IMCD N.V.

Hello and welcome to the IMCD only Q3 2023 results analyst call. My name is Laura and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be unlistenedly. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your questions. If you require assistance at any point, please press star zero and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Piet van der Slicke, CEO, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you, Laura, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Hans Kormans and I welcome you to our analyst conference call on the third quarter of 2023. With us this morning is also Valerie de Lebrun, who will take over from me as CEO as of January 1st. She will briefly introduce herself after my remarks. Before commenting on our results, I would like to give some context about the economic environment we are operating in. From the Q3 presentation of BASF, we learned that world chemical production without China decreased with more than 4%. Perhaps more important for our business is that the manufacturing indexes of the Eurozone and the United States have contracted for respectively the last 16 and 11 months. It shows the difficulty of the economic environment we are working on. Despite this, our European partners and our results in APEC actually performed quite satisfactory, but we saw a decrease in orders in our industrial segments in the third quarter, in particular in the Americas. I would like to remind you that we grew our EBITDA in the first nine months of 2022 with 51%. After the first nine months of this year, EBITDA decreased with 6% Forex adjusted. And this shows the remarkable resilience of our business model as we are able to hold on to most of the growth we made last year. We remain optimistic about the near future. IMCD has strengthened itself considerably with the acquisitions we made so far this year, and we have expanded our product portfolio as well. We are also very encouraged by our digital progress. IMCD is unique in this respect. We have a global ERP and CRM platform. We keep investing in digital solutions. This all results in very encouraging customer adoption. and will drive cost-efficient organic growth. I'm confident to state that our IT infrastructure and cloud-based solutions are leading in the industry. Finally, we expect fourth quarter results to be better relative to the previous two quarters. And now I would like to invite Valerie to introduce herself.

It is a pleasure for me to be with you today and to have started with IMCD as part of the management board and as designated CEO taking over from PEAT in January. Some of you might already have come across my name during the various functions I have had in the past 27 years within the specialty chemicals industry. Having started with Unilever at their Quest International division, which was later acquired by ICI and then by Agivadan, I worked with large key accounts and with development teams in Europe, Asia, and America across many divisions and product groups. After stint as consultant where I focused on services, I then joined DSM as part of the personal care management team, including the e-commerce initiative, and then moved on to become president of two of the three divisions of Acroma, a carve-out by private equity firm SK Capital from Clarion, where I developed sustainable product portfolios and new business areas. In 2018, I took on the position of CEO at Cap Group, a contract manufacturing company mostly active in ag chem, pharma, and personal care, and one of the key producers of monocular acidic acid in the world. In my five years as CEO of Cap Group, I substantially increased EBITDA, I acquired and integrated the Evronik-Georg business, and completed two successful refinancings. In 2020, I joined IMCD as a supervisory member, and was always impressed by the talent and professionalism of the company, and its diversified and asset-like business model. Joining now fully, I'm happy to say that from the inside, IMCD is even more impressive. Based on IMCD's deep technical expertise and extensive lab network, its best-in-class technical and IT infrastructure, and excellence in M&A execution and integration, I'm looking forward to build further on these pillars and to discuss this within our next calls. For today, I will, however, leave all questions to Piet, and I'm excited to meet you again, albeit virtually, in Q1 in my new role. Thanks.