Henkel Ag & Co Kgaa S/Adr

Good morning and welcome to the Henkel Conference Call. For the duration of the call, you will be in listen only. If you would like to ask a question during the Q&A session, please press star and one on your telephone keypad. If at any time you need assistance, please press star and zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand over to Leslie Ilken, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Good morning to everyone. A warm welcome to everyone who's joining our full-year 2025 results conference call today. My name is Lesley Iltke, Head of Investor Relations at Henkel, and I'm today joined by our CEO, Carsten Knoebel, and our CFO, Marco Svoboda. As always, following the presentation, we will open up the lines, and Carsten and Marco will be happy to take your questions. Before handing over, please let me remind you that this call will be recorded and the replay will be made available on the Investor Relations website shortly after this call. By asking a question during the Q&A session, you agree to both the live broadcasting as well as the recording of your question, including salutation, to be published on our website. Also, please be reminded that this presentation contains the usual formal disclaimer in regard to forward-looking statements within the meaning of relevant U.S. legislations, which can also be accessed via our website at Henkel.com. The presentation and discussion are conducted subject to this disclaimer. With this, it is my pleasure to hand over to our CEO, Carsten Knoebel. Carsten, please go ahead.

Thank you so much, Leslie. Good morning and a warm welcome also from my side to everyone joining our conference call today. As always, we do appreciate your interest in our company and we're really looking forward to answering your questions after the presentation. After walking you through some of the key highlights of fiscal 2025, Marco will elaborate on Henkel's business performance and full-year outlook in more detail. Following that, I would like to make Henkel's key drivers for profitable growth the main priority for today's call. So let me move straight to the key highlights of the full year. Organic sales growth in fiscal 2025 was 0.9% with positive price and volume development in Q4 in both businesses. Henkel also recorded an EBIT margin increase driven by strong growth margins while keeping up with appropriate investment levels in order to fool further growth. In addition, EPS at constant currency grew strongly by nearly 5% versus the prior year. We successfully concluded the integration of consumer brands one year earlier, reaching 540 million euros net saving, thus more than we had originally targeted. We also offer attractive shareholder returns by increasing dividends and executing our share buyback of 1 billion euros, which we have nearly concluded in the meantime, reaching more than 900 million euros by the end of February. And furthermore, as you all know, M&A is an integral part of our growth ambition and over the past weeks we were quite successful and reached agreements for four attractive acquisitions, three for adhesives and one for consumer brands, adding around 1.2 billion euros in sales. And last but not least, our full year 2026 guidance implies further top and bottom line growth. And we, of course, also reiterate our mid-term ambition. I would now like to turn to some of the key highlights. We concluded the year with a strong financial position, which is now a strong basis to invest further into our businesses and into M&A, which is the integral part of our strategy. As part of its long term growth strategy, Henkel is constantly aligning its business units with the requirements of dynamic markets and changing customer expectations in order to achieve long term success with future ready operating models. Following our announcement last year, we completed the evaluation of establishing separate legal entities for our two business units in a first step in Germany and will present this proposal to the upcoming AGM for resolution by shareholders. With this move, we aim to make our processes and structures more agile and to better support the future needs of our businesses and the growth agenda of the Henkel Group. The steering of the Group and our business units will remain unchanged. Furthermore, we continuously foster AI-driven solutions across the businesses. In adhesive technologies, electronics stood out, posting double-digit growth, as well as industrials with very strong growth. And we expect this trend to continue in 2026. As briefly already mentioned, we recently reached agreements to acquire the Stahl Group and ATP adhesive systems, as well as a majority stake in Weatherby La Roque. In consumer brands, volumes accelerated in the course of the year and were positive in H2. Hair clearly stood out, being the main growth driver, but also our top 10 brands showed strong growth in 2025. We are successfully expanding our portfolio in consumer brands. Just last week, we signed an agreement to acquire a leading and a fast-growing hair care and styling brand in the U.S. called Not Your Mothers. We also successfully delivered on our sustainability targets. We made significant progress on our net zero target by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 29% for absolute scope 1, 2 and 3 and we are driving carbon neutral production at 37 sites globally. We increased the share of recycled plastic for all consumer goods packaging from 15% in 2020 now to 28% at the end of 2025. We increased the amount of palm-based ingredients coming from certified sustainable supply from 90% in 2020 to 98% in 2025. And last but not least, we again achieved excellent results in ESG ratings and rankings in 2025, including an EcoVadis gold medal and a top A score for climate in the CDP 2025. Now turning to our full year outlook. The guidance ranges imply further top and bottom line growth in fiscal 2026 despite a persistently volatile environment. We expect organic sales growth to be in the range of 1 to 3 percent. The adjusted EBIT margin is expected to come in in the range between 14.5 to 16% and adjusted EPS at constant currencies is expected to show a low to high single digit percentage increase. Marco will now elaborate on the full year guidance in more detail and then also for sure in a couple of minutes he will do that.