Avio S.p.A.

Good afternoon. This is the Coruscant Conference Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Avio First Quarter 2026 highlights presentation. All participants are in listen-only mode and after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Nevio Quattarini, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good evening, good evening everyone and welcome to Q1 2026 results conference call Olavio. I'm here with Mr. Giulio Ranzo, newly confirmed outside chief executive officer of Olavio and Mr. Roberto Garassai, chief financial officer of the company. In a moment, we will go through the presentation we just released on our website, which outlines the main highlights and financial results of the quarter. And in the end, we will, as usual, welcome your questions. Thank you for your attention, and I hand the conversation over to Giulio.

Thank you, Mario. Thank you all for joining the first quarter results, the additional call we have. As Mario was commenting, I was reappointed, so I'm not a newly appointed CEO. I'm second-hand, probably, nonetheless. Off we go. So, another quarter. So, overall, this first quarter is in line with expectations, continues to show growth on what we do, and numbers in line with expectations. We're ready to go with DD29, the 29th mission of Vega. The SMILE satellite is on the pad and is expected to launch on May 19th. We had a little bit of a delay over the last few weeks, but we're on track to fly on May 19th. We recently had two important successes of ION6. The first flight for Amazon. You may recall, those of you who have followed the stock for a while, that this was an important target for ION6, which we achieved together by improving the performance of ION6 to suit the needs of the Amazon customer. So we were very happy on the last flight. We performed the first mission of ION6 with four of our boosters. a very, very important milestone achieved. It's also important to highlight to you that we are approaching notable milestones on our liquid propulsion technology projects, which we often refer to but don't talk much about. We are now accelerating a little bit towards the first adrenaline milestone, so we want to update you a little bit on that as well. On the U.S. projects, We are progressing as expected. We recently completed the land purchase in Virginia and started to order the plant equipment, which are, you know, with more lead time, so we ordered that in advance. As I said, on the financial side, the revenues continue to grow at a transcendent pace. versus last year, which is not irrelevant, if I may comment, because this is the fourth year in a row that we continue to deliver on the top line a growth of 20%, which I can guarantee to you that is anything but simple. Then, based on these aspects here, we obviously confirm the 2026 guidance, which is communicated a few weeks ago. As I said before, like you commented, we have a new board of directors. Five out of nine have been changed in the director, so myself and the chairman remain to grant management continuity, but we have also some new relevant additions that have broadened a little bit the competencies we have around the board of directors. So now, Moving on to page five, as I said, the venue, the next legacy mission is about to be launched, so May 19th is an important flight for the European Space Agency. The smile spacecraft, it's a scientific mission to measure something particularly complex to solar wind. the mission will be the first operated by Avio as a launch operator. But that being that we will essentially replace the former role held by Ariane Space for many years since the beginning of the Vega launcher. And so Avio will be overall responsible for the hold on service, which was, as you know, a target we had pushed for a long time. So everything is ready to go. We should see that next Tuesday, the night, I believe, between Tuesday and Wednesday in Europe. I told you about the first place of Amazon Neo. I remember very well when we pursued this customer a few years ago. We promised Amazon to deliver a capable launcher to suit their needs. in a peculiar configuration. Now we perform the first two flights, the first couple of flights for them. Now, later in July, I believe, we will perform the first flight of Ariane 6 core with the P160, with the larger prep-on booster that will deliver more performance and, therefore, more ability to carry more payloads, more satellites in just one flight. which I think is particularly relevant for Amazon because they have, let's say, scattered their flights across a number of different launchers. IN6 covers a portion of their launching needs, but we are delivering as expected, and I believe the customer is very happy about that. So, therefore, this is very important for us as we deliver the propulsion systems, which are very relevant, as you know, since the grant to something like 90% of the trust. The schedule this year for flights looks really busy. There might be as many as eight IM6 flights and three Vega C flights. The schedule for Vega C in 2026 has been made complex by scheduling of the satellites wasn't ideal, because what we envisioned is that we might have five flights in 2027, maybe it would have been better to do four rather than three and five. Nonetheless, the schedule of the flights was set to this tentative schedule for the time being. We continue to have a robust backlog on both IM6 and Vegas. for the foreseeable future. So we are covered all the way to 2030, give or take. So I think there's quite some visibility over future flights. Now it's all around execution and making sure we deliver on the promise of raising the flight rate. And next year, for sure, for Vega-C, will be extremely relevant. For Alien 60, already, will be relevant this year. And for us, too, in delivering the most. As we said before, a new board of directors with lots of new additions. In particular, we have two U.S. directors, Stephen Wood and Heidi Hsu. In particular, I want to mention the name of Heidi Hsu. She was a former Secretary of Defense, so very experienced in defense technologies, very important for us to have this addition. And Stephen Wood is a financial investor himself, so with some experience on the U.S. market and considering what we have in our plan, I think these are important.