Sulzer Ltd

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SUSUS H1 Results 2023 Conference Call and Lab webcast. I am Alice, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Domenico Truncellito, Group Head, External Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for being with us today, and welcome to SULZA's H1 results call, which we are hosting as a live webcast. You can find the media report and the presentation on our website. As mentioned, at the end of the presentation, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions. To do that, please call the number that was on your invitation or on the press release. With me today is Susan Thoma, our executive chairwoman, and Thomas Zickler, our CFO. Without further delay, I'd like to hand over to Suzanne. Please.

thank you very much domenico ladies and gentlemen welcome to our mid-year results presentation thank you very much for being with us and for your interest in our company we are able today to communicate good half-year results. You see it here on the slide in a summary. We continue a robust, a good performance in all our businesses. We see continued increase in growth in all divisions and we see a substantial increase in sales, which is also due to a better performance in sales execution during this first semester of 2023. Also, you will see substantial increase in our profit. That has several reasons. One is due to our improved execution, our first signs of improving in operational performance. We see a strong cash improvement. We have put a lot of effort on cash management in the last six months, which you can see in increased receivables. I mean, increased collection of the receivables and also more customer advances for large projects. As a result of all of this, we are able to increase our full-year guidance, which I will speak about after Thomas Zickler, our CFO, has given you more details in our figures. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are happy to report 24.1% increase in orders, 15.4% increase in sales and an improving operational profitability up to 10.1%. Finally, I would like to note that our new businesses, which are strictly in the renewables area, have continued to grow and start to be a significant part of our business. Now I hand over to Thomas. Thomas, please go ahead.