Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Q3 Trading Update. It's a pleasure to reconnect with all of you today. For those of you who do not know me, I am Bénédicte Maier from the Investor Relations Team, and I am here with our Chairman and CEO, Jan Janisch, and with our CFO, Stephen Kindler. As usual, Jan and Stefan will share their perspective and discuss the company's performance over the last nine months. And after that, we will open the floor for your questions. If you are joining us by phone, you can ask your question by pressing star one four on your device. If you wish to withdraw from the queue, please simply press star one five. Additionally, if you are joining us via webcast today, you can also ask your question. Please check the instructions which are available under the Q&A link on the web page. With this, we are all set. And with no further ado, I will now hand it over to you, Jan. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Benedikt. And good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our trading update on our Q3 results. Very satisfied with the results. We have achieved a record in EBIT in the Q3. Very happy about it. We had some softer markets in Q3. We had also significant Forex headwind. In Q3 alone, our EBIT was negatively influenced by 10%. And nevertheless, we made an all-time high in real Swiss franc of 1.6 billion. Very happy about it. It all comes down to the new strong earning profile of Holcim, which is based on many drivers from our fast expansion in North America with superior margins to the build-up of our four-segment solutions and products, most prominently with roofing systems where we have solutions Huge success and also very significant margins in that business. And then I would say all the way down to our sustainable product range with EcoPact, EcoPlant and our newest family member, EcoCycle, which helps us to go into value selling and provide sustainable building solutions our customers are asking for. Let me go into some details before Stefan will give us more details on the financial results. I talked about this, the EBIT margin in Swiss francs. We were able to increase it absolute year on year. And I'm very happy about that. And this is based on our strategy, on our strong earnings profile and will not stop growing. this year, but we will continue in the future with very strong margins. This also, our confidence is displayed in the upgrade of our guidance for the year, where we now upgrade from above 16% to above 17%, an industry-leading EBIT margin. We are very happy to do this upgrade. Our M&A is running. This is another driver for our strong earnings profile. We did 21 value accretive acquisitions, which is a clear directed strategy. On the left side, you see the buildup of solutions and products. You know, we started to build up in the US our advanced roofing systems. Now you see we also go into Latin America and we go into Europe with roofing acquisitions and also acquisitions for mortars, for facades and flooring adhesives. On the right side, our very value accretive Boldon Acquisitions, where we usually buy family owned businesses in specific market locations. And also here you see our focused approach with acquisitions in North America, in Europe and also in Australia, where we were able to acquire a very successful admixture company. When we just had the roofing day last month, I was very proud that our teams in this new segment for Holcim, we just started in 2021. So basically, we started two and a half years ago, and we are now able to have the ambition to become the leading roofing system company in the world with more than $6 billion of turnover and an overproportional increase in EBIT of more than $1.3 billion. We have on the decarbonization side, we go at fast speed. One of the KPIs we are measuring is the CO2 per net sales. You see the significant reduction in the past three years with the shift of our portfolio, but also the strong decarbonization of our processes and our solutions. We were able to more than 40% decrease this footprint. And in the first nine months of this year alone, we decreased by 20%. This shows that we are walking the talk and very happy here on this way to decarbonize. We have some more success stories for decarbonization. Very important for me is to translate the decarbonization in building solutions. So just three years ago, we launched our sustainable product ranges, EcoPact for concrete, EcoPlanet for cement, and they became billion, billion Swiss franc brands just within three years' time. EcoPact is 19% already of ready-mix sales. EcoPlanet also 90% of cement net sales. So very successful, also very important for our margins going forward. The newest branding initiative we are having is EcoCycle. EcoCycle stands for all the circular construction we are doing. You remember last year already we were the leading recycler of construction demolition waste with more than 7 million tons recycled. And we continue here with speed. We have 17% increase in recycled waste. construction demolition materials in the first nine months of the year. So very successful and we expect those run rates to continue in the double digit range. We want to be making circular construction a reality in all the metropolitan areas Holcim is active. Lastly, I'd like to share with you our progress in carbon capture utilization and storage. You know we do all the steps to work with alternative raw materials, to go fully for alternative fuels, to find new minerals, to mix with the cement and the concrete, like construction demolition materials. And for the last step in decarbonization, we make big progress for carbon capture utilization. usage and storage. And we have just received already a six grant from the European Union Innovation Fund in one of our factories in Greece. And this brings our total now to six grants For carbon capture utilization projects, I'm very happy to see that shows that our teams are spot on. They have projects, which are smart and which are realistic and have ambitious timelines. And you see here, the 1st project will be already with the start of production 2027 and. We have already six projects fully committed and fully approved by the European Union as part of the Green Deal, as part of decarbonizing Europe. So very happy with this. It's going to be a huge part for us in the future and also with significant return on investment. I think this was the last slide I wanted to share with you on the recent developments. And now I'm happy to hand over to Stefan, our CFO.

Thank you very much, Jan. Good morning, everybody. I'm glad to be here and give some more insights into our financials. Let's start with net sales. We had organic net sales growth of 6.2% for the nine months. Take you from left to right in this chart. First, the acquisitions and divestments. You know that by now this is mainly the divestment of India and Brazil. This is mainly on the acquisition, on the divestment side, on the acquisition side. It's mainly Euro last, but then also the bolt-ons that we do and some smaller divestments and acquisitions, leading to the 6.2% organic. The foreign exchange is quite significant with 7%. This is a mix of emerging market currencies like Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, but also developed market currencies like the US dollar, the Canadian dollar, the euro. and so on and so on. That FX impact has actually increased in the last quarter versus the year to date. If we then move on to the same bridge for EBIT again, left to right, acquisitions, divestments, the same topics that I told you on net sales, the organic growth with almost 14%, almost 500 million Swiss francs of increase of organic EBIT margin. And the FX here, again, very significant. And again, in the last quarter, increasing. But we should also mention that Q3 had a positive EBIT already, despite scope, despite FX, and despite some softening in some markets. So this is a very good news. And lastly, what I wanted to highlight here is the 17.9% EBIT margin, which is the highest we ever had and which is obviously giving us confidence for the increased guidance that Jan just mentioned. Region by region, you see here in the overview, you see that every region contributes. Every region had very good sales growth. Almost all regions had also over-proportional EBIT growth. And I'll take you one by one now very quickly through those regions. Starting with North America, we have organic net sales growth of almost 13% and organic EBIT growth of almost 20%. We have record net sales and recurring EBIT leading to a margin of 22%. And we expect this good performance to continue in Q4. Latin America, similarly, net sales growth of over 22% and recurring EBIT growth of almost 17%. It's the 13th consecutive quarter of profitable organic growth. And also here, we expect the good performance to continue into Q4. Europe, strong increase in profitability. As you can see, net sales of 9%, recurring EBIT of 28%. We have a record recurring EBIT with strong margin expansion in Europe and we're accelerating the progress in decarbonization. Asia, Middle East and Africa, net sales of almost 9% and recurring EBIT of 16% broad-based across our key markets in the region. You know, it's a large region, but the growth and the EBIT improvement is really broad-based and we expect these strong trends to continue also into Q4. And that brings me lastly to solutions and products where we have a healthy underlying market demand in the US and Europe. We have positive price over cost. Our margin improved in the third quarter led by roofing. And we expect a strong growth in roofing in Q4. And a bit of a reminder to what we told you in the half-year mark, we explained that Q2 and Q3 of last year had the stocking effect. You see the bars here. And then you see the destocking effect in Q4 and Q1. What you also see is that our sales level in absolute is normalizing. And also in Q3, we had good sales at the end of the destocking. And now in Q4, we'll also have the positive comparables to show positive growth numbers. With that update, I would like to give back to Jan for the outlook.