Heidelberg Mterials S/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Heidelberg Materials First Quarter Results 2026 conference call. I am Sandra, the call school operator. I would like to remind you that all participants have been listened only mode and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The content must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over to Christoph Beumelburg. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Sandra, and welcome from Heidelberg. We're here with, as usual, Dominik Van Aften, CEO, and our CFO in the IR team. And after going through some prepared remarks, we get ample time for your questions. So with that, Very short intro over to you, Dominik.

Thanks. Hello, everybody. Great to have you on the call. Thanks for joining. Look, we had an interesting quarter in the start for 2026. Robust performance from our perspective, but quite significantly impacted by weather in U.S., Europe, and partially in Africa. So the revenues are at $4.5 billion, RCO $0.2 billion, down from prior year quarter, but important for us, positive price over cost, and that to a large extent mitigates the volume impact that has been driven by the weather. I don't have to tell you northeast. You saw the pictures from New York. You saw how northern Europe and eastern Europe were under snow for a long time. So that's our footprint in that respect. So for us, I would say normal course of business. Transformation accelerator, I think, has taken off, but from my seat and our seat, I think there is still ample room for maneuver on the cost side as we go through the year, especially given the volume developments in the first quarter. So we should expect further good traction on the transformation accelerator. More than 400 million are already on the clock, and we are very confident that we will surpass the 500 million by year end, and that's important for us, especially in the current environment. Share buyback, we set up our last year's buyback of about 400 million now to 450 million with the next tranche that will start after next week's AGM. Important for us, as we always said, we want to grow organically with our sustainable product focus, but we also want to grow externally and great acquisition down under in Australia with masks. that's going through the antitrust process right now, everything on track. And then we have Accenture, I think a very interesting step up into the majority position of a company we know very well, of a market position in Turkey we know very well, and from an expert platform we know super well, and we can leverage for growth not only in Africa, but also in other parts of the world, including . A little bit behind the scenes, we sneaked our French Evo plants through a massive rebuild. Significant investment will be on 300 million euros. Step change in efficiency and decarbonization. The plant is now running. The kiln is running. clinkers produced, alternative fuel are running. So I think in that respect we are really, we'll see a big change in the performance of France, not only in the financial side, but also in terms of carbon footprint. Keep in mind the carbon footprint of this new setup is 30%, 30% better than the old plan, so a massive change. That's why we said step change. And with that, we confirm our outlook between 3.4 and 3.75 billion, where it will be above 10%, and the CO2 emissions will be slightly reduced. If you go to the details on page three, I don't think I have to go through that. EBITDA at 484, 13% down. Operating margin slightly down to 10.7%. And then on the RCO, down to 163 million. If you see on page four, this is mainly driven by volumes. That's the impact that I was describing. From my seat, that is mainly and predominantly weather-related. There are some markets that are a little bit sluggish. We'll come to that, I guess, through the discussion. But in general, this is weather-impacted in Q1. Important that the price of our costs remain positive. If you then go to the margin, you see that LTM, so last 12 months, the margin is actually moving in the right direction in all business lines. So cement is moving in the right direction up to 27.5. Aggregates is up to 25.7. And for the group, then, that means an increase to 21.6. So from our perspective, the green light, the train is moving in the right direction despite all the headwinds. Transformation accelerator, as I said, 380 million of last year, so more than on track. You know, because normally if you have the 500, you would have expected 250 to 300. So 380, a fantastic job, and we just need to do it again. And that's what we are fighting for this year. So we, as I said earlier, we should expect to surpass the 500 million by year end. If you then go through the different areas, Europe is the one that has had harsh weather and where the results really came down. I think Europe is large, a large footprint, and the markets are quite different. From our perspective, the sluggishness of the market sits a little bit in a in a line between the UK and Germany and Benelux in between. The rest of Europe is actually okay, and then in the east, maybe Poland and Romania, that is a little bit slower. The rest is actually going quite well, if not very well. So in that respect, the big countries for us are a little bit hit by the weather and some sluggishness in their performance. I'm sure we'll come back to that during the discussion. Then if you go to North America, the result is below last year, and I would say that's all about the northeast, and that's why, you know, it's for us the biggest region by far. and it is the one that has been hit the hardest by the weather. That's why I think we are on it. April looks good, so I think From my seat and our seat, this is going in the right direction. There are also large projects that are now kicking in and really seeing the material pull. So I'm actually quite optimistic that North America in general, but also the Northeast, will turn the corner. Asia Pacific, I would say stable with some ups and downs in the different countries. Then you can maybe later on say something to Australia, but also there we see movement in the right direction. So overall, I think we've seen the worst in Asia and Australia, but the question is how much uptake we'll see throughout the year. Volume development also in April was actually good. Africa, despite the fact that volumes were a little bit under pressure, especially in the northern half of Africa, but also in some parts of sub-Sahara, given by the weather. In the end, the result was quite stable. And also there, April looks significantly better. So I'm pretty confident that also Africa, or AMSA for us, will continue to deliver well during 2025. And then on the guidance, as I said earlier on, we absolutely stick to our guidance at 3.4 to 3.75 RTO, above 10% ROE, a slight reduction in CO2 emissions, and then on the capex, 1.2 to 1.3, and the leverage around 1.5 times. That's it from our side. René, do you have anything to add?