Thyssenkrupp AG

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q3 conference call of Season Group. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. I would now like to turn the conference over to Andreas, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much, operator. Hello, everyone. This is Andreas Torsch from Investor Relations. Also on behalf of my entire team, I wish you a very warm welcome to our conference call on the Q3 results. With me in the room are our CEO, Miguel Lopez, and for the first time, our new CFO, Jens Schulte, and also my colleagues from the IR team. Before I hand over to the CEO and CFO for their presentations, I have some housekeeping. All the documents, as usual for this call, are available in the IR section on the website. The call will be recorded and the replay will be available shortly after the call. After the presentations, as already heard, there will be the usual Q&A session. And with that, I would like to hand over to our CEO, Miguel Lopez.

Thank you, Andreas, and also a warm welcome from my side to our audience to our Q3 conference call. Today, I will present our latest achievements and financials together with our new CFO, Dr. Jens Schulte, who I would like to officially welcome to this group. Jens, I'm very happy that you have joined the team. Before, I will show you our well-known management summary. Let me start with something new. Let me give you a status update on our management priorities today. and the related topics that keep us busy at the moment. Of course, you know all these issues. However, as they are key to ThyssenKrupp's success going forward, they are worth a recap. Let me begin with our scope of duties that can be aggregated under our management priority portfolio. As you already know, we have established our new segment, Decarbon Technologies, and are preparing it for future growth opportunities. We adjust the business models to the current market demand by concentrating more and more on the E and the EP part. That is the engineering and the procurement while simultaneously capturing a higher share of service business. Also, we have a new management in place. During this process, we uncovered some issues regarding all the projects that we are currently addressing and strictly solving. At the same time, we are continuously working on the standalone solution for steel Europe and marine systems. I will give you an update in a minute. Additionally, we are streamlining our portfolio at automotive technology during its transition towards a high end supplier for auto components. If we now look at the second management priority performance, you will remember these topics. Our performance program APEX, which has been and still is implemented across the businesses and going forward, will be adapted to market needs. Performance should be in our DNA and the partially pretty new management teams are permanently intensifying their efforts in achieving improvements. As you know, still Europe currently is updating, evaluating and finalizing the new business plan and restructuring is ongoing everywhere in the company where necessary. For instance, at material services, we currently restructure German operations at TK Schulte, while at the same time expand our business in the profitable and growing North American market. But also for the other businesses, we are persistently monitoring the needs for further restructuring. And last but not least, we pursue the green transformation with our first DRI plant at Steel Europe or within decarbon technologies where we enable our customers with our leading technologies to reduce a large part of today's CO2 emissions. After this really short overview about what's going on at TK right now, let me go into details with some of these hot topics for the recent quarter. Again, let's start with portfolio and the two segments where we pursue standalone solutions. At Steel Europe, the planned 50-50 joint venture with EPCG is well on track. As a first significant and historic milestone, we signed and meanwhile already closed the contract for the 20% sale of Steel Europe. Right now, we are negotiating the remaining 30%. also at marine systems we are well on track with regard to the standalone solution and our dual track approach the due diligence phase for kfw as a precondition is progressing this is also true for the due diligence phase of carlisle our potential private equity partner and at the same time the spin-off is being prepared as an alternative we will keep you of course informed as soon as there are relevant updates. Now, let's focus on our second priority, performance. Our third quarter showed the solid performance in light of the current difficult markets, apart from negative one-time effects at decarbon technologies related to a periodic higher cost at some individual projects at our cement business, Polyseus, as well as some cash flow payment shifts between the quarters. To reflect this continued challenging framework, we had to adjust our full year guidance on July 25th. Jens will touch on this later on. This is why it is even more important for us to continue with our APEX program, where we pick additional speed and see incremental improvements across all businesses. Now let's conclude with our third item, green transformation, including the latest developments For example, in our order funnel and technology spectrum. First, it is worth mentioning that Steel Europe's climate target for 2045 has been validated by the science-based targets initiative, which underlines our efforts to actively participate in the green transformation. At DeCarbon Technologies, we could announce that ThyssenKrupp Nocera will provide a basic engineering design package for a 300 megawatt electrolyzer, featuring alkaline water electrolysis technology to be integrated into CEPSA's green hydrogen project in southern Spain. And meanwhile, we were able to sign a reservation agreement. This project is one of the largest of its kind in Europe, and will use 15 of ThyssenKrupp Nocera's standardized Scalom electrolyzer units with a capacity of 20 megawatt each. In addition, UDE is enabling its long-standing customer group of Fertiveria to decarbonize its existing ammonia plant, which will lead to a CO2 emission reduction of up to 40 percent. UDE supports Fertiveria to reach its net zero strategy by providing expertise to continuously reduce the fossil feedstock and partially convert production from gray to green ammonia by injecting green hydrogen. With having that said, I would like to hand over today for the first time to Jens for the financial part of today's presentation.