Sgl Group Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SGL Carbon Conference call on the Q1 results 2023. Throughout today's recorded presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, you may press star followed by one on your touchtone telephone. Please press the star key followed by zero for operator assistance. I would now like to turn the conference over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead.

Thank you. A very warm welcome to our conference call about SGL business development and results in the first three months, 2023. On behalf of SGL Carbon, our CEO, Thorsten Daer, and our CFO, Thomas Deppert, will present financials and our expectations for the upcoming months. Later, we will answer your questions after the presentation. Now I hand over to Dr. Trosten there.

Thank you very much, Claudia. Good afternoon to everyone. We are very proud to present solid financials in our first quarter. And we again made positive progress in almost all KPIs. Our group sales are up by 4.7% and we realized 283 million turnover in the first quarter our epda3 our most important financial kpi grew by 9 to 40 million thomas our cfo did great progress equity rate was again boosted to almost 40 percent How are the businesses running? We have, again, increased demand in semiconductors, especially in the field of silicon carbide semiconductors, and this boosted our sales in our business unit GS graphite solutions. Also, the two small business units which we run, process technology and composite solutions, developed very well, and order entry was very satisfactory. Our business unit, Carbon Fibers, was burdened by the expiry of the BMW i3. We lost Carbon Fiber business by the discontinuation of this business. We moved into wind energy and saw a temporary dip. We will explain this later on in our presentation. We want to inform you that we increased our capex a little bit by one-third. And all the additional CAPEX is running into our business unit graphite solutions for the expansion of graphite components for the silicon carbide industry. For the outlook, we confirm the guidance we gave you last time. Our sales in 2023, we expect on prior year level, EBITDA will be in the range of 160 to 180%.