Fuchs SE

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the analyst conference call of Fuchs Petrolup SE. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity for the analysts or Fuchs to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press start key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Lutz Ackermann, Head of Investor Relations, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Fuchs Petrolub, I would like to wish you a very warm welcome to today's conference call on the fiscal year 2020 figures. My name is Urs Ackermann, and I am the head of investor relations. I'm here together with Dagmar Steinertz, CFO, and together with Stefan Fuchs, CEO of Fuchs Petrolub. As always, Stefan and Dagmar will walk you through the presentation, which will then be followed by a Q&A session. All the relevant documents have been uploaded this morning on our IR section on our Fuchs.com homepage. Having said that, I would like to hand over to Stefan. Stefan, please take over.

A very warm welcome also from my side. Unfortunately, we can't see each other. It was a nice tradition to go to Frankfurt and to meet you there in person and hopefully later within one year we can do so again. Thanks, Lutz, for handing over to me. We are very happy that we have you on board since January 1, now a little bit over two months. We had a very nice handover from Thomas, who is now in this new company, and I'm sure you will also meet him over there. So all in all, I think it was a great change, and we are happy to have you. 2020 was a challenging year for the Fuchs Group, to say the least. It's exactly now one year ago that we started to deal with Corona. You know, most of our people work from home since about one year. All our manufacturing people and the lab people are at our premises. We were able to manufacture through the entire year. We had only one or two adjacent locations where we had one or two weeks a shutdown. I think, you know, we had in the second quarter when for us we were in the eye of the storm, we had a significant reduction in earnings by 50%. Also, we made a profit every month. And as you know, from the corona pandemic, the first country hit was China in February last year. Then in Europe and in America, China came back pretty quick, I think, already in the third quarter, in the beginning. Europe during the third quarter, America a little bit later, but all in all, we started to see very good trading months as of September. And therefore, within the same year where we had a profit reduction of 50% in the second quarter, we had the highest quarter ever in the fourth quarter, which made us very proud. And we had also made the decision to keep quiet and don't do short-term actions and fire a lot of people and stop trading. A handful of projects. We have invested about 120 million euros, more or less we kept to our team worldwide. And all in all, we are satisfied with the result, especially with the cash flow. And now I'm happy to hand over to Dagmar, who will lead you through the entire numbers for 2020 and the outlook for 2021. I will then come back with a strategic section of certain topics we are dealing with, and then both of us will be there for your questions.