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.