Bekaert Sa Unsp/Adr

Good morning and welcome to the Bekaert H1 2025 results call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode and we will open the floor for your questions after the presentation. If you require assistance, you may press star zero on your keypad at any time and an operator will assist you. If you wish to join the queue to ask a question at any time, you may press star one. And should you wish to remove yourself from the queue, As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Guy Marks, Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, the floor is yours.

Many thanks and thank you to you all for joining today. What I know is a very, very busy morning. As per usual, I'll just quickly run you through the State of Harvard statement and then hand over to Yves and Seppo. So, this presentation may contain forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the current views of management regarding future events and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, and may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Bekaert is providing the information in this presentation as of its date, and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in it in light of new information, future events, or otherwise. BEACA disclaims any liability for statements made or published by third parties and does not undertake any obligation to correct inaccurate data, information, conclusions, or opinions published by third parties in relation to this or any publication issued by BEACA. With that, I'd like to hand over to Yves.

Thanks guys, and a warm welcome from myself and several sites. So if you look at first half 25 at Bekaert, we delivered a resilient financial performance in the current challenging end markets. We can all see the benefits of our long-term strategy, which has been focusing on the portfolio rationalization, good pricing discipline, and further cost efficiency in the organization. Certainly the first half of the year has been busy with managing the impact of the tariffs. The first wave of 25% import duties on steel and aluminium, we were pretty successful in passing them through to our customer base, as you know, like we did in the past during COVID times, energy surcharges or wire-wrought fluctuations. The second wave in June, bringing the import duties to 50%. As you can understand, it was more difficult to pass fully to the customers. We were successful, but we are more and more concerned about the second half impact on the overall demand of the market economy. We continue to execute our strategy. We disposed and concluded the disposal of LATAM Nord, fully completed by end of June. We keep an intense focus on our cost optimization. So in first half of the year, we reduced overhead costs by 21 million compared to last year, and we will continue working on these topics. A strong working capital improvement reduced by 135 versus first half of last year, creating good, nice cash flow generation for the first half. And we keep on scrutinizing the CapEx investing while investing in good maintenance, good sustainability. We are seeing how to invest in the growth segment. So having said that, we delivered a robust financial performance of 8.8% of EBIT in a very difficult market situation, strong free cash flow, 128 million, and keeping a very low leverage of the balance sheet, continuing our share buyback of 200 million. So let me hand over to Seppo to give you a little bit more details by business segment and overall.