SMA Solar's reports weak Q1 results, strong orders

Source: SMA Solar Technology

German inverter maker SMA Solar Technology AG (ETR:S92) today reported lower revenues and profits for the first quarter of 2017, but said that incoming orders developed “extremely positively”.

High price pressure in all markets and segments in combination with poor weather conditions in key sales markets affected performance in the reporting period, CEO Pierre-Pascal Urbon said. SMA’s net profit was down by 66.5% on the year to EUR 6.3 million (USD 6.8m) and sales contracted by 30.2%. This was in line with the managing board’s forecast from March 29.

The commercial and large-scale photovoltaic (PV) segments brought most of the sales in the period. The top markets for the company included North America, Japan, India, Great Britain and Germany.

All in EUR million, unless specified	Q1 2017	Q1 2016
Sold inverters (in GW)	1.7	2.1
Sales	173.2	248.1
EBITDA	15.9	41.3
EBITDA margin (in %)	9.2	16.6
Net income	6.3	18.8
Earnings per share (in euro)	0.17	0.54
Operating cash flow	41.6	55.5

SMA kept a solid balance-sheet structure, with an equity ratio of 49.5% and high net cash of EUR 413.1 million.

At the end of March SMA had an order backlog of roughly EUR 626 million, of which some EUR 232 million was attributable to the product business. The company will be launching cost-optimised products and solutions on international PV markets in the next months, and present new for comprehensive and fully automatic energy management across various sectors.

Overall, SMA expects to significantly improve its performance in the second half of the year. It reiterated its forecast for sales of EUR 830 million-900 million and EBITDA of EUR 70 million-90 million in the full year. Net cash is seen to stand at between EUR 400 million and EUR 450 million due to high operating cash flow.

(EUR 1 = USD 1.09)

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