Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the half-year 2022 Results Analyst and Investor Conference Call. I am Sandra, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the 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 one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. 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, and welcome to Holcim's first half results call. As usual, we will start with the opening remarks done by our CEO, Jan Jenisch, and follow with more financial details afterwards by our CFO, Geraldine Picot. After that, we'll take some time for your questions, as usual. Without any further ado, I would like to hand over right now to our CEO, Jan. Go ahead, please.

Hey, good morning, everyone, and thank you for making time to join our half-year call. I'm very excited to share more details with you on the results. You can imagine we are very pleased that we continued this profitable growth also in the quarter two. You remember we have already reported profitable growth in Q1, and we even have a better momentum in the second quarter of the year. So I think that's very satisfying to see. Moreover, the growth you're seeing from us is very broad-based. Basically, we have a good demand and strong pricing in all our regions. Then we have some additional push from the launch of our green products. So EcoPact, the green concrete solution, is already 10% of our concrete sales. Then EcoPlanet, our CO2 reduced cement solution, is on the same track. And that's very, very fulfilling to see. And of course, the building up of our fourth segment, solutions and products, is really shaping up now. We have, based on our four acquisitions for roofing systems, Firestone, Malachi, and lately SES insulation solutions. We have built a stronger base for roofing system already with pro forma sales of 3.5 billion Swiss francs for 2022. We have done an additional platform for insulation and facade and mortar systems with the acquisition of four companies in Europe, accounting already for 600 million of performer sales in 2022. So in total, we are now in a situation that for this year, solutions and products will already be 24% of entire wholesale group. So that's a big step. You remember two years ago, we were at 8%. So we could accelerate here successfully and looks like the target we set for 2025 with 30% of sales in solutions and products is of course very, very achievable. And hopefully we have the opportunity to go beyond this original target. So very happy to see that. We have then in the second quarter, as I think we discussed with you previously, was the steepest challenge for us regarding cost inflation. We still had comparatively low cost base in 2021 in the second quarter, and now we have this very high cost inflation, of course, starting with energy, I think with around 40% cost inflation for H1 alone, but also all the other costs from logistics, maintenance, spare parts, and so on. We have high cost inflation, and I'm more than happy to report that we could... balance off here, this cost inflation and even coming back with a positive price over cost for Q2 and for the first half 2022. Very, very fulfilling and puts us, I think, in a great position now. You have seen a little bit our scorecard in the slides, record performance in H1 from net sales to EBIT to net income earnings per share. We have reached new highs and all double-digit growth, I think is a very nice, good position for us, I think, for the second half of the year and also for next year. I think with this, we have Geraldine telling us a bit more on the regions and on the financial results, and then I will return back with the outlook for the year.