Sgl Group Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SGL Carbon Conference Call 9 Month Results 2026. I'm Vicky, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is 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, then 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Yeah, a very warm welcome from SGL's side as well. Yeah, since our last call, a lot of positive things happened. So today we want to talk about these developments, our nine-month figures, and our SGL growth strategy. Even today, Andreas Klein, our CEO, and Thomas Dippold, our CFO, will lead to the presentation. Now I can hand over to Thomas Dippold, please.

Hello, everybody. It's my pleasure to guide you through the development of the first nine months this year. And I jump directly on slide number five, where you see development of the group, our sales. I have reached 595 million euros so far in the first nine months of the year compared to 653, if I round it a little bit, in the same period last year. We are almost 9% down, or in other words, roughly 60 million down, and this can be directly attributed to the discontinuation of the unprofitable carbon fiber businesses which we closed last year in the course of the year. You remember probably that Lavradio has been closed end of the second quarter in June and then subsequently our site in the United States in Moses Lake. We talk about that later has been idled end of August 2025 to say it correctly. and of course these sales can't be repeated and like for like, then we are 60 million down through this structural effect. On the other hand, if you turn it around like for like, our businesses at least overall, we will see some deviations in both directions when we go to the business units, stay on a flat level, so to speak. But all in all, this was expected and this is really the development which we have foreseen. and this is what is in our figures. We see a continuation, as I said, this is a difference between last year. We see a strong nuclear ramp up in graphite solution which boosts our sales and especially the profitability. We see very challenging developments ongoing in our process tech business unit and we see especially high profitable carbon fiber business, sort of fiber composite business, but we will come to that in the individual business units. When we look at our EBITDA pre, you see that it remains almost on the level that we've seen last year. Last year we had 108.6 million Euro in the first three quarters of the year and now we're at 106.3. and as a consequence, when the profitability deviates less than the sales, that means that the margin must go up. We now reach almost 18% sales margin on our EBITDA pre-basis. This is more than one full percentage point higher than last year and this clearly shows how good and how important it was to restructure these businesses and how healthy our existing ongoing strategic businesses are. The good margin development come from, on the one hand side, from the product mix in graphite solution, mainly with the increase of the nuclear business. We see also in fiber composite good margin effect, and this is a little bit offset by the lower contributions from process tech, which we can compensate so far. You have to bear in mind that in sales and EBDA, this is also affected by the one-off payment where we restructured our take-or-pay contracts with our silicon carbide customer. And if you remember that, in the first quarter, we had about $7 million compensation payment. In the second quarter, it was $21 million. So all in all, after six months, it was $28 million, if I round it a little bit. And now we have reached $30 million. So less than $2 million were coming in the third quarter. So this has come to an end. and for this year, I would say, when it comes to this one, operative one of the facts. When I jump into the business units on slide number six, you see Graphite Solutions, our biggest business unit, growing by 10%, now reaching 358.3 million Euro in sales compared to 325 last year. Where does the increase of 33 million come from? As I said, 30 are coming from the termination of the take-or-pay contract as a one-off effect but you have to bear in mind they also include some sales which would have been done in the second half of the year so some of the things have been anticipated until the termination of this take-or-pay contract and they include some one-off payments but also some compensation for the sales for the whole year. This also goes through the EBDA, and now we have roughly 72 million EBDA pre in the first nine months of the year compared to 58.2 last year. This is an increase of 23.5 million, which helps the margin to go up above 20% and we're very happy that we see the two as the first figure of the margin again. You know that we've seen that with the silicon carbide products where we're really hyped in 2022 and 2023. We have seen that for the last time and now we recover back into this region. Again, where does the sale and especially the profitability boost come from? Mainly at the start of our nuclear graphite business, which we start producing on the contracts with Xenergy, which we informed you about since Q3. And we also see an increasing demand for semiconductor components, mainly in China. So you know that we produce big parts of the value chain in Germany in our bond site and then ship everything over to China. This is where we machine it and then subsequently also sell it to the customer. There we see a recovery of the demand in the semiconductor business, not so much in the other areas. Yeah, that's pretty much for graphite solution. On process tech, slide number seven, There you see a continuation of the development we've also seen in the first two quarters of the year. Also, no real improvement in the third quarter. Sales have reached now 74 million euro compared to 102.4 in the first three quarters last year. This is, yeah, I think at half year we were 30% down. Now we are 27.7% down. There's an ongoing weak market situation and very much of uncertainties in the chemical industry in the areas that we serve. We see a lot of postponements and push-outs of the projects. They are delayed all over and sometimes even new awardments that we see. And those projects that really are being started don't have the profitability and the margins or have not the size that we are used to or have seen before. And this is a consequence when you lose in a project business Sales by roughly 30%. This also affects your bottom line. And there you see that our EBDA pre, in the first nine months of 2026, reaches €11.2 million, compared to €28 million, which we have seen in the same period of time last year. This is a decline by 60%. But again, the ratios, if you have these experts and all these engineers who can construct and engineer these projects, then it's difficult to adjust the workforce in the same manner as sales decline. Our margin still reaches some very healthy 15%. We were just maybe, say, a little bit spoiled over the last three years where the margin reached significant higher figures than 20%. But 15%, also to be fair, in a project business, is not too bad. But, of course, we hope that this will recover the soonest. Last but not least, our last operative business unit, Fiber Composite. There, as we said, the restructuring is over. There you see also this technical sales effect. We have reached 147 million euro sales in the first nine months of the year compared to 210 last year. This, again, the 60 million decline, which is structural because of the discontinuation of the business in the two Thank you very much. This is an increase of 60%, whereas the sales go down by 30%. And you see that our joint venture with Brembo, the BCCB, contributes 10.9 million euros. This is almost doubled compared to last year, where we have reached 5.6. So we see a strong improvement also in our carbon ceramic brake business. And also our operative business in fiber composites is doing very well. then you see then that the operative business must have also made a big, big, big jump in the profitability and we now reach a margin of 19.5% if we include the contribution from our BCCB business. So we're very happy with that development. This also contributes after nine months of the year and I also come a little bit later than what happened in the course of October This all contributes and now you see nine months or end of nine months figures. Our net result now reaches 31.3 million euro after nine months compared to the year where we restructured 2025 where our net result was a loss of minus 51.3 million euro. So you see an 18 billion turnaround compared to last year and I think this is remarkable and quite impressive. Our free cash flow more than tripled compared to last year, coming from 12.5 million euro to now 38 million euro. And our net financial debt subsequently went down from roughly 100 million end of 2025 to now 78.5 million euro. These are big improvements, which are directly attributable to our strong cash generation, which our group conducted in the first nine months of the year. And this also leads to a reduction of net financial debt, a very healthy leverage ratio of 0.6, and an equity ratio now again above 40 with 41%, and subsequently a return on capital employed with 10.1%. So we're super happy with the development so far. As a consequence, when we saw these figures and a very strong third quarter, which was beyond our initial expectations, you see that on the next slide, number 10. On the 6th of December, after we have had our initial view on the nine months figures, We informed the capital markets and you guys via ad hoc message about our guidance adjustment. We have said that we informed you that we have increased our sales coming from which were initially guided 720 to 770 million. Now that they are at the upper end of the range, we now say 770 will be reached in our sales, and subsequently also our EBITDA-3 will reach the upper end, no, 130 to 140 million euros, coming from 110 to 130, which we initially guided beginning of the year. So we see a big improvement in profitability and the upper end of the sales range. The reasons for that, I think we also made this very clear in the presentation, is on the one hand side, a very successful ramp-up of our nuclear graphite businesses, which goes to the small modular reactors for X energy. We see very positive product mix changes in fiber composites. And last but not least, the higher earnings contributions from our joint venture, BCCB, and that compensates even the shortfalls that we see in process tech. So we are very confident that we can reach this target. There was a second ad hoc message in October, which we informed you about some three weeks later on the 23rd of October. We were very happy to inform you about the sale of our carbon fiber site in Moses Lake in the federal state of Washington in the United States. This site had been idled one year ago in August 2025, and this site has been sold for 70 million Euro, which comes in three tranches. 45 million per USD we already received, and some other 25 million we will receive in the course of the year 2027. And the disposal gain from this transaction is 46 million USD overall. And I think the team has done a very great job to sell this site. So on the one hand side, we reduced our capital employed on a site which we have no use internally for it anymore and he could convert it with a big gain into cash and profit and we are very happy about that. And having said that, I hand over to Andreas who will guide you through the development of our strategy so far.