Fielmann Group Ag U/Adr

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's analyst and investor call of the Fielmann Group AG, following the publication of the half-year financial figures of the first half of 2026.

And with this, I'm happy to hand over to Fielmann's CFO, Steffen Betjag. Please, the stage is yours.

Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Ingmar, and welcome, everybody. Well, Craig, that was very, very fast. Thank you very much. We come to that later. You know the rules. Two questions per head. Welcome to our half-year results poll. We obviously published interim results and preliminary results already on the 9th of July, so the numbers are more or less well-known. So let's go through that at speed. Before we start with the overall summary, and you can go to the summary, Niels, thanks. Obviously, you all noticed last week that we issued an update to our guidance for the year, and it was obviously a downward correction. Well, you know, let's address that before we start about those numbers. When Niels and I started taking over investor relations for Fielmann, we talked to a lot of you and we stand for honesty and transparency and reliability and we feel that we already guided you based on our June numbers, we already guided you towards the lower end of our expectation and when we saw July and August coming in, we felt necessary that we update our guidance because It became apparent that it might be the lower end, but it might be below the lower end, and therefore we updated our guidance to you guys. It was a year, let me say, full of surprises. Who would have thought that we have an Iran war and a scarcity in crude oil and exploding prices all over again? who would have thought that eight months ago. We definitely didn't and we need to reflect that in the consumer sentiment and we see that being reflected and therefore we adjusted our guidance. We specifically chose a slightly broader range. We chose a range not just a 2% range but the 3% percentage point range, 2 to 5 percentage points or percent growth. We also softened the language around the EBITDA margin going from around 23% to 22% to 23%. The only reason is that, quite honestly, it's not my favorite thing to give you a guidance update and I'm good with doing one for the year and therefore we chose a slightly broader range. I think the important thing is to note that this is a temporary demand trip. It's not, you know, there's nothing fundamental going on in our cost structure. You see that our gross profit margins are super intact. We see actually that July and August have already increased in terms of growth pace. So we're confident, definitely confident that this is the last guidance update we've been giving you. in this year and hopefully for the foreseeable future but you know just to be on the safe side once we do it we said we want to give you a broader range so that whatever surprises all those people and presidents and whoever has out there for us in the making we're basically covered it would be probably stupid of me to say this is it and a hundred percent but I can you can rest assured that all the internal models point in the direction that we're definitely within you know if if the world continues as it does today we're definitely very comfortably in the range that we have given you now with that let's move into the half year number one figures we say that despite our U.S. customers feel because of the uncertainty We still deliver growth and we continue to grow. We grew at 2.3% at constant currency. We see an acceleration in the growth rate in our international markets. It's the same pattern that we've seen over the last two years, that the further away you are from Germany, the better you grow. Unfortunately, Germany is our home market and our biggest market, but we've seen that Germany has been struggling and we'll come to that later. we've seen that Germany has been struggling but you know while we had a lot of you know weather and uncertainty impacts in our other European countries we see that they have you know gone away and for example Spain is back to their usual nine almost ten percent growth rate for the year our EBITDA margin is very stable at We continue obviously to do cost management. We invest into growth. We do that through increased hirings because the more opticians we have in our stores, the more customers we can serve. And yes, we still have an issue with not serving all the customers that we could serve. The more doctors we have in the United States, the more exam capacity we open up. and the more exam capacity we have, the more glasses we sell. So there is an investment going on into personnel expenses. But other than that, we're still very much on a cost-conscious travel. You see the European margin at 25.1% for the first half year. The U.S. dropped by 2.5%. That's mainly due to personnel expenses and building up the capacity. Adjusted EPC margin is stable. and we expect a improved growth dynamic for the second half year. I said July and August, we already see that trend. We're pretty significantly above Q2 numbers, but there's also some seasonality always going on over the summer months when people are on vacation and all that. But we're hopeful because fundamentally we are accelerating our rate at which we open new stores. Tried and tested and over analyzed way of growing for us. We do targeted hirings. As I said, we still send away customers who we can't serve. So if we hire an optician in those stores, then that will immediately increase our top line and productivity gains, mainly the AI by space reflection. I talked to you about that many, many times. Half year 2 should be better than half year 1 in terms of growth and profitability is still intact. Those numbers we talked about, 2%, 2.3% growth, 1.7% organic. You know, we did a small acquisition in Luxembourg. We disclosed that in our appendix. We added 10 stores and adjusted EBITDA margin on same year level and adjusted EBT and margin at the same level as well. I mean, that sounds like, oh, these guys are only growing 4 million in adjusted EBITDA, but please bear in mind that last year was a record profitability year for this company. So whilst with an updated guidance just a week ago, I should be careful, and Nils always says, be careful and tune it down, but I'd say it's still... It's less than we expected, but it's still pretty good that we're beating a record year, at least on the half year.