Voestalpine Ag Unsp/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 5th Alpine Publication 3rd Quarter Business Year 2025-2026 Conference Call. I am Matilde, 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 1 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 Peter Fleischer, head of IR. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to our first quarter to third quarter results of the business year 25-26, the first nine months of the actual business year. With me is Herbert Eibenstein, our CEO, and Jared Meyer, our CFO, who will give you a brief overview of what has happened in this first nine months, and we will be happy to answer your question afterwards. Herbert, please feel free to go ahead.

Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, also from my side. I will jump right into the presentation. And for those who are not so familiar with First Albine, I would like to give a brief introduction. First Albina is a global special metals and steel company and an industrial group and we combine this steel and metal production with processing and engineering competence and from this expertise we develop these special high-quality solutions that offer our customers the competitive advantages And we are a leading partner for high-tech industries with high entry barriers, such as aerospace, automotive, or railway systems. And we are stock listed since 1995 and committed to value creation for our shareholders. So what was happening in these first nine months when it comes to the global economic environment? Let me start with Europe, which is the biggest market for first alpine. In one word, relatively small. So we had from the beginning of the business year relatively subdued economic development and only in the last weeks or days we see a slight upturn in industrial production in Europe. And when we come to North America, you know all the action around tariffs. We have still a robust economic growth, but we know that this is mostly driven by this high investment in the tech sector, in industry growth, is by far weaker. And when we go to or look to Asia, in particular China, we see a relatively stable economic development and this is supported mostly by exports into the rest of the world also because even Even more because of tariffs and South America, which is Brazil, the biggest market for us, we see a reduction in tariffs. economic sentiment why we have this increase in interest rates and we see strong competition from Chinese imports knowing that Brazil is not protecting its borders and trade flows. Let me come to the highlights of the first three quarters. We had very solid results in the first nine months in a relatively challenging environment. I have mentioned that. And I think it's very positive that we have a very, very strong financial position Gerald will present it in his part of the presentation. And for me, it's very important that you can show again strong cash flow development also in the last quarter. And so our markets, railway infrastructure, aerospace, and warehouse and rec solutions are unchanged, positive, good development. And I would say the best space to describe the rest of the markets is that it's a stable demand at low level in mechanical engineering construction industries. And we have a mixed development in automotive industry. On the one hand, steel, steel, flat steel, which is very positive, mainly driven through gaining more market share and the automotive components business is a bit weaker. And so coming from all these restructuring measures we have implemented, we see also a decreased number of employees compared to previous year. So what is still our strategic focus? There are three pillars. The first is more short term. We have these reorganization measures in place. We do also portfolio optimization, portfolio management. You know we have Sold Buderos in high performance metals and I think in the last days you have heard that we also have always divested Böhler Profil in January which is signed but not closed so far. And I think the biggest part of reorganization is automotive components with all its sites worldwide, but also in high-performance metals. Again, streamlining the warehouse structure, streamlining the sales structure, and also in all those activities, the focus is efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And we are quite good on the way and all the programs in time. So we do not forget our growth activities which are strategically is railway systems, tubes and sections, warehouse solutions and aerospace and we are focusing also in new regions for us in attractive regions and this is India, I will come afterwards in the presentation. with a bit more information. And the third pillar is this decarbonization projects we are running on two sites in Austria, so where we want to replace two out of five blast furnaces by electro arc furnaces 1.5 billion and I think all these projects are in time and on budget and so we In a year from today's on, we will start the ramp up for instance in both activities for this green textile projects. Let me come to three highlights. I think I want to give you some positive impressions what we are doing or what we have done. You know that railway systems is a very international business, very to business all over the world, but also in the small Austrian railway market. So we have recently closed the project in Austria, which is a 35 kilometer long tunnel, one of the longest worldwide. And we provided for this project Project, 290 kilometers rail and 235 turnouts and all the digital monitoring system. I think that's a quite positive project of Östalpine and we have numerous other international railway projects all over the world. Very important for us. warehouse and rack solution, a bit smaller as a business, but also with very positive projects. Currently we are working on a hybrid warehouse in Turkey, the biggest we have ever built, 230 meters long, 80 wide, and 40 meters high with thousands of of pellet places and a similar project in Czech Republic for a tire producer. This is with 50 meters, even the highest we have ever built. So you see, even in a very traditional business, there is every year new demand in bigger and more complex projects all over the world. And I have mentioned India before. So for us at the moment, a relatively small market. We have only 190 million revenue. There are five location production sites with 1,000 FTEs. And we have already a turn out activity there, but we want to expand this engineering and design capabilities in India with a couple of people in India which are training the local guys to improve our footprint there. First production site is planned in special tubes, special sections. Most of you know that we have a standard procedure for that 20,000 square feet building, then adding three, four machines. After five years, we fill up this facility, and then we think of the next steps. We will start that process. next year, I think, and we are growing in aerospace supplies in India, so we have seen more and more activities for delivery to the OAMs, and we have achieved the first important approvals so we can deliver to the producers of aerospace airplane parts and also we have a welding consumables facility there. We want to expand it. The market is growing. So two topics, railway very important for us, warehouse very important for us, and geographically India is small, but we develop steadily in the years to come. So let me come to a quick view on the divisions. Steel division, very, very, very strong performance in a relatively weak economic environment. And we faced a very good demand from the automotive industry, I've mentioned before, that I think that we gained market share when it comes to higher quality steel sheets. And also in the energy sector, which is mostly heavy plates. And in all the other markets, mechanical engineering, building, and so on, I have mentioned it before, with a relatively stable and on a lower level demand. Market segments or sentiment in the steel sector improved after the announcement of the EU safeguard measures and CBAM. I think we will discuss that for sure when we come to your questions with a positive outlook. outlook for the remainder of the year and especially into next year to come. And when you look at the EBITDA figure with more than 13%, I think considering the time, we are in a very good result. High performance metals, a bit different with very weak economy and uncertain market conditions with high import pressures, especially when it comes to tooling and industrial parts. Oil and gas was impacted by this low rig count, by slow exploration. Aerospace, on the other hand, very strong development in Europe. And in the course of the year, we see a very good improvement from the demand of Boeing. And we have got additional volumes, additional contracts in this segment. And high performance metals is a very important part of our reorganization plans. And we see these first positive results out of that when you consider decreasing volumes and the results remain steady. So for me it's that reorganization and restructuring is working and we As I mentioned before, we built a new sales organization and most of that is already implemented and we will see the positive results into next year. And even in this difficult situation, we have this 7.6% EBITDA margin. Metal engineering, railway systems, the biggest part of metal engineering is railway system with good performance. We have typical seasonal effects in the winter months. This year, maybe a bit more. And industrial systems show different performance when it comes to welding, relatively stable on satisfying levels. On the other hand, we have tubulars, which is heavily impacted by the U.S. tariffs. This is also the cheap business, and half of the business is U.S. business, so we have again reduced our volumes there and wire. is operating in a very weak market environment, but in the course of the year we have at least increased the volumes on the price side we are working. actively and the efficiency in all these activities we have implemented efficiency programs and everything is well in place and on schedule and we look at the figure the division has 8.7% EBTA and we have promised you that we give you a a deeper insight of the railway systems unit, which is the biggest part of the metal engineering division. It's a very important driver also for our long-term growth ambition. And in this business, we are a full-service provider globally of railway infrastructure solutions. The biggest part is turnout systems with more than 60% of sales. And we have very good development in all markets globally. It's not only replacement and maintenance. It's also new projects, new activities, and rail technology. Rail is a bit below 30% of sales globally. With ANGO it's solid performance. Main market is Europe. Fixation, new business for us. But again, very positive development, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. This is a part of the business we want to grow in the future as well. And signaling has grown quite significantly in the last years. Again, already 6% of our sales, a very good development, and we are delivering at a very good level. And you see when you see this 10.3% in EBITDA margin, you you are aware that this is the most important part of this metal engineering division. Metal forming, as I mentioned before, automotive components compared to that what we see in the steel division is weaker. So we are mostly focusing on European carmaker. So in Europe we see these 12 million cars and not more. And even the U.S. tariffs had an impact in our North American market, our business in automotive components. And as I mentioned before, we are in a deep reorganization part. And it's clear that we have a – there is a way to go, but we are – We are sticking to our plan and so far on time and also we see here the first positive results. Also we have an outflow of money or cost for restructuring in this area. So tubes and sections. Overall solid performance, we had a slowdown in the second half of the year after the summer because of some delayed projects. We will see that in the fourth quarter, more or less good results with a bit lower volume. Precision strip has improved in the course of the year, also profitability-wise. And, you know, warehouse and rack solutions, I have touched it. Very strong demand. Long order book also for next year and even in 2020. EBITDA margin here because of the weakness of automotive component with 6.3%. So this was a very brief overview of the divisional development, and I would ask Gerald to guide us through the figures.