but also the price areas where we have our projects. As you see here on the right-hand side, you can see the power production has increased over the quarter. Last quarter has been busy for us. We have, as we have informed about earlier, merged our small hydro scale platform with Swiss Life’s development platform. Together, this is one of the largest small hydro platforms in the Norwegian market.

We’re very happy to have reached this new milestone with Swiss Life, our cooperation going back to before 2020. Over the years, we have seen that together we can make new progress in this market. We have also made our first FID on a BESS project, the battery energy storage project in Sweden together with Hafslund. The work is already started. It’s positive to see that we further diversify our portfolio with our first BESS projects. More to come, I would think, over the next years. We have also received EUR 5 million from Odal. It’s good to have all the turbines in Odal back in service and also see that we have received the first payments from the cash that is in the Odal structure. Let’s take two steps back and look to Cloudberry and our business model and what we do. Cloudberry is a Nordic independent power producer.

We have a develop, own, and operate strategy and business model, and we are very focused on the Nordic market. We believe in being in the whole value chain from early phase greenfield projects until they are in production, but also to manage the assets when they are operational. In that way, we can both. Have the long-term cash flow from the producing assets, but we have also shown up through the years the development gains we get from our development portfolio. Here you see on the right-hand side, we have a portfolio that is very diversified from early phase projects until they are in production. We have now passed 1 terawatt hour of production, and we are currently constructing also several hydropower projects in Norway, in addition to the BESS project in Sweden. When it comes to construction permits, we have a mix.

We have some permits in Denmark and Sweden where we focus on wind and solar projects. We also have an exclusive backlog where we have new in-house developed projects that we are constantly developing until we get them into a permitting process and then into construction. In addition to the in-house developed backlog, we have a pipeline of opportunities. This is structural opportunities. They could be M&A deals. There are a lot of opportunities in the Nordic market today. I think we see that we are perfectly positioned to make gains from having a strong balance sheet and a network and all the knowledge that we need to advance on these pipeline M&A projects. Today, we have production in eight different price areas throughout Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I think what we have seen here in Norway over the last month is the political risk that we find in our sector.

That is why it is very important for us to diversify our portfolio. We have diversified it on different technologies and different countries, as you can see here, as we have built the production portfolio. As you can see, we have also now our first BESS projects under construction, and we will further diversify the project portfolio in the coming years. Many of you know that the Norwegian government has proposed a resource rent tax on small-scale hydro. That is hydro projects or hydro assets that are below 10 megawatt in installed capacity. This is a proposal that we are very negative to and the whole sector. It is a proposal from a minority government that has now also got a lot of feedback that this is not going to help the development of new renewable energy that the government actually says that they want to support.

This will affect our portfolio if it goes through. Around 15% of our portfolio is small-scale hydro without the resource rent tax. It is still early days, and we believe that they will not get the support needed to go through with this proposal. We think that this can also be something we can come back to at the end of this year. Yes. Over the years, we have built a portfolio of producing assets, as you can see here on the left-hand side, steadily increasing the production portfolio to get the certain level of producing assets, generating long-term cash flow to the company. This is something that we are focusing on and will continue to build a large producing portfolio. On the right-hand side.

At the same time, we are also building our backlog of projects and working with the backlog to bring it to permitted projects and also taking FID. This shows that we are both building new cash flow-generating assets, but also securing a backlog of exclusive projects. In addition to that, always looking at good M&A opportunities and making efforts to use our network in the Nordics. Especially in today’s market, we see a lot of opportunities, and we have a lot of incoming possibilities in Cloudberry. Yes, this is also a slide you have seen before, but now we have gone through with the process of merging the Swiss Life portfolio and the Cloudberry portfolio. Now we have a small-scale hydropower platform that is covering development projects, projects under construction.

We have producing assets, and we have also a team that will manage to both develop the new project and also manage the project when they are operational. All in all, we are very happy with this cooperation and looking forward to further develop it. As you can see here, our Cloudberry assets that we put into this platform, we gained 1.9 times the book value. That is in line with the earlier divestments we have done on the hydro side, which we have achieved around two times book value on our hydro assets. In addition to what we have been touching upon, we focus, as I said, on developing partnerships with large landowners in Sweden and also in Norway. Developing these more strategic cooperations is important for us. Large landowners make it easier to handle all the local stakeholders.

It could also be that with our partners, it is easier to also work with the local stakeholder and the management of the local stakeholders. Same we see in Denmark. We have a portfolio there. We have people on the ground, both on the asset management side but also on the development side. It is a big focus now on land and securing capacity in the grid. We have taken some of our projects and redesigned them so we can meet the requirements from data center developers or Power-to-X developers where we can offer powered land. It is just more than a standard standalone renewable project, but it is more of a capacity in the grid, powered land, and also our production in Denmark and our development portfolio. This goes hand in hand.

Strategy is, of course, to continue to do what we have done over the last couple of years. We will look at the strategy now again, as we do every six months, and see if we should do some adjustments to the strategy when it comes to all these opportunities that we see in the Nordic market and position ourselves also for the new. Demand from the power-intensive industry, both from the classic industry but also from the new. Industry driven by the data center. Projects in the Nordics. Yes. ESG update for last quarter. No incidents. We’re happy to see that. That’s important for us that we can keep on delivering. Zero incidents and zero whistleblowing. We are also very happy to see that we got the highest rating from DNB Carnegie’s portfolio. We got the highest ESG rating in the energy and utility sector last quarter.

We are very happy to see our work. That our work on both the sustainable business model but also on the reporting is recognized in the market. Thank you so much. I’ll hand over to Ole-Kristofer, and he will take you through the numbers. Thank you so much, Anders. My name is Ole-Kristofer Bragnes. I’m the CFO of Cloudberry and will be happy to take you through the financials for this quarter. First of all, capital discipline really is a foundation for continuous growth for us. That, like Anders said, on the strategy has been important for Cloudberry and will continue to be important for Cloudberry going forward. That in the past has enabled us to act on a lot of opportunities, either bolt-on acquisitions, entry into Denmark while being capitalized, and have the flexibility through our debt structure.

We see that also now in what can be characterized as a bit of a tricky market. It’s important to have capital discipline, which can enable us to come out of this a bit challenging market at a much stronger state than we were going into it. Capital discipline and on the back of capital recycling will be important and will be opportunistic on that going forward. Moving into the Q3 consolidated balance sheet, there’s a couple of effects through the Fortuyt transaction, which has greatly impacted our financials. I’ll try to walk you quickly through some of them, and there’s more information in the quarterly report. We see a strong growth in our balance sheet on pretty much all metrics compared to the same quarter last year. What happened to the Fortuyt transaction is that we had two separate portfolios.

Let’s start out with the Fortuyt Energy Norway portfolio, which is the producing hydropower portfolio where we owned 49.99% of that prior to the transaction. What happened is that we acquired approximately 5% of those shares, reaching 55%, and then having to consolidate that portfolio in accordance with IFRS. When that happens, you need to deconsolidate the associated company and then consolidate the full financials at fair market value, which has a P&L effect, which you can see, which we’ll get back to when we go through the P&L. That will increase the balance sheet. The same happened with Fortuyt Vankraft. We injected our 100% owned hydropower assets into Fortuyt Vankraft portfolio. The book values will remain intact as those will continue to be consolidated, but the whole of Fortuyt Vankraft portfolio will be consolidated going forward.

That includes the producing hydropower asset Heran, but also the projects that are under construction on a 100% basis. Those two effects greatly explain why we have such an increase in the balance sheet. Again, important to see that we have still a sufficient and strong equity and total asset side in relation to our debt and report an equity ratio of 58%. That same growth. We see the same growth in our proportionate financials, which are coming from the same explanation, the consolidation of these two larger portfolios. Further, we are and have continued to hedge our interest rate exposure, and we now have 70% hedged at all-in rate below 4%, a weighted average tenor of 10. That’s a slight drop compared to the previous quarter, Q2, where we report around 80%.

That’s due to the debt in Fortuyt Vankraft not being hedged at present, but we’ll look into that. It’s important to remain hedged on the interest rate as we have a strong merchant exposure on the power sales. Moving on to the P&L side. This is the, call it the flip side of the increase in producing portfolio base, which Anders talked about a little bit earlier. We’ve had a strong growth here in underlying financials and profitability due to the increase in our producing asset base combined with strong realized average price over the period. In addition to that, capital recycling has been very important for Cloudberry and is a great value driver, which we’ll continue to utilize going forward as well.

We’ve had in 2022 to 2024 some both external and internal sales, divested hydropower assets two times at around two times book values, realizing strong IRRs, in addition to showcasing development premium once we’ve internally sold wind assets that have been complete at strong values based on third-party valuations. Those effects explain we have had these effects in 2022, 2023, and 2024, which explains why it’s a drop to Q3 2025. The underlying profitability from power sales has increased as we now have a much larger producing portfolio base in Q3 2025 of about 1 terawatt hour of producing assets, which is much larger than when we started with. Diving into the Q3 P&L. The first we can note is that here we see the P&L effect from the consolidation of the Fortuyt Energy portfolio, which I talked about a bit earlier.

We have a gain in the consolidated financials due to IFRS of NOK 110 million, which is a step up to fair value compared to the book values we had on that portfolio. This is a bit technical, but when you consolidate this portfolio, you need to take it in at fair market value, and the difference is either a gain or a loss. In this situation, we have a gain which showcases the excess values we’ve had on our hydropower assets. And that’s evident in the consolidated financials. But again, we have some more explanation about this in the report for those of you who want to dive into it. The consolidation of the Fortuyt Vankraft portfolio does not have the same P&L effects.

No, the proportionate and consolidated revenues and EBITDA have increased compared to the same quarter last year when you look at the underlying financials, primarily due to increased power production and average realized price. Also important to note that there’s a catch-up effect of NOK 7 million in operating expenses, which were charged to the quarter, and that relates to prior quarters in 2025. So the year-to-date costs are correct, but some of that cost should have been taken in the previous quarters. We also have some transaction costs, which both effects are lowering the EBITDA for this quarter, but are then treated as one-offs. If you look about the segments, we can start with the commercial segment, and that segment continues to be the strongest P&L driver for Cloudberry. We’ve had a strong growth in our portfolio power production for 145 GWh to 177.

But that’s despite having very low wind speeds or wind resources in this quarter. And for wind, remember, we talked about it earlier quarters, that the wind cost-based are much more fixed. So the revenues here scale a lot better, or the operating expenses scale, meaning that when there’s lower wind resources, we will have lower EBITDA margins. And that’s on the flip side. If you have more natural or neutral production or higher power prices, you’ll have a much better achieved EBITDA margin than you do at hydro. So that’s evident in this quarter. Very long wind resources. We have a growth in our portfolio. That’s despite, or have a growth in the power production, but that’s despite having a very much larger portfolio now than we did the same quarter last year.

On the other side, we achieve a very strong net power price of EUR 0.61 per kilowatt hour, like Anders also mentioned, compared to a system price of EUR 0.43 for this quarter. And again, this showcases the favorable portfolio composition relatively from the higher southern price areas compared to theoretical average. So that’s good to see. On the right-hand side here of the charts, the LTM figures showcase a drop, but that’s due to a very creative hydro sale in Q2 2024, where we have NOK 109 million of a gain that we recorded from capital recycling and also a large warranty settlement in Odal in Q2 2024. So despite that, when you look at the underlying production, that’s been growing from 618 GWh to 783 on an LTM basis and also with strong realized prices.

So underlying growth, but then the capital recycling effects are causing what seems like a drop. Moving on to the other segments, we can start with projects. The revenue increase is mainly due to NordHard, which is a construction or drilling company that does drilling for some of our projects, but also external projects. That has a positive EBITDA effect of NOK 3 million for this quarter. Again, like we talked about previously, driving project and the backlog and the project transaction forward is a great value driver for the project segments. You will only see P&L effects once we realize a project for this segment, either internally or externally. You should have large gains that more than make up for the costs associated with this quarter, but that is first when we actually do a sale. For the asset management side, we have increased volumes.

Even though the revenue looks like there is a very small drop, Q2 2024 had around NOK 8 million of gain in Q2 2024. When you adjust for that, there is a strong growth from the asset management side, which is very good to see, reaching positive EBITDA. On the corporate side, there seems like there is a little larger cost base there, but that is driven by NOK 4 million transaction costs relating to the transaction we have done in the previous months. Also, there is a non-cash warrant cost of NOK 6 million compared to NOK 4 million in the same quarter last year. Those two effects explain the difference there. Underlying cost base is intact. That is it for the financial side. I will leave it over to Anders for market and summary before we move over to Q&A. Thank you. Thank you, Ole-Kristofer.

Thank you for all the questions you have sent in. We will get back to that. Yes, on the market development side, as you can see, we have realized a power price well above our long-term power price. This is something that we have done over the last years. It is a result of the combination of our merchant exposure, our PPAs on attractive levels, and of course, the price regions that we are having our project. As you can see, we used the TEMA Nordic price curve together with Volt, and it is increasing over the next couple of years. What we see is also that especially the data centers are looking to the Nordics to expand and get more capacity. It is favorable in part of Europe.

We see that most of the growth in the data center capacity will come in the Nordics, throughout the Nordics, but especially then in our three Scandinavian countries and in the right price areas where we have our projects. This is positive, and we are talking to several of the players to follow up on these opportunities. All in all, I think we are very well positioned for the future. We have our Nordic focus. We have our platform. We have the knowledge, and not least the network in the Nordics. We see now how much that means when it comes to positioning ourselves in the Nordic markets. That in combination with a strong balance sheet, we have cash, we have debt facilities that we have not used. We have also our share that you have seen we have used over the last years.

All in all, we are very well positioned in today’s market and also for the future. Thank you so much. I think our presentation is finished. We have received a lot of questions, so that is always nice to see. I will try to answer some of these questions that you have sent us in connection to M&A opportunities, also when it comes to the proposed ground rent or, sorry, the resource rent tax, and also when it comes to questions regarding the power price and also the Cloudberry share. To start out, we have received some questions about the market in general, the M&A opportunities. What are you seeing in the market? What we see is a market that is partly distressed with everything from larger IPP, larger platforms, portfolios of projects, but also brownfield assets that are producing, and down to smaller standalone projects or operating assets.

We have the whole specter. Unfortunately, we see that some of the players have already gone into bankruptcy and are very distressed. Others are just looking to also develop their portfolio together with Cloudberry. What we do is to focus on where we see the most attractive opportunities and try to work on these opportunities. I think being active in today’s market is a core for Cloudberry and to take advantage of our knowledge and of our position going forward with expanding our footprint in the three Scandinavian countries, but also looking towards opportunities in Finland like we have done over the last couple of years. In that sense, very attractive and interesting M&A opportunities in the market as we speak. On the tax proposal, yes, we have paused one of our construction projects. We have started to develop it, but it is early days.

We have found out it is the right thing to do now to pause it to see what the outcome of the resource rent tax proposal will be. That is one project under construction. We have another project under construction that has come a long way, and it is too late to do something there. We are also looking on the earlier project in the portfolio where we have not taken an FID, and we will pause all of those processes also. We will not use any CapEx on the one project that we have paused. Also, we will not use any DevEx on those other projects for the time being. What we see is that this proposal has met a lot of opposition, and we. Don’t think there will be a support for the proposal.

We have also seen now that the whole industry has been very clear that this will just do the opposite of what the government has said that they want to do, mainly develop new renewable and sustainable power. Now they will have the opposite; we will see the opposite effect. All the larger players in the small-scale hydro sector are now stopping their projects. It also affects, of course, the whole value chain in this sector. That is something that I hope we can come back to the market with more information end of November or in December. We have also questions here on the power price going forward. Of course, we see that. As you also saw from the TEMA power price, the price curve is increasing. We see larger demand from industry, the new industry.

Also, when you look at the supply side, there is almost no new projects coming on grid, not only in Norway, but also in Denmark and Sweden. In the south, where we are in the south regions of Sweden and Norway, the demand is increasing, and there is very little new production. Over time, this will, of course, affect the power price. We also see that from the price curves that they are increasing. How that will affect our share price is too early to say, but I mean, doing the right things, developing the right project, having the right focus will also, of course, affect our share price over time. That was some of the questions that we have received. Ole-Kristofer, no? You’re happy? Thank you so much. Thank you for your time, and have a nice day.

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