Schaeffler Ag Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Schaeffler AGQ1-2026 earnings call. I am Sergan, the callers call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode at the conference being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Heiko Eber, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to welcome you to today's call on Scheffler's Financial Results Q1 2026. The press release, the following presentation, and our interim statement have been published today at 8 a.m. CET on our Investor Relations homepage. And as always, we will provide the recording and the transcript of this webcast after the call. I am sure that you have all taken notice of our by now well-known disclaimer. As always, Klaus Rosenfeld, our CEO, and Christoph Haneke, our CFO, have joined the conference call to guide you through the key information in our presentation. And afterwards, those gentlemen will be available for our Q&A session. And now let me hand over to our CEO, Christoph.

Michael, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Q1 earnings call. You all received the presentation that Christoph and myself will share in the next minutes. Please follow me on page number three with the quick overview. I think you saw the numbers and from our point of view, a good summary to say we started well into the year in an environment that is certainly challenging and in some areas unpredictable. Sales growth, ethics adjusted 1% up. We'll share the details in a moment. The gross profit margin is at 21.6, so more or less the same margin like Q1 2025, clearly driven by operational gains in e-mobility, VLS and VIS, with a slightly negative development in TTC. That should not come as a surprise. Average margin at 5%, clearly an improvement in e-mobility. While PTC, VLS, and DIS contributed strongly to the EBIT, also supported by lower R&D cost. Free cash flow seasonally negative with minus 209. You know that. In Q1, it was 155. Christoph is going to give you more detail. This also includes higher restructuring cash out. and some advanced customer payments in the prior year. And yes, EPS is slightly positive, also impacted by the financial result. Page four gives you the breakdown of where we grew, where we not grew, 6% growth in immobility in the first quarter, is certainly pointing in the right direction. Power train chassis, as I said before, slightly down, and then moderate growth in DRS. And DRS certainly also driven by the environment. The strongest growth came out of region Asia Pacific. However, that still has the impact that we explained several quarters now embedded with a switch from a bigger project from China to Korea. More important, page five, if you look at the also powertrain OEM business, and that spans across e-mobility and PTC, breakdown by powertrain type. Quite interesting picture here. Scheffler outperformed in all these three different powertrain types. 4% outperformance in the VEV segments. 16% versus market growth of 12% have also an outperformance of 1.5%. And even in IPE where our sales drop was not as big as the market, that is exactly what I hope for, that I can show you these pictures continuously for the next quarter, but that all points in the right direction. Order intake, again, by powertrain type. We'll come back to the numbers per division. Also shows that in the important best sector, we are showing a book-to-fill of bigger than one, while in the other sectors, in this quarter, order intake was lower than the relevant sales levels. Page six, e-mobility. As I said, order intake for the whole division is certainly bigger than just for a best powertrain solution. It's 1.2 billion, what leads to a book-to-bill of 1.0 times. You may question why that. We showed you in the last quarter that we have an order book by end of the year 2025 of more than 40 billion. We are adjusting also volume assumptions constantly, and we are sure that with that order book we have at the moment enough to do to deliver this, so we are a little bit more selective on order intake. 1.2 billion is a good result, and it's also driven by the right project. Now, let me go from there to Powertrain and Chassis, also there. An oil intake of 1.4 billion gross, slightly below last year, was driven by phase-out and also by market development. And as I said before, here the gross margin has suffered a bit. It is also impacted by one of the impacts that we can discuss in the Q&A. Session vehicle lifetime solutions with a 1% growth that is less than before but a further improved gross margin that then also leads to a superior EBIT margin. Here we can say that, as you see in the highlights, that our platform business in particular in China is growing, serving an increasing number of retail partners, and we're also proud to say that we won the sustainability award for the e-axle repair tool, what again demonstrates that ULS is not just a PTC business, but also very active in the new powertrain solutions. And then last, but not least, bearings in industrial solutions. a good development, 1.6, good outperformance, and also a growing book-to-bill ratio with certainly a different time horizon of the order books. There, just to mention one thing that also points to the new businesses. We are proud that we were part of the Artemis II launch, one of the most spectacular space activities in the last weeks, and were represented here with some high-performance turbopump spinning bearings, bearings that have sort of highest quality and offer a sort of industrial solutions as you see from the rocket is definitely moving in the right direction in its repositioning and performance drive. And one page on new growth, we have selected here again the humanoid because that is what we, from all the questions we get, obviously the one that is most interesting to you. Three points, just to put this in perspective and give you a little bit more This is a business that is in a situation where we are building the business. We are engaging today with 45 different customers. And engaging means active conversations, of which 30 prototype orders have resulted. And from these 30 prototype orders, five contracts have been secured. I cannot mention here the names, but I can tell you that from the five, these are prominent names, both from China and the US and from Europe. And we are in ongoing negotiations to further build the order book. If I look at what we have today and put our more conservative assumptions of a million robots in 2030 behind it. Our best estimate at the moment is that this order book in total order intake from the five customer contracts included has a value of somewhere in a mid-size three-digit million range. For sure, there's this further building and we'll give you, as soon as these numbers are more solid, we will give you more information how that develops. That's what I can say at the moment for one customer side last point here. We will see first SOP from these customer contracts in Q2 26, and then also have scheduled further SOPs for Q3 and Q4 2026. So you see the business is building. It is growing. We are part of the companies that is here at the forefront of development and the number of inquiries also from German OEMs. is interestingly increasing. What helped us was also the recognition for our products. As some of you heard, we won the prestigious Hammers Award at the Hannover Fair. You see a small picture here that recognizes our rotary actuator platform in multiple sizes, in multiple... nanometers and other functions. That's a positive thing. And as you all know, we will continue to expand our automotive know-how into this area. Last point is on manufacturing. We are investing into that business, not only for building the business, but also for making sure that we can scale what we need to scale. I finish on page 11 with my last page before I hand over to Christoph. Capital allocation continues to be driven by a very disciplined approach. capital employed has been further reduced. Also, through the project that we explained to you in the Q4 results, we had capex in Q1 of 237, more or less in line with previous year. The investment rate stands at 0.5 times, and the capital employed at the end of the first quarter was $12 billion. From an average point of view, Q1 over the last 12 months, this is a reduction of $974 million. You see where we spent the money, and I can assure you again, we are disciplined but also able to invest into the new growth businesses based on our strong cash costs. Thank you Klaas, good morning everyone.