Gea Group Ag Ord

Yeah, thank you, Sarah. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. With me on the call are Stefan Klebert, our CEO, and Bernd Brinker, our CFO. Stefan will begin today's call with the highlights of the third quarter. Bernd will then cover the business and financial review before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2024. Afterwards, we open up the call for the Q&A session. Please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement as in the material that we have distributed today. And with that, I hand over to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver, and a good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you on our conference call today. In the third quarter of 2024, GIA has once again delivered a significant EBITDA margin expansion. We have mentioned for many months that we are expecting an order intake recovery in the second half of this year, and the third quarter confirmed our expectation. Order intake rose year over year by 4.3% to €1.3 billion. In organic terms, the increase has been even more pronounced with a year-over-year growth rate of 6.6%. Sales rose organically by 1.4%, benefiting from a further expansion of our service business. EBDA before restructuring expenses increased by 4.9% year-over-year to €217 million. The corresponding EBITDA margin rose significantly by 67 basis points from 15.3% in Q3 2023 to 16.1% in Q3 2024. This marks a new record level. Return on capital employed decreased on a high level to 32.3%. Since we have continued with a very positive operating performance in the third quarter of 2024 with a record EBDA margin, we have again decided to raise our profitability guidance for the full year 2024 on 11th of October. We are now expecting the EBDA margin for the full year 2024 to be in the range of 15.4% to 15.6%, up from the prior guidance of 14.9% to 15.2%. or other guidance parameters have been confirmed. The divisional guidance remains unchanged. The strong profitability performance in the third quarter and the raised EBITDA margin guidance once again demonstrate our ongoing earnings improvement. And as you all know, there is more to come with our recently published Mission 30 strategy, which will be implemented step by step. What else happened in the third quarter? I have just mentioned our Mission 30 strategy, which was launched at our Capital Markets Day on 2nd of October. After meeting our Mission 26 targets two years earlier than planned, the Mission 30 is our new North Star. Underpinned by sustainability, the strategy for the upcoming years focuses on growth, value, and impact. We aim for an organic sales caregiver of more than 5% annually up to 2030. In addition, the EBITDA margin is expected to reach 17% to 19%, with a return on capital employed targeted to rise to more than 45% to 2030. The ambitious plan points out how we continue to grow profitability and at the same time we will significantly expand our sales share of sustainable solutions. If you were unable to follow the event, I would encourage you to have a look at our detailed slide deck or the replay which is available on our investor relations webpage. Only one week later, the GIA Supplier Summit took place, an event which has been introduced by my colleague Johannes Gillot five years ago and has developed into one of our most important annual events. Our most important suppliers, our preferred suppliers, are invited each year to our summit to get an update of our trajectory, celebrate those with outstanding performance, and get to know more on our strategic innovations. This year, we had once again a strong focus on how our suppliers can help us to develop more sustainable solutions and products. The relationship with our top suppliers is growing more and more into partnerships. Partners? which are supporting us on our profitable growth, innovation, and digitalization journey. As a result, we are allocating more spend to them. Since 2022, the spend with this group of strategic suppliers has increased by 37%. And last but not least, we have announced a strategic partnership with Believer Meats. Together, we will focus on optimizing the performance, efficiency, and environmental impact of large-scale cultivated meat production, starting with chicken and expanding to other products. This collaboration will drive advancements in bioreactor technology, perfusion systems, and cell media reuse, while reducing environmental impacts through optimized water usage, power consumption, and circular economy initiatives like waste stream utilization. The aim of this partnership is to lower production costs, streamline technology transfer, and scale operations efficiently to make cultivated meat more affordable and accessible. Believer Meats is currently constructing the world's largest cultivated meat production facility in the United States, which we equip with processing technology. The facility is planned to go into operation at the beginning of 2025 and will have the capacity to produce at least 12,000 metric tons of cultivated chicken annually, without slaughtering a single animal in the production process. An exciting project which has the potential to be a game changer for the entire alternative meat industry. Let me now provide you with a quick update on our share buyback program, which represents an important element in our capital allocation strategy. As you know, we have complemented the first tranche of our share buyback program in May and have started with the second and final tranche at the beginning of June. As of end of September 24, we have executed €229 million or 57% out of the €400 million program. And I can already share with you the latest numbers. As of yesterday's closing, we have bought back 6.6 million shares since the beginning of the program until yesterday's closing, which represents 3.9% of outstanding shares. We bought these shares back at an average price of 37.80 Euro, which is already today a successful investment because the current stock price is 21.6% higher.

With that, I hand over to Bernd. Thank you, Stefan. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.