Symrise Ag Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SimRise H1 2025 analyst and investor call. I am Mathilde, 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 René Weinberg, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mathilda. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our first half 2025 results call. Thank you for joining us today. All related documents, including the press release and presentation, We will reference on today's call are available in the financial results section or website. With me today are our CEO, Jean-Yves Parizeau, and our CFO, Olaf Klinger. After reviewing the results and the outlook for 2025, we will open the line for questions. With this, I will hand over the call to Jean-Yves.

Thank you. Thank you very much, René. And thank you all for joining us today. Today I will review first half performance highlights. Olaf will then cover our financial results in great detail. And then I will provide an update on our OneSIMRISE transformation journey and the full year outlook. But before discussing first half results, I wanted to take the time to reflect on my first 16 months of CEO of Simrise. In my conversation with Simrisers, customers, partners, investors, and other key stakeholders, What is abundantly clear to me is that Simrise has a long heritage of market leadership, born out of a technical expertise, differentiated innovation, long-standing customer relationship, and a passionate, curious culture. Starting with our shift in 2024 to focus on delivering profitable growth, we have embarked on this journey to take the best of Simrise and transform into a company that generates durable, profitable growth strong free cash flow and compounding returns. And it is just that, a transformation, as we need to increase accountability and entrepreneurship to deliver top-tier results, operational excellence and shareholder value. We are in the early phases of our multi-year journey, and importantly, we are taking bold and decisive actions. We are seeing momentum built as we continue to execute again our one theme transformation and the one theme strategy that we are beginning to activate. Now, let me walk you through the key highlights of our performance and strategic progress on slide four. Over the past 12 plus months, we have implemented and began to activate our transformation and today, We are seeing clear evidence that transformation is gaining momentum. First, our results in the first half of 2025 are clear evidence of our efforts coming to fruition. We achieved solid organic sales growth in a challenging macroeconomic environment and delivered improved profitability. Our modeling expansion underscores our focus on operational efficiency and discipline cost management. And we are now entering the next phase of our one theme transformation. With the design and implementation phase complete, we are now shifting towards activation around optimizing our portfolio, delivering profitable growth and driving efficiency. We have also continued to strengthen our leadership team, adding fresh expertise and global experience to support the execution of our strategy and achievement of our goals. Finally, We are updating our guidance to reflect both the current global demand environments and the progress we are making in executing our one similar strategy. More on that later. Together, these steps position us well for the second half of the year and beyond. Please turn to slide 5. Before we go into the details regarding our performance in the first half of this year, I am very excited to announce the appointment of Michael Friede, to executive board as president of the Scent & Care segment, which I was leading at interim. Michael brings many years of broad market knowledge on a high level of industry-specific expertise in various growth areas. Additionally, he has proven international experience, making him an excellent choice for Simrise as a company with global operations focused on delivering exceptional experiences to our customers around the world. This appointment follows other critical leadership additions we have made in 2025, including SVP of Global Operations, SVP for Global Procurement, SVP for Global Quality and Regulatory, and Chief Digital and Information Officer. With that, please turn to slide six, to the first half performance highlights. Sales were 2,554,000,000 euros, reflecting 3.1% organic growth. While CMRise continues to grow faster than the relevant market, we are observing a dynamic global environment with shoppy consumer behavior across certain sectors. To that end, we are focused on controlling the controllable, including delivering on a healthy pipeline of sales opportunities and project vitality with selected customers in key markets, while managing tough year-on-year comparables. EBITDA for the first half of 2025 amounted to 554 million euros, a 4.5% increase compared to the first half of 2024. The EBITDA margin improved to 21.7%, up 100 basis points year-on-year, The reason by our focus on value added products and recurring cost savings through efficiency programs. Net income for the first half of 2025 amounted to 268 million Euro representing a 12% increase compared to the same period 2024. Earnings per share also saw a significant increase reaching one Euro and 92 cents equating to double digit growth. Business free cash flow for the first half of 2025 totalled 226 million euros or a healthy 8.8% of sales. Lastly, we have updated our guidance to reflect the current global demand environment and execution of our one team rise strategy. For the full year 2025, we are moderating our organic growth range to two to 5% from five to 7% previously. We remain focused on driving above market growth through a relentless focus on our customers' innovation and commercial rigor. Through our focus on self-help initiatives and value-added sales, we are increasing our EBITDA margin expectation from around 21% to approximately 21.5%. This is driven in part by identified annual cost savings and efficiency improvements amounting to 40 million euro, with 20 million already realized in the first half of 2025 and the remaining 20 million expected in the second part of the year. Let's turn now to slide seven for performance by segments. The taste, nutrition and health segments achieved organic sales growth of 3.3%. Taking into account portfolio and exchange rate effects, segment revenue was 1,564,000,000 euros in reported currency. The industry leading growth in food and beverage was driven by higher volumes in beverage and savory applications. The pet food division maintained flat organic sales despite continuous cautious consumer sentiment across key markets. The scent and care segments achieved organic sales growth of 2.9%. Taking into account currency effects, segment revenue was 989 million euros in reported currency. Fragrance continued to see strong organic growth across all application areas, especially in fine fragrances. We see significant recovery in aroma molecules due to increased capacities and ongoing market-wide inventory normalization. In the cosmetic ingredients division, we continue to content with a very strong demand level from H1 2024 and difficult prior year comparables. Let's move now to the results for the region in slide eight. We grew particularly well in Latin America, delivering organic growth of 10.6%. Asia Pacific and EME also generated good organic growth of more than 3%. In the North American markets, we are seeing weaker general sentiment, primarily due to macroeconomic uncertainties, persistent inflation, and increasing political and regulatory unpredictability. While these headwinds are affecting the broader consumer environments, it is important to emphasize that this is not a CMRI-specific issue, but rather a reflection of the overall market environment in which we are operating. For the first half, we saw slightly negative organic growth of 1.4%. We continue to work with our customers as they work through consumer-driven challenges in the region. Let me stop here for the moment and hand over to Olaf, and Olaf now will provide you more details on financial.