Voestalpine Ag Unsp/Adr

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 15th Publication First Quarter 2025-2026 Business Year Conference Call. I am Matilde, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in lesson-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 investor relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to our results presentation today of the business year 2025-2026. With me is the complete board of Vissalpine, and Ms. Richter, as well as the gentlemen, will give you a brief overview of what has happened in the last business year, as well as where we stand today, as well as what our outlook expectations are. After the presentation, we will be very happy to answer your questions. Now I would like to hand over to Herbert Eibensteiner to start the presentation.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. will present the business year 2025-26 and I would like to start with the highlights. You have already seen our figures, so even in a very difficult environment, the performance was good and in nearly all key financial indicators and the results I would say were driven by a very robust strategy and very active reorganization and on the positive side we had high demand in railway infrastructure we get good orders in aerospace business And also, this sector is smaller. We had record results in warehouse technology. In construction, mechanical engineering, and consumer goods, it was stable, but at the low level. And automotive was mixed, good for flat steel, and with some difficulties in automotive production. body parts and for me very important is that we can deliver a very good free cash flow and we have reduced net debts that means a very low gearing and we have reduced our employees coming from this reorganization measures of around 1.8% and green tax deal Our big investment project is still well on track in time and in budget. And we want to pay a dividend of 0.75 euros per share compared to last year where we have paid And the outlook is an APTA between 1.6 billion and 1.85 billion. How was the performance of our markets? You know it for sure that we have a very flat economic growth in Europe. we had faced this pressure from U.S. tariffs, which is a very high, high double-digit euro negative effect, and the industry production was on a very low level. When you look at the U.S., very solid, robust development, but to the high extent, it's coming from investment in the technology sector and not so in the normal industry sector, which was very flat. China, still stable. Growth was driven by exports, but domestic demand was very low and Brazil, in South America, Brazil is our biggest market. The economic momentum reduced a little bit coming from these high interest rates and very strong competition from Chinese imports. You know, Brazil was a market without any tariffs, which has now changed a little bit. We will see how this will influence our business. And when I come to the actual strategic focus, no changes. We are working diligently on our economically successful decarbonization of our steel production, the replacements of blast furnaces by electro arc furnaces. And when we look at our value-added areas. Let's say we had good development in railway system, tubes and sections, warehouse and rack solutions, aerospace, and we look also into attractive regions like India, which we have still a small footprint, but we plan to increase our activities in India, and as I mentioned before, very important for our results were this very consistent reorganization and portfolio optimization. We'll be focusing clearly on efficiency, and you know that we reorganize the automotive facilities in our automotive components business, particular in Germany, but not only, and high performance metal made a great effort, a big effort in portfolio optimization. And this is now largely complete. Green tech steel is no change in our plan. So we want to start up with our two electro arc furnace sites in Linz and in Donovitz next year in February to May and we will start up then till 2029 and then you will see a reduction of 30% of CO2 emissions and after 2029 you will see further replacement of blast furnaces and with the goal that we are CO2 neutral in 2050. I mentioned before the added value downstream business. Just to give you a flavor of what I'm talking about. So in railway systems, very important for us is that we got very good orders. We have a good order book and for Deutsche Bahn And the Swiss railway companies, we got contracts of around 500 million. And also Kualban, which is in Austria. We finalized this big project in the course of this year. We are also in rec solution, still growing steadily. And we got very large orders in several countries. several countries in Europe and also out of Europe and we get the biggest order ever in Istanbul for instance and we have already announced that we got for our aerospace business record orders of around one billion for the next five years and that's a very good outlook for this aerospace business. And what we are doing there, high performance materials for engines, complex forging for landing gear and we also provide our customers a logistics service worldwide and when you ask what are the production sites, this is in Austria, and we also deliver parts from Brazil, from summary all over the world. Yes, it was very briefly the highlights of last year, and I would like to hand over to my colleagues in the divisions.