Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Holcim Half-Year 2021 Results Conference Call. I am Sandra, the Coral School Operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Svetlana Jotko, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Holcim, a very warm welcome to our first Half-Year Results Earnings Call. With me in the room are Jan Jenisch, the CEO of our company, and Geraldine Picot, the CFO of our company. As usual, we will start with the presentation of our results by our CEO and go into more financial aspects by our CFO afterwards, and then we will take some time for your questions afterwards. Now it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Jan Jenisch, the CEO of our company. Jan, go ahead.

Yes, hey, good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining our call about the half year results 2021. You can see I'm very excited to share, I think, the record results and also share some more insights with you on our progress regarding our strategy 2022. So I will start and give you some of the highlights and then Geraldine will go through the details of the regions and the business segments And then we are closing with our guidance and outlook before we have our Q&A session. So again, we had a record first quarter of the year. Now we topped that with another record quarter in the second quarter. So I'm extremely pleased that we have such a strong first half of 2021. Also considering that we had record results last year, especially when it came to free cash flow, I'm very happy to see that we continue here and can even improve this financial performance. I think you look at the results, we did our homework. You remember last year we have launched our health cost and cash action plan in the pandemic. as early as in March 2020. And our aim back then was, of course, to safeguard the business through the crisis, which means safety first for our people, our customers, our communities, but then also safety first for our business in focusing on the cash flow. And the second target of the program was really to become stronger and become the most competitive whole sim here out of this pandemic and we have achieved it as the numbers are proving we have record margins so we did a great job on the cost side to really make sure we are as efficient as we can be and our people also did a great job on the pricing side to make sure we get paid as good as possible and on top of that we had a mainly also exciting product introduction, especially the new eco-packed green range of concrete and now the new eco-planet green range of cement. So very pleasing results. I'm even more excited about the progress we make regarding our strategy. You have seen there was a very active first half of the year when it comes to M&A. We had a record number of seven golden acquisitions, especially to strengthen our aggregates and concrete business. That was, I think, very pleasing. We really found seven good local companies and could welcome them to the Holcim family. Then, of course, on top of everything, we made this transformational acquisition of Firestone Building Products, and we had a call at the beginning of the year where we shared the great fit we have for that business and our ambition to become the global leader in flat roofing systems. Now, we just closed the business end of March and we had now one full quarter with Firestone and there has been really overwhelming results. We have, I think, one chart in the presentation. The volumes grew 21% in Q2, so you can imagine how happy we are that we not only had a seeming less start of the business with no disruption, and we already are full in growth gear. We have great demand from the customer side. And on the other hand, we've already started the expansion into Latin America. with the liquid applied waterproofing product range, which is now present in our descenser retail outlets. Also exciting with Firestone, I always shared with you what a great innovator that is for flat roofing systems, bringing all these functional roofing systems for being insulated, being green, being solar, and here we push now very hard to make our membranes self adhering. So to make work on the roof faster, safer, but also of higher quality, we apply adhesive already in the factory and you can easily bond the membrane on top of the roof. So very exciting new products here going forward. I think also when you look at Divestments, we made some steps here. We have signed the divestment agreements for Zambia, for Malawi, and for the Indian Ocean, which is the island group of Madagascar, Mauritius, and La Reunion. So we're very happy here. We found good owners. And we also found very value accretive divestment values for those businesses. So I'm also happy that our portfolio development goes forward here also in this direction. I think when it comes on sustainability, that's very key for us. We also made good progress. You see, I'm sure you're following our ESG rating, which keep improving. I think more than ESG, I'm excited about this green product initiative we started 12 months ago with EcoPact, now available globally in 24 markets. Now we just launched EcoPlanet, also a range of cement with at least 30% lower carbon footprint, and we have huge demand for those products. This is going to be a big part of our future, and we do everything here to introduce these products and also make sure that the supply chain will be scaled up so that we can use as much recycling material as possible, that we can play a big part in using construction waste, demolition waste into our new products. On the technology side, we made a big progress on 3D printing. I think that's going to be a big part in construction in the future. You have might seen some of our projects. We just had the most stunning 3D printed bridge, which we exhibit in Venice at the architectural exhibition. We have other projects. We are printing schools in Malawi. together with an exciting innovation partner. And one of the most exciting projects is to print windmill towers together with General Electric. So we will see this more and more. And 3D printed products, which can have a material saving of up to 80%, will be a big part of the future of modern and sustainable construction. good i think this is a bit the highlights i want to uh to share with you and to start our discussions and now i'm happy to hand over to geraldine who gives us more insights into the results and performance thank you jan good morning ladies and gentlemen so after an excellent q1 q2 financial metrics you can see on slide 10