Bilfinger Se Unsp/Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Billfinger's first quarter 2025 results conference call. My name is Martina Borger, and I'm joined today by Thomas Schulz, our Group CFO, and Matti Jekyll, our Group CFO. As usually, we will start with a presentation on the quarterly highlights and financials, and then open up the call for your questions. As usually, you can ask your questions via telephone by pressing star and one on your keypad or via chat in the webcast. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The event will be recorded. And I will now hand over to Thomas.

Thank you, Martina. Hello, everybody. Let's start with the highlights. We had, as expected, a good start into the year with orders received 11% up, revenue 17% up, EBITDA 50 basis points up from 4.2 to 4.5%. Free cash flow, very good development up to 109 million. And of course, we keep the guidance as it is with the midpoint in the revenue for 4.5 billion euro and in the EBITDA margin with 5.5%. Before we go into the figures and the outlook, et cetera, as always, at first, the safety part. It's part of our ESG configuration. And you see here on that slide on the upper left side, the total recordable incident frequency rate. And what you can see is that we have a slight negative development versus quarter 124, but quite a significant improvement versus the end of last year. Similar situation on the lost time injury frequency rate. Important is that we are targeting to have zero in all these figures. So no accidents for any one of our suppliers, customers, as well as our own employees. Out of that, we go into the industry development. As you know, we show the production index for North America, Middle East and Europe and index to 2019, the last year before Corona. And when you look on that, beside pharma, biopharma, which is the green graph, the other three industries are more or less in the range where it was in 2019. Let's start with the specifics on the chemical and petrochem industry. There we see significant regional differences in growth. On one side, we have the Middle East and US. On the other side, we have Europe, especially Germany. But the outsourcing potential, the willingness of customers to let out of their point of view adjacent business going to suppliers like us is actually quite good. The revenue share was 20%, and we see the demand slightly positive in that area throughout all the regions. If we then come to energy, in energy, we see significant increase demand for storage and distribution. The German investment, which was announced a few weeks ago, actually goes in that direction too. And the outsourcing potential there is good. Our revenue share actually increased to 25% of the top line and we see the demand positive. Then the oil and gas. We see in the oil and gas especially a very strong LNG demand offsetting the lower refinery demand what we have in the industry. Based on all the volatility, politically as well as in the global economy, we see quite a good outsourcing potential. The revenue part in the top line is roughly 20%. And for us, for our products, demand is quite positive. And then we come to the shining star in the production index development, the pharma and the biopharma. As years we say, the localization, the reduced time to produce products since the Corona time actually drives the performance there. Outsourcing potential is good. The revenue share is lifted up to 15% and the demand is quite good too. From that, we would like to present some of the orders that you can see what actually we do on sites. On the left side, we have from Norway, from Thor Medical, an engineering procurement and project management order for a special cancer treatment production based on the element thorium. It shows that we, as Bildfinger, with that what we offer is we are able to go in the pharma, biopharma, on low radiation material too. Not only in technology when we build or when we have to demolish nuclear power plants, in the pharma, biopharma sector too. In the mid part, we have the chemicals and the petrochem from Vinoba, a customer in Germany. And there we have a prolongation of a frame agreement for maintenance, mechanical and piping services. Background is to further increase efficiency of the chemical production for that client. On the right side, we have from a utility company in Qatar in the oil and gas sector to prepare to do a comprehensive study and assessment of onshore and offshore operations with the clear target to have an enhanced energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. These three orders show that we have a lot of common skills. We can serve different geographies and different industries and different customer demands with a high level of efficiency and sustainability improvements. How are we doing that? We bring here new solutions, innovative solutions. This time it's about Roboplast. It's a solution to clean surfaces in offshore so-called mud tanks. And it is important that these mud tanks on offshore installations get cleaned from time to time to perform on the less negative impact with intoxications into the material what gets produced there. We do that together with technology leaders on one side regarding the sandblasting, on the other side regarding robot systems. We brought that together with a data collection system. We are able to improve the asset uptime by more than 50%. As you can see in the picture, no people have to be in the tank, which improves the safety. The cost savings are over 30% and the data collection, which is very important for our clients to prove what they do and what they not do, is fantastically improved with the digital system against manual systems. Out of that, we look into our demand. On the upper left side of the slide, you see our famous opportunity pipeline. Based on the quarter one 2025, what we have now, the indexed month is the January 2023. And you see over the last two years, month by month, which amount of orders we can bid on as the Bielfinger Group. And when you compare that, what we see in the first quarter, we actually have an improvement in the volume where we can bid on versus the first quarter 24, as well as versus the first quarter 23, which, as we say, is a good path for the future for sustainable, profitable growth. When we then look into the orders received, we see here a reported increase of 11%. And organically, minus 4%. So the 11% comes out of the last report quarter from the stock acquisition, what we closed beginning of April last year. Why is it minus 4%? We flagged that already in the quarter four announcement that based on the German election on one side with the uncertainty, on the other side with the US election and the tariff games, what we see there, the hesitation in the market is there and that we see a little bit into our figures, but that will, as we said, only be in the first half of the year and then we will have a normalized situation. Important here to show is that actually our order backlog grew by 20% and organically by 4%, which shows the strong, more balanced, more equal more stable development of our Billfinger Group. And if it gets to more figures, of course, I give to our Group CFO, Matti.

Thank you, Thomas. Warm welcome from my side, everybody out there. A bit of a flavor on the first quarter performance. That was one too many slides now. So group performance, revenue growth, 17% overall, 2% organically. Very good numbers from our industries, pharma and biopharma, energy as well as oil and gas, and as reported a number of times, chemicals and petrochemicals. Industry remains challenging. We hear about production reduction and in in certain instances also in planned closures or reductions there as well. Bear in mind, the first quarter typically is Billfinger's lowest revenue quarter, so we are expecting the usual seasonality here. Same applies for our profitability, however. We reached 4.5%, so up 50 basis points over the first quarter of 2024, driven by a very good increase in our gross profit margin from 10.3% to 11.2%. Where is it coming from? Very simple, better product mix. That means we have more revenue from contracts with better margins, like pharma skids, like engineering services or comprehensive maintenance solutions. We are on a good way here to achieve the midpoint of our guidance, 5.5%. So first quarter, 31% increase in absolute terms on our EBITDA. A little bit of detail in the segments. E&M Europe, our largest segment, orders received slightly down by minus 6%. I think the factors have been mentioned now many times. A bit of the uncertainty. Customers are more cautious. But good growth in pharma, biopharma and energy. And as I said before, chemicals, petrochemicals. remain a challenge, especially in Germany, as we all know. Revenue, 862 million euros, over 729 million, so in absolute terms, 18% growth, minus 2% organically. Again, no concerns here, as we had expected the first quarter, so we're on well on track to achieve the midpoint of our guidance here, which is 3.75 billion euros for the segment E&M Europe. Profitability up 60 basis points from 4.5 to 5.1%, 34% in absolute terms, so from 33 to 44 million. Very good. And you can see Storik is A very good addition here in our segment E&M Europe. International. Also in line with our expectations as communicated before, uncertainty in the United States with the new administration. So a lot of hesitancy on part of our customers. the private or public customers. So the minus 19% is what we had indicated before. And also with the orders received, we know any quarter can be the highest or the lowest. So we don't have a typical seasonality here. Revenue up by 7%, which is a very good number, to 177 million, 162 million for the quarter, predominantly in the Middle East region. And here, in particular, energy and oil and gas industries have contributed to the improvement. Profitability is in line with our expectations and our outlook, 1.8% for the first quarter, 3 million. And as we all know, these are small numbers and any variance looks big in percentage terms. Technologies. Thomas talked about shining star. I wouldn't go to that extent, but 24% up. in order intake is really a success. And if you look at the fourth quarter, 2024, so we're seeing quite a bit of catch up where we had delays in contract awards. So a bit of more pronounced seasonality here. Revenue very solid, 8% up to 186 million. So in book to build 1.07 is a good indicator for further growth in our technologies segment and profitability up from 4.2% to 5.4% in absolute terms from 7 to 10 million. So 40%, 41% to be exact on the back of improved product mix and operational excellence. So those levers that we have introduced with our strategy are working as we have designed them. Back to the group numbers, net profit, 32 million euros for the first quarter this year, up 27% over last year. Earnings per share, 84 cents over 66 cents. We have seen a bit of a higher tax rate here, and that really depends on the countries where we record and report profits. And the tax rate can then vary a little bit, one or two percent up or down. Free cash flow. As said in quarter three, I believe it was, we completed a legal proceeding, a multi-year legal proceeding in the United States, which had a very positive effect or negative effect on the segment international and offsetting positive effect on the group consolidation. However, the cash effect out of the settlement was included in our guidance for 2025. And we're really happy to have received the money in the first quarter. So the legal proceedings are now really final and completed amid double digit million amount. If we take that out, we still have seen our free cash flow in the first quarter more than double over the first quarter 2024. So that's a like-for-like performance based on improved working capital management. And you see the effects also in our KPI net trade assets over revenue. Again, further decrease to 10% in the first quarter of 2025. The good cash flow results in very good net liquidity, so 163 million. Obviously, we're in the second quarter, so that will go down as we pay the dividend, if and when it's decided in our shareholders meeting today. And that also, you can see it on the right-hand side with a bit of a seasonality, so June 30 numbers, we will go up a little bit in our leverage but the target remains well below 2.0 and then finally capital allocation in itself has not changed at all dividend growth our first priority organic growth the second then m a as you well know we have closed On the Roto-Werken transaction, share buyback is running. We have completed, or we have bought how many shares, Martina?