Earnings call transcript: DFDS sees Q1 2025 revenue growth amid challenges

DFDS A/S reported an 8% revenue growth in Q1 2025, primarily driven by its acquisition of Ecol. The company, currently valued at $783 million by market capitalization, faced challenges with a lower EBITDA of $457.7 million and an increase in net interest-bearing debt to approximately €1.5 billion. According to InvestingPro analysis, DFDS appears undervalued based on its Fair Value metrics. The company’s stock saw a modest rise of 0.4, or 0.37%, in pre-market trading, reflecting a cautious investor sentiment amidst mixed financial signals.

Key Takeaways

• Revenue grew by 8%, driven by the Ecol acquisition.
• Net interest-bearing debt increased to €1.5 billion.
• Stock price increased by 0.37% in pre-market trading.

Company Performance

DFDS’s performance in Q1 2025 was marked by a notable 8% increase in revenue, largely attributed to its strategic acquisition of Ecol. While organic growth showed a slight decline, and EBITDA was lower, indicating some operational challenges, InvestingPro data reveals strong fundamentals with a substantial free cash flow yield of 36%. The company also reported an increase in net interest-bearing debt, now standing at approximately €1.5 billion. InvestingPro subscribers have access to 10 additional key insights about DFDS’s financial health and growth prospects.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: 8% growth, driven by the Ecol acquisition.
• Free cash flow: €500 million (adjusted €250 million).
• Improved working capital by DKK 400 million.

Market Reaction

DFDS’s stock price experienced a modest increase of 0.4, or 0.37%, in pre-market trading. This movement suggests a cautious but slightly positive investor sentiment, as the stock remains closer to its 52-week low of 77.3 than its high of 230.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, DFDS expects a 5% revenue growth for the year 2025. The ferry division’s EBIT outlook has been revised upwards to €1 billion, while the logistics division’s EBIT outlook has been lowered to €200 million. The company is focusing on organic growth and cost management, with an operating CapEx of €1.6 billion and a free cash flow target of €1 billion. For detailed analysis of DFDS’s growth trajectory and comprehensive valuations, investors can access the full Pro Research Report available on InvestingPro, which provides deep-dive analysis of this prominent player in the Marine Transportation industry.

Executive Commentary

• "2025 is a year where we lay the groundwork for improving financial performance," said CEO Torben Karlsen, emphasizing the company’s strategic focus.
• Karlsen expressed confidence in overcoming challenges in the Mediterranean, stating, "We are convinced that we will succeed with getting the Mediterranean back on track."
• Highlighting growth potential, Karlsen noted, "We continue to see growth from Mediterranean and North Africa."

Risks and Challenges

• Geopolitical uncertainties are impacting trade flows, posing potential risks.
• The company faces increased competition in Mediterranean routes.
• Potential recession risks in Europe could affect market conditions.
• Disruptions in the meat export and automotive sectors remain a concern.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts raised questions about DFDS’s Mediterranean pricing strategy and its approach to working capital factoring. The company also addressed concerns regarding the competitive landscape in ferry routes and clarified its capacity and pricing adjustments.

Full transcript - DFDS A/S (DFDS) Q1 2025:

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DFDS Q1 Report twenty twenty five Conference Call. I am here, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q and A session. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it’s my pleasure to hand over to Torben Karlsen, CEO. Please go ahead.

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: Thank you and good morning and welcome to DFDS’ Q1 twenty twenty five conference call. I am joined here as usual by Karen Bosen, our CFO and Searn Vonholt, our Head of IR. Our Q1 report headline is that our 2025 transition is progressing. As you may recall, we labeled 2025 a transitional year in our latest annual report. So 2025 is a year where we lay the groundwork for improving financial performance following the events of 2024.

I am pleased to report that the earnings trend improved towards the end of the quarter following execution of multiple turnaround actions during the quarter. There is still a lot of work to be done and further actions are being executed as we speak. When we report Q2 in August, the improving earnings trends should become more visible. In a moment, will give you my view of the current geopolitical events and macro trends and how they can impact DFDS. With our exposure to high growth, net shoring markets, we believe DFTS is well positioned for what seems to be a deglobalization trend.

Before we start, let me highlight our focus on financial solidity. Karen will take you through the details, but we do expect to end the year with a financial leverage ratio that is below the current level. Let’s now take a closer look at the evolving market changes and at the Q1 results. If you turn to Page three, a reminder of our moving together towards 02/1930 ambitions unlocking network value, delivering on our green transition and a strong cash flow focus with a long term leverage target of two to three times. Page four, geopolitical market and competitor environment.

Geopolitically, The U. S. Trade and tariff policy changes, of course make intra European trade flow impact uncertain. There is recession risk. But as I mentioned in the introduction, long term this should be positive for nearshoring positively favoring DFDS.

Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine, the duration remains uncertain. We’ve also seen in Turkey some political risk increase. But lately, of course, we saw that President Trump reached out to President Allergan to see if they jointly could solve the Ukraine situation. On the market side, as I mentioned, the geopolitical events could cause European recession. We haven’t seen it yet.

We don’t see it in our volume numbers. The continent road market remains very competitive. The food and mouth disease that have stopped meat export to UK has now resumed, but at least initially very low volumes. The oil spread between MGO and HFO is down, putting some pressure on our earnings. On the competitive side, especially Istanbul Trieste, we are dealing with the competitor entry in 2024.

And we also see some increase of freight capacity between Holland and UK lately. Moving to page five. As I mentioned also in the introduction, the transition is progressing as our actions start to deliver. If we look at Q1, then the Ferry division, excluding BU Med, delivered above 2024. It was helped by some one off events, but still the Mediterranean result was reduced significantly as Karen will come back to.

The new BU in logistics was adding a lot of cost from the turnaround impacting Q1. The remaining logistics division was below expectations. This is now primarily driven by some situations in the BU continent. We are progressing on our three focus areas. We have adopted the Mediterranean capacity to the new competitive situation and we have started to implement price increases after the significant price reductions we saw during Q4.

These price increases have been well adapted throughout the Mediterranean system. The test turnaround, so the former Ecol, we maintain the breakeven target towards the end of the year, although the turnaround has proven slightly larger in scope than originally seen. Logistics boost projects are progressing. We are deploying structural solutions and in other places commercial and cost initiatives are making the trick. So performance recovery cash flow focus is what we are focused on in DFDS.

And we see the transition year progressing according to plan. The three focus areas are delivering as expected. Despite this, Q2 and Q3 will also be below 2024. And only in 2025 will you start seeing results significantly above 2024. We have a working capital program in place.

We have strong CapEx focus and we are going to reduce leverage as we get into second half of the year. I will hand over to Karen on Page seven.

Karen Bosen, CFO, DFDS: Thank you, Tobin, and good morning, everyone. First, revenue, a positive story of 8% growth in Q1. This is all driven by the acquisition of former Econ, now the EU Test, Turkey and Europe South. If we eliminate for the acquisition, growth is slightly negative, and this is mainly driven by our ferry operations that has some revenue decline coming from the Mediterranean situation and some impact of the Easter, which in 2024 were included in Q1 and in this year is in Q2. On logistics, we still see organic growth of 2%, and then that is driven by The UK and Ireland, which is positive for us.

But again, overall growth driven by the acquisition. Turning to the next slide, Slide eight, our income statement for the quarter. You will see another other income, which is a compensation from insurance from a total construction loss of one freight ferry, the Finlandia ferry that grounded back in late twenty twenty four. And that income, obviously, helps and supports our EBITDA in this quarter. Still, we see a lower EBITDA driven by the troubled areas that we have talked about before and that we’ll come back to later in this presentation.

Net effect of depreciation with the addition of the acquisition of Ecol and the sale of the Copenhagen Ostro, which makes the development more or less flat. And then we have an offsetting write off of the Finlandia Ferry of €83,000,000 taking the overall net EBIT impact of this particular situation with Finlandia Ferry to €33,000,000 That is included in the EBIT below. Financing costs reduced €10,000,000 to €185,000,000 from and this is despite the increased net interest bearing debt of approximately 1,500,000,000 interest bearing debt. And this is due to lower interest rates of just above one percentage point compared to the same quarter last year. Then turning to Page nine.

We visualize here our EBIT this quarter as opposed to the following or the previous four years. And obviously, this highlights that this is not a satisfactory result as we have also clearly communicated. However, it was expected. We see the reductions mainly driven by the two divisions almost half half. And in the following page, I will go into more details about those trials, those reductions.

Turning to Page 10. If we look at Ferry division, overall, we have with this regard, the Mediterranean, which I will come back to, we have a reduction overall of around CHF 48,000,000 driven by the rest of the network. This is a combination of higher bunker cost and the Easter timing difference that I referred to before. And then overall, also some performances above that sort of offsets these. So overall, the impact for the rest of the network is these minus CHF 48,000,000.

If we then look at Mediterranean, we see a significant reduction as opposed to last year. This is expected. We saw it in Q4 twenty twenty four as well. However, this is not an average over the three months. We see an improvement coming in March already and compared to the impact in January and February.

And we are on an improving trend and therefore are beginning to see it. We introduced price increases in the beginning of the year, a new price increase in March 1 down there, following a period where competition has been a lot on prices, and we had had to lower our prices to keep the volumes. We are now in a situation where we start increasing our prices. And therefore, we expect this to be the bottom out of this situation. Several one off items included here.

I mentioned the €33,000,000 from the total construction loss. And then also, we had the AustroCopenhagen route in as a negative in Q1 twenty twenty four. And as we no longer are the owners of that, that affects our comparison of variance positively. So that’s our ferry. If we then turn to logistics, try to display on Page 11.

We try to display it the same way with an impact if we isolate the newly acquired business of €53,000,000 negative coming from our three existing or previous business units also with Nordic Continent and UK Ireland. UK Ireland, solid performance on track. We the main impact we see is coming from the continent where we were impacted by the Food and Masters in Germany that prevented meat export throughout Q1 from the continent into The UK. And there were also some lower flows on the automotive side in our Ghent, Belgian area. Overall then, we’re coming to the loss that we see from our newly acquired business units.

This is in line with expectations, slightly lower, but we knew it was going to be a tough quarter. Turnaround is ongoing, and Torben will come back to that further on. The one off item is reflecting the fact that we have had a positive income in Q1 ’twenty four of provision releases that we no longer have, obviously, in this quarter. So I wanted to show that transparently. Then turning to my last page, Page 12, our cash flow and capital.

I’ll take you a little bit through that. We had a net improvement in our working capital of about DKK400 million, which helps, obviously, our operating cash flow quite well. CapEx under control and about just below CHF300 million offset by the income from the ferries construction loss, which takes us to a free cash flow of just about $500,000,000 for the quarter and an adjusted free cash flow of around $250,000,000 The net interest bearing debt increased compared to same quarter last year of about $500,000,000 driven mainly by the Ecole acquisition facility that we entered into in November. But if we look at it comparing to Q4 ’twenty four, our net interest bearing debt actually reduced $400,000,000 mainly driven by the working capital improvements. The leverage ratio is slightly up compared to previous quarter and, of course, significantly up compared to same quarter last year.

And this is driven by the lower EBITDA now with the loss making activities included for this quarter and the increase in net interest bearing debt if you compare to same quarter last year. That, I will hand back to Thorben.

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: Thank you, Karen. If we turn to Page 14, moving to green and great place to work, yes, we still value those two items. On the ferry emissions, our intensity reduced 6% in this quarter. We customers were willing to pay for and we reduced the number of high speed craft sailings, which are very fuel intensive sailings in this quarter. As some of you may have seen, IMO have come out with new greenhouse gas targets.

We support this. We are aligning our plans to live up to those targets. On the e trucks, we have added another five e trucks this quarter. The pace is slowing down a little bit. We need to make sure that the trucks we deploy are paid for by customers and fit the operation.

And in some places, we have had to buy HVO and other low emission fuels in a transition period. On the safety side, very happy to see that the efforts we have to improve land safety are starting to pay off. After twelve, eighteen months of very focused efforts, hopefully, we can maintain the good traction. Balance between males and females in management, one percentage point improved compared to one year ago. Then moving to the 2025 focus areas and page 16, a short intro.

The majority of our network is upholding performance or improving performance. We have the new agreement with Jersey that will be profitable. We are exiting the Tarifa TangerVille route on our Strait Of Gibraltar business, but the business that remain is performing better than the network, including the Tarifa TangerVille route in 2025. If we look at the logistics division, excluding the newly acquired tests, then on 70% of our revenues, We have a margin of 4.5% EBIT margin up from 2024. And it’s the remaining 30% revenues that we are addressing in our Boost projects.

The tables show that North Sea is on par in terms of performance. Mediterranean, I’ll come back to. Channel Jersey will improve in 2025. Baltic Sea on level and Strait Of Gibraltar improving. In the Logistics division, Nordic is now stabilized after the boost projects have worked.

Continent continue to be challenged with the two areas. Karen mentioned before, UK, Ireland is improving and Turkey, Europe South, I will come back to. So if we turn to page 17, the three focus areas, I know you’ve heard it already, but it is our life adapting Mediterranean turnaround of tests and our logistics boost projects. On page 18, if we start with adapting Mediterranean ferry business to new competitive environment, ore capacity was created on the Istanbul Trieste corridor in September 2024. Pricing dropped dramatically during Q4 twenty twenty four.

In 2025, we have reduced capacity on the corridor. We have also reintroduced price increases first in January, then in March. They have been relatively well received by our customers. And with the capacity reductions and price increases, we are able to maintain reasonable capacity utilization. We are maintaining a reliable high frequency offering from Turkey to Europe, which is something that it seems like especially the large customers are valuing.

We are convinced that we will succeed with getting Mediterranean back on track. But of course, it will only be in Q4 of this year that we will see that we are performing better than the year before because in 2024 there were no competitive pressure in the first two point five quarters. Moving to Page nineteen, TESS, the former Ecol, it’s about rightsizing the network and adapting equipment to the size of the business. We took over 3,700 employees. To date, this has been reduced to around 3,000 and this has come from office employees in Turkey, also office employees in countries that we have closed.

And then it has come from reduction of fleet where we have reduced 400 trucks and corresponding drivers. We have also reduced locations across the eight countries, some of them already and some of them in progress. So with this, we are seeing clearly improvement in run rate losses and a conviction that the turnaround to a around zero result in November is still on track. Finally, Page 20, logistics boost projects

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: progressing

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: struggling with both the Brexit Phase three and the fruit and mouth disease mentioned before. But those two, Ghent and the fresh meat from Germany, Holland into The U. K. Are the main outstanding issues as we look to the coming quarters in logistics. So with that, turning to page 22, outlook 25.

Amidst the evolving macro and market changes, we don’t expect much help from the market growth. Of course, uncertainty is increased by U. S. Policy shifts. We continue to see growth from Mediterranean and North Africa.

We assume road transport markets will remain highly competitive, although we see some ease of surplus capacity. And in the passenger markets, see them overall stable. Channel in principle still have some leftover growth from COVID that we hope to see materializing during the high season this year. Turning to Page 23. Our EBIT outlook is overall unchanged.

Despite a terrible quarter, we knew that this quarter was coming and it has not changed our outlook. We will have growth in revenue of around 5% to come from some organic growth and then a relatively large impact from the net of acquisitions, divestments primarily in Turkey. The Ferry division has raised its outlook from €900,000,000 to €1,000,000,000 EBIT. And conversely, Logistics division has lowered its outlook from 300,000,000 to €200,000,000 Operating CapEx, 1,600,000,000.0 unchanged, but net now 1,500,000,000 due to the cash flow from the total constructive loss ferry. And free cash flow continued to be around €1,000,000,000 as well.

Key priorities, I guess they are clear from the walkthrough of this deck, but we want to protect and grow our underlying network and this is a lot of focus on organic growth. We have our three specific turnaround focus areas that are on track and that we will keep focusing on. In addition, we have a general cost focus. We have a very specific cash flow focus. And we continue to deliver on our green transition and diversity targets.

With that, we hand over for the to the operator for Q and A.

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: We will now begin the question and answer session. We have a first question from the line of Rory Kulinane from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Rory Culinane, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Yes. Good morning. Rory Culinane, RBC. The first question, yes, following the price increases in March, when would your when would you next expect to change prices potentially on the Mediterranean? Secondly, on the full year 2025 guidance, I’d just be interested to know what contribution you’re factoring in from the turnaround measures.

Could you talk around the sensitivities around your guidance? What could spark you to need to upgrade or downgrade the guidance? And then finally, in terms of working capital, is the factoring programs that motivated by a desire to keep covenant headroom comfortable? And I wondered if you had considered asking for a temporary covenant waiver at H1 alternatively as in the pandemic? Thank you.

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: Thank you, Rory. The projections for BU Med are driven by I guess, two main elements: the adaptation of the capacity to the demand and then a price recovery trajectory. The price measures that we want to implement in 2025 have already been communicated to our customers. So we are pretty knowledgeable about the adaptation of those among our customers. The second part is then the cost measures through adaptation of capacity.

So far, we have been quite accurate in seeing the volumes that our customers are bringing to us and have been able to match the capacity. We have planned reductions later in the year. So when you ask about the certainty here, there’s little risk in terms of price increases because they are already we already know how the adaptation rate of those are. So it is more if we are able to manage capacity with demand. And there the swings are less you can say if we get it a little bit wrong and we are able to then also fairly quickly adjust should we be wrong.

So I’ll say that the certainty of our BU Med numbers going into our outlook for 2025 are fairly certain. I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s what we then have in mind is further price recovery in 2026 because we will not be fully back to normal in 2025. If you then look at the factoring question, it’s we have seen our net working capital deteriorate somewhat also due to the Mediterranean situations. And we felt that given how factoring was available to us, we can see it’s relatively commonly applied at least in Danish large cap companies that it made sense for us. The cost of the factoring is less than our normal financing.

And it would indeed help our adjusted free cash flow. It would indeed help our leverage situation. There’s no concern in relation to our leverage. I think we mentioned somewhere in the report that we have a plus 25% headroom to our current leverage covenants with the banks. But of course, the factoring has helped achieve that headroom.

Rory Culinane, Analyst, RBC Capital Markets: Great. Thank you.

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: We now have a question from the line of Ulrik Back from Danske Bank. Please go ahead.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: Yes. Hi, Tobin and Karen. A couple of questions from my side. I’ll take them one by one. So firstly, you state that the Mediterranean ferries segment reported a negative EBIT of around €200,000,000 in Q1.

How does that compare to Q4? And it would be very helpful if you could perhaps split that negative contribution by month from January to March and perhaps also share what the trend is in April?

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: I think we reported a swing from last year of €200,000,000 in EBIT for The Mediterranean. And that, of course, gives an indication of what the full impact of the competitive entry has been to DFDS. There is some seasonality, but it’s not completely off to multiply that by a factor four. And that is, of course, quarter by quarter going to reduce as the capacity adaptation and the price increases are kicking in. And in Q4 of this year, we will perform above Q4 last year.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: Okay. Understood. And then also on the Mediterranean segment. So the current status of the competitive environment, how would you define that? Is it I guess it’s not far from stable at the moment, but it has improved compared to where we were in Q4.

So also back to the question about price increases. So is it correctly understood that you are not planning to increase prices further compared to what you did on March 1?

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: That’s not entirely correct. But the price increases we have planned have already been communicated to our customers.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: So when will that come into effect?

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: I think that’s too specific Ulrik. But they will come during the year and the customers have been informed. Whether this is a stable competitive situation, we are making adjustments to our fleet based on the capacity need we can see. Customers have not welcomed our price increases, but they seem to continue to send their cargo to us. We can also see that the competition is picking up cargo.

Some is converted from land. But whether it’s a stable situation, we don’t know. For us, it’s we have a good demand supply situation inside our business. And that’s what we are fully focused on maintaining now going forward the next three quarters.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: Okay. And then to your ferric guidance increase of DKK 100,000,000, is that perhaps just put some more words about your state that it reflects improved trading in several areas. So it’s not only Mediterranean, which is perhaps going a bit better. So what else is in there?

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: Karen, you may want to add, but I think Strait Of Gibraltar is definitely performing really well as one element. And then it’s a number of smaller improvements across the network.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: Okay. And then final question from my side. You have a comment about P and O increasing capacity and increased competition in the North Sea segment, I believe. How should we think about that? And also combined with comments about a weak European automotive sector, are you doing anything about your capacity or pricing to reflect those movements?

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: No. It’s in the already P and O is already available in that corridor. Maybe it’s highlighting it too much, but it’s just to illustrate that growth is low between what we call North Sea, South and The U. K. And there are many operators.

So it is hard to see price increases and improved results through. On the other hand, we are saying that our North Sea operation is relatively stable. P and O is not directly in our corridors, but of course there can be spillover effects. And we just note that there is some addition of capacity. P and O also has a captive logistics arm.

So a lot of the volumes are catered from their P and O Ferrymaster logistics arm.

Ulrik Back, Analyst, Danske Bank: Understood. Thank you so much.

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: There are no more questions at this time. I would like to turn the line back over to Mr. Tom Carlson for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Torben Karlsen, CEO, DFDS: Thank you very much. Thank you for listening in. We know it’s tough times for DFDS, so we appreciate your support and interest. As I mentioned in the introduction, we are completely focused on executing on actions that will improve our financial performance in Q2 and the rest of the year. You can rest assured that improving the financial leverage is also a top priority.

Thank you very much for joining the call and your questions. Look forward to speaking to you again soon. Have a good day.

Conference Operator, Chorus Call: Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.