Wallenius Wilhelmsen is out with a banging set of quarterly financial results and a huge new lending package as its new chief executive Lasse Kristoffersen settles into his new job.
Along with delivering the third quarter in a row of Ebitda figures over $300m, the company has unveiled an $800m package of vessel-secured sustainability-linked bank financings.
The two bank facilities signed with undisclosed institutions on 30 June have the effect of replacing all Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s outstanding vessel-secured debt, worth some $569m, increasing the company’s fleet of unencumbered ships to 12, and further boosting funds available for “general corporate purposes”.
Along with an already announced NOK 1.5bn ($144m) bond, the facilities are part of Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s already-published “sustainability-linked financing framework”, which incentivises it to reduce CO2 intensity by 27.5% from 2019 to 2030.
“The financings are attractively priced with a link to our CO2 intensity target, and the interest margins will be adjusted on an annual basis,” the company wrote.
“If we achieve the target the margin will reduce [by] 0.05 percentage points for the next year, while if we do not achieve the target the margin will increase [by] 0.05 percentage points for the next year.”
One of the new facilities is a single-bank $200m term loan with a 6.5-year tenor, while the remaining $600m comes from a 10-bank consortium in the form of a term loan and $270m revolving credit facility with a 5.5-year tenor.
Drawdowns did not commence until the beginning of the current quarter, so the new loans are not directly reflected in financial results published today.
Oslo-listed Wallenius Wilhelmsen printed a fat $126m on its bottom line in the quarter just completed, based on $1.19bn total revenue and $311m Ebitda.
Year on year, that post-tax result was over seven times the $17m the company earned in the corresponding quarter of 2021, when it reported $978m total revenue and $170m Ebitda. The total revenue figure represented a 22% increase.
The company reports its results in the three business segments of shipping services, logistics services, and the smaller US military-dominated government services segment.
Shipping accounted for the lion’s share, $968m of the total revenue and $280m of the Ebitda in the second quarter of this year, up from $757m in revenue and $128m in Ebitda in the second quarter of 2021.
Based on an adjusted Ebitda measure the company uses, it reckoned that its Ebitda margin in shipping services was 28.9% in the second quarter, up from 21.5% a year earlier.
But logistics continued to struggle with the effects of the semiconductor shortage, which has constrained business at Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s automobile processing centres.
Quarter two Ebitda in logistics was down by half from a year ago, at $18m compared to $35m, largely because of the automobile sub-segment.
The three most recent quarters have been evenly robust ones in terms of operating results. Ebitda figures have stayed over $300m starting from the fourth quarter of 2021.
On a half-year basis, Wallenius Wilhelmsen turned in $303m in profit after tax on $2.34bn in revenue and $620m in Ebitda for the first half of this year, up from $13m on $1.82bn in revenue and $301m in Ebitda on the first half of 2021.
Former Thorvald Klaveness chief executive officer Kristoffersen was set to present the results today at the company’s headquarters near Oslo, after commencing his duties at Wallenius Wilhelmsen in June.
