Gea Group Ag Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Gear Group AG Q1 2025 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 and 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Oliver Luckenbach, Head of IR. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Sarah, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our first quarter 2025 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 our first quarter highlights. Bernd will then cover the business and financial review before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2025. 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 very much, Oliver, and good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our conference call today. Here I had a good start into the new fiscal year with a strong first quarter. We improved all major financial KPIs and continued our profitable growth trajectory. As indicated with our fourth quarter release, the 1.6 billion euro order intake, which we booked in the fourth quarter of 2024, was extraordinarily strong and shouldn't be considered as a new normal. We benefited from seven large orders which cannot be repeated every single quarter. The first quarter of 25 reflects now a more normalized level of large orders and is with an order intake volume of 1.4 billion and a year-over-year increase of 3.7%, a very solid start into the year. Sales rose by 1.4% to 1.3 billion euros. Organic sales growth amounted to 0.9%. The reason for the slower start in terms of sales generation is the order backlog composition at the end of last year. The order backlog contained more large orders, which led to a slower sales generation at the beginning of the year and should lead to an acceleration towards the second half. EBDA before restructuring expenses increased by 9.8% year over year to 198 million euro. The corresponding EBDA margin improved significantly from 14.5% in the first quarter of 24 to now 15.8% in the first quarter of 25. This sets a new record for a first quarter. Return on capital employed continued to rise at a high level and crossed the 34% mark for the first time. We have achieved an outstanding growth of 34.9% in the quarter. Let me now provide you with an update on our share buyback program. As already communicated, we finished our 400 million euro share buyback program on 11th of April. We bought back in total 9.5 million shares, which represents 5.53% of shares outstanding. We bought these shares back at an average price of 41.98 euro. It was a very successful investment because the current stock price based on yesterday's closing is 38% higher. So we are talking about a benefit of more than 150 million euros. Please keep in mind that the shares will be cancelled within the coming weeks, latest before end of June. Hence, the total number of shares outstanding will be reduced to 162.8 million shares. As you know, the last couple of months have been shaped by geopolitical uncertainties triggered by announcements of the new US government to introduce or change tariffs. We do understand that this is very important for you to understand how we as a company are potentially impacted by tariffs. Therefore, we would like to share the facts and figures on our US exposure. The United States accounted for 18% of our sales in 2024. Around one third of our US sales were generated with products which were imported. That means roughly 330 million euros. They were mainly imported from Europe. And as you can see on the slide, more than 50% came from Germany. Regarding our purchasing volume, approximately 90% of our U.S. procurement spend with third parties is done locally. Only 10% is spent with suppliers based outside of the United States. These are the facts on our U.S. exposure so far so good, but who is paying the tariffs on imported products? The answer, tariffs must be paid by customers. This is already a well-established guideline at GEA, and any changes in tariffs must also be passed on to customers. We have screened all our contracts for their terms and conditions, and the good news is the vast majority of our contracts already contained pass-through clauses for changes in tariffs. The risk from the other contracts not having these clauses is very limited. Based on the 10% universal tariffs, which are currently in place. We are talking about tariffs of low single-digit million euros, which are subject to negotiation with customers. As of today, we see a limited impact from US tariffs on our business, and we are closely monitoring any changes in relation to tariffs. And with that, I hand over to Bernd.