Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Good morning and welcome to First Quarter 2024 Trade-In Update. I'm Nesrine Garbi and I'll be your host today. I'm pleased to be joined by our Chairman and CEO, Mr. Jan Jenisch, our CEO-designate, Mr. Miljan Gutovic, and our CFO, Mr. Stefan Kindler. After their presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. If you're joining us by phone, press star one four to ask a question. Press star one five to drop out of the queue. And if you're joining by webcast, click on the Q&A button and follow the instructions. And with this, I hand it over to you. Jan, the floor is yours.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome. Thank you for joining our Q1 update. Very happy to start to give you some details on our very good start of the year. And then we have Stefan, our CFO, will go into more detail. And then William will conclude with the outlook for 2024. So I'm very pleased with the first quarter. We have done very well with our growth strategy. We have more than 3% growth in local currency. I think you are aware there were a bit less invoicing days and some adverse weather effect in North America. But overall, we are very well on track here to deliver our above 6% of sales growth, what we target for 2024. Very important for us that we continue with our strong margins, our industry-leading margins, and our further increasing margin. So in the Q1, we had an overproportional EBIT growth, more than 17% in local currency, and despite the strong Swiss franc, plus 7.8% in Swiss franc. So very reassuring for our full-year guidance for the 18% EBIT margin. We have then a very strong contribution from solutions and products. I'm very glad now to officially declare the stocking and destocking effect to be over in roofing. You see our roofing sales are up 67% in the first quarter. That's quite a record number if you consider that that's going to be a $4 billion business this year. But it's simply part of this is from the acquisition of Duralust, this very successful completion of our roofing range. We closed last year in April. But also organically, we had 38% sales growth in Q1 in roofing. One big driver of our growth is our M&A execution. So very happy that we had another five acquisitions, five family businesses we could take over in the first three months of the year. So as you see, we are fully on track to deliver our growth by M&A. Also strengthening our positioning in the markets, we closed four divestments. So we are very confident for the guidance for 2024 and Miljan is going to talk about this later. Before looking into more details with Stefan, let me just share a few details with you. First, very important that we continue with our strong margin increase. You see here that Q1 basically continues where we ended in 2023. Very strong overproportional EBIT development here in local currency, but also in Swiss franc. That is very important. You see the margin expansion is another 0.9 percentage points in Q1 alone. So we are well on track here for our guidance of 18% for this year. Our M&A machine, we talked about this for the full year results. Very important, continuous here at full speed. Very happy that we acquired five family-owned businesses to strengthen solutions and products. We bought a fantastic company in Germany. The leader in green roofing systems, Zinko, something we're going to roll out now beyond Germany very successfully. We also strengthened our business in Argentina with a fantastic precast company. And then in the aggregate business, we could reinforce here in Germany with Mendiger Basalt, a very successful family company. In Switzerland, we were – we are – accelerating our construction, demolition, material recycling, and we could take over also here family business. And then in Mexico, we strengthened our already mixed business by also taking over a family-owned company. Very happy to see all that. On the other side of the chart, you see four divestment closed. Very happy here. There are better owners for these countries than Holcim. So very happy we could also successfully close here those four divestments. Overall, very positive effect. We have more than 3% net contribution from our M&A, and you can expect this to continue also for the full year. One part of our big success in this growth and the margin increase is our sustainability and our increase in selling advanced branding solutions. You see here the latest update, EcoPact and EcoPlanet, our low carbon solutions for the customers are accelerating from 16% of respective sales in their segments last year to already 26% in Q1. So we are well on track here to develop these billion-dollar brands further successfully for our customers and for Holcim. Good expansion. We talked about this in the past, how we expand in solutions and products, not only by M&A, but also by very smart investments. And here we have now our new Salt Lake City plant in full operation. increasing our capacity for insulation, which is an important part of our system selling for roofing in this business. Third time we have the climate report, fully integrated now in the annual report. Also here we try to lead the field, very important, so this will be up for vote at the General Assembly. On decarbonization, very important, our KPI of CO2 per net cells further reducing by 5% in Q1. Very happy with that number. And this is something we obviously want to see also for the full year. We had a groundbreaking project yesterday. in the last days in North Germany, where we inaugurated the first carbon capture and utilization project and will be the first project in Germany to come online in 2029. So very happy to see all these foundations for our success growing from solutions and products to our leading billion dollar brands to the decarbonization and to M&A being also an engine for growth and increasing the margins. With this, I'm happy to hand over to Stefan for more details on the results.

Good morning, everybody. Also from my side, happy to present these results to you. Actually, I would like to pick up on the theme that Jan introduced before, the continuing momentum from the fourth quarter into the first quarter. Here you see our EBIT growth quarter by quarter, and you see that the momentum continues with overproportional EBIT growth over our sales growth. Of course, with an increasing margin again, this quarter we increased margin by almost one percentage point, which bodes well also for our guidance on margin for the full year. Sales, as you can see here, our sales organically are flat and in local currency up 3.4%. We had a headwind, of course, from the Swiss franc of about 6% that drove the overall sales. But mind you, the first quarter was a bit specific. We had Ramadan, we had Easter, we had all these things. So we're down by probably a bit more than one trading day on average. And we had some adverse weather conditions. in the US mainly, and also in the UK and Europe, which are major geographies for us. The margin. We said that before, very good progress on margin, not only in local currency and in organic, but also in absolute. So we overcame the Swiss franc, the strong headwinds from the Swiss franc with an absolute margin growth that you can see here. And we think this is almost 8%. We think this is absolutely proof of how a momentum continues into the year. How is that possible? Well, of course, we maintained our commercial strength, but we also had very, very good progress on the cost side energy, for example, that helped us improve our margin. And of course, we had the rebound of the roofing business. The growth was broad-based across all regions. All regions delivered strong over-proportional EBIT growth, good cost performance, good commercial management, and again, the significant progress on roofing that we alluded to since about six months and that you can now really see in numbers printed as well. Let me take you to a quick tour around the world, as we usually do. So we start again in North America. It wouldn't show in the numbers so much, but we still have strong underlying demand. We were impacted really here by weather and by the trading days. The underlying demand remains to be strong. The expansion at our flagship plants in Genevieve, which is very important for de-bottlenecking, for creating new capacity, is well on track. And we expect a very strong performance from our team in the U.S. for 2024. Gets us over to Latin America. Here we had a record Q1 net sales and recurring EBIT. Strong margin of above 36%. What drives the business here, of course, the nearshoring trend accelerates in Mexico and we have a very strong pipeline of infrastructure projects across the continent. Continuing with Europe, record Q1 recurring EBIT, margin expansion of almost 1.5 percentage points. That's now the sixth consecutive quarter of margin expansion. We had two acquisitions in aggregates and construction and demolition materials. Strong results also here expected to continue throughout the year. gets us to a region, Africa, Middle East, EMEA. Profitable growth in local currency, margin expansion of almost two percentage points, which is a significant step up. Significant increase also in alternative fuels usage, which shows that we can also do decarbonization in this part of the world. And as we said before, divestments of our business of Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, which closed in this quarter. Solutions and products. Roofing sales are up 67% in local currency. We showed profitable growth with a margin expansion of 2 percentage points. We had two acquisitions in Europe. We unset before in Germany. And we have a very strong outlook for the year here, obviously, with this good momentum starting. And this will continue through the year. A few words here about the roofing systems because we had that theme throughout last year. We said we retire the chart on the roofing, destocking, but one more time just to really make a point and say this is done. The normalization of demand after destocking of organic sales is 38%. Then, of course, we have the contribution of Duralast with 22%. Now you're going to make the math. Something's missing, right? This is FDT in Germany and some smaller businesses. Then profitable growth, margin expansion of 2.2%. And also a very good and interesting story that our new Salt Lake City plant with the state-of-the-art insulation board production is going well. This is a chart that every CFO is proud to show. Since 2018, we returned more than 11 billion cash to our shareholders. And by the end of this year, you can see that this is a split between share buyback and dividend. We're going to have a dividend increase for the third consecutive year. We're going up 12% to 2.8 Swiss franc per dividend. That's going to be proposed to the AGM. And we told you at the full year results announcement that we're going to launch a new share buyback program that has been launched on March 18th. We're in full swing. We're on track to buy back the shares. And those shares will be canceled at the AGM in 2025. And what's always important for us to mention in this context, we remain committed to a strong investment grade rating. We're executing this share buyback from cash on the balance sheet. With that, I would now love to go over to Miljan for the outlook.