Aperam Sa Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the APERAM fourth quarter 2025 results conference call. I'm Lorenzo, the chorus call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-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. 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 Sud Sivai, CEO. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you very much for joining our conference call today. All our comments were contained in the podcast that we published this morning, which, you know, supports our quarterly financial reporting and where applicable, our disclosure of regulated information. We also save more time for your pertinent questions during this call. Good afternoon to everyone joining this call. Together with my colleague, Nicolas Changerot, we're looking forward to answering your questions. So let's start straight away with Q&A. Thank you. Operator, if you could open the lines. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press start and 1 on their touch phone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered in the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Gresser Tristan from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead, sir.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I have two. The first, could you help us understand a bit the current situation in Europe? If your order books are improving at the moment or not, are more buyers of stainless steel turning domestic? Are buyers of stainless steel importing like nothing has changed? You also flagged that inventory have decreased, but imported surging Q4. So I'm also trying to square that one out and see how much of an overhang there is on the market in Q1, Q2. That's my first question.

Thanks. So the discussion about the market in Europe currently is that, you know, our order books are, from Q4, but it's purely a seasonal recovery. You know, Q1's typically Europe comes back from its Christmas holidays, and there's a seasonal recovery. So we don't see any of anything special, additional, like we said in the podcast. So it's seasonality, purely. The second question you had was, are importers turning to domestics? No, we don't see that specific activity, typical buying patterns. both apparent consumption and real consumption, which drives our production is at seasonal normal levels. In terms of the inventories being low, the distributor supply chain, the statistics were at the end of Q3. And as you marked correctly from our podcast, import surge was there at the end of Q4, probably as some distributors were trying to cover for CBAM discussions. So this will have, like we said in our podcast as well, some overhang in H1, but it's, I believe, a temporary overhang because, as you know, of the three bodies of the European Commission, two, the INTA, which is the association, and the European Council have both come out and said 1st of July is the start of the new... quota period for the trade safeguard duties. So we do believe that that window is closing. So it's an overhang because of these imports end of Q4, but this overhang probably is going to affect the first half of the year a bit. And that's the reason we gave the guidance we gave.