Hapag-Lloyd AG

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Hapag-Lloyd Analyst and Investor Q1 2026 Results Conference Call and Live Webcast. I'm Moritz, the Chorus Call Operator. Hapag-Lloyd today is presented to you by CEO Ralf Haben Janssen and CFO Marc Freese. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Rolf Habenjansen. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much and thanks everyone for making the time to join us here today. We'd like to give you a quick rundown of Q1 and hopefully also a little of a glimpse into the future. Maybe if we start with what I would call the key developments for the first quarter, then I think it's fair to say that we definitely had an unsatisfactory start to the year. There are reasons for that, but nevertheless, if we look back at Q1, I think we would have hoped for a better quarter. If we look at the reasons behind it, one very big reason is definitely the adverse weather conditions that we've had in North and Southern Europe in January and February, and a bit similar on the East Coast of the United States, as we are very heavily exposed to those marks, much stronger than many others, that hit us harder than most. We've seen a recovery in those flows in the course of the first quarter, so I think it's a bit of a one-off, but nevertheless something we could have done without, And of course, we've also had the situation in the Middle East, which caused significant extra costs as from March, which we hope to recover through surcharge, et cetera. But of course, we'll see that only a little bit later. Despite that, I'd say Q1 has been, again, a good quarter for Gemini. Yes, we saw that schedule reliability was down. But given the severity of the disruption that we've seen, I think our recovery has also been quite quick. And you will see again in the second quarter, that we get back to where we were most of last year. On the terminal side we saw good throughput growth and then of course we signed the merger agreement with Zim and also worthwhile mentioning that the shareholders voted with overwhelming majority in favor of that just two weeks ago. In terms of our earnings outlook that remains unchanged. A little bit more about Q1 and the exposure that we've had and which caused our results to dip. I think two main or two, three main things to call out. One is the weather, yeah, that I already mentioned. The other one is significant exposure to the Atlantic trade, which was very weak in the first quarter in particular. And also we have, as a consequence of that, have had to take some capacity out because it was simply no longer possible to to provide those services at a reasonable cost. Of course, we saw the cost going up then on the back of the conflict in the Middle East. I think the thing which is a little bit special about that is that whilst the conflict itself is geographically quite isolated and as such does not impact global flows all that much, the effect it has on costs of course have a global effect because with the surge of energy prices, we have seen significantly higher costs hitting us. I think if we look at what we have today, then we definitely look at 50, 60 million extra costs every week. And of course, we try to pass that on, similar to when you go to the petrol station and you also have to pay a higher fuel price. But clearly, that puts pressure on our business. As far as the militias are concerned, we still have a number of ships stuck there.

And those volumes are limited.