Fresenius Se & Co

Good afternoon and welcome to the conference call of Fresenius Investor Relations, which is now starting. May I hand you over to Nick Stone, Head of Investor Relations.

Thank you, Valentina. Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome to our full year and Q4 2025 earnings call and webcast. Presentation was emailed to our distribution list earlier today and is available on Fresenius.com. On slide two of the presentation, We'll find the usual safe harbor statement, unless stated otherwise. We'll comment on our performance using constant exchange rates or CER. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Michael and Sarah, who will present another competitive performance, followed by an overview of the full year 26 guidance and the underlying components. As usual, the call will last approximately one hour, with the presentation taking between 35 to 40 minutes and remaining time for your questions. To give everyone the chance to participate, Please limit your questions to one to two in the first instance, and we can always come back for a second round as needed. With that, I will now hand the call over to Michael to kick things off.

Yes, very well. Thank you, Nick, and welcome to everybody joining us today. Sarah and I will review our 2025 operational and financial highlights. We will also go into more detail on our individual businesses within TAVI and Helios. 2025 was a great year for Fresenius. a year in which we delivered an excellent operating performance despite significant macroeconomic headwinds. 2026 will be all about accelerating performance and ultimately creating sustainable value. 2025 has been a pivotal year. We launched the next phase of our future Fresenius strategy, Rejuvenate, and it kicked off with really great momentum. We have sharpened our strategic paradigm, upgrade our core, scale our platforms, elevate performance. Over the past three years, we have fundamentally reshaped Fresenius, becoming a stronger, simpler, and more resilient company. We've taken meaningful steps to enhance our position as a relevant player in the healthcare ecosystem of the future. This is now paying back in a highly volatile macroeconomic and geopolitical environment. Presenius is in great shape, and we will continue to take the right steps to have the company in its best form to seize future opportunities. In 2025, we delivered another year of strong and consistent execution. Our businesses contributed strong organic growth. Yes, through double digit for the second consecutive year, clearly outpacing top line growth, demonstrating nice operating leverage. Our balance sheet is now significantly stronger with net depth to EBITDA at 2.7. We're now well within our self-imposed and improved bridge corridor, more than 100 basis points better than 2022. This gives us enhanced strategic flexibility in a challenging macro environment. All in all, 2025 reflects sustained progress quarter after quarter, year after year. We closed the year on a really strong note, achieving our upgraded guidance with 7% organic revenue growth and 6% EBIT growth at constant currency. Our future presented transformation continues to deliver meaningful value for all stakeholders. We've made the organization faster, leaner, and more resilient. Return improvement and deleveraging remain central to value creation. Importantly, the transformation is energizing our teams across the company. Engagement is rising, and our shared sense of purpose is stronger than ever. I'm pleased to announce that we are proposing a 5% increase of our dividend to 1.05 per share for 2025, a clear token for our improving financial strength and commitment to delivering long-term value to our devoted shareholders. Our focused assets are delivering tangible results and position us well for 2026. Across CAVI, we're advancing a strong wave of new product launches and innovations, leveraging our globally leading market positions. At Pharma, pipeline remains a priority, supported by the ramp-up of our Wilson, North Carolina site, further strengthening our IV fluid supply and U.S. operational footprint. In a rapidly changing world order, we doubled down on our More in America campaign, exemplified by our new partnership with Flow Corp to establish a fully domestic end-to-end supply chain for essential medicine. We're fully focused on getting the business right. The trend towards a, let's call it, certain deglobalization means that we're also looking at our global value chains. It will set up our supply chains for the future. Our nutrition business earns attractive, highly accretive margin supported by innovation and targeted investments into attractive growth opportunities outside the VVP tender business in China. In METEC, we're looking for sustained momentum from several contributions, one of them being IVAN-X rollout, the most innovative pump in the market, which we expect to be a meaningful driver of incremental growth in 2026. Biopharma remains a powerful... powerful growth vector where we expect to remain on a double-digit growth trajectory, building on a strong finish in 2025. Our focus will be on commercial execution with continued rollout of our recently launched products, in particular, Totsilizumab, Ustekinumab, and Denusumab. At Helios Germany, we benefit from our solid progress on our cluster strategy. Supported by volume growth and positive pricing effects, we're focusing on further efficiency improvements and optimization to sustain profitable growth. Because Germany needs to step up in this regard. In Spain, growth is driven by occupational health and positive volume and pricing effects backed by our ongoing digitization efforts. We enter 2026 with real momentum. strong drivers across the portfolio and a clear path to continued growth and value creation. However, macro volatility persists, highlighted by last week's U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Tariffs remain fluid, but Fresenius is well positioned with, you know, 90% of group revenues unaffected by U.S. tariffs and 70% of our U.S. medicine produced domestically. We saw a structural organic revenue growth acceleration over the last three years driven exactly by what we labeled growth vectors at Tavi and our rigorous strategy execution. Looking at 2026, we anticipate continued dynamic organic growth. And we expect continued operating leverage with EPS growing significantly faster than the top line. Rejuvenate is important. about innovating our portfolio, about keeping our portfolio young and relevant. The progress of our Kabi portfolio demonstrates this impressively. More than half a billion of fiscal 2025 revenue already comes from new products. If you look back some years, you clearly see how far we've come in reinvigorating an innovation mindset in Fresenius. I'm convinced that innovation is paying back, and the new products are impressively demonstrating that by being a creative, lucrative, structural margin bet. Let's turn to biopharma, a core engine of our rejuvenate agenda and a key catalyst of our performance acceleration. We continue to see excellent momentum in our product. of in-market molecules across all regions, despite some anticipated competitive pressure, closing the year on a very strong note. Cayenne, our first to market Tocilizumab biosimilar, is charging ahead as the fastest growing product in its class. Continues to accelerate month after month, proving the strength of our first mover advantage and the durability of demand. We continue to see nice market share growth, with 37% market share in EU4 plus the UK, and 17% in the US, which is supported by multiple PBM and health plan contracts, many of them exclusive. Our Ustekino biosimilar, Otulfi, delivered incremental uptake in Q4, supported by the launch of our 45 milligram single dose vial, which provides dosing flexibility for pediatric patients. Adoption continues to build, strengthened by our exclusive U.S. distribution agreement for our unbranded Ustakinova with Civica script, under which we completed first deliveries in December. In addition, we just recently received a positive email opinion for our Ustakinova auto injector presentation. This is all in all excellent news. Our denouement biosimilar is progressing as planned. In the U.S., we have signed more than 100 contracts since launch, with all major hospital and clinic GPOs contracts now executed. In Europe, we closed the year with solid commercial progress, including the launch of our Denusoma portfolio, where we continue to differentiate with our unique pre-filled oncology syringe, a key competitive advantage validated by exactly the contracting momentum I've been mentioning. Looking ahead, we expect this momentum into 2026 and beyond as existing contracts increasingly convert into prescription and the broader tailwinds behind biosimilar adoption continue to strengthen. The performance of our recent launches gives us confidence in exactly that. It's highlighted in our Biopharma Meet the Management event Our marketed portfolio and pipeline put us on a clear path to double revenue by 2030 while progressing toward an EBIT margin of around 20%. This will be driven by further launches, deeper penetration, and continued cost efficiencies across the portfolio. And beyond this ambition, we see meaningful additional upside supported by our early stage pipeline and our ability to bring new molecules to market with speed, quality, and global scale. That's our provision business, Fresenius Helios, where we are elevating patient care with next-level digital tools and AIs. Investing in digital and connected solutions are central to our strategy, driving better outcomes, higher efficiency, and staff satisfaction, and ultimately, an improved patient experience. With the two largest private care networks in Germany and Spain, we are uniquely positioned to shape data-driven, patient-centric, and cost-efficient healthcare. During Rejuvenate, we are steadily expanding digital technologies across our hospitals, leveraging our distinctive strength, direct patient access, rich clinical data, and deep medical expertise. A prime example is CasioPaya, our digital health ecosystem in Spain, now serving roughly 9 million active users and capturing nearly all medical activities to create what we would call a seamless and connected patient journey leading to positive results for patients in terms of medical outcomes and experience. Beyond this, we're rolling out AI-supported diagnostics, including rapid stroke and colon cancer detection. These initiatives make care smarter and more patient-centric, improving outcomes and reducing treatment times. Our systems consistently deliver medical quality above market benchmarks. In Germany, for example, we improved yet again with now 92% of cases in 2025 exceeding market average quality performance. Combined with best-in-class clinical teams and state-of-the-art hospitals, Resenius Helios continues to be the top choice for patients seeking exceptional care. Our strategy of upgrading the core and scaling our platforms is moving Fresenius into higher growth, higher value segments, unlocking new profit pools, fostering innovation-led growth while lowering exposure to price pressures. For Fresenius Carbis, this is exactly what Vision 2026 set in motion. Over the past three years, Kavi has delivered meaningful top-line expansion and substantial margin improvement, enabling us to raise our EBIT margin ambition to 17% to 19%. This progress has been fueled by a stable and resilient pharma business and the increasing contribution of our three growth vectors, biopharma, nutrition, and medtech. BioPharma continues to scale rapidly. Nutrition is contributing accretive growth with targeted new product launches, while MedTech is benefiting from continuously improving margins and strong demand for our new products. Together, these businesses are expanding our mix towards more specialized, higher-value segments with structurally strong underlying economics. At the same time, our care delivery platform, President Helios, provides predictable, stable cash flows that strengthen our balance sheet and support disciplined investment in our growth areas. That being said, Helios needs to step up even further to set up the organization for sustainable long-term operational excellence and success. While Kabi is leading with structural enhancement and margin expansion, Helios is not yet delivering in line with our expectations. Closing this gap is a clear management priority for 2026 and beyond. Rejuvenate is now fully underway, and when you look at where we began our future business journey just over three years ago, it's clear how far we've come. We continue upgrading our core, modernizing our operating model, streamlining our footprint, and lifting execution across all businesses. It's the principle of keep doing what we are doing, but doing it even better. But equally important is how we can scale our platforms. This is where rejuvenate truly will unlock value. Across our biopharma, medtech, and care provision platforms, we see opportunities to step into new value pools that build directly on our strengths in critical and chronic care. Our anchor remains the patient, often the patient in the ICU, the OR, the ER, or in other high-acuity settings. And we are exploring selected adjacencies, that means expanding to what lies left and right of the core, broadening our impact along the care continuum. This includes strengthening and renewing our portfolio, pursuing selective in-licensing, expanding geographically, such as the U.S. rollout of our parenteral nutrition, and exploring high-value adjacencies in specialized injectables, next wave biosimilars, nutrition innovation, and connected medtech solutions. These measures are elevating our performance and position for being stronger, more innovative, and more relevant also in terms of growth and value creation in the years ahead. With that, I'll hand it over to Sarah.