Fresenius Medical Care AG

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the report on second quarter 2025 conference call. I am Sandra, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listened only mode and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. 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 Dr. Dominic Hager. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Sandra. I would like to welcome everyone to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2025. As always, I would like to start out the call by mentioning our cautionary language that is in our safe harbor statement as well as in our presentation and in all the materials that we have distributed earlier today. For further details concerning risks and uncertainties, please refer to these documents and to our ethics filings. We will have 60 minutes for the call. To give everyone the chance to ask questions, we would like to limit the number of questions to two. It would be great if you could make this work, as always. Let me now welcome Helen Gieser, CEO and Chair of the Management Board, and Martin Fischer, our Chief Financial Officer. Helen, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Dominic. I'd also like to welcome everyone to the call. We appreciate you taking the time to join us today and for your continued interest in Fresenius Medical Care. Our second quarter results reflect continued improvement in our operational performance and disciplined execution as we transform and strengthen our company. Building on this momentum, we are well positioned to embark on our next chapter, FME Reignite, which we outlined at our recent Capital Markets Day in June. Through our clear ambition to lead kidney care through exceptional patient care and innovation, we are ready to unlock our full potential to reignite Fresenius Medical Care and reignite future growth. I will begin my prepared remarks on slide four. In the second quarter, we delivered strong organic revenue growth of 7%, with positive contributions from all three operating segments. Our FME25 Plus transformation program continues its momentum, delivering €58 million in additional sustainable savings of our targeted €180 million for the year. We achieved 13% operating income growth, further driving margin expansion. Our operating cash flow development increased by 75%, and our net leverage ratio improved to 2.7 times, which is well within our new target leverage range of 2.5 to 3 times. The overall phasing of our earnings through the first half of 2025 has developed well in line with our planning, and we continue to expect accelerating earnings development in the second half of the year. Therefore, we are, of course, confirming our full year 2025 outlook. Given the strength of our cash flow profile and our belief that shareholders should meaningfully benefit in the success of our company, we announced in our Capital Markets Day that we will initiate a share buyback program of €1 billion initially, which will be executed in multiple tranches. We have planned to start with the first tranche already in August, Going forward, our new capital allocation framework provides further opportunity for regular share buybacks. This is a key component of our strategy to reignite value creation, and with that, shareholder returns. Turning to slide five. Here I would like to highlight recent developments in each of our now three operating segments, beginning with care delivery. In the U.S., the stable volume development reflects strong and accelerating patient inflow dynamics, which have been unfortunately offset by higher-than-expected patient outlets due to the very severe flu season earlier in the year. I will further unpack the U.S. volume development later in my remarks. Outside the U.S., international same-market treatment growth increased to 1.7%. Second-quarter care delivery performance benefited from favorable weight and mixed development in the U.S., as well as a positive impact from phosphate binders. Our U.S. clinic network is gearing up for the launch of the 5008X and high-volume HDR, and we will begin to roll out the 5008X to our clinics beginning later in the third quarter and ramping up further from there. On this slide, you will notice that value-based care is highlighted as a separate segment for the first time and is no longer included as part of care delivery. As announced in June, we have initiated a new reporting segment as part of our ongoing effort to refine our operating model, providing greater visibility into the drivers of this growing business and further enhance our financial reporting transparency. This is important as value-based care has a very different financial profile and market dynamics than care delivery. In the second quarter, value-based care benefited from expanded contracting, leading to an increase in member months. With this positive development, the revenue growth in the first half of the year was at the upper end of our expectations. Turning to care enablement. care enablement delivered another strong quarter, supported by volume and price increases, as every year the volume growth is less strong in the second quarter, which is normal phasing. We continue to capture sustainable savings as part of FME25+, driven by disciplined execution of the next level of footprint optimization across both manufacturing and supply chain. As a result, our care enablement margin further progressed within the 2025 target band to 8.7%. Care enablement is also well on track for the 5,000 and 8X launch in the U.S. following the additional FDA approval of Release 2.0 in May. Turning to slide six. If you were able to follow our capital market today, you will remember that Dr. Frank Maddox outlined the dynamics of volume growth and how both patient inflows and outflows play an equal role in shaping overall patient flow. This framework is helpful to understand the components of recent volume development in the U.S. and underscores why we are encouraged about future growth. In the second quarter, patient inflow accelerated a bit more than expected compared to the prior year, supported by a higher number of patient referrals and new patient starts. This is an important trend as it signals strength in the underlying volume recovery and also reflects ongoing operational improvements in our own inflow management process. This positive development in patient inflow, however, was offset by higher than expected patient outflow. The severe flu season in the first months of the year in the U.S. resulted in significantly increased mortality compared to the already elevated level of the prior year, as well as a greater number of mistreatments. The impact of higher mortality early in the year carried forward, dampening volume growth in subsequent quarters as well. This clearly impacts our assumption of plus 0.5% plus same market treatment growth in the U.S. in 2025. We now just carefully assume flat to slightly positive same market treatment growth for 2025. I will now hand over to Martin to take you through the second quarter financial performance in more detail.