Sartorius AG

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sartorius and Sartorius Stedim Biotech conference call and live webcast on H1-2026. I'm Moritz, your chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. 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. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Petra Muller, Head of Investor Relations of Sartorius. Please go ahead.

Thank you and hello and a warm welcome from my side. So today I'm joined by our CEO Michael Grosse, by Florian Funck, our CFO, by Rene Faber, Head of our Bioprocessing Division and CEO of Sotorius Delin Biotech, and also by Alexandra Gatzemeyer, Head of our Lab Products and Services Division. As always, we will start with prepared remarks followed by the Q&A session. The call is scheduled to last one hour. As usual, please limit your questions to one so that as many of you as possible can take part. In case we have some time at the end, we are, of course, happy to take on follow-on questions. I'd like to point out 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 pleased to hand over to our CEO, Michael Grosse.

Michael, please go ahead. Thank you, Petra. And a very warm welcome from my side as well. When I look back at the first half year, I'd say it's been an encouraging six months for Sartorius, during which we continued our profitable growth trajectory. We did have a solid top line growth, we've improved profitability, and we've generated strong cash flow. Before turning to the H1 business performance, let me share one personal observation. Over the past few months, I've spent a lot of time meeting customers around the world and what struck me was the incredible level of innovation, investment activity and optimism right across the industry. I talked to CEOs, COOs and procurement executives across all regions. My key takeaway is that the demand for high-performance single-use products, reagents and technology to substantially improve productivity and total cost of ownership is bigger than ever before. Leveraging AI to drive a step change in speed of drug discovery and in productivity of bioprocessing is becoming a must. Those conversations have really enforced my confidence that this is an exciting time for our industry and that the long-term growth drivers for our market remain very strong. Our technologies play a critical role in enabling customers to develop and manufacture the next generation of biologics. from biosimilars and increasingly sophisticated antibody processes to anti-drug conjugates, as well as cell and gene therapies. Also, AI-driven solutions can help further accelerate workflows, especially in the laboratory environment, and it's truly encouraging to see how open our customers are to this. I know these are exactly the areas where we are exceptionally well-positioned. were the right portfolio and the right strategy to capture those opportunities and deliver profitable growth and sustainable shareholder value. Okay, now let's move on to the H1 performance test. Group sales revenues on operational basis increased by 7.7% in H1, supported by healthy underlying demand across both divisions, recurring business, stays the main driver, showing an increase of slightly more than 9%, while the equipment business was going around 2%. This clearly demonstrates that the underlying momentum of the business is indeed intact. In bioprocessing solutions, we delivered 8.3% growth on an operational basis in constant currencies, with consumables continuing to be the primary driver. Importantly, equipment stabilized and even returned to slight growth in H1. That's an important milestone because it reinforces our view that the bottom is behind us. I'm particularly pleased with the performance in the lab products and services. Their momentum continued to build following the return to growth in the second half of last year. say it's increased by 5.3% on an operational basis in constant currencies, supported by gradually improving end markets, and a contribution of 2.8 percentage points from the MATEC acquisition last year. Let's have a quick look at profitability. On group level, higher volumes and operating leverage translated into improved profitability. The underlying EBITDA margin on group level improved to 30.3%, and Florian will go into details a bit later on. Let me briefly talk about the recent developments related to the U.S. tariffs. Shortly before the end of Q2, we received a substantial portion of the reimbursements for previously paid U.S. tariffs that had been declared not in line with existing law in February of this year. While we applied for those refunds, the timing and ultimate outcome had remained uncertain. As we work with our customers in a sense of partnership, we intend to compensate customers for tariff surcharges. Well, that's all good news. But as you can imagine, it does have an effect on a reported revenue growth. However, and this is the really important point, it does not change the underlying economics of our business. Operationally, our business continues to perform well and is absolutely in line with our expectations from the beginning of this year. Now let's move on. Beyond growth and profitability, we also made good progress on the financial priorities laid out in the beginning of the year. Cash flow development was particularly strong, with free cash flow being significantly up. Our leverage ratio improved further, underscoring our commitments to financial discipline and a strong balance sheet. Let me spend a minute on what we are currently seeing in our end markets, because this is probably one of the questions we got asked most frequently. Overall, I'm really encouraged by what we see. Several areas where demand was muted over the last two years have either stabilized or are now recovering. This is visible in the equipment business, which has stabilized, and where the order book supports a credible path to slight growth throughout the remainder of this year. It's also evident in China where the recovery in bioprocessing continued into the second quarter and where we are also increasingly seeing signs of a turnaround in laboratory instruments demand, supported by ongoing R&D activity. More broadly, biotech funding remains supportive and is increasingly translating into customer spending. While uncertainty in academia has eased and business activity continues to hold up well. Building on this, let me now turn to our outlook. Based on the current business development and the improved visibility, we confirm our guidance, which also reflects the tariff-related impacts, which I tried to describe shortly. We expect group sales revenue to grow by 5% to 9%, and underlying EBITDA margin to be slightly above 30% at group level. Now let me share a few thoughts on innovation. I'm pleased with the progress we've made on our organic growth initiatives, including new product launches. One development I'm particularly excited about is the progress we are making with Pionic. We reached an important milestone with the launch of the two final modules, Pionic Quad and Cross, enabling customers to run now a fully integrated continuous downstream process. Customer adoption continues to expand into clinical and commercial CG&P manufacturing, with systems supporting a growing range of modalities, including antibody drug conjugates, following a recent customer win across all major regions. Customer interest remains very strong, and demand continues to exceed our initial expectations. Another launch was the new vessel of our high-throughput EMBA 250 bioreactor platform. which generated structured, high-quality process data for increasingly digital and AI-supported cell therapy development workflows. This further strengthened AMBER's position as the industry standard platform for process development, including next-generation therapeutic modalities. In the lab division, we launched Cubis 3, the latest generation of our premium laboratory balance platform. The new system combines best-in-class weighing performance with enhanced connectivity and digital compliance capabilities, supporting increasingly automated and data-driven laboratory workflows. And last but not least, IntuSight. which remains a strong success story with growing adoption of our AI image analysis tool across academic and pharmaceutical customers, including three new top 10 pharma customers this year. Recently, research at Leiden University in the Netherlands with our IncuSight further highlighted the potential of AI-driven analysis to improve drug safety testing. Now, what are these examples all in common? They all show our clear focus on helping customers simplify workflows, generate better data, and operate more efficiently. This is exactly the type of innovation we highlighted at our Capital Markets Day and a key pillar of our long-term growth strategy. With that, I will turn the call over to Florian for financial highlights. Please, Florian.