Schindler Hldg Ag Akt

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Schindler conference call and live webcast on Q3 results 2025. I am Valentina, 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 one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Lars Brorson, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Valentina. And good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our Q3 2025 results conference call. My name is Lars Brorson. I'm Head of Investor Relations at Shind. I'm here together with Paolo Campagna, our CEO. and Kalle De Geisler, our CFO. As usual, Paolo will discuss the highlights of our quarterly results and our market outlook, and Kalle will take us through the financials. After the presentation, we're happy to take your questions. We plan to close the call at 11 o'clock in an hour's time. With that, I hand over to Paolo. Paolo, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be back to report on our performance in Q3, And as Lars said, let me start by giving you some highlights on slide number three. Firstly, let me say that we continue to face some growth headwinds in major new installation markets around the world, particularly in China. I will share our order trends in more detail shortly. But before, let me remind what we discussed back in February. A key pillar to our strategy of profitable growth is the pricing discipline. And we demonstrated it again this quarter on a few major projects where the economics were just not consistent with our return expectations. That said, we see good growth momentum in many parts of our organization and particularly in modernization. Orders were up over 16% in the quarter, despite the strong growth we had in Q3 last year, allowing us to show another quarter of order growth for the group. Second, revenues slowed in the quarter, down 0.5%, whilst our year-to-date revenue is up 0.8%. Also here, the headwind from China intensified in the quarter. But our backlog is growing up 1.5 percentage points year on year in local currency driven by modernization business. And we are confident that continuing to expand our capacities, we will execute successfully on this backlog. So I expect us to deliver our full year 25 revenue guidance of a low single digit growth. Although this is likely to be a very low single digit, similar to what we delivered in 24, as Carla will discuss. Third, we delivered another strong operating margin in Q3 at 13%, up 130 basis points from Q3 last year. And we are now able to revise our full year 25 margin guidance, which we see coming in at around 12.5%. That compares to 12% previously. Carla will provide the detail on that, but I'm very pleased to see that the efficiency initiatives launched over the last couple of years are yielding their results. Now, beyond our financial performance, let me touch on some of the other highlights of the quarter. First, we are making very good progress on the rollout of our new US mid-rise product. This product was launched in 24th And we have now successfully delivered and handed over the first units. And our order intake, so 525, is exceeding our plans. You will remember that this product launch was about leveraging our standardized modular platform and enhancing our mid-rise offering in the commercial and high-end residential segment, a key pillar to our strategy in the U.S. market. We are starting to see the results in terms of share gain in the US mid-price market, which is really encouraging. On to modernization, where we continue to industrialize our operations and standardize our product portfolio. We are seeing very good traction with our standardized packages, which now make up close to 17% of our modernization business. And that is not only driving growth, but also enhancing our competitiveness and supporting our journey towards higher profitability in modernization going forward. Then on the topic of sustainability, I'm very pleased to announce that you are installing the industry's first ever low carbon emission steel elevator. The steel used in this elevator reduces carbon emissions up to 75% compared to conventional production and marks an important step towards our 2040 net zero target. And finally, I'm also proud that we have been recognized by Forbes again this year as being among the world's best employer. In the engineering and manufacturing sector, Schindler was ranked third globally. We have close to 70,000 employees and attracting and retaining talents is absolutely essential to our competitiveness and overall health of the company. Well, so you can imagine this recognition is important for us. Moving to our market outlook for 2025 on slide four. We expect the service markets to continue to expand across all regions. with the lowest growth rate in the Americas and the highest in Asia-Pacific, driven by India. The modernization markets continue to offer a clear growth opportunity across the world, with mid to high single-digit growth outside of China and growth well into double digits in China. With around 100,000 aging elevators approved this year for an upgrade within the government's equipment renewal program, To put the scale of this initiative into perspective, just imagine replacing all elevators in Australia in a single year. In installation, we continue to expect the global market to decline by high single digits, mainly due to a low tins contraction in China, where home starts by floor area continue to fall by close to 20% year-on-year. In the January to September period, following a three years of 20 plus percent declines. Home sales have dropped 5% overall, with only the four tier one cities showing a slight increase, with all other cities facing steep declines. Across the region, in addition to good growth in countries such as Spain, now also the important German market appears to have found a bottom and is expected to gradually recover going forward. The so-called Bauturbo initiative to fast-track housing project, recently approved by the German government, should be seen as a positive development overall as it aims to simplify planning, shorten approval times to three months, and allowing flexibility in building rules to tackle the housing shortage in the coming quarters and years. Asia-Pacific, excluding China, is projected to grow by mid-single digits led by India and Southeast Asia, with conditions improving in Australia, and the US new installation market has shown remarkable strength, further increasing from a tough Q3-24 comparison point. In addition, we saw better data coming from Brazil in Q3-25, And we have therefore decided to revise our America's new installation market outlook to stable from slide down previously. So how did we perform in this market environment in the third quarter of the year? Turning now to slide five. Starting with service, our portfolio units continue to expand, showing the strongest growth in Asia Pacific, excluding China. In America, we saw a slight decrease as a result of our increased selectivity when it comes to recaptures that we decided to pursue, as well as from softer conversions. As a reminder, we saw a decline in our NI orders in 2023, and this still has an impact given to the normally longer lead times, especially in North America. On modernization, we have maintained the strong momentum seen in the prior quarters and saw a double-digit growth across all regions, except for Asia Pacific, excluding China, with fewer large projects booked in this particular quarter. Year-to-date, our mod growth in the region remains in double digits. Finally, on new installation, our global order volumes decreased by double digits due to China, where, as mentioned back in July, we are responding to the prolonged weakness in the NI market by resetting and repositioning our China business towards future growth opportunities. Outside of China, our NI orders grew mid-single digit, driven by an upswing in orders in our Europe South and South America zone. And it is worth flagging the comparison from quarter three last year, which was the best quarter in 24 for NI. particularly due to our strong performance in the Americas. But the US continues to develop well and, as mentioned, we are pleased with the customer reception of our new mid-rise product. With that, let me turn over to Carla to walk us through our financial results in more details.