Holcim Ltd Unsp/Adr

Good morning and welcome to Olsen's 9 months, 2026 analyst and investor presentation. My name is Bernd Pomrehn and I'm pleased to be joined by Miljan Gutovic, our CEO, and Steffen Kindler, our CFO. After their presentations, you will have the opportunity to ask your questions. Moira, may I ask you to share the technical instructions with us? Bojra? Okay, I would suggest we start with the presentation by Miljan, and a chorus call will give us the technical instructions to ask your questions later. Miljan, please.

Thank you, Bernd. Good morning to you all and a warm welcome to HaltSim's 2026 Q3 Trading Update Analyst and Investors Conference. Stefan and I are pleased to be presenting our numbers to you today and of course we look forward to taking your questions afterwards. As you have seen, after a very strong first half, our momentum accelerated in Q3. Our organic growth for the first nine months was 5.2% in net sales and over-proportional 11.8% in recurring EBIT. Better still, in the third quarter we entered a new phase of double-digit growth in Swiss francs for both net sales and recurring EBIT that we expect to persist into future quarters. In Q3, we grew net sales by 15.5% in Swiss francs and recurring EBIT almost 17% thanks to a healthy balance between inorganic and organic growth. This positive momentum in Q3 helped drive a year-to-date expansion in our recurring EBIT margin. In August, we also entered into agreement to acquire Fermacell, an established European provider of walling and flooring solutions. We will discuss this later on. And building on our strong 9-month performance, we are upgrading our full-year recurring EBIT guidance for the second time after the increase at H1. We now expect 10-12% organic growth with further increase in our margin year-on-year. Turning to the regional highlights now, as you can see in Europe there was a robust net sales development driven by Germany, Greece, Romania, Spain and also Switzerland. A 5.1% organic growth in recurring EBIT was driven by a strong execution on commercial excellence, cost discipline, and of course an impeccable execution of our strategy next-gen growth. In addition to our highlights, which I will say more shortly, we saw a good momentum in circular construction with more than 30% growth in the volume of recycled construction and demolition materials. The outlook is positive thanks to our strong infrastructure pipeline from roads and tunnels to power generation. And our integration of Xela is now in full execution. Here we confirm our expectation of achieving 60 million euros in run rate synergies in year 3. In LATAM, we delivered 6.2% organic growth in net sales in the first nine months, driven by Mexico and Central America. Driven by our operational excellence resulting in positive price over cost, our recurring EBIT margin was around 30%. We continue to invest by opening new branches of Disensa to expand our network, which now stands at more than 2,460 stores. Also, alternative fuel substitution is increasing in the region, reducing our exposure to energy price volatility. For example, our thermal substitution rate in Costa Rica is now above 60%. For the outlook, there is a strong backlog of infrastructure projects across the whole region, and Pacas Mayo integration is in full execution, with synergies of $40 million in year 3 confirmed. Going to Asia, Middle East and Africa, here net sales were up nearly 8% and recurring EBIT up more than 22% organically. We also saw the margin rose 100 basis points from a year ago to above 26% with positive price over cost. In our Fujera cement plant in UAE, we successfully launched a pilot project that is now safely and successfully capturing CO2 and transforming it into the solid rock using natural processes and breakthrough technology developed by one of our value chain partners. This is really the first live condition carbon capture and undergrowth mineralization pilot in our industry. The positive outlook in this region is supported indeed by robust government funding for infrastructure construction across North Africa all the way to Australia. We are also seeing investments picking up in Morocco as the country looks ahead to co-hosting the 2030 Football World Cup. With that, I would like to hand it over to Steffen to talk through the financial details. Steffen, to you.

Thank you, Miljan, and a warm welcome to you all also from my side. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. Turning first to the net sales bridge, you can see that we had strong organic growth of 5.2% in the first nine months, representing almost 590 million Swiss francs. Total sales and Swiss francs were up even more strongly as the positive net M&A contribution offset a small foreign exchange translation effect of 1.4% or 170 million Swiss francs. The impact from Forex translation has softened significantly throughout 2026 and it actually turned into a tailwind in Q3. Now, although we do not guide on FX, I always get this question, so I anticipate your question now and I'm going to try to tell that FX is expected to remain flat to slightly positive in Q4. Next, for recurring EBIT, we delivered double-digit organic growth of 11.8%. There was FX translation effect of 16 million Swiss francs, or 0.7%, and the 91 million Swiss francs impact from divestments, mainly driven by Nigeria and partially offset by Pakas, Mayo, Xela, and our bolt-ons. EBIT growth was driven by strong commercial execution, as always, Thank you very much. Next, let's look at the progression of a recurring EBIT and recurring EBIT margin. The graph you see here shows a continuing margin expansion, again driven by strong commercial execution, operational excellence and disciplined cost management. As mentioned on several occasions before, we expect margin expansion on a full year basis as well. On the next chart, let's look at the regional performance. Organic growth in net sales was strong in each of LATAM and EMEA in the first nine months and remained at a good level in Europe in Q3. In Asia, Middle East and Africa, there was excellent organic growth in recurring EBIT in the nine months to end September. The margin was 26.1% with 100 base points increased while we remain at the recurring EBIT margin of 30% in Latin America. The margin in Q3 in Latam is actually up by 90 basis points year over year, showing a progressive increase. And with that, I'm pleased to hand it back over to you, Miljan.