Azelis Group Nv

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Azaleas Group NV 9 Months 2021 Trading Update. Presenting this morning is Dr. Jochen Moeller, CEO and Tice Stocker CFO. Dr. Moeller will start with highlights of the period followed by Mr. Baker, who will give you a financial update. Dr. Moeller will then wrap up an outlook and open the floor for Q&A. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. We will conduct a Q&A session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions through their webcast page using the Ask a Question button. I will now hand the call over to Dr. Moeller, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our first trading update since becoming a publicly listed company almost on the day two months ago. I'm very pleased to present a strong set of results to start our life as a listed company. But before we jump into the short presentation, let me take a moment to thank those of you who engaged with us during the IPO process. Thank you for putting in the work to understand our business. Greatly appreciate it. And to those who did not get a chance to speak to us before, welcome to the Azili story. We look forward to working with all of you in the coming years. So let me kickstart the short presentation. As you might have seen on the next slide, please. As you might have seen in our press release this morning, the first nine months across our business were excellent. Next slide, please. Next slide. Here we are. EMEA, Americas, and APAC all generated double-digit organic growth, and we continue to see strong demand in both the life science and industrial chemicals end markets. We also continued pursuing growth through acquisitions, completing 10 acquisitions between January and September. I will talk more about our growth drivers in the next slide. But our growth focus is not just on the top line. We're equally determined to drive up profits and generate cash, as it is important for our stakeholders and to support our future growth. We also succeeded in further expanding our gross margin, noteworthy that our pass-through policy and value-based pricing policy allowed this expansion despite the continued cost increase we are seeing from materials we are sourcing from our partners. The increase in our free cash flow confirms the benefits of our asset-light model. We generate cash through the cycle. Operationally, we also continue to focus on equally important longer-term objectives. We have strengthened our LVC, our lateral value chain, by some excellent mandate wins and continue to position Azelus as the industry reference in innovation capabilities, digital platforms, and sustainability. We have launched multiple e-labs, activated customer portals, and completed several principal ports. These developments are crucial components of our flywheel growth strategy. Early in the year, we received a platinum Ecovados rating. which underscores our commitment to sustainability. Lastly, we're here doing this call for the first time funding our IPO in September. The proceeds from the IPO were used to pay down our debt, giving us more flexibility and had room to pursue growth. But we're also excited because we know that being a listed company will also guide us to balance growth as well as constant value creation. Not just for the capital markets, but for the industry we serve and our employees. Let's move on to the next slide, please.

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