Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Holcim Q1 2022 Trading Update conference call. I am Sandra, the course call 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.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for taking the time. Welcome to Holcim Q1 Trading Update call. We have in the room our CEO, Jan Jenisch, and our CFO, Géraldine Picot. As usual, we will start with the opening remarks done by our CEO and followed by more financial details by our CFO afterwards. As always, we will take time for your questions as usual. Now, without any further ado, I will hand over to our CEO. Jan, the floor is yours.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q1 call. Very pleasing results. I think we had a super start to the year with a plus 20% sales growth and also the EBIT growing over 16%. While I'm, of course, very excited to talk more details about the results, I think it's a great combination of operating excellence or very proactive managing these challenges we have in cost inflation and so on. And at the same time, you see already now our strategy to expand into solutions and products, showing great results here. And I think I'll leave it to Geraldine to go a little bit more in details later on the business segments and the countries. And I would like to mention a couple of important points here. Maybe the first one is that we continue with our acquisition strategy as one core element of our And this, of course, is true for here becoming the global leader in roofing systems with the Firestone acquisition, I think, well integrated already. And also the Malachi acquisition was closed in a record time, only in two months. So already in March, we had the Malachi sales here in our accounts. Very pleasing to see that, what great results we have here. Both companies really hit the ground running. We have high double-digit sales growth with both companies and already an EBIT margin of 17% here in Q1. So I think hitting really all the right buttons you want to have here in solutions and products with high growth and also superior profitability. Besides the big acquisitions, we continue the Bolton acquisitions and you notice that we had already four Bolton acquisitions here starting the year. This is reinforcing our aggregates and already makes concrete business here in Europe and also in North America. So very pleased to see that. You saw that also Standard & Poor's took note of our a strong balance sheet. They upgrade us to BBB+. That's a credit rating we feel, of course, very comfortable with. And we also launched here our first climate report, which will be voted on at the upcoming General Assembly. I think it's exciting to note here our acceleration here in the green growth. We have launched the EcoPact, our range of green concrete, about last year. And already in March, we achieved 10% of the entire ready-mix sales with this global product range of EcoPact. So very exciting to see that, and we are well underway here to basically transform 25% of ready-mix sales here into this new sustainable EcoPact range. If EcoPlanet are the same for green cement with a minimum of 30% CO2 reduction, we also introduced this here globally. We have it already available in 15 markets and we also will report here great progress here in the months and years to come. We have on the financing side with our sustainability link bonds also here we made progress. We launched the first one in Swiss franc and this is another element here of our sustainability strategy. And now all of this you can read in our climate report, which we now launch, I think, probably the first in the sector. And we'll be here up to vote by our shareholders in the upcoming General Assembly. I think with these quick highlights, I would like to pass now to Geraldine, who gives us a bit more detail on cost inflation, on pricing, on geographies, and I will come back with the outlook later.