Mersen Unsp/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Merson 2026 half-year results. The webcast will be structured in two parts. First, a presentation by the Merson management team, represented by Salvador Lamas, Group CEO, and Thomas Baumgartner, Group CFO. Afterwards, there will be a Q&A session, during which you may ask questions in two ways, by submitting a writing question in the box below the player, or by clicking the green hand button on the player to ask a question orally. I will now hand over to Salvador Lamas. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, Nathalie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Before talking about the first half results, let me say how pleased I am to speak to you for the first time as CEO of Mercy. Although I officially took over the role in May, I've been part of the group since 2021 and have been closely involved in defining and implementing our current strategy. Over the past few months, I've also had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time with our teams, our customers across different markets, and of course, you, our investors. Those discussions have reinforced my conviction that Mersenne has unique strengths. Highly differentiated technologies, long-standing customer relationships, a truly global industrial footprint, and strong positions in markets that are benefiting from powerful long-term trends. At the same time, they have confirmed something equally important. The fact that our strategy is the right one. Therefore, my priority today is to continue and accelerate its execution with discipline, agility, remaining close to our customers, and ensuring that we succeed in translating these strengths into profitable growth, cash generation, and value creation. I do see opportunities to further improve our execution, additional simplification, and better capital allocation. These opportunities are already today translated into internal group initiatives aiming to further improve our quality, our processes, productivity, lead times, which are becoming more and more important these days, and efficiency in our manufacturing sites. The first half results we are presenting today are, I believe, a very good illustration of that. The market environment is very dynamic in some end markets, while remaining contrasted across geographies. We deliver very solid organic growth, maintaining healthy profitability, and therefore, today, we are rating our guidance for the full year. So now, turning to our results. Nelson delivered a dynamic first half performance. 611 million euros for the first half, leading to a solid organic growth of 3.9%. EBITDA amounted to 97.4 million euros, which corresponds to 15.9% of sales. An operating income before no recurring items amounted to 56.5 million euros, representing 9.2% of sales.

This represents a solid first half and with that we are raising our guidance.