Fielmann Group Ag U/Adr

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's panelist and investor call of the Fielmann Group AG following the publication of the financial year figures of 2025 and the first quarter results of 2026. And with this, I'm happy to hand over to Fielmann's CFO, Steffen Becher.

Hello, Sarah. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Steffen. I'm Fielmann's CFO and I joined about three years ago. I'm very happy to welcome you to our first quarterly results call where we deal with the 2025 results and Q126. I'm super excited and happy to have Mark with me, our CEO and majority shareholder. And without further ado, I hand over to Mark for the intro.

Thanks very much, Stefan. So I think most of you guys know already the Fielmann Group. So I'll just give a very brief summary of our family business. We are the third largest vision care provider worldwide. We count around 30 million active customers who are served by 24,000 fantastic colleagues of ours across the globe. We're operating in our retail markets in Europe and in the U.S. and we also operate manufacturing logistics in Asia. I think one thing that is particular about Fielmann is a very, very clear focus on customers and patients. We have a 90% customer satisfaction rate, so we do very regular surveys and that's the number of customers that say that they are happy or very happy with us. And last year we reported 2.44 billion in annual total sales. If you look at our market position globally, You can see in the middle roughly the sales split by major countries. As you can see, Germany is still by far our largest market with roughly a 60% share. Then the remaining 40% are split in sequence by the U.S., which is our second biggest market. Switzerland is big for us, 10%. Spain, 9%. Austria and then the other European markets account for the rest. If you look to the right hand side of this chart, you can see our market position. We are the clear and uncontested market leader in terms of unit sales all across Central Europe. So we're speaking about countries like Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia. We're number two in Eastern Europe where we have a very strong presence. and will achieve market leadership in the long term. And we are number two in Spain, a market that we have just entered five years ago and have grown to become the number two in five years. And we're actually pretty confident that we'll take over market leadership next year and grow a lot further there. Looking on the left-hand side of this chart, you can see our market position in the United States, a market that we have entered roughly three years ago. As you can see, we are the market leader in terms of unit sales in the Upper Midwest, so we're talking about states like Michigan and Wisconsin. We also have a strong position in Nebraska, the Dakotas, and in Minnesota. and we're very confident that in the medium term we'll see market leadership in additional states of the United States in an area that we call the Greater Midwest. Overall, we have a presence in 17 states. Just a quick look at our manufacturing and logistics network. So as you might be aware, Fielmann is not only a vision care provider and audiology provider, but we are actually a vertically integrated business. That means we have our own design, product development, and manufacturing capabilities. We generally manufacture the glasses. in the markets that we are active in. We have two large facilities in the United States. We have a big facility in Germany, one in northern Spain, another one in Poland. We're just building up a huge logistics center in Homotows in the Czech Republic, and we have a major joint venture in Danyang, Danyang being the city in the world that manufactures the most lenses in the world. That's why we run a joint venture. Having this globally diversified and integrated supply chain obviously allows us to offer very, very, very competitive prices to our customers and patients globally. And that being the value proposition that we give to our patients, so really competitive value, is obviously one of our key USPs. And with that, just after a quick introduction of the Fielmann Group, I would hand over to Stefan who will provide a review of the financial year 2025.