Wacker Chemie Ag Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Wacker Chemie Q2 2025 conference call. I'm Vicky, 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 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Jörg Hofmann, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

JÖRG HOFMANN, Head of Investor Relations Thank you, Operator. Welcome to the WACKER CHEMEA-HE conference call on the second quarter 2025 results. Dr. Christian Hartl, our CEO, and Dr. Tobias Ohler, our CFO, will walk you through the presentation. The press release, our IR presentation, And detailed financial tables are available on our webpage under the caption, Investor Relations. Please note that management comments during this call include forward-looking statements involving risks and uncertainties. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statement in today's presentation and the 2024 annual report for information on risk factors. All documents mentioned are available on our website.

Chris? Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on our second quarter 2025 results call. During the second quarter, demand in many customer sectors was weak and competition was intense. There were no economic tailwinds either. Trade policy uncertainties are slowing economic development, and there are no signs of a recovery yet. In this challenging environment, with ongoing macroeconomic and few political uncertainty, we lowered our full-year outlook on July 18th. Furthermore, the situation was compounded by the unfavorable development in the Euro-US dollar exchange rate since the beginning of the second quarter and our expectation that the current exchange rate level will remain unchanged. Our second quarter performance and our updated full-year outlook reflect these headwinds. Sales during the second quarter reached 1.41 billion euros, with Group EBDA at 114 million euros. The sum of the four operating segments, EBDA, totalled 182 million euros. Although this reflects an 11% decline year over year, it also shows a 7% sequential increase over the previous quarter. Segmental gain was primarily driven by an insurance compensation in silicones, but also supported by some seasonality in polymers and much higher semiconductor polysilicon volumes. Before we move to the full year outlook on the next page, let me address our most recent initiative in sustainability. We just launched a new tool that allows us to calculate the carbon footprint of our products per the Together for Sustainability guideline. With this PCF tool, we can provide customers with reliable and standardized carbon footprint data for our products. Customer feedback has been incredible so far, with customers requesting PCFs for thousands of products. We see our leading sustainability credentials as a way to differentiate ourselves in the market and to strengthen relationships of key customers by helping them to meet their old sustainability targets. Now moving on to our guidance on page number three. As you saw in our July 18 pre-release, we updated our full-year outlook to account for ongoing trade-related volatility and currency headwinds resulting from a strengthening euro. We now forecast sales between 5.5 and 5.9 billion euros with an EBITDA range of 500 to 700 million euros. Due to lower EBITDA, we expect net cash flow to be more or less balanced and net debt to come in significantly higher than last year. The chemical industry faces unprecedented challenges, and we are not immune. We are countering these challenging market environments with a clear focus on growth, cash, and cost initiatives. We will drive profitable growth by intensifying our sales activities, customer interactions, and innovation. We relentlessly seek out new customers and new applications, always with an eye to achieving profitable growth. We will improve cash flow generation by reducing and optimizing investments and implementing working capital measures, such as targeted reductions in inventories and accounts receivables. And we will reduce our costs by driving productivity and optimizing our plant utilization rates so we can run our assets at the highest level of efficiency and profitability. Also, we will continue to align our entire organization with the new underlying framework conditions. Three strategic priorities will help us to ensure our success. First, we are forging ahead with our specialty strategy. This means that we will be focusing even more on those products and solutions that set us clearly apart from our competition. These are often developed on a customer-specific basis, have a greater depth of added value, and achieve higher margins. Second, we are boosting our efficiency and speed. It's no longer enough to simply have the best solution. We also need to be able to launch it quickly. Speed has become the decisive factor for success in today's world. We have already implemented effective programs to improve our performance and will be exploiting further potential also by making systematic use of digitalization and automation opportunities. Third, we will further strengthen the Wacker's team abilities and skills. Today, especially with everything becoming faster and more digital, this is essential. In these uncertain and volatile times, a clear path is needed here at Wacker We have it and we are following it. Together, we will continue to work on the solutions of tomorrow with expertise, customer proximity, and innovative strength. With that, I'll turn it over to Tobias for a deeper dive into our results.