K+S Aktiengesellschaft

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Kplus S second quarter 2024 earnings call. We hope you had a chance to review our posted slides as well as our Q2 documents available on our website. After some opening remarks by Dr. Lohr, we will directly jump into Q&A. Some technical notes. Please refer to our disclaimer on page two of the presentation. Then a note on data privacy. Please note that the team session will be recorded, webcasted and be available as a replay on our homepage afterwards. People asking a question in the team session have to be aware that by turning on their camera and microphone, they give content to saving and replaying video and audio sequences. Now I would like to turn over to Dr. Lohr for the opening remarks.

Thank you, Julia. Welcome to our Q2 earnings discussion. We had a robust quarter in line with expectations. We were again able to benefit from a strong European and specialty business, and therefore agriculture sales volumes increased to 1.84 million tonnes. Industry Plus also performed very well. In total, Q2 EBITDA reached 128 million euros, up from 24 million last year. Free cash flow of the first half amounted to 87 million euros. For the full year 2024, we confirm the midpoint of our previous EBTA guidance. The visibility we have gained with the China and India contracts and the current time of the year allows us to narrow the range to 530 to 620 million euros. The remaining range results from the different scenarios for sales volumes and for regional or product mix. We also continue to expect full year free cash flow to at least break even despite the planned elevated capex. Ladies and gentlemen, just to give you a sense of the phasing of figures for the rest of the year. Please remember that Q3 is our maintenance quarter. Last year Q3 contributed only 10% to full year EBITDA. However, free cash flow in Q3 2024 should be positive due to working capital movements. Back to Julia.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please use the hand signal and write your name and the name of your research house in the Microsoft Teams chat function. We will then call you individually and you can address your questions to us live. Please switch on your camera. One more request as usual, we would like to answer your questions one by one. So if you have multiple questions, please ask one question at a time and we will answer it first. After that, you will have the opportunity to ask further questions. This brings us to the first question of Aron Ceccarelli from Berenberg.