Oesterreichische Post Ag

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's earnings call of Austrian's Post's full year 2025 results. I am Ingmar, your operator for today, and I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may click on the raise your hand button. We are looking forward to the presentation. And with this, I hand over to the head of investor relations, Harald Hagenauer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this conference call of Austrian Post. Today we would like to discuss the full year, the Q4, and also recent trends of the company. Here with me in the room is Walter Oblin, our CEO, and our CFO, Barbara Bottisk-Eidensteiner. I would like to directly hand over to Walter for the presentation. So please go on.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our full year results for 2025. As a summary up front, the environment has been challenging, continues to be challenging, But we can show today. I think quite solid results for the full year That prove our resilience and stability Let me start on page two Highlighting the context in which we operate overall the longest recession in the longest postwar recession in Europe is Most likely coming to an end until two weeks ago the forecasts on inflation and GDP are were relatively positive. In the meantime, we've seen the Iran war change a number of things and uncertainty has come back. Given all this, there are still two dominant drivers of transformation within the postal industry. Number one, the continued decline of letter mail and direct mail coming from the digitization of communication. and second the growth in e-commerce driving parcel growth across geographies. In this context, we have, I think, shown a quite stable development. This picture, this chart summarizes the key indicators for the full year 2025, revenues 3 billion, 43 million. 197 million. We continue to operate in three business segments with very different drivers and characteristics. Mail, our Austrian legacy business, is still an important and profitable business with revenues of 1.155 billion. Second, Parcel & Logistics, our growth engine, within the meantime, 1.72 billion. Revenues by far the largest business in our group a portfolio consisting of in the meantime more than 14 geographies and third retail and bank this is a combination of our Austrian retail network with Bank 99, a small but growing business where I think the most important highlight of the last year was the breakeven of Bank 99. Let me also remind you here, and I will come back to that later, that as of 2026, we will slightly adjust our segment reporting, moving the retail part of the retail and bank segment to mail segment, basically bundling all USO related businesses while at the same time showing the bank as a pure segment. In this challenging context, page 4, we have shown a solid business development based on a quite good Q4. Revenues, as over the first three quarters already shown, slightly below a strong 2024. 2024 included two quite substantial positive one-offs. One was a super election year in Austria with four countrywide elections contributing revenues of 40 million Euro. In the absence of these, our mail business of course showed a stronger decline and second was a positive combination of Turkish Lira and inflation in the country in total a positive one-off in 2024 of roughly 80 million given these positive one-offs in 2024 we are quite satisfied with the revenue development also with the EBIT and EBITDA development in 2025 as all important P&L lines are significantly above 2023 and the strong growth that we've shown in 2024 has consolidated on a high level. The basis for whatever we do in the company is our strategy LEAD 2030, a strategy that we worked out over the last about one and a half years ago and communicated last May. Three business directions. Number one, we want to be a strong post in Austria, but we want to go beyond post. We want to be a leading provider of key services. postal services, banking services, telecommunication and potentially more in the future. Number two, international e-commerce is our growth opportunity. We are already today reaching 150 million people in a region consisting of Austria, Eastern Europe and Turkey and in this region we want to invest further in profitable growth and become one of the leading e-commerce partner for online retailers in this region. Number three, one group operationally excellent. This includes two dimensions, stronger integration across the group, across our portfolio of countries and businesses. And second, operational excellence as an aspiration across our value chain with a strong focus on efficiency and technology. And in the middle, three overarching values and guidelines. One is sustainability. where we have a few lighthouse projects, including our e-mobility and PB in Austria. Second, a customer focus across whatever we do. And third, a strong company culture and the aspiration to be one of the leading employers in our respective skill groups. In with the strategy we are transforming the company at accelerated speed Here this page 6 shows a few highlights in Austria the last year In May we implemented several changes in on products and pricing to adjust for the declining volumes at the same time we are pushing for regulatory reforms and Bank 99 reached breakeven and achieved a number of important milestones and we're looking optimistically into the future of this bank. In two and a half weeks we will launch our yellow mobile phone offer um... and uh... extend our service offering by uh... through an MBNO offering and uh... uh... last but not least uh... in Austria a strong network initiative uh... extending our number of postal access points from one thousand eight hundred to almost three thousand within two years Within the international e-commerce thrust Some important expansion steps in Eastern Europe most recently two acquisitions in Bulgaria and Hungary a strong push on our out-of-home Network in particular with locker with lockers and um and uh on the strategy pillar number three um i think it's worth mentioning that we have started a comprehensive program called operations 2030 uh that will transform the way we a operate and deliver in Austria fundamentally over the next years second important investments across our important regions we will next week launch a project in Salzburg one of the last logistics centers that we haven't either built new or expanded We're in the middle of a big expansion project a new logistics center in Budapest in Hungary And same is true for a big site in Istanbul Page 7 shows you our international footprint in total 15 countries Austria Eastern Europe Turkey and beyond Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia as countries where we have logistics networks on the ground. In Germany, we are still present with a state subsidiary. and a minority share in AEP, a pharmaceutical discount wholesaler, which we have decided to divest. And in Greece, we are present with an IT nearshoring provider, which both serves Austrian Post, but also the third market. Page 8, moving to now our individual businesses. Page 8 shows you an overview of the letter mail business long-term development. We are now in the 18th year of mail decline. 60% of volume roughly has been lost. Similar development, but not as pronounced on direct mail and media post. In total, revenues are still on a significant level with 1.1 billion Euro revenues from letter mail and direct mail and meter post. You see that we have achieved a revenue decline that is much less than the volume decline, so constant price and product adjustments have helped stabilize the business. It is still a profitable business. We're doing everything to keep it relevant and affordable. Part of that are tariffs that are relatively moderate compared to other European countries. So the standard letter in Austria still only costs one euro and the premium product delivered next day one euro thirty. I think this shows that we also have room to further increase prices without pricing ourselves out of the market. Page 10, a few facts about the development of our Bank 99. Bank 99 was founded five years ago on April, so now almost six years ago, but last year finished the fit full business year. In the meantime, we have a balance sheet of 4.2 billion Euro, a quite risk-averse balance sheet with a loan portfolio that consists of mortgage loans and consumer loans. The whole balance sheet has proven to be very robust and resilient throughout the last years which have shown quite a lot of stress on bank balance sheets with high inflation. We were able to deliver the promise break even last year with an IFRS earnings of 1.5 million. We hope to move further into positive numbers this year. We also made our initial first placing on the bond markets with a preferred senior bond. was a volume of 85 million. Before that, we got an investment grade rating. So a number of milestones that have been achieved last year. And there are clear priorities for 2026. First, further expansion for distribution channel and full focus on gaining further customers and across selling across existing customers. Number two, extending our securities offering. Number three, extending our product portfolio for SMEs. And number four, a clear focus on cost discipline and efficiency that already helped us last year reach the break even in the second half of the year. Moving to our Austrian retail network, we're in a big forward initiative and a big expansion across Austria with self-service facilities extending the number of postal access points from 1,870 to 3,050 as a target for this year and almost 3,000 implemented end of last year. This is extremely well received by consumers. Last year, 35 million shipments either shipped or received via self-service stations and with a strong growth of 8% compared to 2024. In the two weeks, April 1st, we will launch a new mobile phone offering We have been present in telecommunications throughout the existence of Austrian Post, most recently as a sales and distribution partner of A1. Now we are launching an MBNO, again in cooperation with A1, the leading Austrian telecom provider and telecom incumbent. The position of this will be high quality at affordable rates combined with service by our employees, by postal employees in our dense network consisting of postal offices and postal partners and we are convinced that there is a similar opportunity for this telecommunication offering as for our bank offering. Moving now to strategy pillar number two, strong growth in international e-commerce. Page 13 shows you the development of our international, our group parcel volumes across the last years, over the last years. So last year, a year of consolidation after strong growth. The two years before, volatile Chinese customers Contributed to you know, some volatility also throughout the four quarters Q4 was quite good in particular in Eastern Europe and we were able to Come back to the level of 2024 after a difficult start into the year in Austria continued growth page 14 showing more depth on Austria and Last year 232 million parcels delivered so full year growth of 3% Q4 growth of 6% translating in good revenue growth we continue to gain customers based on a superior quality that we offer and page 15 as a result we are the clear market leader in the Austrian parcel market with a in the total market of 56% in the growing B2C market of 63% followed by Amazon and DPT all of them with substantially lower market shares Moving to Eastern Europe Page 16 shows you our Eastern Europe portfolio of group companies complemented by our newest acquisition EU Shipments which we closed last Friday which is not consolidated of course in the figures shown here last year 78 million parcels after more than double digit growth in 2024 a year of consolidation there's a lot of volatility among Chinese e-commerce platforms page 17 gives you an overview about EU shipments we think a very interesting addition to the group was recently added to the included in the group the Financial Times Group of 1000 Europe's fastest growing companies What is the service offering of EU Shipments? It's basically a one-stop shop e-commerce offering for small and medium-sized customers that want to ship, that want to serve international consumers. So EU Shipments provides the software integration into different marketplaces. The core logistics fulfillment, so warehousing, and the pick and pack servers and then connects to a portfolio of different last mile providers. Austrian Post today already is one of them, but the company will continue to maintain a multi-vendor last mile network. Last year 50 million revenue 60 million parcels Handled for 1,300 business customers and the company has shown very good growth Page 18 moving to Turkey again here also a lot of volatility with Chinese e-commerce platforms number one and number two continued insourcing by the two biggest Turkish e-commerce platforms that results in a smaller non-captive share of the total market Arascago last year in a year of consolidation with strong growth on the revenue side but this is mainly driven by inflation Translated in Euro small decline given that 2024 was a very favorable relationship of inflation to currency decline We aspire to push growth stronger over the next years moving to page 19 through various strategic initiatives driving growth in Turkey but also internationally in countries like Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan, putting quality first, improving quality of delivery service where it does not meet the highest standards and a continued focus on efficiency. Across the group portfolio, we are pushing Out of home network options I mentioned Austria but also outside Austria we are targeting roughly 10,000 locker and out of home So 10,000 lockers and around 20,000 total out-of-home locations and we are making good progress and we also recently communicated an acquisition in Hungary which is not closed yet which will add roughly 1,100 lockers to our Hungarian parcel company. We are investing across the portfolio page 21 shows you that we have clear targets for expanding our sorting capacity both in Eastern Europe as well as in Turkey some bigger projects underway and page 22 illustrates that we are across geographies transforming the way we operate in our core logistics Direct to locker tours is one important element end to end acceleration making sure that we offer large e-commerce platforms an opportunity to deliver next day when the customer is ordering late at night and that our value chain is ready for very late cut-off times and automation and robotics will further increase our efficiency. With that said, I hand over to Barbara, who will give us more details about our financials.