Alzchem Group Ag New

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of Alskam Group AG. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. They are now handing over to Andreas Niedermeyer, who will start the meeting today. Please go ahead, sir.

Yeah, hello, thank you. Good morning together. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to our Q3 analyst call. As usual, we open with an executive summary and then move on to the figures after some strategic and most interesting topics. At the end of the presentation, we will be available for questions for sure. And so let's skip the disclaimer and go directly to the page five. So I click through the slides and it takes a few seconds, I think. Yeah. So you have certainly noticed that we have a new look and feel and have prepared a so-called branch and brand relaunch act. The Altscam group is setting a new sign here. Altscam group is flying the flag. with a new logo embedded in a new corporate identity in a stylized Pentagon Stand Act or ACT, which is on the one hand our stock exchange abbreviation and on the other hand a clear call to action. We want to help shape the future together competently and with agility and we want to be part of the answer of the global questions of our time and this is exactly what the new logo should reflect and reflect. The motivation, the agility and the values of Alskam Group AG. Tradition also plays an important role in this. The proven is carried forward into the future even as a globally successful company with a leading market position in many fields of activity. Alskam continues to respect and to cultivate its roots in the region. The company will continue to attach importance to being a good neighbor at all sites, a reliable partner for customers, and a company with a sense of social and ecological responsibility. On the next pages, we may give you a few more impressions of the new design world here. Tidy, clear in language, Yes, finding the details you need to work with us should be reflected in this picture. And modern, crisp in our statements with high recognition value should be seen here in this picture. And in the end, throughout all medias, I hope we have inspired your curiosity a little. We invite you to browse. through our pages, and we would be happy to receive your valued feedback about our new brand. But now, after the short introduction, back to the real business, back to the figures, and back to the hard facts. So, we are on slide nine now. Overall here, we can report another very positive quarter for the Altschirm Group. All key figures are well above the previous year as a result, of the implementation of consistent growth in the nine-month period. The third quarter also was well above the previous year, but more on this details later. As a result, we are able to maintain the guidance for the fiscal year 2021 up to 415 million in sales and up to 64 million in EBITDA, despite the significant turbulence in the market. The commissioning phase of the new NITRALS plant has been completed and successfully transferred to regular operational use. There is considerable turbulence on the raw material and energy market. Either shortages are being felt, significant price increases have to be accepted, or there is a fundamental lack of availability, including logistic capacities. So far, we have almost always managed to implement everything on time, both on the supply and on the distribution side. And here, of course, the strength of our verbund comes into play because we produce our main raw material ourselves in the verbund production and can steer them through all production stages to the product with the highest demand. In the third quarter, we started the market launch of Eminex, and fortunately, we won the Responsible Care Award of the VCI of Bavaria. Thank you for that. The implementation of our CreaPure capacity expansion is well on track. Commissioning is scheduled for the end of quarter three next year and is also achievable from today's perspective. COVID is still an issue. Our district of Traunstein is one of the districts with the highest incidence rates. Therefore, We continue to act cautiously and prudently, but we have not had any further restrictions due to COVID diseases. So all in all, we can proudly report a very good quarter, albeit a turbulent one from a management perspective. And at this point, the obligatory strategic question, what happens next? Well, here are a few answers from George Weisselbommer.

Thank you, Andreas. A focal point of today's presentation will be DieHard. DieHard is the brand name for high-performance thermoset epoxy cure systems and was developed based on dye cyanidiamide hardeners. Over time, we have added Euron and Imidazole accelerators and even formulated epoxy resin systems. Those give us a flexible toolbox, which helps us assisting our customers in solving their curing tasks. In the current environment, in-house production of di-cyan-diamide, milling this raw material according to customer demand, and production of neurons in our multipurpose plants ensures seamless availability and leads to growing market share. With own application labs, will help customers finding the right balance between curing time and temperature while creating highly cross-linked composite systems. Die-hard products have their market as flame repartants in electronic equipment and expanded quickly into lightweight parts for sports equipment like bicycles or tennis rackets. Due to the lightweight yet rigid construction possibilities, they made their way into rotors of commercial windmills. Newest applications are for structural parts in automotive, aerospace, and aeronautic systems. In summary, diehard products were always at the forefront of sustainability, creating end products with reduced weight and reduced energy requirement. On the next page, we would like to introduce the newest development along this journey. Diehard products as raw materials for lightweight hydrogen cylinders. Again, the ability to create systems with high stability yet with low weight makes diehard the choice for cylinders in fuel cell electric vehicles. Countries like Japan and Korea rigorously develop passenger cars based on hydrogen-powered fuel cells. And in other areas of the world, hydrogen mobility is considered a serious alternative for heavy-duty vehicles, trains, or ships. For those applications, we have developed a range of die-hard liquid systems, which can be tailored to the development requirements of hydrogen car producers. The system was tested in several end-user applications and approved in pressure cycles exceeding 700 bars of hydrogen pressure. Those cylinders are composed of a carbon fiber matrix as base bone and cured epoxy resin as body. A typical cylinder is shown in the lower right corner of the slide. The production process is called filament winding with a carbon fiber soap in a liquid epoxy curing system while continuously wound around a solid body. Afterwards, the rotating cylinder is cured at elevated temperatures. Advantages of the diehard system in production of cylinders are the long-term stability of the solution during winding, which leads to higher machine utilization, less cleaning and waste, and consequently high productivity, or in other words, high profitability. During the curing process, it is of critical importance for the uniformity of the cylinder that the heat generated during this process is equally dissipated and hotspots are avoided. Here again, the diehard toolbox does its job. Hydrogen-powered vehicles are part of the energy solution for our planet, and diehard is well positioned to be part of this process. With this positive statement, I would like to give the word back to Andreas.