REVENUE UP +0.5% ORGANICALLY - MOBILIZED TO ADAPT TO COVID-19
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SUEZ Group is fully mobilized to ensure the safety of our employees and provide our services, essential to our customers, every day during this global health crisis. Fully aware of our responsibility, our teams can be proud of all they have achieved since the start of this year, which notably materialises into solid results for the first quarter. I wish to thank personally all our employees for their contribution and their involvement.
Their unfailing commitment allows the Group to become even closer to our customers. We can demonstrate daily the solidity of our organization and of our assets as well as the strength of our engagement. Everywhere we ensure reliability and quality in our services.
In the Q1 2020, the impact of the Covid-19 crisis hid a good performance of the Group. In January and February, in most of our geographies, revenue trends were solid in our three segments: Water, Recycling and Recovery, Environmental Tech. and Solutions.
Looking forward, we are working actively to prepare for successful containment exits. In the current context, the challenges we identified when building Shaping SUEZ 2030, the environmental emergency in particular, will be a priority for the economic recovery to come. We remain focused on SUEZ’s transformation - based on selective growth, simplified ways of working and employee engagement, our differentiating strategy brings us the agility we need to adapt. Even if the current environment is complex, I am confident that, over time, the Group’s resilience will be evident to the benefit of all stakeholders.
Bertrand Camus , Chief Executive Officer of SUEZ
The development of the Covid-19 pandemic has led most governments to implement strict containment measures which have impacted trade, travel, and consumers confidence in multiple parts of the global economy.
During the first quarter, all our businesses saw the first impacts from Covid-19, starting in January in China. The impacts on our China business in the first quarter were in line with our expectations.
Elsewhere, by the second half of March, the direct and indirect effects of population containment were apparent in most parts of our business. In summary:
The changes in activity levels are not uniform. There are indeed some geographic areas and also industrial sectors and clients where activity is normal.
We have set up continuity plans in time, and everywhere we operate we are able to guarantee the reliability and quality of our services. Our first and foremost priority is the Health & Safety of our employees. We work to ensure that they get the protection they need to perform the operations, and all our business continuity plans include measures such as the rotation of teams on the ground.
Our teams across the world were able to start to put in place mitigation actions to adjust to lower volumes and lower activity:
In April we’re seeing the full impact of the health crisis on our revenues and profitability compared to an impact of one to two weeks in Q1 outside China. We are better able to assess risk in countries such as Australia and businesses such as WTS and SES which were not much impacted in Q1. We are also able to see the resilience of businesses such as North American water and sectors such as health care at this time. As we reach the end of April we know that the declines in volumes have largely stopped and governments appear determined to drive the progressive exit from containment from May onward.
The reactivity of our teams has enabled us to reduce our costs and capex and we have raised in April nearly €1.5bn of new debt with long maturities and at an attractive cost, taking our liquidity resources pro forma at the end of Q1 2020 to €5.6bn.
It is too early to assess the impact for the rest of the year, but we intend to continue to keep our stakeholders fully informed of developments during this volatile period.
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