Vallourec S.A.

Hello and welcome to the BALOREC Q1 2025 results release call hosted by Philippe Guillemot, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer and Sacha Biber, Chief Financial Officer. Please note this conference is being recorded and for the duration of the call, your lines will be on listen only. However, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions after the presentation And this can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star 0 and you'll be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to Conor Liner, Head of Investor Relations, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us for Valorex's first quarter 2025 results presentations. I'm Connor Lineup, Vice President of Investor Relations at Ballarat. I'm joined today by Ballarat's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Philip Guillemot, and Ballarat's Chief Financial Officer, Sasha Beaver. Before we begin our presentation, I would like to note that this conference call will be recorded. A replay will be available following the call. You can find the audio webcast on our Investor Relations website. The presentation slides referred to during this call are also available for download here. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements. Future results may differ materially from statements or projections made on today's call. Forward-looking statements and risk factors that could affect those statements are referenced on slide two in today's presentation. These are also included in our universal registration document filed with the French Financial Markets Regulator, the AMS. This presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. I will now turn the call over to Philip Pippo. Thank you, Kudo.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us to discuss VALUATE first quarter 2025 results. You can see today's agenda on slide three. I will move directly to slide five, where we start by discussing the highlights of the first quarter. We delivered another quarter of strong operating results and cash conversion in Q1. Group EBITDA of 207 million euros came in at the high end of the expected range, and the EBITDA margin improved sequentially from 20 to 21%. We generated strong cash flow, which brought our net cash position at the end of the quarter to 112 million euros. Turning to the outlook. We expect second quarter of 2025 EBITDA to range between 170 million and 200 million euros. Based on recent strong bookings, we also confirm that Group EBITDA will improve in the second half of 2025 versus the first half. In the quarter, we saw continued strength in our international bookings. We published press releases highlighting major contracts announced with Solatrack, Kuwait Oil Company, and Allseas for the buzios field in Brazil. These were won with a strong pricing that reflects the high value we bring to our customers. Meanwhile, in the US, market prices increased further in the first quarter and again in April. This will drive higher prices in our results in the coming quarters. However, the pace of U.S. price increases has been hampered by a high level of uncertainty on both trade policy and customer demand. Also in the quarter, we announced the planned divestment of Sherimax, our subsidiary focused on specialized welding technologies. This follows the successful turnaround of the business as part of the new value-added plan. The CEL follows our strategy of streamlining invested capital to focus on our core business of premium tubular solutions. I would also highlight that we received a strong endorsement from all three rating agencies recently, including an upgrade to an investment grade rating from Fitch. This marks Valwag's first investment graduating in about a decade. This is clear evidence of the degree to which we have crisis-proofed our business. Let's turn to the U.S. OCTG market on slide 7. The horizontal rig count has remained stable since mid-2024. Customer demand has been strong in the U.S. over recent months, as the industry inventories had become too low to serve today's level of drilling activity. Looking at imports, there was a noticeable uptick in January. We believe this was driven by the usage of trade quotas under the old steel import system. Recall that the shift to the new blanket tariff system occurred in March. Once again, this behavior was disproportionately driven by importers of commodity welded tubes. Imports moderated again in February and March. Market prices have been increasing as a result of strong order books across the US OCTG industry and these still tariffs. Based on this trend, our invoice pricing should improve in the second and third quarters. However, The market has yet to fully reflect the impact of tariffs due to the high level of uncertainty on trade policy and trading activity. On this later point, the recent volatility in oil prices has created uncertainty around U.S. activity levels in the second half of the year. Some ENPs have announced tweaks to their CapEx budgets. but there have been limited actual activity reductions so far. Should a downside scenario materialize, you can expect that we will remain highly disciplined and stick to our value over volume level. Let's move to the international OCTG market on slide 8. Demand, as measured by the recount, remains stable at the high level outside of the U.S. There has been selective softness in global activity. However, we have not seen a direct impact on our business. Our focus on high-end premium tubes in Middle East and North American gas, deep water Brazil, and also high-value areas has insulated us from this weakness. We noted last quarter that our bookings were outperforming the price indicators we have shown on the right. Let us turn to slide 9 to discuss this. On slide 9, we show the volume and price trend of our global OCTG bookings. We have split this data into North America onshore and the rest of the world. The rest of the world represents the markets we serve from our premium export hubs in Brazil and Asia, including North America offshore. You can see the strong trends I referred to earlier. Our group OCTG bookings volumes in Q1 were the highest they have been over the past year and a half. On the right, you can see an inflation in US pricing. More importantly, you can see resilient pricing in the rest of the world. This is a strong endorsement of our value over volume strategy. Recall that rest of world orders typically shift a few quarters after booking. Therefore, this trend supports the expected improvement in second half EBITDA and will support our results into 2026. Looking ahead, we still see a strong pipeline of opportunities across many core geographies. Outside of North America, we have a very heavy focus on national oil companies who are, in many cases, ramping up activity to deliver on multi-year plans. The rest of this international business largely serves high-end, low break-even projects for well-capitalized international oil companies. We remain optimistic about the outlook for our international customers' demand. I will now turn the call over to Sacha to discuss our financials.