Carl Zeiss Meditec Ag

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Carl Zeiss Meditech AG Analyst Conference 9M 2023-2024 results. At this time, all participants have been placed on listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your hosts, Christian Frerich, Head of Investor.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to our in-list call. With me, as usual, is our management, our president, CEO, Markus Weber, and our CFO, Justus Wehmer. They will guide you through our financials with some prepared remarks, and afterwards, we look forward to take your questions. I would like to hand over to Markus.

Yeah, thank you so much, Sebastian, and also a warm good morning and welcome from my side, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the nine-month 23-24 Analyst Conference of Carl Zeiss Meditech AG. So let's have first a brief look at our agenda. I will start off with an overview, as usual, of the results and just to give more insight into the financials. Following that, we would like to provide deeper insights into what we are doing about cost control measures and some details around recent order development. Finally, we'll update you on the outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year, 2023-2024. And afterwards, as usual, we will be very open for your questions. We discussed the business situation of the first eight months. In mid-June, the third quarter results reflect what we shared with you when we lowered revenues. Revenue and profit are both under continued pressure year-on-year. The respective investment climate and equity markets, as well as weaker consumer sentiment in our effective business, continue to create headwinds for our business. It's the first time that DORC was consolidated in the Q3 numbers. Please note the reported numbers all include DORC in the slides. So, coming to revenue, revenue in nine months, 23, 24 was down, minus five, one point, if you correct me, minus 1.5% to 1.487 billion Euro, adjusted to currency effect, it was almost stable at 1.510 billion Euros. Currency headwinds mostly came from RMB, USD, US Dollar and Japanese Yen. DORC contributed 53 million revenue in Q3, excluding DORC. The organic revenue was 1.434 billion euros down by minus 5% yield. Both equipment and consumables demonstrated a sideways trend. The restructuring investment climate continued to put pressure on equipment, especially in North America, as we have said in particular in June. The decline in consumables is still preliminary due to the stopping of refractive treatment packs until March 24. There has been a relatively soft start to the summer peak season of confections in the Chinese market in Q3, as well as some delays in the implementation of IOL volume-based procurement, leading to a more unfavorable consumable mix share than we had initially planned for. However, recently, there has been at least some stabilization happening as we speak in our order intake. The book-to-bill ratio stabilized and reached slightly above 1 in Q3, after being below 1 for several quarters. EBIT amounted to 163 million, a significant minus 34% decline year-on-year, which contains stocks of around 4 million. Justus will talk about the stock contribution in just a moment. EBIT margin was 10.9% and down from 16.2% last year. Excluding DORC, the organic EBIT was 159 million with a margin of 11.1%. Adjusted EBIT margin was 161 million with a margin of 11.2%. In the adjusted margin, we stripped out DORC EBIT contribution. DORC integration costs one of payment and amortization on PPA of earlier acquisitions. The main reasons for the steep decline in EBIT were the revenue contraction and resulting lack of operating leverage, as well as the product mix, as I've already mentioned. OPEX are trending sideways, thanks to the strict cost control measures we have implemented. Our net income dropped by minus 42% from 205 million in the prior year to 180 million due to lower EBIT and weaker financial results. This reduced FX hedging contribution in the reporting period. Earnings per share fall to €1.32. Now I would like to hand over to Justus, who will provide you with more background, and we'll discuss the figures in more detail.