Henkel Ag & Co Kgaa S/Adr

Good morning and welcome to 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 with an operator. I will now hand over to Leslie Ilken, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Good morning and a warm welcome to everyone joining Henkel's Q1 2026 results conference call today. I'm Leslie Iltgen, head of Henkel's Investor Relations. Today I'm joined by our CEO, Carsten Knoebel, and our CFO, Marco Svoboda. Carsten will begin with an overview of the key developments in the first quarter. Marco will then follow with a more detailed review of the company's financial performance. 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 to Carsten, please let me remind you that this call will be recorded and a replay will be made available on our 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 form of disclaimer in regard to forward-looking statements within the meaning of relevant legislation. It can also be accessed via our website at hancock.com. As always, the presentation and discussion are conducted subject to this disclaimer. With this, it's my pleasure to hand over to our CEO, Carson Kilby-Carson. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much, Leslie. A warm welcome also from my side to everyone today joining our conference call. As always, we do appreciate your interest in our company and we look forward to answering your questions. After walking you through the key developments in the first quarter, we will elaborate on Henkel's business performance and the full year outlook in more detail. So let me move straight into the highlights of the first quarter. In Q1, we delivered good organic sales growth of 1.7% on group level, equally supported by both business units. We saw continued positive price and volume development in both business units. As a result, volumes have now been in positive territory for three consecutive quarters. Furthermore, We are making strong progress in executing on our M&A strategy in both business units, and we have recently signed five acquisitions with combined annual sales of around 1.6 billion euros. To date, we have already successfully closed three of these five transactions, whether that be LaRock, ATP Systems and Adhesive Technologies, and Not Your Mothers in consumer brands. I will elaborate in more detail on the acquisitions in a minute. In addition, we have successfully completed our 1 billion euros share buyback program by the end of the March, in line with the announced timeline. And finally, our full year 2026 guidance remains unchanged. As you are all aware, acquisitions are an integral part of our growth strategy. With the recently announced acquisitions, we are investing a total of nearly 5 billion euros and adding combined annual sales of around 1.6 billion euros. Overall, Expected sales growth of the assets we are acquiring is clearly above average. By 2030, we expect to realize synergies in the high single-digit range as a percentage of sales of the acquired companies, translating into an increase in adjusted ETS of at least 10%. We will provide further information once all transactions have been successfully closed. While we keep investing into our businesses organically and non-organically, we also let our shareholders participate in the company's success. Through the completed share-by-back program of a billion euros and dividends of more than 800 million euros paid for 2025, we have returned almost 2 billion euros to our shareholders over the last 12 months. In adhesive technologies, we successfully closed the transaction of ATP adhesive systems effective April 1st. With this acquisition, we are entering the highly attractive and fast-growing market for high-performance water-based specialty tapes, which currently grows at around 7% and are expanding our portfolio beyond liquid adhesives with solid solutions. Water-based specialty tapes show increasing market penetration and outperform the broader tapes industries with above-average growth rates by offering a more sustainable alternative to traditional solvent-based tapes. By increasing our offering and capabilities in the tapes market with a broader range of innovative bonding solutions, we create additional value for our customers and we drive further profitable growth. With the acquisition of Stahl, we are expanding into the specialty coatings market for flexible materials and we are adding a highly complementary portfolio that serves various customer segments to our business. This market shows attractive growth rates of 3-4%. Stahl also focuses on environmentally responsible water-based solutions, further underpinning our sustainability commitments. Building on valuable complementary technology and R&D capabilities and a know-how-based business model with a high degree of customization, this acquisition is a strong strategic fit for our adhesive technologies business and will enable us to bring more innovations to our customers. Together with the previous acquisitions of Kritica Infrastructure and Seal4Life, we are further strengthening and expanding our technology portfolio which is already the broadest in the industry, by adding attractive adjacencies. As a result, we are not only entering new markets, but we are also creating the basis for new technology-led opportunities in our core businesses, unlocking additional growth potential. By further reinforcing our technological agnostic approach, we can drive even more customer-centric innovation tailored to specific application and performance needs across industries. A strong example of how our broad solution portfolio positions us as the partner of choice for our customer is NASA's recent ATEMIS-2 mission, where we delivered industry-leading performance and reliability across structural integrity, thermal protection, surface technologies, and safety-critical ceilings. Overall, we are supporting space exploration with more than 20 mission-critical solutions engineered to withstand extreme environments and to enable highly demanding, one-of-a-kind applications. The proven performance of our Loctite solutions on the Orion spacecraft underscores the relevance of our materials for both today's and future space missions. Another great example of our technology leadership is in paper packaging, where we are expanding our coatings expertise to capture high growth opportunities in the packaging market. With advanced barrier and heat seal coatings, we are enabling our customers to shift from traditional plastics to recyclable paper-based packaging solutions. And furthermore, we are broadening our solution portfolio with our in-house packaging recycle lab, which offers comprehensive recyclability assessments for fiber-based packaging. Turning now to our consumer brands, where we are further expanding our hair business through attractive M&A opportunities with Not Your Mothers and with Olaplex. After having streamlined and cleaned up our portfolio over the past three years, we are now adding back size and scale with a brand that has historically grown clearly above market rates, further strengthening our footprint in North America. In the meantime, we successfully closed the acquisition of Not Your Mother's effective April 24th. Not Your Mother's is a leading and a fast growing hair care and styling consumer brand in the US and it allows us to expand our hair footprint in the largest global retail hair market which shows attractive growth rates of around 4%. Not Your Mother's brings a diversified channel footprint, including mass retail and e-commerce, creating attractive opportunities to accelerated growth in our consumer business. And finally, its complementary capabilities and deep hair expertise further strengthen our innovation engine and power insight-driven product development. With the acquisition of OLAPLEX, we are expanding our global presence in the premium hair care segment which also offers attractive growth opportunities with a CAGR of around 5%. Olaplex is a well-established, globally active premium channel hair care brand offering a portfolio of science-led high-performance products. It addresses a diversified premium channel mix across professional, specialty retail, and also e-commerce. With its strong scientific foundation, we see compelling opportunities for future growth and innovation. Over the last few years we have been significantly transforming our consumer brands portfolio through strategic refocus and more recently with targeted M&A. There is a clear focus on attractive categories. We have sharpened our brand focus and we are successfully executing on our M&A growth strategy. When looking at how our hair portfolio has evolved And considering all transactions will be closed, we will have expanded this business by around 1 billion euros since 2021. And in addition, our hair business has been growing above average over the last years. As a result, we now have a much more balanced portfolio. Our hair business, in the meantime, has nearly now the same size as our laundry care business, each accounting for around 40% of consumer brand sales. And at the same time, we have enhanced the attractiveness of our laundry care business through a clear focus on premium brands in combination with impactful innovations, for example, under our strong brands Persil and Pervol. With our strong brands, customer-centric innovations, and an almost balanced footprint in consumer and professional, we are building on a strong foundation to become the authority in hair. This ambition is underpinned by our strong growth performance with a CAGR of more than 6% over the last three years, outperforming our consumer brand business by more than 300 basis points. And finally, the continued strong growth dynamics of our top 10 brands are underscoring our sharpened brand focus. In Q1. The top 10 brands again delivered above average organic sales growth of around 5%, driven by a balanced contribution from growth, price, and volume, and we expect their share of sales, which currently accounts for around 60%, to continue to increase going forward. In this context, Let me also highlight the strong results of our premium laundry care brands Persil and Pervol mentioned before, a clear proof that our focus on premium brands with strong innovations pays off. On Persil, we delivered mid-single-digit growth in Q1. In 2025, Persil was the market leader in Germany, gaining 200 basis points in market shares. And Pervol achieved high single-digit growth in Q1, underpinned by strong market share dynamics with gains of 170 basis points globally in our active markets in 2025. And now, turning to our full-year outlook, which remains unchanged. For the group, we continue to expect organic sales growth of 1-3%, an adjusted EBIT margin in the range of 14.5% to 16%, and adjusted EPS to increase in the low to high single-digit percentage range. And with this, let me hand over now to Marco, who will lead you now through the key financials in more detail.