Evotec SE

Welcome to the Evotech SE full-year result 2024 analyst call. I am Yousef, the chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and that this 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. This conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcasting. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Volker Braun. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Josef, and a warm welcome to all of you following our webcast today. We will cover fiscal year 2024 results and will also share our 2025 guidance. Before, we will be guiding you through the results of our strategic review process and share our midterm outlook with you. Before we do that, It's my duty to point to the cautionary language, which you find on page two. And the second housekeeping item is to mention that this call is scheduled for up to two hours. It's now my pleasure to hand over to Christian Wojciechowski, who will guide you through today's call.

Good afternoon and thank you for taking the time to dial in. Before we go into content, I would like to take the opportunity to welcome Paul Hitchen, our new CFO. Paul joined on March 1st and I'm excited to see such a great CFO complementing our management board. Paul and I will guide you through the presentation today. Let me first tell you how we will run this call. We will obviously cover the full year 2024 results, and we will do this right at the beginning. We will then cover 2025. I will share our views on the current market environment, but I will also talk about the broader context in which we operate. This context will help you understand better why we are confident that Evotech will enjoy accelerated growth in 2025 and beyond. This will then lead us to our strategy review and our transformation program. We will approach this call in the same spirit I announced last time, providing clarity, a transparent approach, and reliability. Reliability also means delivering on what was promised. During our Q3 2024 results, call, I announced that we will conduct a thorough evaluation of our strategy, our operations, the organizational setup, and our processes with diligence and without bias. We have concluded this evaluation and I can reiterate what I said in November. Pairing EvoTech scientific excellence with operational excellence is the way forward to deliver superior and sustainable profitable growth. Evotech today can rely on very strong fundamentals, a world-class scientific team, cutting-edge technology and outstanding customer relationships. Those fundamentals have carried remarkable revenue growth in the past. We will continue to build on it. On our journey to delivering profitable growth, You will now hear us also talking about making the company stronger, not just bigger. We will address this later during the call. Let us now start first with full year 2024. There are encouraging developments to report on. I'm quite pleased to say that after a number of rather rough previous quarters, Evotech has come nicely around the corner with strong Q4 results. 2024 group revenues, R&D expenditures and adjusted ABDA are well within the guidance issued in summer last year. We've seen a strong year-end finish, a pattern we've seen already in previous years. This Q4, however, sticks out as it has been the second best quarter ever in revenues with strong operational leverage. In 2024, we successfully strengthened many of our partnerships, both in Shared R&D and at Just Evotech Biologics, which are paving the way for long-term growth in an overall still soft market environment. I'd like to single out a few highlights. For Just Evotech Biologics, The expansion of our tech partnership with Sondos and expansion with other customers underpinning the strong growth dynamics. At Shared R&D, our excellent collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb has been a true success story since many years. Whilst we've seen recent decline in revenues, we just signed the extension of our multi-year collaboration in neuroscience and targeted protein degradation. A new technology partnership with Novo Nordisk to support next-generation cell therapies, a new multi-year master research collaboration agreement with Pfizer, initially focusing on early discovery research for metabolic and infectious diseases, and a new precision medicine partnership in cardiology with Bayer. Those partnerships are a strong testament to our scientific excellence and are all based on Evotech in-house technology. On a group level, I would like to highlight that we have successfully implemented the priority reset in Q1 this year. I would like to now turn to Paul to guide us through our detailed Q4 and full year results. Paul, please.