Amrize Ltd Ordinary Shares

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Holcim Q3 2025 Trading Update Analyst and Investor Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Sandra, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listened 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 1 on your telephone. or on the virtual HD web phone keypad on your screen. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing by the relative field. 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 Bernd Pomrem, Group Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Zandra. And good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be here with our CEO, Miljan Gutovic, and our CFO, Stefan Kindler. They will provide an update on our strong nine months, 25 results. Afterwards, they will provide an update on our strategy. And finally, obviously, they will give an outlook for the current year. With this very short introduction, I directly hand it over to Miljan. Miljan, please. Thank you, Bernd.

Good morning to all of you and a warm welcome to HoldSim's third quarter results. Stefan and I are pleased to be presenting our earnings to you today. And of course, there will be a time afterwards for your questions. We delivered strong profitable growth in the first nine months of 2025. Highlights, as you can see, include accelerating net sales growth in Q3 of almost 5%. Also strong over-proportional recurring EBIT growth across all our regions. And the industry leading margin above 19%. Our margin expansion was driven by our high value strategy. This includes scaling up our sustainable offering and accelerating decarbonization and circular construction to drive profitable growth. Earlier this week, we announced that Holcim signed a binding agreement to acquire Xela, a European leader in sustainable and innovative walling systems. The acquisition is a milestone in our vision to be the leading partner for sustainable construction, and it will also accelerate the expansion of our high-value building solution segment in line with our strategy. With Xela, we have a growth platform in the highly attractive 12 billion euro rolling market, and I will talk more about this later on. Elsewhere, we have continued our disciplined execution of Value Accretive M&A. Since the start of the year, we have closed a further 14 transactions focused on the most attractive markets. With these strong results, we are confirming our full year guidance for 2025. I'll talk about the guidance in full at the end of this presentation. Turning to the regional highlights now, Europe continues to deliver strong margin expansion driven by our high-value strategy, our sustainable offering, as well as decarbonization and circular construction. Demand for sustainable offering is expected to drive continued earnings momentum. And here in Switzerland, our lighthouse market for innovation, where we introduced the world's first circular cement, we have just launched EcoPlanet with EcoCycle, cement with at least 10% to 100% of recycled construction and demolition materials inside. In Europe, more broadly, the residential market is showing signs of recovery, and we also have a robust project pipeline. In Latam, we delivered double-digit net sales growth for the first nine months with a recurring EBIT margin above 30%. We have also completed three value accretive acquisitions in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina since the start of the year. These acquisitions will help us further accelerate the expansion of Desensa, the largest construction material retail franchise in the region. Desensa is growing strongly and we have opened around 290 additional Desensa stores in the first nine months. We expect strong performance in Latam to continue with Central America and recently acquired businesses driving growth. In Mexico, there is a very strong pipeline of infrastructure projects to accelerate growth from 2026. Asia, Middle East and Africa delivered a double-digit increase in recurring EBIT and outstanding margin expansion of 200 basis points. We saw a strong demand in North Africa and in Australia, where our joint venture business, Cement Australia, also recently closed the acquisition of a division of BGC. Further out, there is a positive outlook in Australia, and we do expect a strong demand in North Africa to continue this year and also in the years to come. With that, I would like to hand it over to Stefan to talk through the financials in more detail.