Oesterreichische Post Ag

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to today's earnings call of Austrian Post Q1 2026 results. I am your operator for today, and I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode during this conference. 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 having said 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 our Q1 results. Here with me in the room is Walter Oblin, our CEO, and also our CFO, Barbara Boltisk-Eidensteiner. I would like to hand over to Walter to answer.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have the opportunity to present to you our Q1 results. Let me start right away on page two. I think the summary is the environment continues to be quite challenging, both on a macroeconomic level as well as for the postal industry overall. Europe wide and also in Austria the market environment on the one hand provides some positive perspective as the longest recession after the Second World War is forecasted to be over at the same time geopolitical uncertainties and the Middle East conflict weighs on the macroeconomy and tariff measures and different Regulatory proposals both on the EU level as well as on a national level have the potential to disturb e-commerce markets the two mega trends dominating our industry for the last years are Continued to be present and continue to be to dominate our industry number one digitization of communication with declining letter mail volumes and direct mail as a result and and second, e-commerce continues to fuel growth in parcels, but all this in a quite competitive and volatile environment. Page three gives a summary of the key developments and of the key topics in Q1. In Austria, an accelerated decline of letter mail for this single quarter of around 9%. We do not expect this figure for the full year, but we have seen a rise in letter mail decline over the last roughly 18 months. Second, there is a good path of growth in a large part of our portfolio, both in Austria as well as in CE, 10% and 9% respectively. a little bit less in Turkey but also here on the positive side we are in growth mode again despite a regulatory burden given that the threshold for imports for customs for Chinese Asian process has been taken away and there is a substantially reduced inflow of Chinese parcels into Turkey. So in this context, the 2% I think are quite okay. On the revenue side, again here, the positive news revenues are up by 0.9%. This despite what I said happened in Turkey and this despite the quarter where we did not have any revenue from our telecommunications business, neither from the old corporation which ended in December 2025 nor from our new telecom offering which only started April 1st. On the earning side, the quarter was as expected weaker than last year, EBIT down 7.7 million, sorry, EBITDA down 7.7 million at 93.8 and EBIT down 11.6 million. basically three main drivers. One is the silent period in telecommunications. Second, a challenging market environment, in particular competitive environment in Eastern Europe. And third, the already mentioned absence of Asian volumes in Turkey. Three highlights to mention on the positive side. One is the closing and initial integration of EU Shipment, an e-commerce fulfillment company based in Bulgaria with a presence across Eastern and Southeastern Europe, including also in selected Western European markets. We feel very positive about this company. Second, a very good quarter of Bank 99 with an was a profit of more than 2.5 million in the first quarter. And third, the successful start of Yellow. Yellow is our telecommunications brand that we launched on April 1st with an MVNO offering, which has been well accepted in the first month. Page four gives you the usual overview of Allstrand Post. One thing to note, Remind you that as of this quarter we are switching to a somewhat modified segment reporting We have decided given that the bank 99 now has reached a level of maturity That we want to present it as a standalone segment Accordingly, we have taken the retail the Austrian retail segment or retail element of the segment and Included it in the mail which we now have named Mail, Retail and Services. In the middle, eCommerce and Logistics is mostly or only a renaming. We think that eCommerce and Logistics better reflect what we are doing here, given that we are a partner for eCommerce companies on the logistics side. Page 5 summarizes the strategy we decided and communicated a year ago. Our vision is to be a leading logistics and services group, reaching more than 150 million people in Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkey, and beyond. Three core elements, one, post and beyond in Austria. We want to be a strong post in Austria, but beyond that, offer key services for consumers, including financial services, and more in the future, all integrated into one consistent ecosystem. Second, international e-commerce. Our aspiration is to be one of the, or maybe even the leading e-commerce partner in Austria, Eastern Europe, Turkey and beyond for e-commerce retailers, be they small, be they large. And third element, one group, operationally excellent, This means that we want a stronger Harmonize across the groups from integrate stronger exploit efficiencies with the aspiration to be operationally excellent in whatever we do And to be a leader in the application of modern technologies Let me now go through the core elements of the strategy starting with the Austrian and Business and here again starting with the incumbent mail business letter volumes continue to decline now for the 17th or so year this first quarter at a rate of 9% in total we've lost around 60% similar development on the direct mail side with a relatively stable development on unaddressed mail, but a stronger decline on addressed mail. Revenues overall still declining substantially less than volumes. Mail remains a large and profitable cash generating business with revenues of beyond one billion last year. Also, our tariffs shown on page seven remain moderate if compared across Europe with other countries. So I think there's also some leeway still, some headroom for further price increases without pricing ourselves out of the market. We have increased prices on the standard product May last year. on other products. So registered mail, international mail, direct mail effective January 1st this year. And so I would still expect some further price increases on the standard product or on the core that the product still this year in the second half. So much on mail. Moving to our bank, bank 99. is developing quite well it's well accepted in the market constantly receives positive feedbacks from different customer service second year in a row best customer service among retail banks in Austria which I think is remarkable given that the bank is only six years old and has a quite small marketing budget compared to the main retail network such as the Spackhausen sector or the the right-right sector 300,000 consumers 4.2 billion balance sheet last year breakeven with an income of with a net income of 1.5 million a very good start into the first quarter with an EBIT of 2.6 million this includes a smaller one-off but still we are on a good record of Expanding our profit also for the full year. We will expand our asset offering, so our offering of stocks and ETFs, so the ability to trade, to buy and sell single stocks as well as ETFs. in the coming months. We are working also on a focused SME offering to be launched in the second half of the year. And we are constantly working on automation and cost efficiency. Excuse me. Our self-service network is being expanded month by month. We are soon reaching or surpassing the threshold of 3,000 Postal access points. With that, we have increased the number of postal access points by more than 60% over two and a half years. And this self-service network is well accepted by consumers. Last year, 35 million transactions, I think, is a number that speaks for itself. Page 10, our mobile offering has been launched in time in budget on April 1st. The idea is similar to the bank. We do have a strong postal ecosystem consisting of a brand, of a retail network, of digital channels, and offering customer frequency that we can use to cross-sell and to add further services. This is the plan for Yellow, the brand we launched on April 1st. Yellow is an MVNO offering which is running basically on the network of A1, the Austrian Telecom incumbent. We offer a very focused, transparent, simple offering consisting of mobile phone rates, hardware, internet rates, and a few additional packages. The positioning is to offer a quality network at quite affordable rates combined with consulting and service close to customers in our retail network, which is the densest retail network in Austria in the telecommunications sector with 340 postal branches and 1,300 postal partners. This offering has been received well on the market. We are fully on plan with customer acquisition rates over the first month and this despite a very price aggressive competition given that there is a battle between two other mobile companies going on in Austria but our positioning here with the retail network as the main sales channel has proven very effective in this context. Moving to page 11 to our e-commerce and logistics business. We have expanded our presence now operate in more than 15 countries with last mile networks in most of these countries and with now the acquisition of EU shipments, also in logistics and e-commerce fulfillment offering for cross border e-commerce in Eastern Europe. The idea is also to expand this to Austria and Turkey and also selected Western European markets step by step in a CapEx light business model. Let me start going through the geographies starting with Austria on page 12. again 10% growth in Austria quite strong momentum we are gaining market share and gaining new customers on a already strong level against an already strong level in 2025 including customers such as Winted which is the European category leader in the second hand C2C business quite strongly growing also revenue wise with 9.5% a good revenue growth moving to Eastern Europe here light and shadow good volume development with plus 9% EBIT wise we are not satisfied the competition is quite price aggressive in particular from the side of new entrants on the puzzle locker side but we see that in some markets this competition is not sustainable such as in Hungary where one competitor has announced to exit and where we have engaged in a transaction which is still not closed yet as we're still collecting the necessary approvals so overall a good revenue development in Eastern Europe But not set satisfying profitability in the first quarter and we are addressing both operational as well as strategic levers to Get to a profitable get back to a profitable growth path Moving to turkey on page 14 here as I said a regulatory discontinuity with very restricted import rules for parcels from Asia, which have led to a drop of volumes of around 5%. Still, the company was able to achieve a net growth of 2%, and revenue-wise, including also price increases and inflation, plus 20%. Of course, there is inflation in these numbers. So, overall, a Again, challenging quarter in Turkey, but we are looking more confidently in the next quarters. Page 15, a short glance on EUshipments.com. The company is based and founded in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is targeting revenues of about 55 million for the full year. We have fully consolidated the company as of March 1st. We see good profits, good growth. Good customer satisfaction are trying to integrate this where reasonable and where necessary with Austrian Post Group are trying to use the platform of Austrian Post in other markets to also support geographic expansion and think that this e-commerce logistics offering will help us growing profitably in Eastern Europe, but also in Austria and in Turkey. So much is an overview on the most important developments in our strategy. It's weeks after we communicated the full year results, and I'm now handing over to Barbara, who will give you more details on our financials.

Thank you, Walter. also welcome from my side. In line with our guidance, we gave with full results Q1, we expected weaker, and yes, it's weaker, but we are showing some growth on the revenue side, about 1%. As Walter just mentioned, with March, we are also including the revenues of EU shipment, but we did another fully consolidation of HLX, It's our IT company in Greece. I will come later on because this has also some impact on our balance sheet. EBITDA and EBIT are in line with our expectations, but of course they are down by 8 million on the EBITDA side compared to Q1 2025 and also down by 12 million compared on the EBIT side. We are still showing a stable balance sheet with low debt. Financial debt to EVA is showing up at 0.3 times, and the logistic equity ratio is 27%. I will also do some comments on this later on when we are going through the balance sheet. We were able to produce a strong operating cash flow. Also, there I will spend some words later on. Volto already mentioned the change in our segments reporting. We already did, I think, a first intro on this with the Q4 results. So we have now a clear result reporting on the Bank 99, and I think this also helps you to go on with your estimates in a better way. If we are coming to page 18, Wojta already mentioned the situation on the market, the DAF situation on the digitization side, on the main business, and we also saw that the pricing measures could not offset the volume designs there. We also lost revenues on the telco side due to the silent period. This we will be able to in the coming quarters. On the e-commerce logistics side, we really had a great Q1 in Austria with a strong growth of nearly 10%. In Turkey, we just saw the volume development, but due to the inflation and FX in total, we see minus 2.7% on the revenue side in Euros. See, there we had a very big Q1 in 2025, and we see that there the revenues are coming back, and we see there growth on the parcel side, on the volume side, and also on the revenue side. Thanks, also already commented. Why are the revenues lower? It's due to the lower interest rate level we saw in Q1 2026. Coming now to the earnings, we already went through. So what do I want to mention there? We are lacking the telecommunication income, so we saw the revenues of about 7 million we lost, and it's falling through, I would say. On the other hand, On the e-commerce side, we have had a good profitability in Austria on the PASO side, in Turkey and also in CEE. There's room for improvement as competition was really intensive there. The bank, 2.6 million of EBIT. That's a really good improvement compared to last year, but there's also one problem. time positive effect of about 0.8 million so please do not take 2.6 times 4 for the full year EBIT of the bank it will be a little bit lower but the bank is really doing well coming to corporate consolidation so there we see minus of 5.7 million it shows that the cost savings programs we are running at the overhead side and the focus there. Going now into the detailed profit and loss account. I only want to have a short discussion on the financial result. There we have the negative impact out of the valuation of the book option for Aras Cargo. We had there evaluation effects of minus 8.4 million in the financial results 2026. In 2025, in the first quarter, we ended up with plus 4.4 million. So you're seeing there we have a quite high swing. This is what we cannot really steer. It's really depending on inflation and FX in Turkey. Also the tax rate is suffering due to this because this valuation effect we're not able to take as a tax deductible. Going now into more details on the segment side. Mail retail and services. There you see the development of the different segments within this segment and What I want to address is that we saw on the direct mail and media post the main decline in the addressed segment and in the unaddressed segment the business was better. The easiness of this segment started due to the loss of telecommunication income where we are trying hard to come back to levels of before. On the e-commerce and logistic division side, I think everything was said. Profitability is suffering out of Turkey and see and good profitability on the Austrian side. There we are also showing in-group logistic solutions in the side of EM shipments, which amounts for about 5 million on the revenue side and about 0.8 million on the EBIT side. Division bank, I think everything's set. Then coming to the balance sheet, you can see a decrease on the equity side compared to end of 2025. It's coming out of the put options we got out of the acquisition of EU Shipments. So it's the liability we put against equity and for H&X and EU Shipments. So for both together, it bounds for about 75 million. And on the other hand, I think the balance sheet is quite stable. financial debt is at 124.2 and equity ratio still amounts for 27% for the logistic part. Coming now to operating free cash flow. Our cash flow from operating activities amounted for about 79 million. We did some investments. It's a little bit more than 20 million. The The biggest spend we did in the first quarter of 2026 was the acquisition of EU shipment and we had a payout of 59.1 million. So free cash flow before money market investments was 8.7 million. So where did we spend our money in the first quarter? Mainly in Austria for our der Logistikzentrum Salzburg-Weiss, auch für einige E-Motorräder und auf der anderen Seite auch für unser Home-Business international. Now I would like to give back to Walter for the outlook for 2020.

Thank you, Barbara. That concludes with the outlook for the whole year. I think as a summary, a stable outlook, a rather confident outlook, that assumes that we can catch up most of what we are behind the prior year in Q1 over the next three quarters. In terms of market environment, of course, there is some uncertainty, but the core trends of the declining mail volume and still increasing e-commerce markets, the market environment remains pretty stable. On the parcel side, we have some uncertainty from different levies on parcels, mostly from non-EU countries, which are still not 100% clearly defined. So we will have to see how this affects parcel volumes. On the revenue side, for the overall group, we expect a slight revenue increase, similar to what we've seen in Q1. Potentially a little bit above that. This will be the net of decline in mail in the mid single digit range. So a higher volume decline offset by certain price effects. A revenue growth on the e-commerce side in the upper single digit range and a slightly growing income also on the bank side. So overall, we expect growth for the full year. We continue to invest, as Barbara said, with a CapEx guidance of 140 to 160 million, with our Salzburg Logistics Center as the main big project included here, and the expansion of our electric fleet as the other big project. investment program part of the investment program and on the earnings level the target is to achieve earnings that are in line with the last years with the bandwidth of the last years of course depending on the macroeconomic environment and on the Turkish Lira Euro exchange rate but overall as I said we do expect to catch up some of the that we've seen in EBIT versus last year over the next three quarters. So with that said, I would like to thank you for your attention, and we are now happy to take your questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will start the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may click on the raise your hand button. If you're connected by a phone, please press the key combination star 9 on your telephone keypad to enter the queue. One moment for the first question. If there is Ingo Schmidt, you should be able to unmute yourself and place your question.

Good afternoon. This is Ingo Schmidt from Montega. First of all, congratulations on a solid set of operational results in Q1.

My first question is about ARA's cargo.

We know that the European Asian import volumes is a temporary effect due to the new custom rules. Based on what you see now, when do you expect these volumes to recover? Are you already seeing a stabilization in the second quarter? And secondly, on CEE and SEE, you mentioned continued marginal health in the region. Could you maybe explain a bit more how EU shipments can help you over time? Should we mainly think about higher parcel volumes, or can services like fulfillment also help to support margins going forward? Thanks.

Well, thank you for your questions on Aras Tago. As you said, there has been this discontinuity on the custom side. We do expect Chinese volumes to find other ways into Turkey and part of the volume to be over time absorbed maybe by Turkish e-commerce platforms which are to some extent in the hands of large Chinese e-commerce groups. Overall, we are optimistic that both revenue-wise as well as EBIT-wise that the next three quarters will be better than the first quarter. There is a variety of initiatives underway, in particular focusing on SMEs, where we see potential for Ares Cargo. and what we've seen in April confirms that we seem to be in a good way. On CE, I think there are also a number of initiatives ongoing. You're aware that there is one strategic project, which is the acquisition of an exiting competitor in Hungary, which should help if this acquisition goes through. There are a number of initiatives on the operations side but also initiatives which go in the direction of a stronger integration across the group exploiting synergies between companies that in the past have more acted on a standalone basis where we're now trying to stronger integrate across the group exploiting synergies on the cost side but also presenting the group stronger as a region to large international customers and again here, the volume development in the first three months makes us optimistic that volume-wise we are on the right way.

Maybe I can answer this question. So what we are focusing together with EU shipment to roll out the concept of EU shipment in countries where we are ready. So this means going to Turkey and other countries other countries where we want to do fulfillment for the customers. But what we want to avoid is only shifting parcels to Austrian posts and subsidiaries because then this would put the business model of EU shipment at risk. So this is not, of course, it will help our entities with some volumes, but it's not the focus to ship every parcel coming from shipments with our entities. So it's more the rollout of the fulfillment business and also getting new customers in these countries.

Okay. Thank you, Cori. I wish you continued success for the rest of 2026 and, of course, have a great weekend.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Yes, thank you very much. We move on to the next participant. Miss Helene Eveline is connected via phone and you can unmute yourself now. Miss Eveline, you should be able to hear you, yes.

Hello, hi. This is Marco Olivida from Marquis. I've got a few questions. on your e-commerce logistic print in Q1. So clearly, Ostra volumes quite strong, CE volumes also not bad, and Turkish volumes up 2% relative to Euro a bit down the other year. But overall, you know, top line was good, but EBIT was down the other year. So first question is, I mean, How the EBIT in Austria, so partial Austria only, develop on a year-over-year basis on the back of 10% volume growth? Did we see growth in Austria in terms of EBIT? Would be the first question. And then the second question is on your CEE business. Because you're growing volumes 9%, but revenue a bit less. But overall, you are flagging competitive pressures affecting on margin. So, as your 2030 strategy is about growing more in CE, the question to you is, I mean, does that make sense strategically? Do you think that you can grow volumes but also EBITs? And yes, if you could just explain why you're seeing these margin pressures at the moment and how you think you can solve the problem and grow not only top line but also EBIT in the future if these are such challenging markets. And then third question on your wage increase from the 1st of July, whether you have had negotiations, whether you expect any challenge let's say from the current situation around increasing fuel price and therefore possible inflation going up and therefore are unions already asking for higher wage inflation than what you were expecting maybe a few months ago? Thank you.

Michael, thanks a lot for your comprehensive questions which also allow me to address a few topics that we did not cover in our presentation. I think they're important ones. So let me start from the back. Iran crisis. I think the good news is that directly there is very little impact on our business. So we are not present in any way in the region where there were military actions so neither Iran nor UAE nor Saudi Arabia 0.1, 0.2 on energy costs we are relatively relaxed given that in Austria we have electricity already 60% of our fleet 0.1, 0.2 we are on HVO so not on oil based diesel but on vegetable diesel so I think you're aware what HVO is so there is also a price fix for the year 2026 so we are relatively relaxed on energy costs and for the remaining exposure to diesel we are well etched given that there are also priced so-called diesel floaters in our pricing. So energy cost is not an issue. Of course, the secondary effects of the Iran war on the global economy will also at some point in time, and nobody knows to what extent this will hit Europe and Austria, but I think the good news is so far direct effects, almost none. Third question, so I'm moving back up, was on the collective wage negotiations. We closed these negotiations last week or the week before last week. So the outcome was a 3% increase as of mid-September. So this is, on the one hand, a little bit below inflation. So the relevant inflation was roughly 3.4%. So we closed at 3.0%. 2. It will not start July 1st, which is the typical effective day for our wage negotiations, but only on September 15th, so two and a half months of saved wage increases, which should also help to relieve or to, yeah. which would help on the cost increase in the second quarter so overall I would say a satisfying result of course such a wage negotiation is a difficult one in tough times but we feel quite good about the outcome and so we do not expect any further wage increases for the next 12 months Your second question was on Eastern Europe. To summarize, where should the improvement come from? On the one hand, as mentioned, we are strategically trying to gain market share with also inorganic moves such as in Hungary and we're looking at other options. Second, in the end, we are in an economies of scale business where market share counts and in some of the Countries we still we need to benefit we need more market share and would benefit from for the market share So we're looking for strategic ways to increase market share second. We are in a big out-of-home initiative All those markers are at different speeds migrating towards out of home delivery in Hungary we see that this can go quite fast so there is an advantage of pure out of home place at least for a certain time but we are catching up fast improving our out of home footprint and we expect some improvement from that third as mentioned we are working on synergies across countries both on operations but also on the sales side where we are Aggressively establishing a group sales and this leads me back to the strategic question of why do we think it's wise to Grow and invest also in Eastern Europe We think we will benefit from Being able to offer a region a larger region. We think Austria in itself is in a consolidating industry too small and as a standalone entity to operate. So we think this region gives us relevance, gives us scale, and gives us in particular high-level scale in negotiations with large customers. And therefore, we still think that our strategy is the right one. but of course you are right that Eastern Europe currently is a very competitive market but we think over time this industry will also consolidate and as we are seeing in some markets some of the competition is not sustainable.

May I add something? In addition we are working on the logistic network side we are coming up with a new logistic hub in Budapest in the second half of this year which will also help us on the cost side and also we will be able to handle higher volumes and also in Slovakia we are going to get more efficiency in our logistic network with a two hub system so also on the cost side a lot of things are happening there

Michael, I think your first question, and sorry for missing out on that, was the profit development in parcel Austria, so in e-commerce logistics Austria. Yes, this has gone up, so the volume has translated also into improved absolute profitability, and we see that our investment, the capacity we have installed, that we benefit from increased market share and increased scale given that the substantial share of costs has fixed cost characteristics.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Salimiti, for your question and to the other participants. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you may click on the raise your hand button. This is now Ms. Iselin. You should be able to speak again. Mr. Linite So that's not the case and ladies and gentlemen there are no more questions on the line and therefore I hand back to you Mr. Hagenauer

Thanks ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. Thanks for participating in this call. Of course, as always, if you do have some more questions today or the next days, don't hesitate to call us. Thank you very much and have a nice weekend.