Mayr-Melnhof Karton Ag

The conference is now being recorded. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Meyer-Mannhoff Cartoon Call regarding the half-year results of 2024. 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 your host, Mr. Switz Spock.

Good morning and welcome on the part of MM Group. My name is Stefan Zwerg-Spork, heading investor relations and corporate communication. It's a great pleasure to have you joining this Q&A conference call on our first half year results 24, which we released this morning just two hours ago. Besides the press release and the half year report, the CEO video statement has been published on our website mm.com. In this call, we want to provide you now with a possibility to direct question on today's communication to our CEO, Peter Oswald, who is sitting next to me. Since this call addresses an international audience, we would very much appreciate your questions to be asked in English in the following Q&A. Before we go for that, Peter, may I ask you to start with a short summary of the key messages?

Yeah, thank you, Stefan. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining this conference call. I do not want to repeat my video message here, which you might have seen. But let me briefly summarize the main highlights. First, in this quarter, we've improved results sequentially and also compared to quarter two in 23, which is very encouraging. Our board and paper business has returned to operating profit. Our volumes in board and paper are substantially up. We are from now on reporting packaging in two divisions, because we think that the farm and healthcare business is a very distinctive business, also with a different business model. And to remind you, it's not just selling folding cartons, but also leaflets and labels. And therefore, we think it's in the interest of our shareholders to be here more transparent and show it as two separate divisions. In food and premium packaging, we've seen some profit decline, but by and large, our record results of 23 have been defended. In pharma and healthcare packaging, we are making steady progress, not as in 23 when we more than doubled our EBITDA from our newly acquired Accenture packaging business on a like-for-like basis, but it's a steady improvement. And going forward, we expect here to benefit from the GLP-1 analogs for weight reduction, where huge capacities are being built up. Looking at our balance sheet, it is stable. Looking at the cash flow statement, our operational cash flow and free cash flow have significantly improved. And going forward, our extensive CapEx program has now been finalized. And so we'll automatically enjoy a substantial free cash flow. So with this brief summary, I would suggest that we open the Q&A.