A tough year amid rapidly changing market conditions
2024 was a sobering and intense year for Umicore, our shareholders and employees. It was also a year of resilience and agility. We adapted to challenges, adjusted our leadership team and initiated the strategic review of our Battery Materials business. At the same time, we demonstrated and reaffirmed our strong foundations in materials technology and in dealing with critical metals which continue to serve us well.
The headwinds in the developing electric vehicle market, marked by a sharp slowdown in demand growth for electric cars and mounting geopolitical and regulatory complexities, had its repercussions on the entire value chain, including on our Battery Materials activity.
The outcome of the strategic review will be shared at our Capital Markets Day in March 2025. In the meantime, we decisively took action. We implemented efficiency and cost measures and focused on disciplined capital allocation.
We brought down capital expenditures to €555 million, well below the €650 million we had initially planned. Operational and financial efficiencies added more than €100 million to our 2024 EBITDA, above the €70 million we had set out to achieve. We took difficult decisions. These involved impairing 1.6 billion EUR from our Battery Materials business and cost savings impacting 260 positions Group-wide, primarily affecting our people at the Jiangmen plant in China and at our corporate and R&D activities in Belgium. We prioritized maximizing the use of our battery materials plants in Poland and Korea and to serve our strong customer contracts from this agile footprint, before any further expansion. This decision led us to pause our Canadian battery materials project in Loyalist, Ontario.
Regardless of these challenges, our foundation businesses – Recycling, Catalysis and Specialty Materials – continued to perform robustly, generating strong cash flows and returns.
Confidence in the future
As we continue to navigate a volatile environment, we remain focused on delivering returns on our investments and on preserving a strong balance sheet in an uncertain macro-economic and geopolitical environment. This entails a continued alignment of our operations to optimize capacity utilization, further cost management and efficiencies.
For 2025, we presently expect adjusted EBITDA to range between €720 and €780 million, compared to €763 million in 2024. Given the overall context, the Supervisory Board proposed to reduce the 2024 dividend to €0.50 a share.
2025 will be pivotal for Umicore as we are laying the groundwork for a solid path forward. We are eager to demonstrate that we have again true value creation potential by delivering materials solutions that are essential in a move towards a more sustainable world.
We will do this by fully leveraging what we know makes Umicore unique: our strong foundations in materials science and application knowhow combined with our circular business model.
Our success will, first and foremost, be driven by the hard work, deep knowledge and dedication of our employees across the globe. We thank them all for their efforts and commitment over the past year. Together with a leaner Executive Leadership Team we will foster an environment where we innovate, collaborate and execute, always putting our Group agenda first. Together we are determined to emerge stronger from the present challenging context and to seize new opportunities in 2025 and beyond.
