KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to KWS SAAT SE publication of full-year results 2025-2026. The conference will be recorded. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to our host, Dr. Jorn Andreas.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our full-year 2536 results call. Before we dive into the numbers, let me start with a brief perspective on the year. So, 2025-26 was certainly a challenging year for the agricultural sector. We've seen lower acreage in several crops, cautious farmer sentiment, and also adverse currency developments that created quite some headwinds across many of our markets. Against this backdrop, we delivered actually a very resilient performance. So while sales were affected by market conditions, we maintained a strong profitability, we generated excellent cash flow, and further strengthened our balance sheet. And at the same time, we continued investing, innovation, and executing our city priorities. We are very happy about that. So in short, the year once again demonstrated the resilience of the KGaA business model and the strength of our diversified portfolio. Before we dive into more details, as always, please note that some statements made today are forward-looking and are therefore subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the disclaimer on slide 2. Let's start with the group highlights. Cases reached 1.63 billion euros. Organic sales declined by only 1% despite significant average reductions in sugar, wheat, and corn. each reduced reported sales by roughly 1 percentage point. FBA came in at 343 million and remained at a strong level despite the software market environment. Net income increased by more than 13% to 158 million, supported by a significantly improved financial result. FBA cash flow remained strong at approximately 123 million, and was virtually unchanged from last year. As a consequence, net debt dropped and declined further to less than 9 million, leaving us with an exceptionally strong balance sheet. So, while market positions affected growth, profitability, cash generation and financial strength remained very solid. Let me now put this into perspective against the targets that we set at the beginning of the year. So looking at our guidance, SAAT development was clearly more challenging than anticipated at the beginning of the year. We initially expected around 3% organic growth and later adjusted our outlook to roughly set development. The result of minus 1 reflects weaker than expected acreage development throughout the year that we, to a large extent, mitigated by our control of strength. At the same time, we continue to focus on what is in our control So we implemented efficiency measures that contributed roughly 25 million in savings in fiscal year 2025-2026. In addition, we also actively managed account development, generating efficiency gains that will continue to support profitability going forward. As a result, despite the expected English development and also adverse currency effects, that were also significantly impacting our FDA, we successfully delivered and adjusted FDA margins within our guided range of 19% to 21%. In addition, the disposal of our North American corn license rights, we then successfully completed the strategic alignment of our corn segment that contributed another 29 million to our FDA, also in line with our expectations. And finally, we intend to increase the dividend to €1.30 per share, reflecting our ambition to deliver stable or rising dividends every year. So, taken together, we delivered three out of four targets in a challenging environment. Financial sales. Looking at the bridge, three factors explain the reported sales decline. First, NOVA Anchorage reduced organic sales by and Peter Vogt. They created another percentage point of headwind, mainly the U.S. dollar, the Turkish Lira in the Ukrainian . And third, portfolio effects accounted for the remaining and were largely related to the absence of R&D service revenues from our former . So, the key message is here that the decline was not driven and Peter Vogt. Turning to profitability. So as in the last years, we recorded a few one-time items as shown on the slide. Currently, it benefited from a 29 billion gain related to the disposal of our North American corn license rights. while the prior year included the reversal of a VAT provision. The largest year-on-year improvement came from the financial results, mainly supported by positive effects from the sale of our transportation agro lines against the corresponding negative effect in the previous year. Including those effects, net income and earnings per share, as previously mentioned, increased by 13%.

Let's now dive into the segments and let's start with sugar beet, our largest product segment.