Schindler Hldg Ag Akt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Schindler Conference Call on Q3 Results 2020. I am Sandra, 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 and 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcasting. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Schindler. Please go ahead.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our third quarter 2020 results conference call. My name is Marco Knuchel. I'm the head investor relations at Schindler. I'm here together with Thomas Oetterli, CEO of the Schindler Group, and Urs Scheidegger, our CFO. Thomas will give you a short introduction and guide you through our results, which will then take you through our financials. After the presentation, we are happy to take your questions. In view of the limited time available, I ask you to limit yourself to two questions. So thank you. With that, I hand over to Thomas. Please, Thomas, go ahead.

Thank you, Marco. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, also from my side. Before we dive into the three results I would like to reflect on a few milestones beyond the financials. First of all, I wish all of you really health and safety in these very challenging times. We are all facing COVID-19 in many places. We talk about the second wave. We do have due to this also economical uncertainties and very challenging elements on the foreign exchange front. But let me start maybe with the summertime. Over the late summer months, we commemorate the Schindler's 40 years in China. Schindler was the first ever Western corporation to form a joint venture in China in 1980. Our campus in Jading is our second planet and a testament to an outstanding team that keeps delivering. A team that has bounced back quickly in these very challenging times and strongly once lockdown measures were lifted and also supported other parts of the Schindler world that were still much more affected by local lockdowns. In the third quarter, we kept driving the global rollout of our new modular product range. with launches in various key markets across Asia Pacific and Europe, in ever-changing and challenging conditions that challenged us to be much more agile and adaptive. The teams did outstanding work, and the initial customer feedback has been extremely positive. These are just two examples that show once more the strong Team Schindler fabric That makes me very, very proud to be part of it. With that, I would like to draw your attention to our results presentation. Please turn to slide number two, which gives a market overview. The environment remains challenging, and we saw construction industries worldwide affected by these circumstances. A few words to the region. Asia-Pacific and the Americas were the worst affected areas. EMEA has been showing more resilience. Only China stood out with a V-shaped recovery. Competition has intensified in contracting markets, especially in new installations and modernization, resulting in increasing pricing pressure. Last but not least, on top of this, the appreciation of the Swiss francs continues. and translation effects keep negatively impacting our results. We will provide more details about the markets by region on slide three to five. So, how did we do? Please turn to slide number three. For the third quarter 2020, order intake has been driven by the new installations and service business in China and Europe. Strong, negative, foreign exchange impacts continue to affect negatively our results. Or the backlog execution and our maintenance portfolio supported our revenue development. So let's move to Asia past the week. China showed V-shaped recovery in Q3 with a robust new installations market. We were able to capture this momentum and grew compared to the previous year. In India, market activity has been improving, but is still severely impacted by the lockdown and rising numbers of COVID-19 cases. Other Southeast Asian markets show uneven activities across all product lines. On a positive note, our modular product range launched in a number of markets in Q2 and with additional rollout in Q3, has been receiving positive customer feedback. Let's move to the Americas. In general, uncertainty remains high in the Americas. The markets in the region are facing increasing pricing pressure in both new installations and service segments. In North America, the new installations market in office and residential segments was almost stable, while the infrastructure segment was muted and the commercial sector is contracting and very, very challenging. This had severe impact on modernizations and repairs, especially in the non-residential segment. Latin American markets were affected by the lockdowns too. Delayed infrastructure projects and overall economic and political uncertainties. The residential segment also slowed down. Let's move to EMEA. Northern Europe displayed a solid development with stable new installations and service businesses. Southern European markets showed contraction in commercial sector with many investment decisions being postponed to 2021. The region also faces intensified price pressure in all segments. In EMEA, Schindler grew across all product lines, except for modernization. In Q3, we continued to roll out our modular product range in various key markets in EMEA. We now turn to slide 8 to have a closer look on this new product. I would like to highlight some essential features of our new product range that is now available in key markets in Asia Pacific and Europe and have received very positive customer feedback. The products are fully connected and offer an enhanced user experience via cloud-enabled features as well as numerous design options to tailor to customer and user needs. All this while delivering on the highest energy efficiency ratings and data security standards. With this short overview, I would like to hand over to Urs for an update on the financial results and the outlook for 2020. Urs, please.