Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli AG

Hello everybody here in Kirchberg and hello more than 100 participants online. Welcome to the full year result presentation of Linden Sprüngli 2025. I will walk you quickly through the highlights of 2025 and we'll have a deeper look at the original performance, then I hand over to our CFO Martin Hug. He will give us an explanation on the financial results and explain the progress that we made in sustainability. And then I will outline our growth agenda and the outlook for this year and for the years to come. And then we will open the floor for questions and answers. We grew 12.4% last year. the strongest organic sales growth with the exception of the recovery after COVID. We achieved 5.9 billion Swiss francs turnover. We improved our EBIT slightly by 20 basis points to 16.4% or 971 million Swiss francs. Our earnings per share increased by 8.5%. Our free cash flow was in line with our expectations slightly lower than our long-term guidance at 7.5% due to the higher value of the inventories. We operated in a challenging environment. It's not a surprise for any one of you. The cocoa price volatility forced us for the last four years to increase our prices overall in the area of more than 40%. Geopolitical tensions had an impact on consumer sentiment. Global trade wars and tariffs also gave us a tough time. do the calculations and we saw a clear consumer behavior change. Consumers had to tighten the belt and consumer sentiment, as mentioned, was weak across the globe. We continue to ramp up our global expansion. As you know, we generate 87% of our sales in Europe and in North America, and we bring out the seeds to cover the white spots on the map, so we opened branches in Bulgaria, signed a joint venture in Saudi Arabia, Open subsidiaries in UAE, in India, created a logistic hub in China to shorten the supply chain, create hubs for co-packing so that we are more flexible and can sell fresher products. And we signed an agreement with a retail operator in Malaysia, and we will see results pretty soon there. Our global retail division in general was again, once more, a growth engine of our company with 20.8% growth, mainly driven by com store growth, so like-for-like growth in the existing stores, but also benefiting from the expansion and opening of 53 new stores. So altogether, our store network is now 621 stores globally. We opened not only more stores, but also premiumized and upgraded our stores. This means bigger stores in more prominent locations. The best examples were for sure the Piccadilly Circus store that we opened in March last year and in autumn in Vienna, 500 square meter stores in the best location, Kärntenstraße 1 on two floors. with very promising results. And as mentioned, we also enter into new countries with our retail division as a spearhead. With Dubai Style Chocolate, we were the first big chocolate company to react to a global social media hype So we really could prove the agility of our organization, and it resulted in the biggest innovation ever in our group, not only under Lindt, but you can see also Ghirardelli and also Russell Stover launched products with the Dubai-style recipe, and Ghirardelli even launched Dubai Hot Fudge Sundae, which is today the number one seller in our Ghirardelli's coffee stores. The story goes on. In this year, we extended the range already with different recipes, with dark and white recipes. And the latest launch is an extension of the city range, Tokyo-style chocolate with strawberry matcha. Also, this started with very promising results, first in our retail stores and now also in the grocery stores, in the wholesale. What it did to us, this Dubai-style chocolate, was a clear... contribution to strengthening our brand equity. It made us more relevant with the gen set. So with the younger target group, we see it in our retail stores. We see it also when we analyze the consumption data. So altogether it was not only incremental sales, but it was also a clear signal to the consumers that this is a dynamic brand and open to launch also very exotic recipes. Coming to the regional performance, you see that 50% is generated in Europe, and we grew with 15.3% above our expectations in the most established markets with the highest market share, so that makes us also confident that we certainly did not reach a plafond anywhere, but we can increase our market share also in well-established markets. When we come to North America, you remember that in the first half we published very soft start last year with 3.5% and we were pretty nervous even if we knew that we have strong plans for the second half, but then we grew double digit in the second half and with 8.9% organic growth in North America, we clearly outperformed the market and gained market shares. Rest of the world with 11.7% growth slightly below our expectation. I will come to this later when we tackle the individual regions. When it comes to Europe, for the first time, we saw double digit growth across all countries in Europe. You can see in our big countries, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Switzerland, growth rates between 12 and 15%. So this is really unprecedented. It also shows that the brands are well established. The price increase led to a relatively low price elasticity, and we could really translate these price increases into growth. We saw even higher growth rates in CE, Iberia, Austria, Nordic, Benelux, all between 20% and 30%. Key growth drivers were on the one side our dark tablets, excellence tablets. We saw growth rates significantly above the total growth rate that we enjoyed in Europe. And we saw a strong growth on all recipes that were centered around pistachio. We had Lindor pistachio balls, Lindor pistachio tablets. We have Excellence pistachio. And, of course, we have the Dubai Style chocolate. And this mega trend around pistachio really boosted the sales of all products that offered pistachio recipes. Retail expansion, the biggest share of our retail division is also located in Europe. And as mentioned here, not only the flagship stores, but also regular stores were opened and contributed to the strong growth in Europe. Coming to North America with 16.2%, we had an outstanding growth rate at Ghirardelli. Ghirardelli benefited from a trend that people consume less out of home, more in home. And the trends to baking in home was beneficial for Ghirardelli as we are the number one for baking chips. So we had growth rates above 30% in this baking category. and this resulted in a 16% growth for Ghirardelli. Lindt USA, as mentioned, with a soft start. They had a very strong success with the Dubai-style chocolate in the second half, so they could catch up to 9.4%. Russell Stover, once more, unfortunately, a disappointing year. The price increase led to hefty discussions with retail partners, and they partly failed. reduced the volumes for Valentine's Day, etc. It resulted in a 6% decline of sales in Russell Stover. Canada, 8.8% in line with expectations. Mexico, these were some one-time impacts of inventory evaluations, etc. This is temporary, and we will see good results again in this year. Coming to the rest of the world, you can see we had problems with our distributor business. We indicated it already last year at the half-year presentation. The strong Swiss franc forced us to – and distributors are – we – We sell the products on a Swiss franc basis, so this forced us to increase prices even above group average, and many distributors were reluctant to implement these strong price increases, so we had long discussions in the first half. In the second half, we grew double-digit again, so I think we go with a strong momentum also into 26, but altogether, of course, these minus 2.2% drag down the total growth rate of the rest of the world. while all the other countries showed similar growth rates, like in Europe, especially Japan and Brazil, where we have strong retail divisions, close to 20%. China also encouraging with the new setup in logistics, a 20% growth rate. South Africa, certainly a market with a low purchase power where we still were able, with our price increases, to grow 13%. Global travel retail, we had a very strong presence with Dubai Style Chocolate in global travel retail, and we really saw it was a bestseller from Buenos Aires to India, everywhere where we offered it. And Chile, this is from a very low base. We opened six stores in Chile, and we have a plan to roll out to 20 stores like we have in many countries now in Latin America, as well as in Middle East and in Asia. This was my short browse through the highlights of 2025, and I hand over to Martin for an exploration on the financial results.

Thank you. Welcome as well from my side, everybody here in Kirchberg. Welcome everybody online as well. As Berkley said, we have more than 100 people online. So definitely looking forward to presenting to you the financial results. So just in a nutshell, so 12.4% organic growth above our guidance of 9 to 11. So I think good news there. From an EBIT margin perspective, you're also... On guidance, actually, we guided for the lower end of 20 to 40 basis points. So we get 24 basis points and 16.4%. Free cash flow margin. I think we flagged to you guys that because of the higher inventory levels, we will not be at 10% this year. So we came in at 7.5, which is actually in line with our expectations. Also good news here. After 11.6% last year, earnings per share, we are at an all-time high of 3,164. I will show you also in one of my charts the five-year development on the earnings per share. So definitely this being one of the key highlights of today's financial presentation. And then net debt, despite the share buyback, We have still a healthy level of net debt. Net debt to EBITDA is at 0.84. So we're right more or less in the middle between our target of 0.5 to 1. So I think a very strong set of number when we look at 2025. Organic sales growth, when we even look a bit further back over the last five years, we grew 13%, 11%, 10%, 8%, and 12%, which gives an average of about 11%. So definitely very strong growth. performance over the last five years and above our mid-term guidance of 6 to 8%. Sales in Swiss francs out of the five years, actually in four years, our Swiss franc growth was below the organic growth. So the Swiss franc, as you know, strengthened in the last five years. Still, we achieved 8.2% growth in 2025 and we added about 450 million Swiss francs to our top line in 2025. We increased our prices, so it was really price-driven growth last year, 19%. This actually led to a volume mix loss of 6.6%, which is ahead of our plan. When we did our price increase discussions one year ago, or even one year and a half ago, we expected more of a volume impact. I think that's an important takeaway. Internally, we are not surprised by this minus 6.6%. the minimum elasticity we actually expected, even expected slightly more. And then from a Forex perspective, we have minus 4%. Segment information here, we saw the acceleration in Europe from 9.5 to 15.3 in 2025. North America coming in at 8.9, as Bertel has shown, by subsidiary as well, and rest of the world growing double digit in 24 and also in 25. despite the fact that the DIS business, the distributor business, which is a relatively large chunk of the rest of the world business, actually was down by 2%. We still grew double digit in the rest of the world, showing that we have a very healthy business in the key markets like Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, and South Africa. I think a very interesting story is as well the difference between H1 and H2. Whilst in Europe, H2 came in slightly lower than H1, which is not a surprise and which we flagged in July, that 17.7% growth in Europe is not sustainable. So we still came in at 13.6% in H2, which is, I think, still a very healthy growth, double digit. I think the big positive here is the big acceleration in North America, which is actually above our own expectations, right? We did not expect, we expected a very strong second half in North America. We did not necessarily expect 20%. So that's, I think, a key highlight for today and then also rest of the world. We also see a very nice acceleration in the distributor business, but across the region there, going from 7.8 to 14.5. So if you just look at H2, I think it's actually good to see that we have quite a balanced growth rate of 12 to 14.5% across all the segments. Now moving on to the costs. And, you know, when I presented to you the price volume mix, some of you may have thought, okay, why did they actually do 19% price increase? Did they not overdo it? And the clear answer here is no, because when you look at our material expenses as a present to sales, we actually lost 270 basis points gross profit margin, right? So in reality, we were not able to offset the higher cocoa bean costs through our price increases. We lost 270 basis points on our gross profit margin, which is quite substantial. And looking maybe a bit at the cocoa chart here, I did not extend this chart back to 1975 or so, but between 1975 and 2023, not a lot happened in the big scheme, right? It was pretty flat between 1,700 pounds per ton and 1,950 or 2,000 pounds per ton. And then the whole roller coaster ride started, right? I mean, we have seen a massive price increase. No big news here. But, of course, it was a difficult period to manage. And I think it's also important to bear in mind when a market goes up as deeply as it did, the chocolate industry does not immediately increase prices, right? You kind of start little by little. It's all a bit delayed because you have typically a cocoa bean inventory, you have futures, you know, to cover your future deliveries that you get from your suppliers. So the chocolate industry didn't actually do price increases for 8,000 pounds, for example, right? Because it was all... a bit delayed and then when you had the coverage, you obviously did not buy a 10,000. So it didn't need to do price increases for 10,000 or for 8,000. What does that mean? It actually means that when the market comes down, when the cocoa market comes down, we don't have any, because we get lots of questions, are we going to immediately decrease prices? The answer is no, because if you are hedged, your cost base, your cost of goods remains stable for some time. So even if you wanted to, you don't have actually the opportunity to do that as long as you still want to improve your EBIT. I mean, the big question here is where do we go from here, right, with regards to the cocoa market? We have seen an oversupply now, slight oversupply. We have a very good production this current season, which started in October. At the same time, the chocolate demand is not so strong, right? It's negative, as you have seen in Nielsen. So we have a surplus of more or less 300,000 tonnes. So that's the reason why the market dropped substantially. But oftentimes this type of commodity markets, when they go up, they exaggerate. When they come down, they also exaggerate. So I would personally not be surprised if we did see again an increasing market in the next months and also in the midterm, because some of the structural issues, they are still here, right? We still have diseases in West Africa, swollen shoot disease, which means that the trees are less productive. And we will see what happens with the demand. I think the demand will actually also increase again. We will see a growth in volume, not only at Lindt, also in the overall market. And last but not least, we had three seasons, three cocoa seasons of shortages, of deficits, right? So the global stock levels, they came down quite substantially. So even though we have now 300,000 surplus, it still means we have relatively low inventories of cocoa beans. And let's say that it's not solved. Not everything is solved. So that's why actually the chocolate industry in the next few months, I'm not expecting massive price decreases because of the current uncertainty. And in addition to that, we have now new costs that are coming in, right? We have higher fuel costs, which drive up, of course, logistics costs, which drive up costs for containers across the globe, which drive up in the medium term packaging material costs, etc., Then we have sustainability costs which are coming in for science based targets for climate, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not like that's actually nice that we have some relief on cocoa, but we will have other inflations coming around the corner. So don't necessarily expect a price increase in the short term. Personnel expenses. As you saw, material expenses are actually up by 270 basis points, but our EBIT margin increased by more than 20 basis points, by 24 basis points. So we achieved that actually through all the other costs, right? One of them being personal expenses. In the last five years, personal expenses to sales came down from 21.5% to 19%. So that's an improvement of 250 basis points over five years. And it's also an improvement of 50 basis points last year. I mean, of course, our wage increases were not in line with our Swiss franc growth of more than 8%. We got some efficiencies out of the factories. We have worked heavily on efficiency programs. So it's good to see that we got the benefit here. Operating expenses. A very important category in here is marketing. Actually, I can tell you that the overall marketing spend increased in absolute in 2025. So this decrease here of 50 million more or less is not coming from marketing. It's coming from all the other areas. So what are all the other areas? It's supply chain costs. So we have heavily invested in improving our supply chain, especially in North America over the last five plus years. So we can really see the benefits of that. We have costs in there like maintenance and repair. Of course, this is a slightly lower volume. We have certain benefits there as well. And we also worked a lot with the factories on efficiency programs. And we have other SG&A costs in there, such as Salesforce costs, et cetera, where we also tried to be more efficient. So we got almost 300 basis points out of here, even though marketing in absolute went up. So also good news. And then depreciation. is more or less in line with 2024 at 300 million. And that means we've got some benefits here, also some operating leverage of 30 basis points from 5.4 to 5.1. And, you know, over the medium term, and we said that in the last five years, over the medium term, the depreciation in absolute will get closer to our CapEx. And our CapEx is currently 330 million. So this will be going up little by little, even though we will, of course, try to manage the percent of sales. So our EBIT came in at 971, 16.4%. And if you compare that with 2021, we increased it by more than 50%. So we increased the margin by 90, 60, 60, and now 20 basis points. So I think this is a very strong story in a very difficult environment, right? With massive COCOA inflation, It was not easy to manage such a positive bottom line. And we did that, as you have seen, through good cost management. Actually, not through price increases. Price increases, of course, helped that we don't even lose more gross profit margin. But without managing the costs extremely carefully and being more efficient, we would not have been able to increase our EBIT margin. A lot of this increase in EBIT margin over the last five years is coming actually from North America. I did not show this in this chart here, but in 2021 in North America, we had an EBIT margin of 7.7%. So we increased the EBIT margin over the last five years in North America from 7.7 to 13.7, 600 basis points. It's something we have been communicating. We have communicated in here in this room and in many also one-to-one meetings that we are planning to improve the EBIT margin in North America by 50 to 100 basis points per year. It's good that you actually see that we delivered. So we go now to 13.7. The journey will continue. We will continue to increase the profitability in North America over proportionally also in the next years because we are still below group average and we are still way below Europe. In Europe, we were able to continue to successfully increase the EBIT margin as well. In the rest of the world, we have invested heavily. I mean, we have invested in the supply chain in Brazil. We have invested in the supply chain in China, for example. We have a good setup now. We have open new subsidiaries in Chile, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. So that obviously has all an impact on the EBIT, because if you have a new subsidiary, typically in the first couple of years, they do not create the profit, but it's more like a cost center. So it's not something that makes us unhappy, the fact that we are lower here. I think from here now we should actually see the benefits in the future. Those new subsidiaries and those new setups, they will also generate increasingly net revenue. So we will see an improvement in our EBIT margin in the next years. EBITDA plus 7.6%. I mentioned, let's say, the ratio to our net debt. So net debt was... close to 1.1 billion. Here we are close to 1.3. That's why we have this kind of multiple of 0.84. This being one of the background information, very important background, why we are launching a new share buyback, right? Because we have a very healthy balance sheet, actually. And the tax rate has been relatively uneventful. Let's say at least when you look at this chart here, it has been quite a challenge for the team to To manage it, especially in 23, we had quite some noise there with runoff benefits, etc. But if you look at just at the high level here and you don't look at the background, we had a relatively stable tax rate of around 21%. We believe this will rather go up in the future, right? Because of the Swiss taxes going to be higher in the future. Also, some of the higher tax regions becoming more profitable, like the U.S. So we expect this ratio rather to go slightly up in the future. Net income, not that much to say, also up by around 8% last year. So good news. Capital expenditure I mentioned, and we mentioned in the past, we gave you a guidance of around 6% capex to sales. And in the last three years, we were there or thereabouts, right? We were at 5.8 and now 5.6%. I think that's within expectations. I think also going forward, we'll be more or less at 6%. We are still investing. You know, we are investing in retail. I mean, we are opening more stores than ever. We have opened more than 50 stores, bigger stores. We invest heavily in infrastructures such as new SAP systems. And, of course, we are absolutely convinced that we'll grow volume in the future. We are volume story right at the end of the day. We want to be ready for the volume growth that is about to arrive. We are building new wafer lines, big and exciting new innovation that will roll out globally in 2027. So, yeah, we are investing in our business, as you can see. Free cash flow, I mentioned, or we mentioned earlier in July that we won't get to the mid-term target of 10% average, right? Our guidance, 10% is not valid for each single year, but we're saying on average we want to get to 10% over medium term. We have achieved that. On average in the last five years, we were at 10.3%. We had an outflow of 320 million in the inventory because of the higher value of our inventory. If you add that back, we would actually be at 760 more or less. So it would be way above the 10. This inventory value, you can just lose it once in your networking capital. So even if COCO stayed high or had stayed high, this would not be, again, an outflow out of our networking capital. So we have a lot of the opportunity here in the future that we have actually inflow if the value of the inventory comes down. Therefore, we are positive about our future free cash flow that will hit the 10% in one or the other year, probably even slightly above. So this is another reason why we are launching a share buyback, right? The strong balance sheet, net debt to EBITDA, Future cash flow that we can read well now, which will be double-digit, we believe, being a second reason. I'll give you some more reasons later. Then earnings per share at 3164. Again, here, very positive performance comparing the last five years, right? Plus 54% earnings per share. I think that's good news. Development, I think especially the development from 24 to 25 is very positive, that we have been able to manage positive earnings by share development, even though our, let's say, the COCO cost went up, even though our material expenses went up, and even though we had to do 19% price increase. Then the net financial position, we don't need to go into details here. We actually gave back more to the shareholder than we generated as free cash flow. And we also had a 200 million capital increase. So overall, we are still in a very healthy, in the corridor of 0.5 to one time leverage. So I think good situation to be in. And here's the third reason why we are launching a share buyback. I mean, we have increased further our equity. We're almost at 55%. So we are in a very healthy situation from a balance sheet perspective, 54.5% equity. Not only are we launching a new share buyback, we're also increasing dividend to 1,800. Again, same reasons as I just gave you before for the share buyback. We are at a payout ratio of close to 58%. And of course, the AGM still has to approve the 1,800. That's what we are going to propose to the AGM. Dividend yield at 1.5. And the market cap is at 27 billion as of end of December 25. So we have improved our or increased our market cap over the last four years. In 21, that was kind of special situation where the lint share had a PE of 60. I think in general, the stock markets were really high at the end of 21. So it's probably not a good benchmark there. But it's good to see that overall, we have been able to increase our market cap as well. And I mentioned the share buyback. I'm sure you have read it. I mean, we are launching a share buyback of 1 billion starting in summer in June. That's the plan. It will actually be a three-year period share buyback, so roughly buying back between 300 and 350 per year. And it will replace the current share buyback, which is still in place right now, but which most likely will be finished at the latest by the end of May, probably even before. So that was the financials in a nutshell. Quickly going to sustainability as well. So our 2025 sustainability strategy, we have just concluded it now, right? We had targets for 2025. We have now worked on a new strategy for 2030. I will show you the new strategy as well. But first looking at the 2025 numbers. So we had the goal to reach 80% of our priority around macrame materials to source them in a sustainable way. And we achieved 93.2%. So we overachieved. We targeted 100% of cocoa to be sourced through our farming program or through other responsible sourcing programs. We also achieved that. Science-based target, climate is a very important topic, right? And we committed to reducing our footprint and we have made around 20% progress to do that by 2030. We then also have a 2050 long-term target. Packaging is important, the recyclability of packaging, and our goal that we set for 25 was 90%, and we achieved 92.4%. And then maybe not so much as a target, but more looking at an external organization that is looking at all the companies, how they are doing in sustainability, and they call this a renowned organization, where we won actually a silver medal. We are top 7%, so we are part of the top 10%. best companies according to them in our industry, which is also good news. It shows from a more neutral position that Lindt has made a lot of progress actually over the last years in the area of sustainability. From a cocoa sourcing perspective, which is our most important raw material, we have further strengthened our child protection strategy. We are working together with the ICI. That's the International Cocoa Initiative. They are a very renowned organization to help companies to improve their child labor remediation or monitoring the remediation system. We have done that. We have also launched a living income program. You may have read in the press that Lint together with Mondelez, Hershey, Mars and Nestle created the Together Coco initiative. We are jointly going to set up a foundation based in Switzerland and jointly we are going to try to close the living income gap, especially focused on Ghana and Ivory Coast. I think that's an exciting new project, a new organization that is going to be founded by the key players in the chocolate industry to really try to tackle, let's say, the problems that there are in terms of living income gap in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Last but not least, as from 2026, all our cocoa is Rainforest Alliance certified. What does that mean? It actually means that in the future, when you look at the Lint product, you will also see the Rainforest Alliance logo on them. Not immediately, it will be phased over some time. But I think it's also good to know that we also have this certification now for our cocoa. I promised you to give you a quick snapshot of the 2030 sustainability plan. It's indulgence rooted in responsibility. This new strategy is centered around three key areas. Source with purpose on the one side, care for the environment, secondly, and then also valuing people. Behind all those three areas, we have subcategories, and behind these subcategories, we have KPIs, so we can measure it. And we are publishing this, right, also going forward. In the annual report, you have also a non-financial part where you have the whole sustainability topic covered. And in the future, we'll track against this new strategy, right? So you can think about areas like supporting cocoa excellence or reducing emissions. So we'll report against how are we doing against, let's say, against our targets for reducing emissions. Or another key area is we want to champion health and safety because we want to make sure that all inter-employees, if they work in retail, if they work in the factory, that they are in a safe place. So as you've seen, we have made great progress in sustainability from a financial point of view. I think we have seen quite some key highlights. We grew double digit over the last five years in net sales, almost 11%. We had an increase of the EBIT, overall EBIT over the last five years of 51%. We improved our EBIT, our earnings per share, sorry, by 54% over the last five years, which is great news. And all of this, and also looking at our balance sheet, has made us decide to increase or to propose an increased dividend in the HM to 1,800 and also to launch another share buyback. So I think we are in a very healthy situation and Otto Werth will show you now how we are going to actually trigger more volume growth again. Thank you.

Thank you. I think we could illustrate that we had rather a strong growth story in the last four years. not only top line, but especially also bottom line. And I will outline now how we want to continue our growth story, how we want to continue our top line growth and also bottom line growth. So one thing is clear, we were forced to increase our prices by more than 40% in these four years. And in three out of these four years, we did not see any impact on our volumes. So we were flat on volumes and we could translate the price increase one to one in top line growth. Last year, especially in the second half, when we had to implement a total of another 19% price increase, was the first time that we also saw in combination with a very weak consumer sentiment and a higher price sensitivity, price elasticity for Lindt products, and we came in with minus 6.6% volume mix. And it's our clear target to get back to stabilizing volume and to grow volume again as we did in the last years. And what are the measures behind? First and utmost, we want to further strengthen our brand. And we will do this with a couple of measures that I will elaborate later. We want to increase the visibility of our brand. We are an impulse brand, so it's most important that people really see us immediately when they enter a grocery store. They have to see us in shelf space. They have to see us on secondary placement. They also have to find us in prominent locations when it comes to our retail stores. Also here, we made big improvements. And, of course, the execution has to be perfect on every touch point. As our prices are higher, people are less forgiving and expect a perfect execution in everything. And the best example are also our retail stores where we did not see any price elasticity even last year because there is an experience and there is an excitement around the products that is second to none and consumers accept also the price increases. The preconditions for getting back to volume growth are our brand equity is stronger than ever before. We focus on the core and key innovations. And you have seen last year that with the Dubai style chocolate, we really came out with a spectacular innovation that strengthened us within the young target group. It brought consumers into our stores, consumers to our brand that never have been buying Lindt before. So it really gave us a new momentum in dynamic of the brand. Visibility, physical and mental availability I mentioned already. And, of course, we want to more aggressively expand into new markets and also expand with our global retail channel, which is one of the biggest contributors to strengthening our brand equity. Everyone who has ever been in a lean store sees the brand with different eyes and has a better perception of the brand. And we know that we highly benefit also in the wholesale and in the grocery markets from this positive image transfer. I mentioned the brand equity is stronger than ever. You know that Kanta Brand does a study about the value of brands every year. And for the first time in 25, we were able to get the number one rank within all chocolate brands. We were the most valuable chocolate brand in the world with 9.4 billion customers. calculated brand value. And even within the food and beverage brands, we were able to rank within the top 10 brands right behind Nespresso, ahead of Nescafe, ahead of Kinder. So really something the whole organization is proud of. And we will further, of course, invest into our brand. This is the key prerequisite to further grow with the premium prices that we are charging to consumers. If you see our long-term track record, you can also see that we were achieving a CAGR of around 6.5% between 2005 and 2019, so ahead of COVID. It was mainly driven by volume, 4%, 2%, 2.5% were driven by price increases. And this picture has changed slightly. We were able to accelerate the growth. As of 21, I eliminated the COVID year. So it's not comparable to the chart of Martin because I said I don't want to count the recovery year in 21. But as of 21 to 25, we had a CAGR of 10.1%. Stronger driven by pricing with 8%, but still with a positive volume across these years. And as you can also see, with 450 million organic growth in 25, we were able to generate the highest absolute growth that we have ever experienced. And when we discuss sometimes about acquisitions, there are hardly any premium chocolate companies out there in this size. So we prefer to generate 450 million growth organically, capitalizing our strong brand support, capitalizing our strong brand equity, filling the idle capacity in our own factories, etc. So we think this is much more beneficial for our P&L and also for strengthening our global footprint than going out for acquisitions which are normally even smaller than Why do we believe that we still have long-term headroom to grow and potential to grow? Because if you compare our market share to the big players in the chocolate market, we are still a relatively small company. And we know from those markets where we are established long term, like here in Europe, like here in Switzerland, we enjoy market shares between 10 and 22%. So we have a 22% market share here. We have market shares close to 16 or 19% also in Canada, in Australia, in Austria, in France. So there is no reason why we should not have a 12% market share also globally. So we believe that we will increase our market share like we did, by the way, in all the last years, also for the years to come. And I will soon explain which trends are in favor for premium brands and especially for Lindt. This should make us confident that the growth story will continue, especially if we look 37% of the total chocolate market, which is around $130 billion, 37% are generated in the so-called rest of the world. We generate 13% there, and we have a market share in this rest of the world of 2%. So only if we bring these 2% to the average market share in Europe and North America, which is around 7%, we could deliver the growth story that we are announcing. But in addition, we also see a huge opportunity to further grow in Europe and in North America, where we have the biggest funds and the strongest muscle also to strengthen the demand for our brands. published already in advance, a very surprising analysis. This is based on SIRCANA data, so this is a household panel, and it shows its real consumption in the last 52 weeks. And we analyzed the consumption of non-GLP-1 users compared to the consumption of chocolate of the GLP-1 users. Because we always were very nervous and said all those people using weight-losing drugs, will they cut back on chocolate consumption? We will lose them in the category. And the surprising outcome was that GLP-1 users even grew their chocolate consumption stronger than the total chocolate market. And especially when it comes to premium chocolate, and you can see premium chocolate grew stronger than total category with 6.5%. But here, the GLP-1 users grew their chocolate consumption even by 16 or their spendings on chocolate by 16.6%. So that really came as a surprise to us. What is also surprising, the usage of GLP-1 increased within one year from 6% last year to 15% this year. This means 15% of U.S. households have at least one person in the household that uses a GLP-1 drug. So this is really a significant number. and it represents 17.5% of chocolate sales. The good news is that unlike all hypotheses, also from analysts, or also our own expectations, these people still long for some indulgence, and when they long for indulgence, they over-proportionately go for premium chocolate, hence for brands like Ghirardelli or Lindt. The total chocolate market globally is sold via different channels. And you can see here 43% of the total chocolate market are generated in the classical wholesale trade, grocery, supermarkets, hypermarkets, etc. We have a strong position, but of course we are continuously working to strengthening our position there. That's our bread and butter business. We expect high single digit growth across the globe in this, let's say, backbone of our business. then you still have 7% in confectionery stores in the global market. And this is where we play with our own 600 lean stores. And here we expect also for the years to come strong double-digit growth. because we have found now a scalable model, a model that is in line in profitability with our wholesale business. So there is no reason to hold back in the expansion. This is why you have seen the highest number of store openings last year with 53 stores. And we can imagine even to open more stores in the future as we are entering new markets. So this is a channel that we own more or less also exclusively compared to our competitors. None of them has such a strong direct-to-consumer channel. E-commerce represents 6% of the global chocolate market. We have an over-proportional share thanks to our gifting competence there. As you know, chocolate is an impulse category and therefore less suited to be bought online because online is more a destination. But with our gifting products, we play a significant role also in e-commerce. Convenience. is a channel which is especially strong in Asia. We are underrepresented there. We have developed a program to aggressively conquer this convenience channel. It represents 27% of the total chocolate market. So very significant channel. So here we also expect a high double digit growth in the long term. And then you have the so-called global travel retail business. It's the duty-free business on all the airports. We are market leader in this channel. And here we also expect to protect the strong position and grow in line with the market, but it will more be in the single digits. And then there is another channel, 14% of total chocolate market, the so-called discounters. It's a mixed basket. We work together with some discounters. In Switzerland, for example, you know Oldenar is also classified as a discounter. But then you have the hard discounters, which represent the majority of this channel. And we decided not to... operate in this environment because we believe it doesn't give us the stage for a premium brand that also helps to strengthen the brand equity and it would be more a competition which is mainly driven via price and we want to keep out of this channel. We are convinced that we benefit more by offering the other channels a premium brand that helps them also to clearly position them as a premium channel, helps them to differentiate from the hard discounters. And therefore, we have a clear strategy on this, by the way, also as the only big chocolate brand in the world, we are not represented in this channel. Why do we believe that we have tailwind for our growth story? First of all, we see a premiumization of the category for many, many years across the globe. We will benefit from this. At the moment, probably a bit, let's say, dampened by the weak consumer sentiment, a bit dampened by uncertainties which are in the world. But long term, this trend is here to stay. We see that the growing middle class, of course, is striving for better life, for better quality products, and aging population is also helpful. They are more hedonistic. They are more striving for indulging themselves. We see gifting culture increasing. If you see out there what people spend today on flowers or also on gift boxes in cosmetics, you know that there are also a lot of specialty stores out there. We see and are convinced that people will also spend more on gifting in chocolate and we are the number one gifting brand, also this will help us. We expected consumer sentiment to improve with the recent developments. We fear that it might be a setback. I will come to the outlook later. When we analyzed the situation beginning of the year, we were pretty confident mid of January. End of January, we received the figures from the Christmas market last year, which was, to our surprise, significantly weaker than we had expected, especially volume reacted, especially on higher-priced items. And then a couple of weeks later, we also got the news about the new escalation in Middle East, so that we said, okay, if we – Take all the information together. We better be cautious, and we lowered our guidance for this year. But in the long run, we are sure the consumer sentiment, which is an all-time low, especially in the U.S., but also in Europe, will improve again, and it will also foster our growth story. Product availability always used to be number one for any big, fast-moving consumer goods. Today, it's not a big issue anymore because in online, you can buy everything at any time and you get it ideally delivered within the next half an hour. So, therefore, consumers are looking more for shopping experience when they go out because no one wants to spend his life in front of the laptop and ordering everything online. These people still are looking for an enjoyable time and shopping experience. And this is what we offer in our own stores. And this is why we also see this strong like-for-like growth and this overwhelming acceptance of our stores also in best locations like here, Piccadilly Circus. And then there is an increasing, ever-increasing health trend, especially with the younger target group. So people strive for a mindful indulgence. And we have seen, like GLP-1, also this is in favor of our premium brands. People go less for quantity and more for quality. And also this makes us believe that the long-term trend is in favor of our brands. And hence, we are confident to deliver our long-term guidance as we have announced it. This brings me to the outlook. As mentioned, we have lowered the forecast cautiously for this year to 4% to 6% organic sales growth. We confirmed the improvement of EBIT. leave that especially by the end of the year we will slightly benefit also from the raw material relief and and therefore also with a slower growth we will be able to protect the bottom line and in the long term we want to get back to six to eight percent mainly driven by volume growth again also for this year we expect a softer volume in the first half because we still have price increases in place, mainly on the Easter business. For the second half, we expect to get back to volume growth, and of course, also for the years to come. And also the EBIT improvement of 20 to 40 basis points, Martin, elaborated already, driven also by strong improvement in the U.S., but you have seen also last year 80 basis points improvement in Europe. So I think, and of course, rest of the world will also recover. Also here we are confident. With this, I would say we open the floor for answers and questions, and I ask Martin to join me here on stage. Please.