Sartorius St Bt Unsp/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Sartorius and Sartorius Stedin Biotech's 9-month 2026 results call. Please note that the call is being recorded and streamed on Sartorius' website. Your participation in this implies your consent to assist. A replay will be available shortly after the call. I would now like to turn the conference over to Petra Muller, head of investor relations of Sartorius. Please go ahead.

Petra Muller Yeah, thank you, operator. and hello and welcome to everybody. Joining me today are Michael Grosser, our CEO, Florian Funk, our CFO, Rene Faber, head of bioprocessing and CEO of Sartorius St Bt Unsp, as well as Alexandra Gatzemeier, head of lab products and services. As always, we will start with prepared remarks followed by Q&A. The call is scheduled for one hour. Please limit yourself to one question to allow as many participants as possible to take part. If time permits, we will, of course, take follow-up questions at the end. Please note that management's comments will include forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties. And for details of the relevant risk factors, please refer to the Safe Harbour Statement in today's press release and also in the presentation. And with that, I'm pleased to hand over to our CEO, Michael Große. Michael, please go ahead.

Thank you, Petra, and a very warm welcome from my side as well. I'm happy to report a solid set of results for the first nine months of 2026, with both of our divisions contributing to growth. At the same time, we further improved profitability and generated strong cash flow. This allowed us to continue deleveraging and further strengthen our balance sheet, all in line with the financial priorities we outlined at the beginning of the year. Let me share some high-level views here. At the group level, we saw solid growth during the first nine months of the year. Looking at the divisions, the strong operational sales growth in bioprocessing solutions was driven by healthy recurring business and the continued recovery of the non-recurring business, which grew year on year. Overall, this confirms the equipment recovery we anticipated at the beginning of the year and supports our confidence in its further progression. Lab products and services performed particularly well and even exceeded our expectations. Growth was broad-based across the portfolio with particularly strong momentum in our bioanalytics business. And some pull forward in Q3. Here, AI-driven drug discovery workflows are becoming an increasingly relevant growth driver, and especially our Octet platform is very well positioned to benefit from this trend and the opportunities it creates. Overall, we are very pleased with our top-line performance, especially considering that tariff surcharges shifted from a benefit to a headwind in Q3, and MATIC is now fully reflected in our organic baseline. If we strip out all tariff effects, our underlying growth actually accelerated compared with the previous quarter. Turning to profitability, higher volumes together with continued cost and operational discipline keep us well on track with our profitability objectives for the group and for both divisions. The combination of profitable growth and continued discipline on working capital translated into a substantial improvement in free cash flow. As a result, we further reduced leverage and continued to strengthen our balance sheet. Overall, we are very pleased with the progress we've made so far this year. The positive momentum is based on end markets that remain fundamentally intact. We are seeing healthy pipelines and increasing research activities across our customers, which has supported demand for lab instruments and consumables. As these programs move through the pipeline, production volumes increase, and so does the need for bioprocessing solutions. In bioprocessing, customers are increasingly focused on improving productivity and efficiency while reducing costs. We saw the strong interest firsthand at our recent process identification forum in Göttingen, which brought together 130 participants from 54 biopharma companies and 30 external speakers across the industry. The discussions range from intensified upstream processing to continuous downstream manufacturing, automation, and data analytics. My key takeaway was that the industry is increasingly moving from discussing the potential of process intensification to how to implement it in practice. Artorius is very well positioned for this transition with technologies spanning the workflows from early process development to next generation bioprocessing. And of course, we do not stand still on the innovation front. First, in BPS, We have expanded our portfolio with technologies that improve oxygen transfer, enabling further process intensification in upstream and ready-to-use cytokines in closed sterile bags and a new animal component-free cell culture medium. Second, in LPS, we added an AI-powered in-queue site module for faster label-free stem cell analysis and a new octet biosensor for faster antibody measurement with less sample preparation. Building on this, Let me briefly turn to our outlook. We confirm our full year guidance and continue to expect operational group sales growth around the midpoint of our 5% to 9% range and an underlying EBITDA margin slightly above 30%. For BPS, our expectations remain unchanged. YBF refined our expectations for LPS following the strong nine-month performance. We will come back to the details shortly. I will turn the call over to Florian for the financial highlights. Florian.