Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the LaFarge Holcim Q3 2020 Trading Update Conference Call. I'm Andre, the Corus Call Operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Svetlana Lyotko, Head of IR. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Andre. Good morning, everybody, and a very well welcome on behalf of LaFarge Holcim to our Q3 Trading Update Analyst and Investors Call. With me in the room are Mr. Jan Jenisch, the CEO of Lafarge Holcim, and Mrs. Geraldine Bicot, CEO of Lafarge Holcim. It's my pleasure to hand over right now to Mr. Jan Jenisch. Jan, go ahead.

Yes, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call regarding the Q3 performance. I'm very happy. I will make some remarks to start with, and then Geraldine will lead us through the details before... we come to the outlook and then, of course, to your comments and questions. First of all, very excited to share the great news with you. I think we are very happy how volumes came back in the last months and what a strong performance, I think, well ahead of everyone's expectations we could deliver here. If maybe I quickly start with the Some comments on the volumes. You have seen that our volumes are very broadly based. We had the best results in Latin America where our cement volumes are up 6% for quarter three. Fantastic results. Here we are very helped by our branded product sales. So all the branded cement bags we are selling there and where we have leading position has helped us and our strong foothold in distribution and in the retail markets here have been a big plus for us in Q3 and also going into the futures. We have then in Asia Pacific also here ahead of last year 3% the volumes up also excellent and here also we have the same effect of this very strong branded product sales in the distribution and retail channels in markets like India and the Philippines. We have on Europe and Middle East very resilient demand. Europe just slightly below last year and the same for Middle East, Africa. So also here a big resilience on the demand. While North America is a bit later in the disruption cycle, as you remember, they had a very good first half year and now they have to deal with some of the disruptions from pandemic a bit later than the other markets. So we see that in our Q3 volumes. Nevertheless, I think this will also come back to normal volumes very soon. Then I'm very happy that our action plan health, cost and cash brings very strong results. If you remember, we started this already in March and really focused here on cost reduction on one side, but cash generation on the other side, very solid financing and liquidity. And you see that on the slide, we are here clearly above targets and You also see that then also in our margins where our margins are up, EBIT is up 10% against last year's and I can also share with you that all financial KPIs are better than last year's quarter. So really excellent and this makes us also very confident then going into the future, which I will comment later. For now, I'm asking Geraldine to give us a bit more details on how Q3 went.