Bilfinger Se Unsp/Adr

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Q1 2026 results call from Bilsinger. My name is Martina Kalkarke, and I'm here together with our group CEO, Thomas Scholz, and our group CFO, Matti Jekyll. As usual, we will start with a presentation of our quarterly highlights, and then open the call for your questions. Also, as usual, you can ask your questions via telephone by passing star and 1 or via chat on the webcast. During the presentation, everyone will be on the listen-only mode and the event will be recorded as usually. I now hand over to Thomas. Thomas, please.

Hello, everybody, and thank you, Martina. So, let's start directly with the highlights. We had a slower start into the year and predominantly based on the severe weather conditions, what we all enjoyed, and which makes it quite difficult for us then in snow and ice to make the necessary work on our customer sites. When we look into the orders, it's minus 5%. Revenue is up despite the weather conditions by 4%. And our EBITDA margin is on 4.6, which is a 5% improvement on EBITDA. The earnings per share went up to 0.99 euro. The cash flow is 21 million. And the outlook is definitely confirmed. And the midpoint, as we always highlight, is actually our target for the revenue as well as for the EBITDA margin. And on strategy execution, we are well on the way. We closed on the 1st of April. The exposition in Turkey with Technocon. Before we go further into the market and into the financial figures and into any other thing related with our group in the first quarter, something about the safety performance. Safety is an indicator of quality. And again, we had a fantastic good start into the year. We had a very good year 2025. And the start into this year was very good with the TRIF. with 0.69, which is, of course, calculated on a million working hours and shows a fantastic performance. Our ambition is, of course, to have zero here, but despite the geopolitical trouble as well as the weather conditions, our organization showed a fantastic good performance. Out of that into the industries. And as you know, on the left side, we showed the production index. One of a lot of different KPIs would be used to forecast our business, and in that case, to forecast our four main industries. And you see that we have here four graphs, starting with 2023 index and going up to 2030, which is our midterm target and guidance, what we gave on the 2nd of December on the Capital Markets Day last year. And when you look on the graphs, you see that the chemicals petrochem are the lower performer ones, then oil and gas, then energy, and then pharma, biopharma is the shining star. But all are growing, some more in a kind of a slow side way with a little bit of pickup with oil and gas as well as with chemicals petrochem. The others more aggressive with energy as well as biopharma. When we then look to the right side, let us start with the chemicals and petrol camps. We have, as we already say, for several quarters, if not years, significant regional differences in expected growth and in activity levels. We see positive North America and the Middle East despite the Iran war. And we see more on a consolidation, more on a restructuring, more on a getting back to more profitability business in Europe. The outsourcing potential, the potential what we see as building to take over more maintenance work, more asset performance improvement work from our clients is in that part of the industry very good because we see a part of customers expanding and, of course, a part, especially in Europe, contracting and they actually focus ask for a lot of workload and a lot of input and we can offer with our outsourcing potential good solutions. The revenue share is 20% on the top line and the demand is, as you see, more on the sideways based on the regional differences as I explained before. The second industry we would like to talk is energy. The increased demand for generation, storage, and transmission of energy is actually giving the industry a positive outlook. It makes already 26% of our revenue share and with a good outsourcing potential. And we don't see, as you see on the left side with the production index, which is in line with how we forecast that industry, we see a further increase. positive development in that part. And for the ones who follow us a longer time, you see that actually before chemicals, petrochem was up once 30% of the top line, now down to 20%, whereas energy is now up to 26%, which shows that with all the work that we do, as we always say, more than 80% is the same, no matter which industry we work in. And we are able to go into industries with a good profitability versus the ones being with a slower activity level. Then we have oil and gas. Of course, an impact short term through the trouble in the Middle East. It is 20% of our revenue share, the outsourcing potential is good, the demand is good. What we see with all the trouble and the horror of what happened and what is partly still ongoing, of course, higher oil and gas prices, increase the willingness of that customer group to invest more, especially into improved asset performance, brownfield investments. We see here an increased demand and especially for LNG, especially in the United States, where we clearly see that they are now the main energy supplier into the world. Then last but not least, our farmer bio-farmer with the typical growth drivers to localize the business. Very quick in the market with new IP, which helps the industry to grow and to develop. Outsourcing potential good because they are not used to build that much in that short time. They need partners to do so. The demand is good and our revenue share is 11%. If we then go from the industry into selected orders, this time three orders again for the segment Western Europe out of the area acid performance. It's in the area biopharma in the United Kingdom, and it's about integrated services regarding enhancement of the acid performance for a biopharma production site. In the middle part you see an order from Germany in the segment Central Europe, again in the asset performance business unit. Here it's about improving performance, doing engineering and installation services to optimize natural gas production in Germany. And on the right side from the segment International and Czech Republic, basic detail and site engineering out of our construction management service within consulting and engineering. And it is actually to a big sub-supplier to a larger customer of us. From these selected orders into innovation. Innovation for us is a driver of growth. It's a driver of reputation. It's a driver of customer reliability. And here we have, together with our customers, the challenge on sites with multiple installations of scaffolding to have an optimized system. operating and handling not only on the scaffold itself, actually on the necessary people and of course the timeline so that the next companies, for example us with insulation, painting and so on, can go into the right spot at the plant. This is what we do in an updated version of our Bilsinger client portal 2.0, where we are able to have an online data mobile device, which is using artificial intelligence. to risk detect and to have so-called proactive decision-making speak where to deploy scaffolding in the next 24 hours, 96 hours, and so on. This helps to reduce the necessary time to do the work by up to or around 40%, which is a cost reduction for the customer and, of course, for us. of around 30% and actually is for us in that case significant more competitive as well as more profitable for us. Out of that innovation into the group demand. And when we look into the opportunity pipeline, which is now indexed on the quarter one 2024, you see that we had in the quarter one 2024 between 100 and 105 indexed as an opportunity in front of us. This is business index where we can bid on and where we know it will go on. A year later, in the first quarter of 2025, you see the figure between 103 and 116, which is quite up versus the year 24. When we then look into what we had this quarter, it is actually 102 to 106, and not on the level as it was the quarter before. What's the background of that? Of course, severe weather conditions have a slight impact on that. But mainly the uncertainty, what we saw in the geopolitical situation, and of course at its peak with the Middle East, turbulences, which is not stalling or taking away possible order intake coming, but it's actually putting it on a timeline in a slower decision making. And that is typical for these kind of crises Why is that the case, especially in the process industry? Because the Middle East part has an impact on the energy cost, which is a big part of the product cost what our customers have. So decision-making is slowing down, but the decisions are not that they go away or that the investments are not needed. It just takes a little bit longer time. That has an impact on our order intake, which is then down 5%. But when we look into the order backlog, there we see a slight movement, a slight up of 1%. When we then give some further input into the different areas of the order intake, of course, on the positive side, we have energy, we have pharma, we actually see oil and gas. On the more depressed side is, of course, the chemicals, because they are heavily under cost pressure. We sell a lot into that area, but the average size of these orders is significantly smaller than it was two years ago, because they have to see how is energy cost developing in the next few days, weeks, and months. Out of that, I would like to give to Mati, our CFO.

Yes. Thanks, Thomas. Good afternoon. Just a quick look into the numbers and some details from the segment. Revenue achieved 1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2026. That's plus 4%, so that's a nice growth rate despite all the issues that Thomas alluded to. On the gross profit, the margin is slightly down from 11.2 to 10.8%. That's mainly driven by the weather impacts that we had. When you cannot work at full speed, then you have some underutilization to deal with. On the contrary, we further improved our cost structure. We reduced our SG&A expenses by about 3 million compared to the first quarter 2025, so the SG&A rate is now down to 6.4% for the quarter. As a result, our EBITDA margin went up by 10 basis points, 4.6% over 4.5%. 5% last year, so the trajectory is in order. Taking a look into the segments, and what we can say is that we see a bit of a mixed picture inside the segments. That's true for Western Europe, Central Europe, and also international in the different regions. For example, here in Western Europe, in the UK, order intake And revenue is up, while in the two countries, Netherlands and Belgium, orders received and revenue were down compared to the first quarter 2025. Growth came from energy, and even though the chemicals and petrochemicals industry has its challenges, we saw some growth there, but a little bit of a decline in oil and gas. gas on the orders received side. The EBITDA margin here went up quite nicely by 50 basis points from 6.3% to 6.8%. That is due to more efficient contract execution, but also to the successes in integrating our acquired businesses, the former stock business or M0 in the UK. Off to central Europe, also here. We saw a mixed picture. We saw growth in order intake and revenue in Scandinavia, in the Nordic countries, while Germany or the DACH, the German-speaking area, was lower than the year before, both in orders received and in revenue. But if you look at book-to-bill here, we're almost at 1.0, 0.99. So not too bad, actually, for the segment Central Europe in a difficult first quarter. profitability is on the same level as in the prior year. Here we have seen more impact from the weather conditions, adverse weather conditions, so that's something that we had to deal with, but in the end, EBITDA is up by 5% from 25 to 26. Segment international, an interesting picture here where the Absolute growth is less than the organic growth that has to do with the dollar movement between Q1-25 and Q1-26. International contains North America, the Middle East, both geographies are dependent on the US dollar and then we have Eastern Europe which is less dependent on the US dollar. On orders received, we did see increases in North America with additions to our large framework contracts. Obviously, the Middle East was impacted by the beginning war in late February. On the revenue side, similar picture where we did see increases in North America while we saw declines in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe. From an industry perspective, we have seen additions in oil and gas industry in the international segment. Profitability went down from 6 million to a break-even position. That had to do with both the geopolitical uncertainties, or to name it clearly, the war in Iran or against Iran, which has affected our operations in the Middle East, and the adverse weather conditions were more severe in Eastern Europe than in other places. Taking a look at the net profit, increased from 32 million to 37 million. That has mainly to do with an increased EBIT, but also we had a favorable one-time tax effect in the US so that the tax rate decreased a few percentage points and that has helped us. The earnings per share went up by 17% from 84 cents to 99 cents per share. And if we look at The adjusted net profit, which then at the end of the year is relevant for the dividend, that went up from 94 cents to 1 euro and 4 cents per share between the two quarters. The free cash flow is a lot lower than in last year's first quarter. As you may remember, we had a one-time effect of mid-double-digit million amount from a legal proceeding in the U.S. That money came in in the first quarter of 2025. So in our own plannings, budgets, and forecasts, that was included. And what happens when the weather is, is not as good as we had expected it and other uncertainties come into play. Then it slows down the process on site, which means the invoicing and the billing process, it takes more time to get our work certified and when it takes more time, then it takes more time to issue and raise the invoices and then get paid. So when you look into a little bit of the details, you see that our work in progress increased more than what we would normally see. And the result is also to be seen in the net trade assets over revenue, which went up to 9%. Both the free cash flow and the working capital will improve in quarter two and quarter three when those seasonal effects come to rest. Not much to report on net liquidity and leverage, which is fine. One thing that we are going to do is you see we have financial debt of 178 million. which includes a promissory loan note that will expire, a part of it will expire by the end of June, 120 million, and then there is a variable interest component of 30 million, so a total of 150 million will be refinanced, and we went to the market today, so I'm sure some of you have seen the information already. And with that, I hand it back to Thomas.