Gea Group Ag Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Gear Group AG Pre-Close Call Q3 2025. 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, 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1, 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. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you very much, Heidi, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Oliver. I'm the head of investor relations, and I'm joined by my deputy, Rebecca, and my colleague, Edelweiss. We welcome you to our Q3 2025 pre-close call. It's actually the first pre-close call as a DAC40 member. So, since the 22nd of September, we are now playing in the Premier League. As today's call will contain forward-looking statements, it will be conducted according to our disclaimer. I will not read the disclaimer, but please be aware of the cautionary language that is included in our safe harbor statement, which is part of our presentations, you can find on the Internet. We will now address topics which we also discussed during recent conferences and roadshows. And afterwards, you will have time to ask questions. Let me start with our guidance. We confirm our group guidance for full year 2025, which we rate in August. Organic sales growth is expected to be between 2% and 4%. EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses is expected to be in the corridor of 16.2% to 16.4%. And ROSI, return on capital employed, here we guide 34% to 38%. Second topic, customer industries. In food, we see continued activity especially on the project side. Beverage, here demand is at priority level. Dairy processing continues to look promising and has been a growth contributor in every single quarter since Q2 2024. Dairy farming, here the market sentiment is very positive in most regions. For pharma, the pipeline looks good. And finally, new food. Here we expect the demand likely to remain soft in 2025. That gets me to the second or third topic, order intake. We expect that 2025 will be another good year for GEA. The pipeline continues to look promising and we are seeing that customers continue to negotiate orders. We also continue to see good base order business. Concerning large orders, we are in very interesting discussions and are optimistic that we will see some of the large orders kicking in in the second half of 2025, but we can't pinpoint to the specific quarter when they will be signed. In Q3, we have seen large orders, so orders above 15 million, with a total volume in the mid-double-digit million euros area. As you can guess by hearing this volume of large orders, BALASNA cannot be included. As communicated, the announced order signed with BALASNA will be booked in the second half and, as it is not yet included in Q3, it will be booked in Q4. The translational FX effect is expected to be negative, as we have also seen in the second quarter. On sales, topic number four. Organic sales growth has been 1.2% in H1. The increased guidance stands at 2-4% organic sales growth for the full year, as we do expect an acceleration in growth in the second half. Q3 should already show a step into the right direction. Translational FX effects also here are expected to be negative. Topic number five, EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses. The H1 EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses was 16.1%. On the rolling last four quarter basis as of the second quarter 2025, We have also achieved an EBITDA margin before restructuring expenses of 16.1%. However, for the full year, the guide is 16.2% to 16.4%, which we are very confident to achieve. That's it from my side, and I will now pass over to Rebecca.

Thanks, Oliver. Good afternoon, everybody. So, regarding topic number six, cash flow, what to keep in mind for the third quarter. Regarding capex, please keep in mind that we increased our capex expectations for the full year with our H1 results. We expect capex of around 255 million euros for the full year 2025. In the first half, we had 92 million. Networking capital to sales ratio for 2025, the target corridor is 79%. And the ratio will most likely be within this corridor for the third quarter. Topic number seven, additional financial information. Just as a reminder, depreciation amortization, we are guiding for the full year 2025, 210 million euros. In the first half, we had 100 million euros. Regarding the financial results, we are guiding minus 30 million for the full year. And we had in the first half minus 90 million. And the tax rate for the full year, we are guiding 29%. And in the first half, we had 28.8%. This closes the topics we wanted to address in today's pre-closed call. And we are now happy to take any questions you may have. I will pass on to you Heidi for the Q&A session.