Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q3 2022 results conference call. I am Sandra, the call school operator. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mrs. Svetlana Jotko, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Thank you, Sandra. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Holcim Q3 trading update call. As usual, we start with the opening remarks by our CEO, Jan Jenic, following by more financial details by our CFO, Geraldine Picot. Afterwards, we'll take time for your questions. The call is limited to one hour, and therefore, to give everybody the opportunity to ask a question, please limit yourself to two questions only. Now, without any further ado, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Jan. Go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. I'm very excited today to share a bit more background information on our excellent results and then also to have a good discussion with you. You have seen the results already. We are very happy that we continue the excellent momentum of the first half into the year, also for the third quarter. And again, we're achieving a new records for sales, for operating profit. I think we couldn't really ask for more. What is more is that a big part of this success is based on our transformation of Holcim, transformation into the new fourth segment solutions and products, which is now already showing significant results and result contribution. Also our successful transformation the geography where we very fast expand in North America which already makes 40% of our sales and even more on the profit side and then also the sustainability profile has changed very positively and I will speak about this in a minute so all together we are pleased we have good order books we don't see We don't see a decline in demand for Holcim also in the fourth quarter or for the start of the year. So we are confident to do the upgrades in the outlook, which we did, upgrade on the net sales, upgrade on the EBIT, then of course the new exciting low level on the debt leverage. So I'm very happy we could do that. Let me just point out a bit on a couple of the slides. I would just like to comment on slide five, where you see this high activity level we have on the transformation of the company. With the first nine months of the year, we did 16 acquisitions, and we did the two significant divestments of India and Brazil. So very remarkable how much speed we have on the expansion of solutions and products with another six acquisitions to further strengthen our roofing and insulation systems, but also to enter here into tile adhesives and into per se systems. On the other side, we did 10 so-called bolt-on acquisitions to further strengthen our business segments of aggregates and ready mix. And very happy to see that. And this will also be our focus. for the future. We want to continue with this activity level. We have a super strong balance sheet and cash position. And we will continue here to acquire and to transform Holcim here for solutions and products and also for the geographic focus. You have then on page seven, you see how we progressed. So from originally 8%, Solutions and products, we are now already at 25% in 2022, if you account for all the changes being made on a full year basis. So we are, I would say, ahead of our target of 30% for 2025. So I look forward to hopefully overachieve the strategic target when it comes here for the expansion of solutions and products. Most exciting for me is on slide eight, how this is already contributing. When you look at the four business segments, you see that a big part of our success is now based on solutions and products or is based on the growth. So the first nine months, we had an EBIT growth of 390 million Swiss francs. And that's fantastic to see that how fast the growth This segment became already our second segment in the Holcim Group after our business segment of Cement. And this is, as you can see from the numbers, the reason why we have a growth in operating profit. Even despite the strength in Swiss francs, we were able to have new records. And this is due to this transformation, more solutions and products, but also more North America. Talking about North America, we have on the next slide, number nine, this impressive geographic transformation of Holcim. You see the numbers, how we were based in five different regions back in 2019 before the pandemic, and now through all the portfolio changes, now North America is 40% of our company. Also, Europe has improved to 32%. And then our super strong foothold in Latin America makes these three regions now more than 80% of whole SIM. And this is what we want to see in the future here, to have these regions where we have strong market shares and excellent earnings profile, which you see on the next slide, number 10. You see the earnings profile. slightly over proportion in North America, largely over proportion in Latin America, and also the same picture. These three regions now make more than 80% of our earnings. So that's very great. We could do this in such a rather fast period of time, and I'm happy that our strategy works, also works already into the numbers. On sustainability, a lot of excitement from a new science-based framework for 1.5 degree scenario. I'm personally the most excited about our green product range, eco-packed, eco-planet with sales growth beyond our expectations. And we have included a new slide for you, slide number 12, where you see now that the decarbonization of Holcim but also the growth in solutions and products leads to a totally new sustainability profile of the company, where in this year we reduced our CO2 per dollar of sales by 30%. So very impressive, I think. And I think with this background on transformation and a bit background on the results, I hand over to Geraldine. who gives us more details on the result and performance.