Sartorius AG

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sartorius and Sartorius Steeling Biotech conference call and live webcast on Q1 2026. I'm Moritz, your call's call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference has been recorded. A replay will be available shortly after the call. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. I would now like to turn the conference over to Petra Müller, Head of Investor Relations of Sartorius. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, and a warm welcome also from my side. I'm joined today by our CEO, Michael Grossner, by Florian Funk, our CFO, by René Faber, head of the Bioprocessing Division and CEO of Sertori Still in Biotech, and by Alexandra Gatzemeier, head of our LPS Division. As always, we will start with prepared remarks, followed by the Q&A session. As the call is scheduled to one hour, please limit your questions to one 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 risk factors, I encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in today's press release and the presentation. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Michael Sartorius. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you, Petra, and a very warm welcome from my side as well. We are happy with the start of 2026, which is again sort of a transition year. Before turning to the key messages for the quarter, I would like to briefly reflect on the strategic context following our Capital Markets Day a few weeks ago. At the C&D, we provided an update on our strategy and outlined our new midterm financial targets. Since then, the focus has been and is very clearly shifting to execution. The real work begins by consistently translating strategy into tangible results and actions, and the work has already started in line with the evolving needs of our customers, and the broader biopharma and life science markets. Our shared vision remains unchanged to simplify progress in biopharma and life science research, enabling better health for more people. With that context in mind, let me now turn to the key messages we would like to share with you today. We are off to a good start in 2026 and are very pleased with our performance in the first quarter of the year. Things develop well. with a continuous strong recurring business in both divisions. At the same time, underlying EBITDA developed positively year-on-year, and profitability remained resilient. This once again underlines the strength and resilience of our business model, as well as the benefits of our disciplined operational execution. In biopost solutions, sales increased by around 8%, reflecting robot's underlying demand. Consumer momentum remained strong, while equipment was soft as expected, but is anticipated to improve in Q2. Lab products and services showed around 5% sales growth, continuing the pulse of momentum that started in the second half of 2025 already. This development was driven primarily by lab consumables and our bioanalytical portfolio, also including the Mat-Tech acquisition. While instruments' demand remains cautious overall, we continue to expect at least stable development in 2026. Cash flow development was strong year on year. At the same time, we continue to make progress on deleveraging, underlining our clear commitment to financial discipline and a strong balance sheet. In light of our solid start into the year, we confirm our full year 2026 guidance for the group, and we expect sales revenue growth in constant currencies of around 5% to 9%, and an underlying EBDR margin slightly above 30%. Let me now briefly highlight a few innovations launched in Q1 that demonstrate the strong customer demand for Sartori solutions across the biologics value chain. Starting with cell therapy manufacturing. With EVIO, our new cell therapy manufacturing platform, we are addressing one of the key bottlenecks in autologous cell and gene therapy. Scalable, and reliable manufacturing of highly personalized therapies. EVEO enables fully automated multi-parallel production, allowing customers to run up to eight patient batches in parallel and achieve up to four times higher yields compared to conventional approaches. By automating critical process steps and reducing manual handoffs, EVEO also shortens manufacturing cycle times, helping customers move faster from vein to vein, and ultimately accelerate time to patient. At the same time, it will help to reduce footprint, capital intensity, and over-manufacturing complexity, supporting both centralized and decentralized production models. Turning to cell line development, we introduced two complementary innovations aimed at significantly improving speed and efficiency early in the biologics development. The latest generation of our CellSelector platform, CellSelector CLD for cell line development, enables significantly faster and more reliable cell line developments by combining automated imaging, monoclonality verification, and gentle clone isolation in one single system. This reduces manual efforts and uncertainty early in the development, shortens timelines from months to weeks, and strengthens regulatory readiness through integrated documentation and traceability. In parallel, our genetically engineered show-host cell line allows for faster clone development and up to three times higher productivity, supporting robust and scalable manufacturing as biologics pipelines continue to grow in complexity. These innovations once again highlight how Sartorius systematically removes bottlenecks across the biologic value chain, from early development to manufacturing, by helping customers shorten timelines, increase yields, and improve overall process efficiency and cost structures. Well, with that, I'll now hand over to Florian to walk you through our Q1 financials in more detail.