Heidelberg Mterials S/Adr

Thank you, operator. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone listening in to our Q3 earnings call. Pleased to report the numbers that we published this morning. As always, we have in the room Dominic, our CEO, Rene, our CFO, and from the IR team, Robert and Ozan, myself. So, you know, happy to receive your questions after the prepared remarks. And for those, I hand over to Dominic.

Chris, thanks a lot. Welcome, everybody. From our side, great to hear you and have you on the call. Let me just go through the presentation quickly, and then we get to your numbers. Good quarter for us. I think revenue up 1%, RCO up 5%, after currency impact even 7%. So I think that's good. Also operating EBITDA margin up by 65 basis points. I think that's a good quarter, driven also by the transformation accelerator, savings around 250 million. So we are basically halfway to where we need to go and want to go, although we've still got 15 months to go. So I think that's well on track from our perspective, if not even better. is on track to be finished by December at the latest. So I think that should be good. The second tranche, obviously, of the 1.2 billion. So fully on track to what we have communicated. Good news on the decarbonization side. We expand our leadership in that respect. I'm sure we get into your questions on this one. but we took the FID final investment decision for Pacewood CCS project. Construction will start this year. So that's good news. And on the back of that and on the back of Breivik performing well in terms of carbon, capturing the carbon and also putting it under the Norwegian sea, we are able now to sell the first Evo Zero products to the market. And we have already the first projects that are up for delivery. So in that respect, things are moving well. And on the back of all of that, we are confident to give you a positive outlook for the remainder of the year to end up at a narrowed range for the outcome of the RCO this year, which will now be 3.3 to 3.5 instead of 3.25 to 3.55, so I think that's also good news. ROIC will be around 10% and the CO2 emission will come slightly down. So overall, I think, fully on track. If you go to the page 3, You see again the numbers. I think that that's all going in the right direction. Revenues up, EBITDA up, EBITDA margin up, and EBIT up. I think that in difficult market environments, I think a very convincing performance. That same is true for the full year, everything green in terms of revenue, EBITDA, margin, and EBIT. So I think we don't need to go through the details. You can read them yourself. If you go to the Q3 bridge, page 5, 55 million, almost 55 million up, 5% on RCO. And you see, yes, there is still volume decline, so the net volume figure is still down. But the good news is price over cost is positive, and that's a very important measure for us. We told you all along that our clear target is to keep price overcost well in the positives throughout the year. And this is what we again delivered in Q3. And you see also on the left side, currency impact. There is a significant currency impact to my earlier remark. Also in the quarter, almost 30 million. And on the flip side, there is positive scope effect where the acquisitions start contributing. So in this case, 30 million up. If you look at the same picture on the nine-month figures, page six, you see that the net volume is minus 91. and the price of our cost is 202. If you want to read something positive into this, you see that the volume decline is slowing down because it's a big quarter, minus 24 million on the volume side compared to nine months, 91. You can do the math yourself. I think there is a little bit of a stabilization effect on the volume side coming, and then also if you go to the scope effect, Let's start with currency. If you see the currency, I think the currency impact is significant. So you see for the full nine year, 29 million, while for the quarter alone, 28 million. So you see the currency impact is significant. So it's the scope effect. Again, 29 million for the full quarter, but 48 million for the first nine months. Do the math. So I think it's moving in the right direction also on getting the effects from the acquisitions. If you turn to the transformation accelerator on page seven, we are absolutely confident that we will hit 500 million, if not more, on the transformation accelerator. We have 250 million in the books. on the three pillars that we are chasing. And it's really showing now also in terms of how we execute this internally, the advantage we have globally and to really push the global advantage of being very focused and pure play in our industry to really drive efficiencies along the platforms that we have described, decarbonization, digitalization, but also technical excellence. And the transformation accelerator is a fantastic tool to show also the contribution of that. Now, when we get to Europe, you know, from our perspective, not a great quarter in Europe. We say that very clearly. There were a couple of one-offs in there. René will maybe go through the details in a minute. but I think okay on a fairly high level, but we are an ambitious team, and I would say as good as Q2 was in Europe, I think Q3 was also driven by those not a fantastic exercise, but I think everything that we can see and what we can manage internally, both in terms of pricing, but also in terms of costs, I think that goes in the right direction. The market is the market to some extent, And obviously we are heavy weighted to some markets that are still under pressure, which is great news because if we do our homework right, then the upside potential out of this is substantial, if not substantially better than with any comparison. So in that respect, it moves in the right direction in general, but Q3 is nothing to over-celebrate on Europe. We are very honest about this. But for me, the more important message here is this is a quarterly impact. We do not see a Change in any positive trend from from the bottom up in Europe and we are doing consistently our homework Show you so I'm very confident that Europe will show its strength down the road Then we go to the next page, we moved to North America. Other than Europe, I think strong water from North America. Also the comms we can see. I think overall, I think there was a good development in North America. Overall, I would say revenues up, EBITDA up, RCO up, like for like in the higher single digit numbers. I think that is and also margins up, especially in aggregates, good performance, also in cement stable on a good level. So overall, I think a good quota from North America. Asia-Pacific, I think, splits into a couple of different messages. I think Asia, to be honest, is still in difficult territories. I think the hopes were higher, I'm being very honest with you, on the Asian performance. I think they're doing good homework again. I think there are markets and countries that are really performing above our expectations, but there are clearly also countries like China, Hong Kong, to some extent also Indonesia, that are clearly under our expectations. Again, upside for the time to come, but I think that's not where we wanted it to be. Maybe on Australia, René, you want to comment?

Australia had a very strong quarter for us. August, September was very good. Also, October was very good. So, Australia is slightly coming back, which was very good cost-based. Now, the volumes can deliver good margins. So, Australia is in very good shape, was very good shape in Q3.