Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Holcim Q1 2023 trading update investor and analyst conference call. I am Sandra, the chorus call operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Benedict Meyer, investor relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Thank you, Sandra, and good morning, everyone. A warm welcome to Holcim First Quarter Trading Update. I'm joined today by Jan Janisch, our CEO, and I'm also delighted to introduce you to our new CFO, Stefan Kindler, who has just joined the group this month. As always, we will spend a few minutes reviewing the business, and then we will be happy to take your questions. I will now hand it over to you, Jan.

Yeah, Benedic, thank you. Good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining our call. I'm very happy to share our strong start to the year with you. We go a bit, you have received the presentation, which is, I think, representing the story very well. Let me just go quickly over some of the slides, and then Stefan will go more details on sales EBIT, but also especially on the regional results before we come to the outlook for the year. So first of all, I'm happy we have started the year really well. We have organic growth sales of plus 8% and then overproportional on the EBIT side, plus 12%. Very happy everything plays out, how we master this superinflation with cost mitigation, but also with selling higher value products and also with significant price increases in the markets. Here I'm extremely happy that we do this in a very timely manner. We are in that inflationary environment already for almost two years now, and I think at Holcim we have done the pricing in a very proactive way so that our results are not suffering. On the contrary, they are improving the margins. I'm very happy that our growth strategy also from the M&A side was very active in Q1. We closed 12 acquisitions already in three months' time. Could add another five acquisitions in the buildup of our fourth business segment solutions and products. had a record fast closing of Duralust, fantastic acquisition, fully completing our technologies we need in the roofing market and we closed already that acquisition at the end of March and that's already fully now with Holcim. From April onwards, we bought another roofing company, Flachdach Technology in Germany and also in Argentina and Mexico, we could add here roofing companies here for a global rollout so very happy how this is happening and you can expect more from us here also for 2023 we have on the climate side i think we make excellent progress on decarbonization we just launched our climate report end of march which will be subject to voting by the shareholders in or 12 days time in our General Assembly. Excellent report. Shows how fast we are progressing now to decarbonize Holcim, but even more to decarbonize the way we are building, which is also very appreciated by our customers. And we've moved here very fast. Altogether, Q1 was, I would say, within our expectations. gave us the confidence to upgrade the guidance for 2023 further, and we have upgraded the organic sales growth guidance to above 6%, and then corresponding over-proportional increase in EBIT with a growth of above 10%. I think with this overview and the highlights, I'm very happy to hand over to Stefan, and he will run us through sales EBIT and the regions.