Sartorius AG

Welcome to the presentation of Sartorius and Sartorius Stadium Biotech's 9-month 2025 results. Please note that the call is being recorded and streamed on Sartorius' website. Your participation in this implies your consent with this. A replay will be available shortly after the call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Petra Müller, Head of Investor Relations of Sartorius.

Hello, thank you, Matilda, and a warm welcome from my side. I'm joined today by our CEO, Michael Große, by Florian Funk, our CFO, by René Faber, head of our Bioprocessing Division and CEO of Sartorial State and Biotech, and by Alexandra Gatzemeier, head of our Lab Products and Services Division. As always, we will start with prepared remarks followed by a Q&A session. As the call is scheduled for one hour, please limit your questions to two so that as many participants as possible can take part. Please note that management comments during this call will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties for discussion of the risk factors. I encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in our today's documents. All of these are relating to our nine-month figures, and the reporting are available on the website. And with that, I'm pleased to hand over to Michael Grosse, CEO of Sartorius. Michael, the floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Petra, and good afternoon, everyone. A very warm welcome also from my side, and thank you for joining us today. As usual, we will walk you through our operational and financial performance year-to-date, discuss our updated outlook, and for the remainder of the year. Before we drive into the details, let me share a few remarks on my first three months as the CEO of Sartorius AG. Over the past weeks and months, I focused truly on listening and learning, connecting with colleagues and customers, partners around the world to understand their perspectives, expectations, and ideas. These conversations have further strengthened my conviction that Sartoris is indeed a company with a tremendous strength. Outstanding team, deeply respected position in our industry, and significant opportunities for the future. It's been an overwhelming start, I have to say, in the best possible sense. I want to thank all of my colleagues for their warm welcome, their commitment, and the enthusiasm they bring to their work every day. We will continue to evolve our strategy in line with where our customers and the broader biopharma and life science markets are heading. Our shared vision remains unchanged. to simplify progress in biopharma and life science research, enabling better health for more people. This brings me to the key messages that we would like to share with you today. First, we are pleased, and we really mean it by that, not necessarily only about the results, but as well the fact that during this year, 2025, we have been able to say what we do and do what we say. So we are pleased with our results for the first nine months and the progress achieved across the group. Sales grew by 7.5% in constant currencies. Even more encouraging is a significant expansion of our underlying EBITDA margin by two percentage points to 29.7%. And this despite FX headwinds that played an even larger role in Q3. This clearly demonstrates the positive effects of the growing volumes and the operating leverage in our business model, as well as our strong operational performance we had been working on for the last month. The main growth driver was once again the continued strong demand in our consumer business across both divisions. The 12-month rolling book-to-bill ratio was clearly above one and continued to improve sequentially. So, we have now seen nine consecutive quarters of improvement in this ratio. For the bioprocess solutions division, we delivered double-digit growth in the recurring business, which more than offsets the softness in the equipment business, which remains subdued but is stabilizing. In lab products and services, performance improved gradually, as expected, with slight growth in Q3 driven by recurring business. While instruments' demand remains subdued overall, it is more stable, similar to the trend observed in BPS. This development is equally supported by some recent positive momentum in our bioanalytics portfolio, partly driven as well by new product launches, including the updated InQ side version, which is featured on the cover page of this presentation. The leverage ratio was further reduced, underlining our commitment to financial discipline and a stronger balance sheet. Reflecting our confidence in our markets, we specified our full year 2025 guidance for both divisions and the group, now including the effects from tariffs and the MATIC acquisition in summer. For the group, we expect sales revenue to increase by around 7 percent. The underlying EBITDA margin is expected at slightly above 29.5 percent. Overall, Sartoris continues to execute well in line with our commitments and plans, combining innovation leadership with operational excellence and performance. Before handing over to Florian, I would like to make one comment on the 12-month rolling book-to-bill ratio, as many investors have asked how we are thinking about future disclosure of these metrics. We have always commented that this ratio was never intended to serve as a new KPI, replacing order intake, which we stopped reporting at the beginning of this year. We rather viewed it as a helpful metric during the normalization phase. To stay consistent throughout the fiscal year, we will provide a comment again when releasing our full year 2025 numbers. However, with the stocking now being largely completed, we have decided to phase regular communication on this metrics out. Business performance is best reflected in sales, the KPI we guide on, and which is more appropriate for assessing our consumables-dominated business model. Therefore, as of 2026, we will focus on sales revenue as our primary performance indicator and complement this with directional comments on the demand environment. With that, let me hand over to Florian, who will take you through the financials in more detail. Florian, over to you.