Evonik Inds Ag Unsp/Adr

Thanks a lot and welcome ladies and gentlemen to our full year earnings call. We have four key messages that we want to bring across today. First, we had a successful year 2024 with sector-leading earnings growth and strong free cash flow. Second, we are well prepared for the multiple challenges around us. On top of that, and therefore third, we will further push forward our self-helping measures and programs. And this leads to four. We will deliver further earnings growth in 2025. Maike and I will now go through these messages one by one and give you some more background. Having said this, Maike, the stage is yours.

Thank you, Christian, and good morning also from my side. I will start with the year 2024. we have delivered 25% EBDA growth in a quite tough environment. And yes, admittedly, this was supported by the recovery in animal nutrition, but also smart materials and specialty additives with 11% EBDA growth each have clearly outperformed the average growth of our European chemical peers. This is the result of a 4% volume growth which is partly due to restocking, but also driven by our strong positioning in attractive pockets of growth. And it is supported by the contributions of our cost-saving programs on group as well as on business level. Aside from EBITDA growth, we have extended our strong free cash flow track record and again delivered a cash conversion rate of above 40%. Some quick words also on our fourth quarter. To be honest, here, the pure numbers do not tell you too much about the underlying performance of the businesses. We had the usual year end seasonality, which was even a bit more pronounced this year, especially in the businesses that delivered strong volume growth in the first nine months. And on top, the quarter was impacted by several one-time effects. So I recommend to rather shift your focus to our confident guidance of year-on-year earnings growth for the first quarter. This is a much better proxy to understand the underlying positive dynamics we are currently seeing in our businesses. And back to Christian.

Thanks a lot, Maike. That brings me to the second key message. We are well prepared for the multitude of challenges around us. We have delivered strong earnings growth in 2024 in an environment of weak end market growth, a weak German economy, rising protectionism, and still high earning costs. These challenges did not come as a surprise to us. And this is why we have, with a long view, and over the last years already, prepared ourselves very well. We have continuously invested and strengthened our attractive pockets of growth that has resulted in a combined volume growth of more than 5% in specialty additives and smart materials, and even stronger than that in businesses like coating additives, oil additives, or silica. with a balanced asset footprint across the three main regions. 40% Europe, 30% United States of America, and Asia. And for us, Asia is not only China. Half of our Asian sales are in countries like South Korea, India, Thailand, or Singapore. We, ladies and gentlemen, we produce local for local. For example, for example, We produce 80% of our sales locally in the US. This means that we would rather benefit from any tariffs in the form of higher selling prices in the region. And with our mostly low energy intensive product portfolio, we have a rather low exposure to European energy costs, less than 5% of our total costs. Having said this, back to Microsoft.