Fugro : Full Year Results 2016

Highlights full year

• Year-on-year revenue decline of 24.8% or 22.7% on a currency comparable basis in line with the market
• EBIT margin (excluding exceptional items) decreased from 4.8% to 0.5% mainly due to strong price pressure and lower activity levels in the oil and gas market.
• In the second half of the year EUR 75.5 million impairment losses, onerous contract provisions, restructuring costs and other exceptional items incurred, resulting in total of EUR 227.2 million for full year.
• EUR 186.1 million cash flow from operating activities after investments driven by cost savings, improved cash collection, curtailed capital expenditure and proceeds from asset disposals, resulting in significant net debt reduction.
• Proceeds of EUR 190 million subordinated convertible bonds, which are excluded from covenant requirements, were fully used for early repayments on United States private placement notes.
• Net debt/EBITDA of 1.1 versus covenant requirement of below 3.0.
• Backlog for the next 12 months down 11.6% on a currency comparable basis compared to a year ago and up by 7.3% compared to the third quarter of 2016.
• Outlook 2017: For the first half of the year, Fugro expects further significant decline in revenue, however less severe than in 2016, with ongoing margin pressure. Revenue decline bottoming out towards the latter part of the year. Positive cash flow for the full year.

Impairment losses, onerous contract provisions, restructuring cost and other exceptional items totalling EUR 227.2 million in 2016 compared to EUR 363.0 million in 2015

Paul van Riel, CEO: 'The downturn in our largest market, oil and gas services, continued unabated in 2016. We had to take the painful decision to cut yet more staff positions. We reduced capacity and cost and at the same time we succeeded in strengthening our market positions. This could however not offset increased price pressure. In our building and infrastructure and power market segments we achieved reasonable results. Our focus on cash flow again paid off. We generated substantial cash flow resulting in a significant reduction of net debt.

We took an important step forward in our Building on Strength strategy and regrouped our geotechnical, survey and subsea services activities into a Marine and a Land division with two business lines per division: Site Characterisation and Asset Integrity. This strongly improves our ability to deliver large, integrated service offerings to our clients across all markets, and positively impacts the efficiency of our organisation and utilisation of our assets.

We anticipate that, for the first half of 2017, the offshore oil and gas market will continue to decline significantly. Both the stabilisation of our backlog over the last few months and clear signs that pressure on the oil supply side is beginning to build, indicate that our market may bottom out towards year end.'