Lonza Group AG

And thanks to all of you for joining our call today. Before we start the presentation, let me share with you our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements made by us. This is also available in the online version of our presentation for you to download and read in your own time, I guess. Before we move to the details of our half-year results, let's briefly look at the agenda that we prepared for you today. I will start with an overview of our H1 performance and some of the key highlights from across our business. I will then hand over to Philippe, our CFO, who will take you through the financial results in detail. After that I will return to provide an update on the performance of the individual business platforms and conclude with our outlook for the rest of the year. Following the presentation, we will take a short two-minute break and return with a live video stream for our Q&A session. Let me start with a top-line overview of our H1 performance. We delivered a strong performance across all three of our business platforms. All of this essentially spot on or even better than our expectations at the beginning of the year. This strong performance reflects the sustainable, robust demand for our offering, the depth of our customer relationships and the disciplined operational execution by our global OneLonsa team. Together with some favorable phasing, these strengths taken together enabled us to deliver sales of 3.4 billion Swiss Francs and a CER sales growth of 16% compared to H1 2025. The core EBITDA reached 1.2 billion CHF, which represents a high margin of 34.8%, an increase of 4.4 percentage points versus H1 2025. Alongside the strong sales growth and further margin expansion, in H1 2026 we improved our free cash flow by 300 million CHF compared to H1 2025. Based on this performance and our current H2 forecast, we are upgrading our full year core EBITDA margin outlook to 33-34% and reconfirm our expectation of 11-12% CER sales growth. As in previous years, our guidance remains rooted in a disciplined assessment of our business. Our track record of consistently delivering on and at times exceeding the promises we make to you gives us confidence in the upgraded outlook we are providing today. My takeaway as the CEO of Lonsa? We have a tight control and very good visibility of our business at hand and how it will evolve over time. And we have a global team which efficiently translates over and over again market opportunities and our customers' trust in Lonsa into an attractive and very profitable business. Earlier in H1, we also marked an important strategic milestone for our company with the agreement to divest the capsules and health ingredients business to Lone Star. With this large divestment, alongside the other recent divestments, we further executed the One Lonza strategy and have now completed our transformation into a pure play CDMO at high pace. All this within less than 15 months after announcing our new strategy in late 2024. While H1 numbers as such are obviously an important proof point and in our case a strong one, let me put them into perspective to how we see the full year performance evolving and how it relates to what you can expect from us in the years to come. Based on our upgraded 2026 outlook, we are convinced to eventually look at another strong year and another important step on our overall trajectory of strong profitable growth and significant value creation at Lonsa year over year. All of this fully in line with our ambitious organic growth model of low teens annual CR top-line growth on average over time at continuously expanding profitability and cash generation. My takeaway? We continue to deliver on our promises and intend to continue to do so in the future. Now, let's dive into our Group's business and the overall operational performance in H1. In the first half of 2026, we saw broad-based momentum across our businesses, with all three business platforms delivering double-digit constant exchange rates, sales growth at high profitability. This also meant a return to positive sales growth for specialized modalities, as expected and communicated to you earlier, which reported 22.6% sales growth compared to H1 2025. In integrated biologics, we have seen healthy momentum in our mammalian and drug product technology platforms. While delivering fully in line with our expectations, the business platform is lining up, among others, the large-scale commercial assets in FISP and Vacaville as important drivers of future growth in the years to come. In advanced synthesis, exceptional growth has been driven by a combination of small molecules and bioconjugates. and in specialized modalities we have seen exceptional growth in microbial from a low prior year base alongside sustained healthy growth in bioscience and a strengthened operational performance in cell and gene. With our new operating model that we have introduced in April last year, We have further increased focus on quality, operational execution, productivity and cost discipline across our global network and across all three business platforms. The organization-wide effort to drive both top line and margins and improve cash generation is becoming increasingly embedded across OneLonsa. And I am encouraged to see the first tangible results of these efforts already reflected in our H1 performance. This is another proof point for me that we are on track with our measures to deliver both elements of our longer term organic growth model which is not only attractive top line growth but equally margin expansion which will then more and more translate into attractive cash generation. Customer demand remained robust across technologies during H1. This was reflected, as an example, in the extension of our strategic long-term collaboration with the leading US biopharma company for a broad range of innovative clinical and commercial biologics. The agreement underlines continued high demand for our global biologics development and manufacturing services as well as our capability to deliver highly tailored and flexible solutions to meet specific customer needs. The ability to combine multiple sites, including all of our commercial-scale US sites and development services from across our global network within a single partnership highlights the strength of our unique OneLonsa business model, which strongly differentiates us within the CDMO industry. and specialized modalities, we have seen the approval of the sixth commercial cell and gene therapy in the Lonsa network, further consolidating our position as the world leading commercial manufacturer in this space. We continue to support sustained demand by investing in our growth and this is reflected in our announcement of today of two new ADC related projects. One to expand our payload linker manufacturing capacities in FISP and another to further strengthen our commercial scale ADC fill finish offering in Stein, both in Switzerland. More about these in a moment. These investments also support the continued expansion of our integrated offering across technologies, which sees growing interest as customers are looking for a single strategic partner that can support their programs from early stage clinical development through to large-scale commercial supply and from drug substance to drug product. This end-to-end capability is further evolving as another key differentiator for Lonza and positions us strongly to support antibodies, bispecifics and ADCs and other bioconjugates throughout their life cycle. With our increasingly diversified offering, our deep long-term customer partnerships and our broad and well-diversified geographical footprint, our business model is uniquely positioned to remain resilient and deliver profitable growth as the external environment evolves. Let me now provide an update on some of our key growth projects in some more detail. Across our network we continue to make good progress in executing the investments that will support the next phase of growth for Lonza. And we are adding new ones to support future growth mid to long term. In Wackerville, the upgrade measures towards CDMO readiness continue to progress well. As communicated previously, already the five contracts signed by the time of our full year 2025 reporting in January this year are expected to offset the gradual reduction of Roche volumes through 2028. Perceived attractiveness of the capacities and customer demand remain high, reinforcing our confidence in Wackerville, starting to drive growth after 2028 and fully exploiting the site's capabilities and capacities in the early 2030s to maximize value creation for Lonza. Let me also briefly touch on our large-scale aseptic fill finish facility in Stein. As customer needs continue to evolve, we have decided to further enhance the strategic scope of the facility by adding capabilities for high-value small molecule drug products alongside its original focus on biologics only. This will broaden the addressable market for us and will further strengthen the long-term attractiveness of the site. The additional capital requirements will be small, while the enhanced scope is expected to extend the timeline to start operations in 2028. Turning to our newly announced investments on the right side of the slide, both in support of our integrated ADC offering. This area continues to attract strong customer interest, given its high therapeutic and commercial potential. In FISP, we are building a set of multi-purpose, highly potent payload linker suites, which are scheduled to commence ramp up in 2029. We continue to see strong customer demand in this area, supporting our confidence in the long-term opportunity for this investment. In Stein, we are building a second commercial aseptic ADC filling line, which is due to commence ramp up from 2030 onwards and already benefits from a major pharmaceutical company as an anchor customer and strategic partner. Both projects will reach peak sales by the mid 2030s at the latest. Alongside investing into growth in line with our new One Lonsa strategy, in the first half of 2026 we also took the final step on our transformation journey to a pure play CDMO. We signed an agreement to divest the CHI business to Lone Star for an enterprise value of 2.3 billion Swiss Francs. The transaction is expected to close before year-end 2026. Within less than two years, we have systematically transformed our portfolio around the technologies and capabilities where we see the greatest opportunities for superior long-term value creation. As you can see on this slide, this transformation included four divestments of non-CDMO and non-core CDMO activities, sharpening our focus on our three business platforms, integrated biologics, advanced synthesis and specialized modalities. At the same time, we continued to embed our new OneLonsa operating model across the company to ensure our organizational scalability and readiness for the significant growth in the years to come. Today, Lonsa has a clear strategic direction and a portfolio fully aligned with our ambition as the global leader in the CDMO industry and the most trusted partner for the biopharmaceutical industry. While implementing our one-launcher strategy, we follow a highly disciplined approach to how we deploy our funds. Every growth investment, organic or inorganic, is assessed against our defined capital allocation framework. We have presented this before. However, let me briefly recap it here, considering its importance for our strategic decision-making process. As you will see, our first priority is to invest in maintenance, infrastructure and systems, ensuring that our base business remains robust, efficient and well positioned to reliably deliver value over time. Second, we are committed to a progressive dividend policy. This brings us to the discretionary cash that we have available for growth investments, both organic and inorganic. We remain highly disciplined when allocating capital to organic capex or bolt-on M&A, guided by strict financial thresholds and our commitment to sustainable value creation. For such investments, we need a clear view on how our distinct CDMO business model can deliver value for our customers and that we can differentiate against competition through the Lancer engine as our unique set of strengths. In the absence of appropriate strategically and financially attractive growth opportunities, surplus capital would be returned to our shareholders. Until 2030, based on our organic growth model, we intend to invest more than 7 billion Swiss francs in organic capex, with the majority of it dedicated to future growth. As said, these investments follow clear financial return criteria, namely an IRR of at least 15% and a ROIC at peak of at least 30%. For acquisitions, we will remain disciplined and committed to attractive financial returns to ensure shareholder value creation from a strong strategic fit and the potential to generate synergies. Now, let's take a brief look at some analytics underpinning our confidence in Lonza's growth potential going forward. Across our technologies we continue to see sustained demand for outsourcing. For example, demand for mammalian capacity continues to outpace supply. With recent geopolitical developments, pharma and biotech customer demand for U.S. capacity has remained particularly high. And this is reflected in the sustained level of contracting for bioelectrics capacity at all our U.S. sites, namely Portsmouth and Buckerville. Looking ahead, we anticipate an increased regionalization of supply and demand, a trend that aligns well with Lonsa's broad and well-diversified global network and our ability to support customers across key pharmaceutical markets. The sustained trend towards outsourcing across the biopharma industry is reflected in the modest and, based on our historic and forward-looking analysis, unchanged capex to sales ratios of the largest pharmaceutical companies, which balance out at around the 5% between 2015 and 2030. While the ratio has remained largely flat and looks set to continue at the same level, there is greater interest in US investments in the current geopolitical context, likely at the expense of investments in other regions. As a result, we continue to see healthy momentum in strategic outsourcing across both large pharma and biotech customers and attractive opportunities across technologies and geographies. In this context, Lonza's continued focus on growth investments has remained attractive to both large pharma and small and medium biotechs. This has helped us to maintain a largely balanced customer portfolio among the two. In my regular exchanges with a number of key pharma customers, I have not seen any evidence of a fundamental shift in how they view their strategic partnerships with Lonsa or outsourcing more generally. This reinforces our confidence in the resilience of the demand environment and our ability to deliver on our ambitious growth trajectory. Within our customer portfolio, I should also mention that we have a high weighting of long-standing strategic partnerships that in multiple cases span decades. At the same time, we continue to maintain a strong presence in early stage development which supports future demand for our technologies and capacity. Overall, The fundamental drivers of outsourcing remain firmly in place and we see Lonza very well positioned to continue to significantly benefit from these sustainable long-term industry trends. With this, I hand over to Philippe for him to take you through the details of our strong financials in H1 2026.

Thank you very much, Wolfgang. Good afternoon and good morning to those of you joining from North America. Before we dive into the details of our half-year 2026 financial performance, let me remind you that all figures relate to Lonza's continuing CDMO business unless explicitly stated otherwise. This means they exclude the capsules and health ingredients business, which is reported as discontinued operations. The half-year 2025 financials have been restated accordingly and were published on June 23rd, 2026 to allow you to put today's result in perspective. Also, unless otherwise stated, sales growth figures are reported in constant exchange rates. Starting with an overview of our financial performance in H1-2026 where Lonza delivered a strong performance with sales of 3.4 billion Swiss francs and an H1-weighted CER sales growth of 16%. Importantly, this growth was entirely organic. whereas the strong growth reported in H1 2025 included the contribution from the Vacaville acquisition. In actual exchange rates, sales grew by 11.2%, reflecting an FX headwind of almost 5 percentage points versus H1 2025, mainly from the weaker US dollar. This FX impact is expected to moderate significantly in H2 2026, as the US dollar weakened primarily during the first half of 25, while it's transcended again more recently. For the year, we therefore expect an FX impact on growth of minus two to minus three percentage points. Core EBITDA increased to 1.2 billion Swiss francs, representing a growth of 27.4% versus H1 2025. This translated into a core EBITDA margin of 34.8%, up 4.4 percentage points versus last year. Our margin expansion was supported by operational execution, maturing growth projects and operating leverage. A favorable product mix and phasing further contributed to the margin uptick. This is also reflected in the continued improvement in our return on invested capital ROIC, which increased by almost 3 percentage points to 13.2% in H1 2026 versus H1 2025 on an annualized basis. This demonstrates that our stronger earnings performance is also increasingly translating into higher returns. This strong H1 performance provides the foundation for our upgraded 2026 core EBITDA margin outlook of 33 to 34%, from our previous outlook of a core EBITDA margin above 32%. As Wolfgang already mentioned, this was a particularly strong first half supported by a lower prior year base and favorable business phasing. Momentum remains positive and absolute sales growth will continue in H2. We expect a lower percentage growth in the second half of 2026 based on the prior year high comparable, especially in advanced synthesis. As a result, H1 and H2 for the Group should be viewed together, with a stronger first-half performance and a more normalized second-half growth, combining to deliver growth in line with our full-year 2026 outlook. Looking at sales growth by business platform, all three business platforms delivered double-digit CR growth in H1-26. Integrated biologics grew by 10%, advanced synthesis by 28%, and specialized modalities by 23%. This demonstrates the broad base nature of the first half performance and shows that all our businesses are contributing to Lonza's growth. Integrated biologics delivered healthy momentum, driven by maturing growth projects and robust growth in the base business. Vacaville, as communicated earlier, showed an H1 weighted sales phasing due to a planned shutdown in the second half to implement the CDMO readiness changes and for the full year we expect the Vacaville site and sales to be roughly in line with full year 2025 at around 0.6 billion Swiss francs. As expected, Advanced Synthesis delivered another half year of exceptional growth, supported by strong performance in small molecules and especially in bioconjugates versus a lower 2025 base. H2 sales for the platform are expected to be higher than H1 in absolute terms, with growth versus the prior year normalizing against a much stronger prior year base and favorable phasing. Adjusting for these factors, underlying growth in H1 was in the low teens, demonstrating the continued strength of the business. Following a somewhat weaker year 2025, impacted by plant asset adaptation in microbial and operational challenges in cell and gene, our specialized modalities business platform returned to strong CER sales growth, mainly driven by microbial and bioscience. Celengene returned to normal operations towards the end of H1, which is expected to support growth in the second half. Overall, sales for the Group grew by almost half a billion Swiss francs in constant currencies in H1 2025. This reflects our continued effort to bring new capacities online and increase throughput within our existing base assets. Turning to Cori Bida and margin development, the strong top line growth translated into significant margin leverage. The Group Cori Bida margin expanded by 4.4 percentage points to 34.8% in H1 2026. This uplift was mainly driven by three factors. First, growth projects across platforms continue to mature, meaning are more utilized and operate more efficiently, and so contributed positively to margins. Second, sales growth outpaced functional expense growth, creating operating leverage. And third, our organizational focus on operational execution, productivity measures and cost discipline began to show tangible results. A favorable product mix and H1 weighted sales facing further supported margin accretion. The strongest margin improvement came in Advanced Synthesis, where core EBITDA margins increased by 6.8 percentage points to around 48%. Also, H2 margins are unlikely to reach the exceptionally high levels seen in H1. We continue to see a strong margin trajectory for the business overall. Specialized modalities also delivered a material margin improvement, with the core EBITDA margin increasing 10.7 percentage points to 28% from strong margin improvement in our microbial business. This was driven by the return to growth of the platform, favorable portfolio mix, and disciplined cost management. With that margin uplift for microbial and the continued attractive margins in bioscience, specialized modalities is now getting closer to the overall group level margins. In integrated biologics, the core EBITDA margin remains stable at a solid 36%. Margin accretion in the growth business from project ramp-ups was offset by less favorable profit mix in the base business. Moving to free cash flow, we made further progress in H1 2026. Free cash flow improved to 426 million Swiss francs compared with 116 million in H1 2025. This represents a clear step up in cash generation and reflects the stronger earnings level as well as somewhat lower capex spend. It also illustrates that our organizational focus on cash generation is beginning to show first results. CAPEX amount to 530 million CHF in H1, equivalent to 15.7% of sales compared with 21.2% of sales in H1 last year. In H1 2026, trade working capital as a potential of sales increased to 37.9%, reflecting the strongest sales growth in H1, which resulted in a higher level of accounts receivable at the end of the first half. We expect this to be a temporary factor and we continue to see additional opportunities to improve trade working capital. Now let's take a look at our CAPEX spend and project portfolio in more detail. In H1 2026, around 60% of CAPEX was invested into growth projects across our business platforms. While we expect some normal CAPEX phasing from 2026 to 2027, investment intensity is expected to remain within our CDMO organic growth model range. Our key investment area in H1 remain mammalian, drug products, bioconjugates and cell and gene. We continue to make progress on our major growth projects, including the upgrade measures at Vacaville, which will lead to the aforementioned site shutdown in H2 2026. Also, we advance larger CAPEX projects in drug product and bioconjugates. This investment portfolio is central to our CDM organic growth model. The assets currently in ramp-up are increasingly contributing to growth and profitability in the short to medium term as utilization continues to build. At the same time, the projects under construction provide the additional capabilities and capacities needed to support Lonza's long-term growth ambitions and meet future customer demand. Across both categories, we remain focused on discipline return criteria and investment areas where the Lonza engine creates a clear competitive advantage. Our CAPEX investment plans and how our disciplined capital allocation translates into sustainable long-term growth, cash generation, value creation is a topic we will have the opportunity to discuss in more depth at our upcoming Capital Markets Day in Wackenville in October. I very much look forward to see you all there. With that, thank you for your attention. Now let me hand back to Wolfgang for the business platform updates and the 2026 outlook.

Yeah, thank you, Philippe. And indeed, now let's look more closely at the H1 performance of each of our three business platforms, starting with integrated biologics. In this platform, our largest business platform, we delivered sales of 1.87 billion Swiss francs and a CER sales growth of 10% as compared to H1 2025. With a core EBITDA of 674 million Swiss francs, we delivered a flat margin of 36% versus H1 2025. Sales and margin were both driven by healthy momentum from growth projects ramping up across our Malian and drug product technology platforms. Sales growth was further supported by the base business, although the margin was offset by a weaker product mix in H1 and the growth project ramp up in FISP. Looking at specific sites, we saw H1 weighted sales at Wackerville. However, we anticipate that this will be offset in H2 due to the extended shutdown to progress with the site's capex measures, with full year 2026 sales expected to be broadly flat versus full year 2025 at around 0.6 billion Swiss francs. Overall, We are very pleased in how the site is now fully integrated in our global network, continues to fully deliver on our expectations and to attract high customer interest. Wackerville is also part of the, I believe, unique and successful offer that we could make to a leading US biopharma company as one of our strategic partners. Turning to our large-scale mammalian asset in FISP, we have commenced the multi-year ramp-up in line with our planned timeline. While during ramp-up this asset doesn't contribute to growth yet and is dilutive on margin, it will become an important source of future growth of our biologics business. In addition, the already ongoing drug product investments in Stein that I mentioned earlier belong to integrated biologics and will also support the platform's long-term growth trajectory. Now let's take a moment to look at the performance and key highlights in our advanced Synthetis platform. Here, we delivered exceptional CR sales growth of 27.7% versus H1 2025, resulting in sales of 834 million Swiss francs. We also reported a core EBITDA margin of 48.1%, an increase of 6.8 percentage points versus H1 2025 for a core EBITDA of 401 million Swiss francs. Sales growth in this platform was driven by a combination of factors. We saw a strong performance in our small molecules technology platform and especially in bioconjugates. This was further supported by increased asset utilization alongside a favorable product mix, a lower base in H1 2025 and phasing. The accompanying high core EBITDA margin was supported by a favorable mix, good operational execution and strong operating leverage. While we are pleased with the exceptionally strong performance in this business platform in H1 2026 and anticipate higher absolute sales in H2, we envisage that CR sales growth will moderate in H2 as planned due to a combination of less favorable phasing and portfolio mix alongside a higher base in H2 2025. Similarly, margins will normalize in the second half of the year as expected. To support the attractive long-term growth outlook of Advanced Synthesis, our recently announced highly potent payload linker expansion in FISP that I talked about earlier will provide much needed additional capacity in response to strong customer demand. Finally, let me take a moment to review the performance of our specialized modalities business platform. Here, we delivered sales of 553 million Swiss Francs and a strong CER sales growth of 22.6% as compared to H1 2025. We also reported a core EBITDA margin uplift to 28%, an improvement of more than 10 percentage points versus H1 2025, resulting in a core EBITDA of 155 million Swiss francs. We are particularly encouraged by this continued progress with margins in specialized modalities now approaching Group Average. This highlights the balance across Lonza and demonstrates the profitable growth is being delivered across all business platforms. The return to positive sales growth was driven by exceptional growth in our microbial technology platform compared to a low base in H1 2025 with the asset successfully adapted and now contributing to growth. Performance also benefited from favorable phasing in H1 2026. Bioscience sustained double-digit sales growth as well, benefiting from favorable sales phasing, while Cell & Gene showed a strengthened operational performance towards the end of H1 2026, and we therefore expect the business to make a meaningful contribution to growth in H2. Double-digit core EBITDA margin accretion was driven by a combination of strong sales growth and favorable portfolio mix alongside our ongoing focus on good cost discipline across our operations. Now let's turn to our outlook for the full year 2026. The strong performance we delivered in H1 reinforces our confidence in our one Lonsa strategy and its centerpiece, the Lonsa engine. Together, they drive attractive growth above the underlying market, while our disciplined investments continue to create the foundation for future growth. These investments will remain in the mid to high teens of capex as percentage of sales and will proceed in line with the capital allocation framework that I shared with you before. Based on our strong H1 performance, we are upgrading our full year 2026 core EBITDA margin outlook to 33-34%, while reconfirming our expectation of 11-12% CER sales growth. In summary, for 2026 you can expect from us the delivery of another full year of strong profitable growth. which will then form the basis for us to continue on our overall trajectory of strong profitable growth and value creation year over year in line with our organic growth model. As we come towards the end of our presentation, let me take a moment to summarize the four key takeaways of our half-year results. Firstly, We delivered a strong H1 performance with 16% sales growth at constant exchange rates and a high core EBITDA margin of 34.8% while also materially improving free cash flow. Based on this, we are well set up to deliver a strong full year in line with our upgraded outlook. Secondly, these results show benefits of our sharper focus on quality, operational execution, productivity, cost discipline and cash generation. While this is an ongoing journey that will never stop, the first signs are encouraging and reinforce our confidence that we will continue to unlock value across all levers. Thirdly, looking to the external environment, we see that customer demand for Lonza's capabilities and capacities remains strong. This reflects the deep trust of our customers in us and supports the resilience of Lonza's unique business model. Across our global network we continue to see customers choosing Lonsa for our scientific expertise, our strong commitment to quality, our manufacturing excellence and our ability to support complex programs across the molecule lifecycle and across the world. In H1, lastly, we have successfully completed our transformation into a pure play CDMO, which will enable us to continue to unlock significant value from our CDMO business. This gives us a clear strategic focus and ensures disciplined capital execution, with an impartial view on organic investment and bolt-on acquisitions. With all of our investments, we are guided by the same objective, creating sustainable long-term value for our shareholders, our customers and the patients they serve. Before we conclude, let me remind you about our Capital Markets Day, which we will host in Wackerville this October. This is your opportunity to engage with our chairman and myself, with Philippe as our CFO and other members of our leadership team. You will gain deeper insights into our strategy and value creation framework and visit one of the most important sites in our global network, widely recognized as a global beacon of biologic manufacturing across the biopharmaceutical industry since more than 25 years. We will share how we are executing the One Launcher strategy, discuss our growth ambitions and provide a deeper look at the opportunities ahead in our integrated biologics business platform. We look forward to welcoming many of you to Wackerville and we encourage you to register your interest soon if you wish to join us.