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Welcome to the Brentagh SE 9M 2025 results call and live webcast. Please note that the call will be recorded. During today's call, webcast participants will be in a listen-only mode while we conduct the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, we ask that you please use the raised hand function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. Instructions will also follow at the time of Q&A. I would now like to turn the call over to Thomas Altman, Senior Vice President, Corporate Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Abigail. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our earnings calls of the third quarter 2025. On the call with me today are our CEO, Jens Bergason, and our CFO, Thomas Reisten. I will walk you through today's presentation, which is followed by a Q&A session. Our relevant documents have been published this morning on our website in the investor relations section, where the replay of today's call will be available. Allow me also to point you to our safe harbor statement, which can be found at the end of the slide deck. With that, I will now hand over to our CEO. Jens, over to you.

Thank you, Thomas, and good morning to everyone out there. Just as a general remark of the experiences help us by giving a feedback to Thomas and just give us a rating on how the sound quality is, it would be good. Because in the morning's call we did with the press, there were some corners where we were very hard to hear. So if you could get a status check on that from you after this call, and then we'll see if we need to change tech or do something to improve that. It's a great pleasure to speak with you today for the first time as the CEO of VENTAG. The last two months I've been more or less travelling constantly around the group, spending time with between 100 and 200 customers and our teams out in the region, and also the supply partners. And I started during the summer, obviously, to read up on the market and look into the business model of the company and the way we operate. In the last two weeks I've been a little bit more in the headquarter, but a lot of time spent out there on the kind of building the understanding of the company, starting from the outside. I have still a lot to learn, but I'm very happy with what I've seen in the beginning and the potential. So I'm going to share that in mainly two dimensions, the short-term priorities, and we will not go too much into strategy now. And it is unknown whether you step into a company like this to how much it actually touches everything around us. So that's impressive. But maybe even more impressive in this company than I guess the skill and commitment of our commercial teams around in the world. and how they interact with our customers and supply partners. It is really great to see. And I think that perhaps that is the strongest, the biggest strength of the company, actually, that we have this very unique culture. out in the markets in the front end. And I'm very pleased with that. I'm very honored to join such a team. And it's great to see that we have that culture and that customer focus. All that said, my initial observations confirm the company's fundamental strength and you see a lot of potential. And if you look at the market, there isn't anything in the market helping. I think We are in the longest drop in terms of chemical from the downturn after COVID, and yet we haven't seen an upturn. And yet we are in some extent performing. It's not great, but compared to many other players in the chemical industry, the difficult times prove the ability of Brentog, but also our position in the value chain, with our market position and value proposition and the way we run the business that we can actually do relatively well even in difficult times like this. And one of the winning recipes is obviously that we stay very close to the customers and understand their needs and keep delivering every day, even in a difficult market. If we then look at the potential for operational improvements and efficiency gains, I kind of stage a little bit of work in the company. When you step into a new business, which I've done before, I've been in the sector a bit before, but stepping into a new company, you need to separate a little bit strategy, changes to the strategy, a company has a strategy, but changes to the strategy and what we do now, what are the immediate priorities to improve. And I put that on those slides, summed it up in those three bullets. And the first one is sales. With the market conditions we have, I haven't said growth, I said sales. We can't control the market turnaround, but we can control how much effort we make on sale. And in some of the changes that we have announced, we are anchoring the company to make it easier for us from the top to bottom to be even closer to the market and to empower our local sales teams and driving growth by being close to the customer. And there are two... the first one started already in the summer, was that up to now there was a track where we would split the company in two, or the disentanglement, and there was an awful amount of internal focus to do that, being done on systems, on moving assets, shifting businesses, and that had been going on, and we have stopped that work, I've stopped that work, have escaped, but we need to find it, we need to develop that, we need to get better of it. But shifting that internal focus to external is a sound step, among other efforts to really make clear to an organisation that the core process of this company is to buy a product and to sell it, and all the things we do between, and all the overheads and the support So that's the first priority. The second is, I lumped it under the words clarity and simplification. We have two strong divisions that each have their own distinct role and market strength, and also slightly different business model. You have discussed that before, so it's clear to you. having the company set up with an intermediate two executive committees then you have the local business units the regional business unit and a very big central team has also implied very long decision lines with lots of steps and i will say a bit too much bureaucracy and a loss of speed and what we're doing if you have read the And I'm now putting quite a bit of focus into reducing the number of steps in decision making. And finally, we have execution. The top line is down, it's still down, and the market is not good. And it's not a disaster at all, the market, but it hasn't come around. execution topic, but we haven't done so well until now, is to execute on cost reductions. There was a program announced one and a half year ago, maybe a bit more, and we need to execute on the cost out, because the mismatch between the cost structure and the increases we have had with this duplication of functions, management teams, and the extra layer that has been introduced has come at a high price, and I think it's time to reset that and start to work costs out and improve our competitiveness. So if we then go into those kind of headline focus areas on the short term, if we turn to the next slide, it does outline some of the action, starting from left to right. covered sales, and it doesn't mean I don't want to grow. It's just that immediate action is to get people out on the ground and get the organization to back up the sales effort and the customer proximity and the customer closeness. And the good thing with that is that we have a culture and a crew in this company that really want to do this. So this is more of a unleashing them and getting them back and stop focusing on splitting and allocating businesses and internal transfer costs and what have you. We still do that, but it's not the focus. So that's the left part. Second one is simplification. We want to simplify how we make decisions, shorter chains. I want smaller, more empowered teams, faster cycles, and agility is an overriding goal with very clear ownership of the business. We don't run a matrix. I don't want to run a matrix. I want very straight lines out into the business. So what we are doing here is that we are putting together an executive committee CEO, CFO, CO, HRO in there, so some functions that have consolidated. This might change over time, we will evolve this, it's nothing static. But it will mean that we have an executive team that has members in it that are really sitting in the market, interfacing with customers every day. The German managing board that traditionally is seen as the highest level of management in the company, we are detuning that a little bit. It will be only Thomas and I in that. Surely there will be decisions that have to be taken on that, but as I see it, the management team, the executive team is the executive committee, and that means that the distance from the front end to me is going to be very short, because I have a direct report on every market, and I will oversee that myself. And I'm convinced that we'll improve the hands-on operational management. And I think in the distribution business, at the core, it's a very simple business, and we mustn't overcomplicate it. of overheads, and I think this structure will serve us better. I made two additions, or announced two additions. The one is CHRO, a new HR director. We haven't really had that in Brent again. Distribution business is a people business. She, Frances, joined us 1st of November, so she's already here. And then on the A goal we have is to build a world-class distribution company or distribution supply chain, and therefore I've also recruited a CEO, and he will report to me, he will be part of the EC, and he will join us first of April, because I see the potential of the whole supply chain organization. With regards to the two divisions, we have one company, but we have two businesses. We have the essential division and the specialty division. No change to that. That was good. It was healthy. It's different drivers for success. So we maintain that and I value both of them. I want to grow in both of them. So there's no change to that. But I see the backbone and the scale of what we have. Brento has a lot of assets. We have a lot of I admit, the scale effects hasn't really come out, but that has grown. And some of you have pointed that out. I agree with that, and that's something we need to work on. But when you look at the potential of getting scale effects, they are there. We have some of it, but we can do more of that. So to sum up, I mean, we are not doing the split. And the reason is that the multiple differential between these two, the value of the cost of doing it and the disinerties, it doesn't make sense. I would also say on that note that from an M&A perspective, I see a whole lot. I mean, a key driver for topline, you have organic growth that we need to work on. of the industry, a lot of the targets, and I look just in these two months at 12 targets, very few targets are pure, pure, pure play. They have a little bit of both. And I think there is a risk with being too streamlined and too segmented that you lose a lot of M&A if you all the time have to divest one portion of the company you buy. And so I think that having both businesses also make it a little bit easier to find good targets. And we have a good pipeline of targets. So to sum up, we want to operate two market-leading divisions within one group, respecting the two-business model, commercial focus on both, and then going after growth, doing normal strategy and implementation from those. Within the strategic framework we already laid out, and we will review it of course, but we continue with that, but we do that with one back-folding in terms of supply chain. Doesn't mean that all assets will sit centrally, not at all. We keep the assets out in the businesses, and they're going to also be devoted assets assigned to each one of them. Some are shared, some are devoted. And then third, on the execution. Execution is super important, and when I reviewed the historic initiatives that have been going on, I felt maybe we have tried to do a little bit too much in Pered, so I want to move towards a more focused execution mode, and of course quicker and shorter decision-making chains. We're going to keep our eyes on the execution, and that has already started. And I think that's incredibly important for us in order to deliver cost savings. We are looking, as we brought in the stock exchange release, into short-term and medium-term cost out. And the philosophy here will be that we start close to me. We start at the top. I have headquarters staff. I have functions. I want to reset that into a much smaller team. So that's the first stage, and we're already starting that. Reducing headquarters and support function overheads. And then we will move out through... other functions and then as the CEO arrived we would get more and more close to the supply chain and all the action there. But basically that's the staging, that first remove overheads and duplication, and slim that down, and then after that we get on to supply chain operations. But I need to do a little bit more work on that before we start. The other aspect of it with overhead has already started, and it's starting to roll out and be quite detailed as we speak. So that's the short to medium term. Then if you look at the long term, yes, We need to review the strategy. It doesn't mean we change all of it, but Dentorg has run in a certain way for more or less 150 years, and we have the two businesses now. We are doing a strategic review. It has started, and I will come back to that in the second half of 2026. One of the goals will obviously be growth, not only because it's a market that grows, but make us more capable of growing. But I will come back to that now, the focus is on the immediate priorities of Alta. If we go to the numbers on slide nine, if I can. You have seen those numbers. have read them, and I think that there is nothing in the macro environment that has really changed. The tariffs are there, we have the Chinese overcapacity coming in in Europe, Latin America, South Asia, almost in 2024 it was 33 billion Chinese imports into Europe of chemicals, and probably increasing this year, I haven't seen the numbers. complication is here for the principles, maybe less of a problem for us, and then you still have the instability in the Middle East, we have the Ukrainian war, we have the trade tariffs, and we only have some countries that have put in tariffs to protect themselves, and Mexico and the We are relatively fortunate in the way we can handle that. It speaks to the business model of a distributor in this space. And if I were to look at the numbers, what numbers are you... Obviously, we are not overly happy with the numbers as such. We would like to get back to growth and have a better market. But I think some of the numbers worth emphasizing is... If we take the EBITDA margin with the 5% decline in the top line, that it only goes from 9.1% to 8.9% this year, and that we have managed to get a bit more cost reductions into that to protect the gross profit decline and gross profit margin and most of all the EBITDA margin. And when I compare that to the market, we have done maybe better than some of the players. So that's both of the positives, I would say, of those numbers. If you move to the slide of sales development, basically the same decline in both businesses. Maybe we can see a slightly better volume in material science, but still strong competitive pressures, but otherwise I would pretty much say that more or less the markets are subdued on both sides of the business, both businesses. Going on to the regional development, material science here volumized a little bit better than some of the other businesses, but quite strong price pressure. And in Latin America, the growth is primarily due to the acquisition in Mexico. And apart from that, I want to say anything is new on this but if you take an example of that in america to just give you a flavor brazil chile peru central america guatemala heavily heavily impacted by chinese imports mexico not because they put tariffs and then you have other countries like colombia for example that protect themselves a little bit more the market more safe from Chinese import, and we see a better business. Argentina also doing a little bit better, but it varies a lot, but generally you see all over in these regions the impact of that. That said, we are navigating it, and we are handling it, and it is not a huge problem for us compared to some of the other players in our industry. Over to you, Thomas.