Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Holcim Q3 2021 Trading Update Conference Call. I am Paul, the course co-operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Ms. Svetlana Jotko, Head Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Paolo. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Holcim Q3 Trading Update Call. Thank you very much for taking the time for us. With me in the room, we have Mr. Jan Jenic, CEO of our company, and Mrs. Géraldine Bicot, our CFO. As usual, we will start with the introduction of our results by Jan, and following to more financial details by Geraldine. We will take some time for your questions, as usual, also afterwards. Now I hand over to you, Jan. The floor is yours.

Hello, good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining our call this morning. I'm very excited to talk about our Q3 update with you. I think it has been a very satisfying quarter. You saw the numbers. We have a good sales growth in Q3, like for like, but then also with our successful portfolio transformation, we are almost 13% up in Real Swiss ranks. So I'm very satisfied. with what we see on the demand side and our supply side. We have focused very much this year to keep fully running and supplying our customers. There are many disruptions in supply chains, and we are very happy that we prepared the company very well to be able to supply all needed Holcim products also in Q3. That's, I think, very good. Then the margins. We have a record Q3 on the EBIT, so we were again able to have a positive price over cost. Many people are worried. We have some significant cost inflation, as you all know. I think the energy cost alone was up 28% in Q3. Also, logistics is up in other areas. cost buckets. Nevertheless, it's our job to manage this by cost mitigation, so we strongly change our fuels to alternative fuels. We have many, many positive aspects here on the factory side to be more efficient, and then at the same time, we have a good pricing result with a 5% effective increase in 2021. So very satisfying. And again, we are proud that we are able here to navigate through this pandemic or post pandemic with good volumes and very good margins. I think on the strategic side, I'm very happy with the portfolio moves we could complete this year. We just announced a month ago the divestment of Brazil, I think, for quite an attractive enterprise value. At the same time, we also signed Zambia and Malawi divestment. Indian Ocean divestment was actually closed this week, so we have the proceeds here in our accounts. That has been completed, so very happy. More excited, I'm on the buy side. As promised, we accelerated the Bulldog acquisitions. We promised one bulldozer per month and we are exactly on that line. We have nine bulldozer acquisitions for aggregates and ready mix in the first nine months. So that's very good. And then our big Firestone acquisition, which is now half a year with us. That is giving us a lot of pleasure. Business is running very well. We are growing double digits. more than 10% organic sales growth. I think it's the single highest growth we have in our business segments and that brings us to this movement we want to make where solutions and products, our fourth business segment becomes a reality and already for Q3 16% of our sales is here with solutions and products. Very, very happy about this and we will continue here to make this a big part of our future. Many progress being made in sustainability. You have this in the presentation. I'm extremely happy with the success of the rollout of EcoPact, EcoPlanet, but also our clear path for net zero, and now approved by science-based target initiatives. So here, I think we all move in the right direction, and this is all good. We come to the guidance later, but you see we are confident to further upgrade our guidance to now at least 22% of EBIT growth for the full year. With this, I will come to Geraldine, and she gives us more details on the results.