Dsm Firmenich Ag

Good afternoon and thank you for joining today's call. I hope by now you will have had time to look through our half-year press release and that you have been able to locate our presentation to investor slides on the website. You will also find here our disclaimers about forward-looking statements, which I encourage you to familiarize yourself with. Now, let me hand you over to Dimitri to start with some introductory comments. We will try to limit today's call to about 45 minutes, considering that this is a very busy day for you. Dimitri?

Yes, thank you, Dave. Yes, thank you, Dave. And let me add our thanks to all of you for joining us today for the first ever interim results conference call for DSM-50. Following the completion of the merger in May, we are in our 80th day. We thank you for your interest in our company. And as you can imagine, given that we spoke with you just over a month ago at the release of our preliminary trading update, there is no big news today. What you will see is confirmation that performance of perfumery and beauty and taste, texture and health have both performed well in a volatile macroeconomic environment and that we are accelerating our vitamin transformation plans to address challenges in animal nutrition and health and to a lesser extent, health, nutrition and care. Therefore, rather than our usual rhythm of taking you through some slides in our investor deck, we believe time is probably best spent for you today to moving straight to our Q&A. But just before we do that, we thought it might be useful if Geraldine says a few words about the presentation of our financial statements today. But as you can see, there is a lot to take in. And given that this is the first time we are presenting as DSM Feminic and also our financial results, Geraldine, over to you.

Thank you, Dimitri, and hello, everyone. Indeed, we know it's a busy day for you, so we're trying to be super efficient here. Now, unfortunately, we're not making your lives easy because this press release is a rather complicated one. In fact, we found it also at times a little bit tricky to follow all of the different numbers. So let me first say that the IR team is there to help you, and please don't hesitate to reach out. if you're trying to navigate your way through the presentation. Now, I just want to give a couple of comments to give you the frame within which we prepare these numbers, because it is indeed the first set of reported numbers for DSM Firminich. Now, the first thing is that here we're bringing together two companies. And of course, in order to have something which you can actually analyze in terms of performance, it's easier if you have six months of DSM and six months of Fiuminish together. Now, that's what we have called performer. You will see that on the first page, for example, of the press release. That's the top table. And most of our comments are actually referencing the performer performance. So like for like comparison versus prior, etc. Now, in fact, from an IFRS point of view, given the merger was effective May 8th, the true accounts are actually combining six months of DSM and two months of Firminich. And that is what is the IFRS basis. Now, that becomes particularly relevant when you look at, for instance, cash generation, etc. So that's the difference between IFRS and Performa. Now, there's one extra twist in all of this, and that is the introduction of some new matrices called Core. And what we mean by that is that, in fact, the combination is treated from an IFRS point of view as an acquisition, although it is a merger of equals. But that does mean that we have had to do a purchase price allocation accounting treatment with a step up of assets and liabilities coming from Firminich itself. into the combined balance sheet, for instance. So it does inflate the capital employed. It also, for instance, impacts quite a lot the net profit because of the amortization of these stepped up intangibles. So in order to give you something which is understandable, we've introduced core, which, by the way, was a feedback that we got from you that this was appreciated in the Linder-Praxair deal, for instance, and we've tried to use a similar approach to provide as much transparency as possible. So just wanted to make that as clear as possible. And with that, I think we're actually going to go straight to Q&A. So operator, the floor is back to you.