Carl Zeiss Meditec Ag

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Carl Zeiss Meditech follow-up call regarding the CEO change announcement. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Sebastian Frerichs, Head of Investor Relations.

Welcome, good morning, and thank you for joining this short notice call. I'm Sebastian, I'm the Head of IR at Carl Zeiss Meditech. For our US-based investors and also our UK investors, whom it is quite early today, a replay and transcript of the call will be made available quickly after we conclude here. Surely all of you have read our news yesterday afternoon regarding the CEO change. With today's call, it is our goal to provide to you an outlook on how we intend to move forward in the short-term, mid-term with management, as well as look on how we expect to achieve continuity in strategy in the future. With no further ado, let me hand it over first to our CFO, Justus. In just a moment, we will also have Andreas, CEO of ZEISS Group, and our designated interim CEO as of January 1st make some comments on the situation. Afterwards, both will be available for some questions. Please note that this call will have to be concluded after about 30 to 40 minutes, so I will kindly ask you to keep questions short and to the point of the CEO change. We will not answer business questions today. These will be covered in depth in our analyst conference in Frankfurt on Thursday, in just a couple of days. So over to you, Justus.

Thank you, Sebastian, and also from my side, I'm really appreciating that you took on this short notice the time to join this call. You will all have read the news that our CEO, Maximilian First, is stepping down by mutual agreement at the end of December. The reason for this, as you have read in our news, is a recently concluded investigation into a violation of ZEISS internal code of conduct. Before passing it on to Andreas, I want to highlight the following key messages to you as our shareholders. The investigation had absolutely nothing to do with Carl Zeiss Meditech AG. Our financial statements for the fiscal year 2024-25, which we are due to release in a couple of days, are not impacted, and neither is our business outlook. there has been no financial damage to Carl Zeiss Meditech AG. Having worked alongside him for the last six months, I can state today that since Max became CEO in June of 25, significant change has already been initiated to Carl Zeiss Meditech. And that despite his unexpected departure, the last month has been key to guiding the company in a new direction. We are now looking to implement a very fast, short to midterm solution to make sure none of the speed and energy gets lost. We are acting with the highest sense of urgency as we know our markets are currently very tough and performance over the last couple of years has been disappointing. I look forward to detailing the status of our change initiatives out to you in our analyst conference on Thursday. And now I will hand it over to Andreas to speak about the outlook and his planned interim leadership of Meditech. Thanks, Andreas, for joining us today. Yeah, thank you, Justus, and thank you, Sebastian, for your remarks. Let me add some comments on how we are moving forward together. While it's the first time I'm addressing you as our shareholders and partners publicly, frankly, it would have been nice to have done that in a better context. For sure, I'm really looking forward to working with all of you as I will take over the interim leadership of Meditech in January. Allow me to make three key points. First, management continuity will be assured. Speaking as the former head of the supervisory board, my most important goal throughout this has been to provide an immediate succession for the Meditech executive board and extended management team to be able to make quick decisions and act decisively. Markets are not easy right now, and there is no time to lose. Second, the change at Meditech will continue at maximum speed. In just six months, Maximilian First has initiated a number of crucial organizational changes at Meditech that I fully stand behind, such as the creation of the new sales organization to drive commercial excellence. New priorities in R&D to increase speed and focus of the company, as well as a review of the global footprint sites.