All arrows point downward Waterfall – Swedish Dagbladet

CFO Ingrid Bonde and CEO Magnus Hall at the press conference. Photo: Anders Ahlgren

The headsets are sitting on. Magnus Hall, President and CFO Ingrid Bonde is collected on the first bench in what looks like an anonymous cinema. It’s a minute left before they have to get up in the live webcast.

halcyon days of Stureplan is past. We are in administrative office in Solna to get the 2015 results served.

The short version: All arrows are pointing down.

The result landed at minus SEK 19.7 billion, after depreciation the entire 36.8 billion kronor during the year, including 17 billion for the Swedish nuclear power and the entire 19 billion for coal power in Germany.

But the underlying operating profit (without impairment) of plus 20 , 5 billion is 3.6 billion below the 2014 result, despite an extensive savings program. Waterfall economic cases also continued in the final quarter.

– There were really no surprises in the last quarter. No new impairment charges were added, said Ingvar Matsson, who is an analyst at Swedbank continues:

– But they’ve had a tough year. The risks with Vattenfall as a company made up.

– It has been a turbulent year, said CEO Magnus Hall with a wry smile on stage and pointed out that the company has great pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. Despite the increase Waterfall their carbon dioxide emissions during 2015 from 82.3 million tons from 83.5 million tons in 2014.

– Basically, I am not happy with it. But we started up our Moorburginvestering and then increased emissions. There is no investment, we would have done today, says Magnus Hall.

Moorburg is Vattenfall’s new coal plants outside of Hamburg, which began operating in full scale in 2015, says Magnus Hall.Just it the work should be retained. But a big headache for Hall is otherwise Vattenfall’s sale of its German brown coal works.

There are several additional threats ahead. The already low price of electricity looks to drop even more, which is a direct threat to the profitability of all forms of power. Vattenfall must also soon hedge – hedge – its electricity soon, which means large additional costs with falling electricity prices.

And the Swedish nuclear power is a shocker. Vattenfall has already written of SEK 17 billion in 2015 in the Swedish nuclear power and announced that Ringhals 1 and 2 to be closed prematurely. Now flagging Magnus Hall to Vattenfall faces a crossroads: either invest to meet safety or close all Vattenfall’s nuclear power plants in Sweden.

And the press conference turned into an unabashed publicity coup to reduce the so-called power tax 7 cents per kilowatt hour, which together with the low electricity prices make nuclear power production unprofitable.

another big issue is whether there will be further significant depreciation (read profit decreases) if the coal plant turbines market, the sword has fallen sharply against the book value. There did not want CFO Ingrid Bonde comment in detail. She just said that you normally watch amortization requirements in the third quarter of each year, but that if something extraordinary happens, they will look at it before.

– Looking Framar seem electricity prices are low. A question mark is whether there is additional impairment on the Swedish nuclear power and the German coal power, and where the entire sales process of the German coal power should stop, says analyst Ingvar Matsson at Swedbank.