Sika Ag Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SICA Half Year 2025 Results Conference Call and Life webcast. I am Shari, 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 broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Dominic Slapnick, Head Communications and Investor Relations of SICA. Please go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon, everyone, and a warm welcome to our half-year conference call. I'm delighted to be joined today by Thomas Hasler, our CEO, Adrian Wittmer, our CFO, and Christine Kukang, Head of Investor Relations, plus Yomi Lemmermann, IR Manager. We are excited to share with you the performance highlights and key developments for the first half of the year. Earlier today, we published our half-year results and made the supporting presentation available on our website. Thomas and Adrian will shortly walk you through the main achievements, financial results, and provide insights into our outlook. Following their remarks, we look forward to answering your questions. At this point, I will pass the floor to Thomas, who will commence with an overview of our key highlights.

Thank you, Dominik, and welcome also from my side. And I would like to start the half-year reflection with where we took off in January, February, with momentums that continued to deliver as expected in the Americas, as well as in EMEA, and with a softer market in China. Through the duration of the half-year, we have seen input factors that have been very challenging and unprecedented in regards to the global economy and the applicable tariffs and the relationship between the main players in our industry. I believe when we look back and consider all this uncertainty, SICA has demonstrated its resilience to all weather conditions, It has gained in difficult markets market share, and it has also been able to do this in a profit margin increasing way. Let me now go a bit into the key elements that we have seen and how that has contributed. I think when you look at the EMEA evolution, it's very nice to see that Besides the strong markets in the Middle East and Africa, we also see a continuous growth momentum in Europe, here starting in Eastern Europe, but also soon moving over to the other parts of Europe. So EMEA, a region that has demonstrated its consistent improvement. The Americas, strong start, a bit confused by the by the tariff discussion with the Canadian and Mexican countries, but then the escalation with the Chinese government, we could clearly see towards the end of the first quarter that this confusion has also confused our customers. Our customers took a bit sideline step and were kind of holding and waiting for how the dust is settling. And this has, I think, to quite a bit of a large degree now been done. I think the China escalation has cooled down. Japan is clear. The UK has an agreement. And finally, also just recently, the European situation is clearing up the sky. And this is probably the most relevant aspect that clearing up the sky means that predictability for our customers is now better and the activities that have been put on hold or have been postponed can now restart in the second half. So this is just to the situation in the Americas. where we also have a continuation less impacted by the tariffs in Latin America, where we have good growth momentum, similar to what we see in other parts of the world. When I move over to Asia Pacific, Southeast Asia, India have a very strong momentum. But as mentioned, China, with the escalation, with the US government also having difficulties to regain momentum and having deflationary elements still impacting the recovery. But moving now over to the consolidated numbers, I think we have demonstrated we can outpace. We have 0.6% local currency growth, which comes from price and from volume. in a declining overall market condition, we have been able to safeguard our material margin on a very high level of 55.1%. And we were able also to offset the lower volume growth by efficiencies and synergies. And here, especially also, we would like to outline the increase in our MCC synergy targets which we have raised by 20 million for the ongoing year, as well as then for next year, which is the final year of the full integration of NPCC. At the same time, we see that these market conditions are offering great opportunity for consolidation. We have been able to close for acquisition, both on acquisition, small and mid-size in nature, in roofing, in building finishing and also in an expansion in Qatar. This is just indicative of a market that has been in the recent six months demonstrating more opportunity and for us a great opportunity to also consolidate this fragmented industry furthermore in the coming months and years ahead of us. On the EBITDA margin, we were able to expand our margin by 20% to 18.9%, as mentioned, several elements that contributed to this. Also, our CapEx spend has been well positioned into locations where we are investing into future growth in Singapore, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Brazil, and China. We have done substantial allocation that is also fueling future demand with most efficient and innovative products that we can produce locally in all these markets. But with that, I would now hand over to Adrian to go a little bit deeper on the set of numbers.