Fresenius Medical Care AG

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the report on Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Release and Conference Call. I am Valentina De Coro, School Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. Presentation will be followed by Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Dr. Dominik Heger. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Valentina. I would like to welcome everyone to our earnings call for the second quarter of 2026. I appreciate your flexibility to join this earlier call. We felt it is more helpful to have the call earlier given that we had to publish earlier than originally planned. I do apologize for the inconvenience in particular for those of you who are located in a different time zone or those of you who cover another company hosting a call in parallel right now. As always, I 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 SEC filings. The call is scheduled for one hour. In order to give everyone the chance to ask questions, we would limit the number of questions as always to two. Thank you for making this work. Let me now welcome Helen Giza, CEO and Chair of the Management Board, and Martin Fischer, our Chief Financial Officer. Helen, the floor is yours.

Thank you Dominik and welcome everyone and thank you for joining at this earlier time of the day. I will begin my prepared remarks on slide 4. We continued our strong start to the year delivering another quarter of highly profitable growth supported by solid organic revenue development and further improvement in profitability. Operating income growth accelerated to 23%, in line with our planned phasing for the year, and we realized another quarter of margin expansion. This was also supported by the continued execution of our FME25 Plus Transformation Program, which delivered €67 million of sustainable savings during the quarter. Excuse me. We also completed our initial €1 billion share buyback program on an accelerated timeline and have already launched a second €1 billion program, underscoring our continued focus on disciplined capital allocation and reigniting shareholder returns. With a net leverage ratio of 2.6 times, we remain around the lower end of our target corridor and continue to maintain a strong financial position. With that overview, let me turn to the key second quarter highlights across our operating segments on slide five. Beginning with care delivery, the international markets delivered 0.8% same market treatment growth. In the US, same market treatment growth declined by 0.9%. At the same time, I am genuinely encouraged by the progress we are seeing where it matters most for our patients. Our continued focus on quality and patient care is making a real difference. Missed treatment and mortality improved in the quarter. These are outcomes that are deeply meaningful for the patients who rely on us every day and for all of us who are committed to their care. The same market treatment growth declined due to our own clear operational myths in our business development approach to capture our fair market share of referrals. This exposed an execution gap and led to a further softening of referrals in Q2 compared with Q1. We have promptly addressed this with an organizational change enabling rapid implementation of the necessary prepared measures. While these measures will take a few months to gain traction, we remain confident in our path to restoring referral rates in the affected areas. Given the compounding effect of lower first half referrals on the rest of the year, we now expect USA market treatment growth in 2026 to be around the Q2 level. I also want to recognize the strong execution driving accelerating momentum across several strategic priorities under our Reignite strategy. We are making significant progress accelerating the rollout of our 5008X in our clinics in the US. We have a dedicated slide on high volume HDF coming up where I will provide a broader update. As we continue to strengthen our core operations, we remain disciplined in optimizing our clinic network. We have successfully completed the clinic footprint optimization, exiting around 100 select underperforming clinics. We are realizing favorable rates and seeing contributions from our revenue cycle management initiatives, providing further evidence that our operational improvement efforts are gaining traction. As already indicated, we are beginning to see the impact of our catheter-related bloodstream infection prevention efforts. We saw a 23% reduction in bloodstream infections over the past year, which supports lower infected-related hospitalizations and also translates Thank you for joining us today. LOWERED MORTALITY AND HOSPITALIZATION RATES WHEN FME PATIENTS ARE MANAGED BY INTERWORLD HEALTH ON OCTOBER 12TH WE WILL HOST AN EXPERT CALL WITH TOMMY O'CONNOR THE CEO OF VALUE BASE CARE WHERE WE WILL GIVE MORE INSIGHTS INTO THIS SEGMENT INFORMATION ABOUT THE CALL IS AVAILABLE ON OUR INVESTOR RELATIONS WEBSITE Turning to care enablement, the 5008X rollout gained also momentum for care enablement with growing sales supporting favorable business growth. Overall, we continue to realize positive pricing and volume development outside of China, driving momentum in our underlying business. Despite recent headwinds from regulatory changes, China remains an attractive products market for FME. With refreshed leadership, we are reviewing our strategy to win, as well as our product portfolio for this market. We are navigating elevated raw material and logistics costs driven by the conflict in the Middle East. While these external cost pressures remain a headwind and are something we are monitoring closely, they are currently absorbed in our guidance range. This further reinforces the importance of our continued execution of our FME25 Plus program to drive sustainable savings. Before I turn to the 5008X update, there are two other innovations that I want to highlight. Recently, we introduced Recently, we announced the introduction of TherapyWise, a cloud-based analytics capability designed to provide retrospective, program-level insight into kidney replacement therapy delivered in acute and hospital critical care settings. TherapyWise reflects our continued focus on innovation in critical care by applying data analytics. This helps hospital and clinical leaders gain visibility into how kidney replacement therapy is delivered across their organizations, supporting informed discussions around workflow, consistency, and quality improvement. We also launched Connexus, marking a significant milestone in our home dialysis strategy and our broader digital transformation journey. By bringing peritoneal dialysis and home hemodialysis capabilities together on a single platform, we are creating a more connected experience for patients, caregivers, and clinical teams. We have already achieved our patient go-live with encouraging initial feedback and we look forward to expanding adoption as we continue to scale the platform globally. Most importantly, Connexus establishes a global digital foundation that will enable future innovation and help us advance our commitment to delivering high-quality, person-centered home care. Next on slide six, I'm excited to update you on the progress we are making with our 5,000 in Ajax rollout, which is accelerating as planned. We are firmly on track to meet our 2026 targets, including converting around 20% of our machines in our own clinics. By late July, we had converted 227 clinics across 23 states representing 10% of our machine base. Of the more than 600,000 treatments on the 5008X, around 170,000 have been HDF and more than 100,000 high volume HDF. So far, we have produced 4 million consumables for the 5008X, which is in line with our plan and is rapidly ramping up. Our extensive training efforts have covered around 5,000 renal nurses and patient care technicians. It has been a tremendous undertaking to achieve all of this, and I am proud of how much we have accomplished so far. Last Wednesday, we announced BeaconUS, which is a major research initiative designed to generate real-world evidence for high-volume HDF in routine U.S. clinical practice. This reflects our commitment to bringing innovation to patients thoughtfully, responsibly, and with rigorous scientific evaluation at scale. We are encouraged by the positive early experiences we are seeing from both patients and clinicians. To give you some examples, patients report feeling better both during and after dialysis. And for example, data shows 40% fewer muscle cramps. More than 70% of treatments using AutoSub Plus technology in our research cohort are already reaching the high volume HDF target of at least 23 liters of convective volume per session. Clinical experience suggests simplified clinician workflows, optimized resource utilization, including reduced water consumption, and a much quieter overall dialysis clinic experience. Early observations are tracking consistently with previously published international randomized and real-world studies, including the landmark EU-funded CONVINCE study that collectively have associated high-volume HDR with fewer hospitalizations, fewer mistreatments, and improved survival outcomes compared with conventional hemodialysis. I will now hand over to Martin to walk you through the second quarter financials in more detail.