Siemens Ag Spons Adr

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Siemens 2026 First Quarter Conference Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the Safe Harbor Statement on page 2 of the Siemens presentation. This conference call may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the company's current expectations and certain assumptions, and are therefore subject to certain risks and uncertainties. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to your host today, Mr. Tobias Atler, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Q1 conference call. All documents were released this morning and can be found also on our IR website. I'm here today with our President and CEO, Roland Busch, and our CFO, Ralph Thomas, who will review the Q1 results. As always, we will have time for a lively Q&A. Please be aware that our AGM starts right after, and therefore we must limit the time of the conference call to 45 minutes. With that, over to you, Roland.

Thank you, Tobias. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter performance ahead of our AGM. We delivered a strong start to fiscal 2026, generating clear momentum for continued value creation for our stakeholders. While geopolitics are making headlines and creating substantial volatility, we are focusing on opportunities to drive collaboration, competitiveness, and customer value. I will share some more examples in a moment. Now, let me outline some of the key highlights of the first quarter and give credit to our hard-working team, which has earned our customers' trust again. Book the Bill reached a healthy 1.12, lifting orders backlog to a record high of €120 billion. Nominal top line growth rates were materially impacted by strong Euro, as expected. Group orders reached 21.4 billion euros, up 10% on the prior year, led by massive momentum at smart infrastructure. The team reached a quarterly order record in healthy end markets. It was supercharged by several large data center orders, mainly in the United States, to build out cloud and AI infrastructure. Digital Industries posted an encouraging start, although the macro environment is still offering only limited support for key customer verticals. Both automation and software delivered double-digit order growth on easycoms. Our automation business was particularly strong in China, where only our fully localized portfolio has gained further traction in a competitive environment. We continue to launch new products in the first quarter, and there are more to come during fiscal year 2026. The software business is capitalizing on strong demand in healthy end markets. Mobility orders were clearly up, and we have a compelling pipeline of awarded larger contracts. A great success was announced last week. We will deliver more than 200 train sets for the world's largest open rail system for fully automated train operation in Copenhagen. Overall, revenue growth reached 8% with broad-based growth across all businesses. A very strong contribution came from smart infrastructure electrification business, up 22%, and the software business at Digital Industries achieved 11% growth. Automation increased a healthy 9%. I'm pleased to see that revenue was up in all regions. The Americas led the way, up 11% fueled by strong momentum in the United States. EMEA grew 8% and Asia-Australia was up 5%, driven by India, which was up 15%. Stringent execution and sound operating leverage converted into a strong industrial business profit of 2.9 billion euros. Profit margin expanded to 15.6% and topped market expectations despite a currency headwind of 60 base points. These results translated into earnings per share pre-PPA of €2.80. After an extraordinarily strong fourth quarter for free cash flow, we saw a seasonal swing back and delivered €700 million. After a strong start, we raise and narrow our group profit for earnings per share. Ralph will give you some more color. In November, we laid out our One Tech Company program for focusing on highly synergetic portfolio to drive scale. We are working diligently on all necessary steps to execute our plan to deconsolidate Siemens Healthineers. And we are making good progress. In early Q2 of the calendar year, we will update you on further details as planned. Just a few days ago, we divested our airport logistics business in the United States to Funderlande and have thus now closed this remaining portfolio topic entirely. Four key levers drive our growth ambitions as one tech company. First, grow digital. At the world's leading tech event, Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we showcased how customers and partners are harnessing AI to transform their businesses. With our AI-enabled technologies, deep domain know-how, and trusted partnerships, we are accelerating the industrial AI revolution. More in a minute. Second, growth regions. Together with the EPC expertise of Samsung C&T, we will deliver customer-centric, smarter and more sustainable solutions in infrastructure projects such as for airports, hospitals and data centers. This is another great opportunity for us to bring together our strengths in digitalization, electrification and automation across Siemens. Six landmark projects in Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Canada have initially been identified for collaboration. Third, growth verticals. Data centers' demand has materially exceeded our expectations and reflects our design and delivery capabilities. The team grew our revenue in Q1 by around 35%. We are confident that we will be able to keep up this pace through fiscal 2026. We will achieve this by combining our strengths with a best in class partner ecosystem. For example, together with Invent, we developed a liquid cooling and power reference architecture purpose-built for hyperscale AI workloads based on the latest NVIDIA systems. Our technology partnership with Delta Power Solutions will provide prefabricated modular power solutions. Together, We will cut data center deployment time by up to 50% and CapEx by up to 20%. Equally important, we will reduce carbon emissions as well. Fourth growth lever, Grow AI. One of the best reference cases is our own native and AI-powered manufacturing factory for motion control in Nanjing, China. Our team there has improved lead times. time to market and productivity decisively through constant digital transformation and by using more than 50 AI applications. Now, our Nanjing factory was recognized as the fifth Siemens location to earn the World Economic Forum's Global Lighthouse Award. I briefly talked about the importance of mutually beneficial partnerships to bring AI to the real world. Use it to create impact and then scale it. At the CES, we showcased a number of examples. Together with our longstanding partner, NVIDIA, we are building the industrial AI operating system throughout the entire value chain, from design and engineering to manufacturing operations and into supply chain. Our customers can develop products faster with the most comprehensive digital twins, simulate complex systems and processes in software, and then adapt production in real life. Our primary product launch was the Siemens Digital Twin Composer, which does exactly that. It creates a virtual 3D model of any product process or plant. At CES, our pilot customer PepsiCo shared how they have used it with real-time data to simulate plant operations for selected manufacturing and warehouse facilities. The results are impressive. Within weeks, our teams optimized and validated new configurations to boost capacity and throughput by 20%, a highly scalable approach. As another element of our partnership with NVIDIA, we will build an AI accelerated portfolio on GPU technology, including AI native electronic design and simulation as well. And we will closely collaborate to design the next generation of AI factories and optimize each other's operations through shared innovations. We deepened our high-profile partnership with Microsoft as well. Looking ahead, we are expanding the co-built and award-winning industrial co-pilot to form a comprehensive suite across the industrial value chain. In addition, nine new AI-powered co-pilots are being deployed in our software offerings, such as Teamcenter or Polarion, to streamline product data navigation and drive operational efficiency and cost savings. This steady stream of innovations is also supporting our growth in digital industry software business. Organic ARR growth again reached a very healthy level of 10% over the prior year. In addition, our acquisitions Altair and Dogmatics are adding to our success by delivering a business performance in line with our expectations. The integration of Altair is progressing well. There, around two-thirds of the measures for achieving the cost synergy target of $150 million have already been implemented. A key measure from a financial as well as a cultural perspective was bringing our teams together by consolidating our own 100 sites. At the same time, they continuously strengthen our EDA portfolio with tuck-in acquisitions. These positive perspectives over to you, Ralph.