Salzgitter Ag Akt Shs

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Q1 earnings call. My name is Markus Heitler. I'm the head of investor relations at Salzgitter AG. Joining me today are my colleagues, Verena and Jan, and obviously most relevant, our CFO, Birgit Putrafki, who will be available to answer questions after a brief introduction statement. I look forward to engaging discussions and without further ado, I'll hand to you, Birgit.

Thank you, Markus. And a warm welcome from me to you out there as well. Happy that you take your time to listen to us. Actually, it's not such a long time since we spoke last time. It's only seven weeks ago, and this was when we published our annual report. And actually, I guess it may feel a lot longer than just a few weeks, because we all may think these days that the world changes significantly every single day. Just to give a few examples which are keeping us all very busy. For example, the noise around the trade tensions and the impact of the US administration's tariff policy are of high interest to all of us. And then there is also some lingering uncertainty about how the new German government will address the key economic challenges through concrete measures. And we are very positively looking at that and waiting for that. And third, of course, unfortunately, there are some more subdued economic forecasts for the major economies just recently. So while the environment also for us remains quite challenging to predict and of course very volatile, we believe that our first quarter results underpin the outlook for the full year 2025. We see the assessment we made in March confirmed by the reported figures for the first quarter. As expected, the sales are below the previous year's level and this decline is mainly due to three factors. Firstly, the contribution of the Mannesmann stainless tubes groups are no longer included in the current figures following the divestment of the asset. Second, the sales decreased due to lower average selling prices when compared to the first quarter of last year. And third, sales came down due to lower volumes in the trading business. Adjusted for non-operating special items, the earnings before taxes were more or less breakeven. The turmoil surrounding the US trade policy, of course, had an impact on currency exchange rate and, as a result, on the validation of derivatives. In the first quarter, we had a negative effect here of around 23 million euros from the reporting date valuation of our derivative positions. In addition, we made a risk provisioning of 10 million euro for a planned portfolio measure. All in all, these items burdened our EBT by 32 million euro. Without these effects, we have achieved a black zero. Working capital rose seasonally in the first quarter, which it does every year after year and closing up to 2.67 billion euros. That was almost 200 million euros higher than at the end of the year and closing at the end of last year, 2024. However, which is good, it was 360 million euros lower than at the end of Q1, 360 million euros lower than one year before. Our gross cash flow, on the other hand, improved significantly. While still slightly negative, it improved by around 100 million euros versus the previous year's figure. Our cash flow from investing activities, that was almost balanced overall in the first quarter. And this is mainly due to the receipt of 155 million euros. public funding for our Zalkos project. And all this leads to a net financial position of minus 624 million euros by the end of the first quarter. And compared to the end of last year, this represents only a slight decline of roundabout 50 million euros in another peak spending year of Zalkos. Let us now turn to the outlook. There are some quite mixed signals with respect to the German market. Both the German government and the International Monetary Fund now expect growth to stagnate in the current year. At the same time, we consider that political measures will stabilize the economy. In particular, the announced special fund for infrastructure projects. And this we expect as fundamentally positive impact to become over the course of the next quarters. And this is not yet reflected in concrete order. So we are waiting for the concrete orders coming out of this. A noticeable upturn in demand from these funds is still quite some way off zone. The spot prices for steel rose in the first quarter, and this is not yet fully reflected in our sales for the first three months. And as the possible upward trend in this area will only become apparent in the coming months and quarters in our books, also because especially for hot roll coil, our contracts have a runtime between six and 12 months for half of the contracts and for the others with a shorter period. So in case the prices will keep picking up, we expect some positive impacts in the second half of the year coming from that. And in the light of all these developments, we confirm our forecast for sales and earnings as we presented to you in March. And with this, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my introductory remarks and I'm looking forward to your questions.

All right, Elba, you may start the Q&A session.