Verbio Se

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Montega, welcome to the earnings call of Verbio following the publication of the Q3 figures of 2022-2023. The CEO, Klaus Sauter, and Alina Köhler from Investor Relations will give you a presentation on the results in a moment, and the floor will be open for upcoming questions following the presentation. Having said that, I hand over to you, Mr. Sauter.

Thank you very much, operator. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, for the presentation of the Q3 results of the business year 2022-2023. In my name and the board and together with Alina, our head of IR. So we prepared a presentation. First of all, we will report about the group financials, segment financials, acquisition of our new site in the United States, in South Bend, ethanol, and then update and outlook. And for sure, for this discussion, one of the main topics will be the development in biodiesel, especially the imports from China. But let's start. Alina, please start. Okay, so First of all, an overview about the production and the key figures for Q3. So finally, about the production, we are very much in line. We increased the biodiesel production 10% year on year due to higher utilization in Canada. Ethanol production is stable year on year. And the RNG production, renewable natural gas, 14% plus year-on-year due to capacity expansion. Epid A, minus 66% compared to the previous quarter last year. So the decrease is primarily due to decline in sales prices, in particular for biodiesel. We have a big margin squeeze in biodiesel imports, but therefore we prepared later a slide about the Chinese imports and on the same time, higher purchase prices for feedstocks. Net cash minus 32% from 177.5 million to 121. So change is driven by EBITDA and working capital plus. Then we spent money mainly for growth investments, building up new capacities and our other activities in Germany, tax payments and dividend payout. Equity ratio still stable at 73.8%. So we have a strong balance sheet. Financial stability remains high. But now I would like to hand over to you about the details.

Thank you very much and good morning to everyone from my side as well. So as Klaus already said, our EBITDA for Q3 was at 43 million. And this is short of the year back EBDA of 128 million, which was definitely driven by the attractive procurement that we did on rapeseed oil, but also on wheat. So it's not very comparable to actually compare the numbers. So what we also show on the slide is that in the last quarter, we had an EBDA of roughly 49 million. And as you can see, the composition has changed tremendously. So the bioethanol segment actually recovered very strongly, whereas the biodiesel segment declined due to the reasons that Klaus already mentioned, especially the imports of the Chinese biodiesel, which we will come to in a second. However, for the biodiesel segment, as I mentioned, there is a low comparability year over year. However, you can actually see that in the gray, sorry, in the green light bars, our sales increased year over year. We said that the biodiesel prices actually declined. However, in North America, we had a better utilization in the Canadian plant, which was driving the increase as well as better biodiesel prices. And in Canada, Yes. So, however, the EBTA was burdened by the decline in European biodiesel prices, which were coupled with comparably high purchasing costs, and the attractively priced GHG premium stabilized our results here. So in the end, we showed 25 million EBTA in the Q3 figures for our Q3 EBTA in the biodiesel segment. which is a very good result considering the imports that we've seen from China. But I'll hand over to you again.