Schindler Hldg Ag Akt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Schindler Conference Call on Half-Year Results 2021 Conference Call. I am Alice, 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 Marco Knuchel, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our half-year 2021 results conference call. My name is Marco Knuchel. I'm Head of Investor Relations at Schindler. I'm here together with Thomas Oetterli, CEO of Schindler Group, and Urs Scheidegger, our CFO. As usual, Thomas will start and Urs will then lead us through the financials. After the presentation, we are happy to take your questions. I would like to ask you to limit your questions to two questions only. Thank you very much in advance. With that, I hand over to Thomas. Thomas, please go ahead.

Thank you, Marco, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome from me too. Before I go into the details of the first half, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our people around the world. who have under these very difficult circumstances managed to focus on our customers and they delivered also solid results. They have gone above and beyond to keep our customers and our community safe. And I would like to thank our suppliers and our partners for their outstanding collaboration. So let's start with slide number two. The markets recovered at varying speeds. Even though revenue and operating results broadly reached pre-pandemic levels of 2019, COVID-19 is far from over. Nevertheless, we saw encouraging growth for the first six months of 2021. Now, looking ahead, we remain cautious as virus mutations keep challenging the world, but also as foreign currency headwinds persist, and as raw material costs and logistic cost inflation is increasing. Besides other operational measures we have been taking, Schindler is increasing prices across all product lines and geographies to compensate for the higher cost base. Delays on construction sites globally are adding to the challenging situation. Therefore, we remain committed to our vision and to accelerating our future readiness. Let's move to slide number four, our Corporate Responsibility Report 2020 and have a look on some highlights. As part of this future readiness, sustainability and more broadly corporate responsibility continues to be a top priority. COVID-19 has made the centrality of corporate responsibility for business resilience very clear. In 2020, we already officially joined the UN Global Compact, the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, reaffirming our commitment to align our operations and strategies to the UN Global Compact's 10 universally recognized principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption, and collectively contribute to achieve a more sustainable world. Let's move to slide number five. our corporate responsibility roadmap. So far, we have made good progress, namely in the areas of safety, where we surpassed our goal last year, as well as our goal to attract diverse talents while increasing value in the communities in which we operate. In all the three areas, we are doing well. But we still have ways to go in some areas, namely the reduction of emissions generated by our vehicle fleet or the assessment of our supply chain regarding sustainability metrics. Let's move to slide number six on our agenda, how we drive the corporate responsibility. We continue to drive our sustainability agenda. In June, we announced our commitment to science-based targets, and we are now in the development stage of that journey. In addition, we are committed to continuously improve our reporting and we have outlined new sustainability initiatives, including a full transition to renewable electricity by 2025 and a no waste to landfill target across all our sites globally by 2023. Now let's move to slide number seven. And let's have a look on the Top Speed 23 program. Sustainability is not only the only priority we have. Being future ready also means accelerating digital transformation, boosting product innovation to strengthen our position in key markets and key segments, and addressing stability gaps over the longer term. So let's move to slide number eight and let's have a look how this all comes together with our actual macro environment. The top speed 23 program that we announced last quarter is designed to do just that. So we can meet some of the challenges that we as an industry face and turn them into chances proactively while still following the Schindler way. On slide number nine, you see the program structure. The program has now started, and we have received some good first initial feedback. The key initiatives focus around key competitive levers. With Top Speed 23, we aim to strengthen our position in key markets, create an industry-leading customer experience, and further integrate sustainability into our business model. We will expand up to 270 million Swiss francs until the end of 2023 in order to accelerate our new installation growth, to drive portfolio growth and mass connectivity, to develop sustainable modernization solutions, to accelerate the digital twin for escalators and our modular elevator product range, to boost product innovation for selected markets and customer segments, and to foster procurement excellence. Up to half of the expenses will be dedicated to portfolio growth and mass connectivity. Some of the benefits will be felt as early as next year, while others will come through over the next few years all with an eye of speeding up some of our ongoing key initiatives. Let me pause here and bring you back to the here and the now, our results of the first six months of the year. I will hand you over now to our CFO, Urs Scheidecker, who will give you some color on what happened in the first six months. Urs, over to you. Thank you, Thomas.