Straumann Holding AG

Hello, I am Andy Herzog and I am happy to tell you about my passion project, the Mobile Dental Clinic. We bring dental care to Syrian refugees in Jordan so that they are relieved from pain and able to create dreams and perspectives for their lives again. When I traveled to Jordan as a volunteer with the Noiva Foundation in 2016, I saw the urgent need for dental care among refugees. They live in difficult conditions, neglecting oral hygiene. Most of them have oral health problems. I wanted to do something about it. So I approached Strahmann Group with my idea to start a mobile dental clinic. They agreed to support the project right away and with the help of 80 volunteers it soon became reality. We bought a decommissioned military field hospital and on arrival in Jordan it was fitted with dental chairs and equipment. We then settled the container onto a truck. Since 2019, local dentists treat refugees on the Syrian border and educate children about oral hygiene. Obviously, the pandemic is a challenge for our work in Jordan, but we were able to continue service. We had to reduce the scale and could only use one of our two chairs for safety reasons. But I am happy to say that despite these hurdles, we were able to offer 2000 treatments in 2020. We are eager to get back to helping more patients as soon as the COVID-19 situation is more stable. For me, it is a privilege to support Noiva and the local dentists in bringing human kindness and relief to those in need. I am very proud to have Straman Group on board and want to thank them for being such a supportive partner.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Straumann Group first quarter 2021 results conference call and live webcast. I'm Andre, the Chorus Call Operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Guillaume Daniello, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you and good morning, everyone. I very much hope that you, your families and your colleagues are well. Thank you for joining this conference call about Stroman First Call Reasons for 2021. We are continuing to take action to keep our people safe and support the fight against COVID-19 in the communities we serve. And in this spirit, we are grateful to see that the vaccination programs are pinging up speed in some regions and that some of our employees have already been vaccinated. We are supporting the vaccination programs from a company perspective because we truly believe this is the only way out of the situation. During this conference, we'll be referring to the presentation slides that were published on our website this morning. As customary, you can see our disclaimer on slide two. This morning's presentation and discussion will include some forward-looking statements. The conference will follow the usual format. As shown on the agenda on slide three, I will give you an overview of where we stand. Then our CFO, Peter Harkon, will share details about our business performance across our regions. After that, I'll provide you with an update on the strategic initiatives as well as our outlook for the future. As always, we will be available to take your questions at the end of the presentation. Therefore, let's start with our highlights and move directly to slide number five. The Traumann Group achieved very strong first quarter sales results in 2021 compared to the first quarter of 2020. Revenue reached 470 million Swiss francs, which shows an accelerated growth trend. We achieved impressive organic growth of 34% compared to previous year, which was, however, already impacted by the pandemic. The negative currency impact was 6% percentage points, and the acquisition effect amounted to 2%, attributed to Dr. Smile. One of the highlights was our orthodontics business. It grew strongly across all geographies. This reflects our efforts to strengthen our value proposition. We will provide more details about exciting successes in the orthodontics business later on. We continue to invest in the future and our innovation pipeline is full. The global rollout of our immediate solutions such as BLX and TLX is continuing and we are looking forward to bringing exciting new products to the market also during the rest of the year. Examples of upcoming launches include the two-piece ceramic implant Neodent Z, scheduled for the second quarter, and the Neodent EasyPak, which is offering for GPs all components for an implant placement in one single package. In line with our focus on investing in our company to support future growth, we announced an investment worth up to 170 million Swiss francs in building a new Stroman Group campus in China. China is a major contributor to growth now, and we strongly believe it will continue to drive significant growth in the future. Taking into account the strong start, we have decided to raise our guidance, and I will explain this in more detail later. I'm incredibly thankful to the entire Sprom&Book team for their dedication and contribution, which definitely helped us strongly to achieve this record results together. Slide six shows the regional organic revenue growth rate for the first quarters of 2021 and 2020. It also shows the average organic growth rate for the past two years, as I believe it's important to put the Q1 2021 results into perspective. In the first quarter of last year, you can see that all regions were down to single-digit growth, while APAC was already heavily impacted by the pandemic. In the first quarter of this year, all regions performed very strongly. They have each returned to double-digit growth. We saw strong demand in North America, as well as in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, where we have expanded our presence since the first quarter of last year. In Asia Pacific, we returned to exceptional growth after the strong decline in Q1 last year. And in Latin America, we bounced back strongly despite the still quite challenging environment. We are very happy to report the strong performance, which represents a record quarter for the strongman group. Moving on to slide seven, I would like to share some insights into these developments. Looking at the market, we saw a switch from the pandemic headwinds that we had last year to a tailwind during the first quarter. According to Modi's, households around the world have accumulated 5.4 billion US dollars in additional savings between the start of the pandemic and the end of 2021. Meanwhile, the Conference Board's Global Consumer Confidence Index reached its highest level in the first quarter of 2021, as shown on the left side of the slide. This suggests then that consumers have disposable income and are confident spending it. Based on numerous conversations that we have had with key customers in different geographies, It seems that these conclusions are also applying to specialty dental treatments. Dental practices are open around the world and patient confidence is strong. Activity in dental practice is going back to pre-pandemic level. Therefore, we believe this is due to increased consumer focus on specialty dental treatments and spending on oral health being prioritized because of ongoing pandemic-related restrictions. This is reflected in our local organizations' assessments, which are shown on the right side of the chart. Therefore, together with this trend, the success of our strategy implementation, our strong product portfolio and past investments have accelerated our growth during the first quarter of 2021. With this, I hand over to Peter, and he will provide additional details.