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The Unnamed Company reported a robust performance in Q4 2024, with a 60% increase in volume and a 44% year-on-year revenue growth. Despite these gains, the company faced challenges with a decline in EBITDA per kilo to -€3.4. The company ended the year with €8.8 million in liquidity and completed a €14 million equity raise in January 2025. According to InvestingPro data, the company’s current market capitalization stands at just $0.59 million, with a concerning current ratio of 0.62, indicating potential liquidity challenges. The company’s overall Financial Health Score of 2.05 is rated as "Fair" by InvestingPro’s comprehensive analysis system.
Key Takeaways
- Q4 2024 volume increased by 60%, surpassing 2,000 tonnes shipped annually for the first time.
- Revenue per kilo was €13.4, a decrease from 2023 levels.
- The company raised €14 million in equity in early 2025.
- The US market comprises 50% of total sales volume.
- Targeting EBITDA breakeven in 2025.
Company Performance
The Unnamed Company showcased significant growth in Q4 2024, with a notable 60% increase in shipping volume. This milestone marked the first time the company surpassed 2,000 tonnes shipped in a year. Revenue growth was strong, increasing by 44% compared to the previous year. However, the company faced challenges with a decrease in revenue per kilo and a decline in EBITDA per kilo to -€3.4.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue growth: 44% year-on-year
- Revenue per kilo: €13.4 (lower than 2023)
- EBITDA per kilo: -€3.4 in Q4
- Liquidity: €8.8 million at year-end
- Equity raise: €14 million in January 2025
Outlook & Guidance
Looking ahead, the Unnamed Company targets reaching EBITDA breakeven in 2025. The company plans to achieve full production capacity and expects continued volume growth. Potential expansions in the US (Maine) or the Netherlands are also on the horizon. The focus remains on high-value food service segments, particularly in Europe and the US. InvestingPro subscribers can access detailed analysis of the company’s growth potential through exclusive ProTips and comprehensive financial metrics, including the company’s Fair Value estimate and growth scores. Get access to over 30 additional key metrics and insights with InvestingPro.
Executive Commentary
"We have increased our production significantly. We have increased our sales," said Vincent, highlighting the company’s operational achievements. Jean Charles added, "We continue to target EBITDA breakeven during 2025," emphasizing the company’s financial goals. Vincent also reaffirmed their commitment to the U.S. expansion plan.
Risks and Challenges
- Potential 25% tariffs could impact US market expansion.
- Decreasing revenue per kilo could affect profitability.
- Achieving full production capacity by 2025 may face operational challenges.
- Economic conditions and market demand fluctuations in key regions.
- Maintaining sustainability metrics and certifications amidst growth.
Q&A
No questions were asked during the earnings call due to technical issues.
Full transcript - King Digital Entertainment PLC (KING) Q4 2024:
Vincent, CEO or Senior Executive: Okay. Hi. Again, we had some feedback that a lot of people were not able to get into this meeting. So we went through our whole presentation, but I think it’s not fair that so many people missed out on it through probably IT problems which we are not exactly understand what happened. So I think it’s fair to do it again.
And I hope you still bear with us our excuses for these hiccups. So with that then, I would like to go to our highlights of 2024. First of all, of course, welcome, everyone. We are very pleased to share with you our fourth quarter results. By way of highlights, I would like to mention that in Q4, we achieved a 60% volume increase of our sales.
And for the first time, we surpassed 2,000 tonnes of shipped volume in the year. Our operational EBITDA improved by €1 per kilo in the year and Sean Charles will comment further on that. Meanwhile, at the December, we initiated a biomass adjustment plan, which by now we have almost concluded and I will speak to that later. And finally, we executed a fully underwritten million private placement equity raise, which was concluded at the end of this year and had a broad support of our shareholder base. This has strengthened the company’s financial foundation and it will support the acceleration of our sales towards full farm capacity.
Moving on to production then, going a little bit more in detail. In the fourth quarter, our biomass production remained stable at six forty one tonnes, which is very similar to the levels we had before. But our standing biomass reached the level of eleven twenty tonnes, which is actually more than is optimal for production. And I’ll come back to that. Production successfully met the various size requirements of our clients but we noted an increasing demand for larger sized fish.
Before for us a large sized fish was three kilos of three plus Now our customers are asking us for four plus and even five plus which we are able to meet to a certain degree these larger sized fish. As we advance with our fourth generation of fish on the farm which we expect to grow faster, we believe we can also in the future meet demand for larger sized fish while the production time will remain the same. As in the quarter before, we continue to control biomass production to growth basically. As I mentioned, we had too much biomass on the farm. This control of growth resulted in higher than desirable feed conversion rate.
We did expect that under the circumstances, but it is not exactly where we want to be. And this brings us to the action we have taken to improve that, a biomass reduction plan. The back in December, we decided to reduce this biomass from eleven twenty tonne to a more optimal level of around 900 tonne, which we wanted to reach by the end of the first quarter in twenty twenty five. And as mentioned, we are actually there now we have done that. This biomass volume of around 900 ton is sufficient to produce the harvest that we want harvest level that we want to reach this year and it will help us to improve our production KPIs.
So to reduce biomass, we’ve taken out a certain amount of small fish, one kilograms fish out of our farm and we have filleted most of them and frozen them for sales as frozen fillets. We also at the same time aggressively promoted the sales of small fish in certain retail sectors and that went actually quite well. But as a result, we have accounted for a 1,200,000.0 reduction in the fair value of our biomass at the end of Q4 twenty twenty four and will say something more about that. If we move on to sales, when we compare with the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three, we actually increased our volume by 62%, which is I would say very nice large step. This was driven by our enhanced sales capabilities and our focus now is very much on food service and we have made good progress in the food service sector both in Europe and in The U.
S. And it will continue to do so. Year on year, our revenue growth was 44% through higher volumes, although some of those volumes were sold at lower prices than the year before and I will come back on that in the next slide. Tariffs, of course, is the word that we see in every headline. Now today, they may also happen on seafood in The U.
S. We do not for sure, we hope not, but it could happen. The U. S. Is about 50% of our total sales volume.
If indeed tariffs would happen and if they would be in the order of 25%, it will be tough to grow volumes as fast as we plan to in The U. S. So we will then have to focus more on Europe as we do today. But it remains to be seen what Mr. Trump will do.
When it comes to price and size mix, the revenue per kilo in the quarter was €13.4 This was lower as you can see in the graph than in 2023. This change in revenue is mostly the result of strong promotional activity in retail and mostly of small fish. When it comes to larger size fish, prices remained resilient despite some of the launch initiatives we did with new customers to get the product into the market. The full year revenue per kilogram was down from in the year before. And again, this result was this decrease was mainly a result of promotional activity.
The push to now we’re just still on the previous slide but okay. The push to reduce the number of small fish also resulted in an increased proportion of small sized fish in our mix. It went up to 51% in the last quarter. We think from here on we will see an increase of the portion of large sized fish as we have no longer excess small sized fish in our farm. And with that, I’d like to hand over to Jean Charles who will focus on the finances.
Jean Charles, CFO or Finance Executive: Yes, thanks Vincent and good afternoon everyone. Let’s start with our production cost. Our production cost in Q4 remained above our target levels. Also we’ve started to see a positive downward trend. The main driver continues to be our FCR which stayed above normal.
This was primarily due to the biomass growth control measures we maintained throughout the quarters and these measures put some pressure on efficiency. That said, we’ve also see some improvement in other key production indicators. We are still benefiting from lower feed price. This is largely thanks to falling raw material cost, particularly fish meal and fish oil and the strong partnership we’ve built with multiple feed suppliers over the past two years. These collaborations are now really paying off, delivering better quality feed, improved biological performance and lower cost.
It’s also worth mentioning that we haven’t yet fully captured the global drop in feed prices, so we expect further benefits in the near term. Energy prices have remained mostly stable in the quarter with a few temporary spikes in the spot price late in Q4 but also into early Q1 twenty twenty five but without major impact for us for the time being. Outside of feed and energy, we’ve continued to keep both other fixed and other viable cost when under control and supported by several operational efficiency initiatives. Regarding profitability, this is our top financial priority and this remains achieving positive EBITDA in the short term. Q4 was a challenging quarter despite the strong volume growth that Vincent mentioned, we’ve invested significantly to open new markets and build relationship with new customers and this included promotional efforts and launch related pricing activities.
So we have also now a fully staffed and strengthened sales and marketing team in place. We spent 1,000,000 more in 2024 on sales and marketing than in 2023 and particularly in the third and fourth quarter of this year. Another factor impacting Q4 profitability was the cost of the fish harvested during the quarter, which reflected elevated production cost incurred throughout 2024. As a result, EBITDA per kilo declined compared to q three to minus 3.4 per per kilo. A quick note on the biomass reduction plan Vincent mentioned earlier, to accelerate the reduction of the biomass by approximately 300 metric tons by the end of Q1, we are investing a significant number more than normal of small fish.
These small fish will be sold fresh or frozen via special channels at a lower price point. And this has led to a write down of the biomass value by 1,200,000 that we recorded in the last quarter of last year. So in our managerial P and L that you can see in the press release, this write down is treated as a one off exceptional item. So despite this challenging quarter, the outlook remains unchanged. We continue to target EBITDA breakeven during 2025 and to get there we are focusing on four key levers.
First one is scaling to full capacity. This remains our most powerful lever over half of our cost base is fixed and in 2024, we sold around 50% of our capacity. We are now running closer to two third and we plan to ramp up to full capacity very quickly. With volume growth exceeding 60% in Q4, we think we’ve demonstrated strong commercial traction for the product and we expect this momentum to continue into 2025 to fully benefit from the scaling effect. Secondly, that focusing on high value segment, we are prioritizing large fish sales to food service customers because that’s a segment with a strong growth, strong growth potential and also very attractive margin.
So also here we’ve done very good progress in the last quarter of the year showing very strong growth in this segment. On the biological performance, we also see significant upside in this area with the biomass reduction program completed in the course of Q1, we should soon be operating at much more optimal level than we have been in 2024. This should result in stronger biological performance in the near term. We also expect gains from the fourth generation of fish that we introduced in the farm recently in the course of q four and we will continue to benefit from ongoing R and D programs and also innovation that we are introducing in the farm. And last but not least, the cost discipline, we continue to keep a very tight grip on cost.
The last two years, we’ve learned a lot from new activities and pilot that we have conducted in both commercial and operational areas. And we learned a lot from the success but also from the challenges we faced in these areas, and now that really help us to allocate resources to the areas which are most likely to yield the best retail. So we are really focusing on cost control, but also very good resource allocation to have the quickest return possible. So as an illustration of the cost control and the resource allocation, we did some strategic review in, at the end of last year. And at the we finally decided to consolidate the hatchery operation in The Netherlands.
You know that over the past few years, we maintained a pilot hatchery at our US site to secure the boost stock and to to support future production in The US. But in parallel, we’ve significantly expanded our hatchery capacity in The Netherlands through our phase two project. We have a new state of the art facility that was commissioned in early twenty twenty three and is now the world largest yellowtail actuary. This actuary has performed exceptionally well for for almost two years delivering very high quality consistent output and also successfully raising the first generation expansion project is still pending a final investment decision due to the ongoing legal proceedings, we’ve explored alternative ways to ensure fingerlings supply, once the operation commence, start in the in The US. So we are confident we can deliver eggs or fingerlings from The Netherlands to The US should the dedicated actually not be operational when we start production in The US.
So as a result of this strategic consolidation in The Netherlands, we’ve impaired also The US actuary related assets, fixed assets, leased asset, and, different tax asset by approximately 1,200,000.0, and we recorded an exceptional provision for restructuring for an amount which is quite immaterial. It’s really important to to stress that this decision to consolidate the actuary in The Netherlands then does not impact the broader US expansion plan, which remains unchanged and Vincent will provide more detail on this in the next few slides. Regarding our cash position and liquidity, the the cash usage in 2024 was primarily driven by two factors and also in the last quarter of the year. First, the working capital increase we’ve seen a real strong buildup of working capital, particularly biomass and frozen inventory amounting for the whole year to about €5,000,000. And this is more than what we expected, but also this is more than what we need for normal operation.
The second driver of the of the cash usage for the full year and for q four are the CapEx we incurred the remaining phase two capital expenditure mainly related to the completion of the processing facility in Q1 but also the completion or the connection to the grid and the completion of some facilities outside of the farm. So we now expect inventory and biomass levels to normalize over the next few quarters, especially for the frozen inventory. We’ve brought a dedicated sales manager for frozen product line, which is already helping us to accelerate that channel development and reduce the frozen inventory. Also with the biomass reduction plan, we expect the biomass to reduce significantly starting in q one from this year. On the CapEx front, now phase two is fully completed.
It’s behind us and we completed it in line with the plan and the budget we had. So going forward, capital expenditure in ’25 will be focused exclusively on the farm CapEx and will be significantly lower than in 2024. So we’ve ended the year with 8,800,000.0 in liquidity and available financing facilities. But on top of that, we recently in January, we completed the 14,000,000 equity rate that we announced late December of twenty twenty four with a full support from all our key shareholders. So this is a strong signals of trust in our strategy and the execution.
So to wrap up, this quarter marks the first tangible results of the strategic steps we took in 2023 and early twenty twenty four, particularly the reinforcement of our sales team. And these efforts are now driving some results with the volume growth accelerating very strongly in Q4 to over 60%. While we are not yet at EBITDA breakeven, we have a clear and actionable path to profitability. The four key levers are in place and our focus now is on executing again this plan and reaching our target in the course of 2025. So with that, I’ll hand it back to Vincent.
Vincent, CEO or Senior Executive: Thanks, Charles. So expansion, I think in previous presentation also we have been working on two different options. One in Maine where we have a permit to build facility with a capacity of up to 8,900 tonnes and the other one is here in Holland. Again, as also we’ve commented before when we received all our permits by the end of twenty twenty two, beginning of ’20 ’20 ’3, those permits were appealed, both the municipal permit and the state permit. We went through several court cases, we have won all those cases.
However, we are still awaiting the final decision of the business court of Maine on the state license. The hearing was in June and frankly, we had expected a final judgment earlier, but it should come soon. So we expect to have a final decision by a judge within the next couple of months and we expect it to be in our favor. In spite of these almost two years delays, more than two years delays now, we remain committed to U. S.
Expansion plan and there’s no change there. However, in the meantime, we have been sort of paralyzed with The U. S. Project. We have been working on our Phase III project in The Netherlands, and we’ve been working on a design to increase production here by another 2,500 maybe even 3,500 tonne.
We submitted a permit request somewhere in 2023. We have cleared the permit basically with all but one entity and that is the local municipality with whom we are in discussion about road access. I really expect to be come to a favorable agreement there pretty soon and then a construction permit for Phase three here in Holland should be issued. In the meantime, we have been working on the design. Of course, we build Phase II.
We’ve had it in operations for a year and a half now. And again, there are many learnings and again, we have seen that we can do better in the next round. So we’ve been working on a design for a Phase three, which is also applicable in The United States, where we basically increase the size of all units, where we focus on simplicity, simplicity in terms of operations, simplicity in terms of maintenance and most importantly on a lower CapEx cost per kilo. We’ve done a sort of phase one or first step of the design in LOD100 as a scope. We’re still not totally satisfied.
We’re going to do more work. We want to see how we can do even better than although that already looks better again than what we built before. We think we can still do better so we keep working on that while we are waiting for one of these permits to come through. So we continue working on expansion and as soon as we also here in our current operation meet the targets that we have set ourselves when it comes to sales and when it comes to cost, etcetera, we would move on with an expansion either in The U. S.
Or here in Holland. Talking about sustainability, back in 2020, we set ourselves targets to achieve over the next five years for several KPIs amongst others, the forage fish dependency ratio and the CO2 produced per kilogram fish produced. The yellow line on this in this presentation here shows the 2025 target. On both you can see we have actually beaten the target already. When it comes to CO2, we did decrease production further in 2024 from 5.2 to 4.2 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram produced.
And on the fish forest dependency ratio, it actually remains stable. Although we reduced fish meal and fish oil in our feeds and also used more fish meal and fish oil from fish processing waste, the positive effect of this was offset by the higher feed conversion rate. So we stayed where basically where we were before. We do expect that with this biomass reduction, we will get a lower feed conversion rate and then this number should also improve further. When it comes to the numerous certifications we have, we have renewed all of them in either 2024 or just here at the beginning of twenty twenty five.
The requirements for these certifications become more and more stringent year on year, but I’m glad to report that we have passed the grade everywhere also in the last round of certifications. And with that, maybe let me summarize the presentation by looking at the main takeaways. So first, the performance in 2024 has given us further confidence in the strength of our production platform. We have increased our production significantly. We have increased our sales.
And once we have lowered our biomass, I think we also further increase our production KPIs. We are seeing momentum building up in our sales. We expect also that volumes in 2025 will be significantly higher than in 2024. And within the next two years, we hope to get to maximum production capacity of this facility. We are in ’25.
We remain very focused on our current operations, but we do continue to prepare preparations for expansion in another location or in this location here in the nearby future. This morning, we presented we published our annual report. I would encourage it’s on our website. I would encourage you to take a look at it. It provides much more details on the issues we have probably on the things we have just discussed.
And also, it, of course provides all the details on the financials, especially when it comes to sustainability and R and D. I think there’s some really interesting materials in there which I encourage you to take a look at. And with that, thank you for your attention and support as we continue our journey. We will be looking forward to build on our current results and continue our growth trajectory. Very sorry for the IT hiccups.
I’m extremely glad most of you hang in there or have hung in there. And we’re able to see our the second time we did our presentation. And now then, we are ready to take your questions. So if you’d like to ask a question, please unmute, state your name and the organization you represent and go ahead. Does it work?
Can you also use a chat on it? You can also. No. It seems that there are no question. I do hope this is not due to another IT hiccup.
If so, if you have any question also, please feel free to write to our investor relations and email, which you’ll find on our website. And we’ll be happy to answer any question that you may have in writing. And we’ll come back to you very fast on that. Again, frankly, I hope my excuses for the IT hiccup, but I’m glad that most of you have been able to participate in our presentation. And thank you so much and see you again in a couple of months.
Jean Charles, CFO or Finance Executive: Thank you.
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