Merck Kgaa

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Merck Investor and Analyst Conference call on third quarter 2025. At any time during the conference, you can press star 1 1 to enter the queue for the question and answer session. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen only mode. Please note this is our customer's request. This conference will be recorded. I'm now handing over to Florian Schroeder, Head of Investor Relations, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you so much, Sarah. And a sincere welcome to everyone joining the Merck Q3 25 results call. I'm Florian Schreder, the head of investor relations at Merck. I'm delighted to be here today with Belen Garrigio, our group CEO, and Helene von Röder, our group CFO. During the Q&A part of this call, we will also be joined by Kai Beckmann, CEO of Electronics and Deputy Chair of the Executive Board, Jean-Charles Wirth, CEO of LifeScience, and Danny Bazohar, CEO of Healthcare. In the first few minutes, we will walk you through the key slides of our presentation. After that, we will be happy to take your questions. Now, I will turn it over to Belen to get us started.

Thank you, Florian. Good afternoon and welcome everybody to our Q3 earnings call. I am now on slide number five, starting with the highlights of this quarter. So as you have seen during the morning in Q3, we delivered solid organic growth across all three sectors. Organically, the group revenues increased by 5.2% and EBITDA pre went up by 8.8%. Life science delivered the strongest organic sales growth at 6%, followed by by our healthcare and electronics businesses, which both deliver solid organic growth of 5%. One key highlight of the quarter is the continuation of the strong performance of our process solutions business, which showed organic growth above 10% for the third consecutive quarter despite rising comparables. We saw a very strong order growth year over year, and a book-to-bill ratio that is still comfortably above one. In science and lab solutions, we return to organic growth, and that despite continued near-term headwinds. In healthcare, organic growth was largely driven by the CM&E franchise, up 7%, and solid NNI performance of 6%, driven by Mavenclad, which rich double-digit growth in this quarter. Oncology showed moderate organic growth despite heavy competitive headwinds for DaVentio and rising competition for Herbitubs in China from non-comparable biologics. Following the closing of the SpringWorks acquisition on July 1st, this is the first quarter in which we are consolidating our rare disease franchise which has contributed 4% portfolio growth for healthcare and has performed well in line with our expectations. Moving into electronics, we saw organic growth of 5%, driven by our semi-material business. And in this context, please note that Q3 includes one final month of surface solutions, since we have now successfully divested as of July 31st. Regarding full year 2025, we are now confirming and narrowing our absolute guidance ranges for net sales, EBITDA pre and EPS pre. We are maintaining the midpoints for net sales and EBITDA pre while slightly increasing the midpoint for EPS pre. So turning to slide six for an overview of our performance by business sector. Once again, organic sales growth in the third quarter was plus 5.2% and life science was the largest contributor with organic sales growth of almost 6% driven once again by the stellar performance of process solutions. Healthcare grew 4.6% organically driven by strong growth of our CM&E franchise alongside contribution from Maven Cloud and Fertility, which has returned to growth supported by Pergoveris. Electronics also showed a solid organic sales growth with semi-materials up high single digits, while DS&S was down in the low teens range, as was expected. Regarding our earnings, EBITDA pre-amounted to $1.69 billion, up plus 8.8% organically versus the same quarter of last year. The currency had a negative effect across all sectors, while the portfolio effect was slightly positive, driven by the contribution of spring words. As flagged in our Q2 earnings call, EBITDA pre in Q3 was supported by the sale of a priority review voucher, resulting in a gain of plus 60 million in healthcare and legislative changes in South America, adding another 59 million of income in CO. Our underlying EBITDA pre-margin, excluding these two effects, was stable at around 29%, fully aligned with our expectation for the full year. And with this, let me hand it over to Helene for a more detailed review of our financials.