Gea Group Ag Ord

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the GIA Group AG Q2 2026 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.

Yeah, thank you very much and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today for our second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me on the call are Stefan Klebert, our CEO, and Alexander Kocherscheidt, our CFO. Stefan will begin today's call with the highlights of the second quarter and Alexander will then cover the business and financial review before Stefan takes over again for the outlook 2026. 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, hand over to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver, and good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to welcome you to our conference call today. Before starting with the review of our second quarter results, let me share with you some important news, which we published last week. The executive board has resolved that we will start another share buyback program in the amount of up to 500 million euros. Keeping in mind that we have already bought back and canceled shares with an aggregated volume of 700 million Euro in the last five years, the new program brings us to a share buyback volume of 1.2 billion Euro between 2021 and 2027. An impressive volume in relation to our market cap. The new program will be split into two branches and will run until the end of 2027. The first tranche of the programme, worth up to 250 million euros, starts tomorrow and will be executed over the next seven months. Like the last programme, all repurchased shares will be cancelled once the programme has been completed. These news clearly demonstrate our conviction in GEA's growth opportunities. We are growing our top line, improving our profitability further and making continuous progress towards our mission 30 targets. Thanks to our strong cash generation, the share buyback is not limiting our investments, R&D spending or potential acquisitions. As in previous programs, there is an ESG feature linked to the buyback. We will donate part of the guaranteed outperformance, which is the difference between the purchasing price and the volume-weighted average price of our shares over the duration of the program, to the Deutsche Universitätsstiftung. It will be roughly €250,000, which will be used to support exceptionally talented students in STEAM education. I am turning now to our second quarter release. After having already reported a strong first quarter, we accelerated top-line growth and improved profitability further in the second quarter. Order intake rose significantly by 14.2% year-over-year to €1.5 billion. This performance was driven by strong growth in all order sizes. Base orders, however, had by far the highest absolute growth contribution. Large orders, though orders above 15 million euro, had a total value of 34 million euro, while no large order had been booked in the prior year quarter. Sales grew strongly by 10% to 1.4 billion euro. Organic sales growth was even higher at 11.0%. EBITDA before restructuring expenses increased by an excellent margin. 15.6% year-over-year to €251 million. The corresponding EBITDA margin improved to 17.4%. This marks a new record level for GIA. Return on capital employed continued to rise from an already high level in the prior year quarter to 36.8% in the quarter. This marks a new record too. Due to an excellent cash generation in the quarter, net liquidity turned from a net debt position at the end of the second quarter in 2025 into a net cash position of 71 million euro at the end of the second quarter in 26. To sum it up, a very strong second quarter with improvements in all key performance indicators. Due to this very positive operating performance and confident expectations for the remainder of this year, we raised our guidance for the fiscal year 26 as announced on 21st of July. We are now guiding organic sales growth to be between 6 and 8% for the full year 26, up from the prior range of 5 to 7%. The new range is well above our midterm target of more than 5% organic sales growth. EBDA margin before restructuring expenses is expected to be in the range of 17 to 17.4% up from the prior guidance of 16.6 to 17.2%. This brings us already close to the low end of our mission 30 target even if you have to consider that this year's EBDA margin is before restructuring expenses while from next year onwards the EBDA margin is as reported. The new guidance for return on capital employed is between 36 and 40 percent clearly above the prior range of 34 to 38 percent. As you can see we are once again delivering what we promised or even more than that. This is one of my favorite charts. Once again, we have been recognized as one of the world's most sustainable companies by Time Magazine and Statista. Over 5,000 companies were evaluated globally to identify the top 750 companies, and GEA not only made it to rank 17 globally, but was ranked first among all German companies. This is a special honor for everyone at GEAB as it underscores our position as a real frontrunner in sustainability. And it is exactly this distinctive aspect, sustainability, as a driver of long-term value creation that we strive to communicate to the capital market. Over the past few years, our investor relations team, together with my executive board colleague, Dr. Nadine Sterley, has done a fantastic job in transparent and understandable ESG communication. It is especially rewarding to see that this work has been recognized and appreciated by you, our investors and analysts. Receiving the German Investor Relations Award for Best ESG Communication is a great honor to us. It reflects something we truly care about, engaging openly with our stakeholders and bringing our shareholders along on our journey towards an even more sustainable company. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your vote, your trust and your continued support. We see this award not only as recognition of what we have achieved, but also as encouragement to keep pushing ahead on our journey Guided by Our Purpose Engineering for a Better World. And now I hand over to Alexander, who will give you more insights into our performance in the second quarter.