Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the AGRANA Results for the full year 2024-2025 conference call. I am Yusuf, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and that this 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 followed by one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or for broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Hannes Haider. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to AGRANA's conference call presenting our annual results for the 2024-2025 financial year. You already got some insights in our figures when we published a talk announcement on the 25th of March and on the 24th of April. Today, we will provide you with more details on all segments and also the audited financial statements. As announced in our invitation, a presentation is available in reference to this call. You can find the presentation in the IR section of our website. Our CEO, Stephan Büttner, will host today's presentation. Our board member, CTO Norbert Harringer, can apologize due to illness. The presentation is divided into three parts. We will start with an introduction and a focus on the highlights of 2024-2025. Then we will go on with the segment overview and comment on the financial statements. Finally, our CEO will conclude with an outlook for the ongoing business year 2025-2026. The presentation will take about 20 minutes, and afterwards, the lines will be opened, and we will be glad to answer your questions. Now, I may pass over to our CEO, Stephan, who will start with the presentation. Thank you. Hannes, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, let's start with the overview, the highlights of the last business year 2024-2025. Unfortunately, our business performance and our profitability was not satisfactory. Yeah, it's a result of the still quite weak economic activity in Europe, and especially the recession in Austria and Germany ongoing. We still are facing high volatility in raw materials and also energy costs. Yeah, and overall, the market environment is not really predictable. Also impacted by political decisions, also recently with the duties to be imposed, potentially, and all these things are having immediate effect on the market. Food segment had a very strong performance in the last business year. This is very important for us, also despite the difficult economic setting. Starch segment was weaker due to the overall economic situation, especially as the paper industry is still weak, also the construction industry, whereas the food industry is doing better, but price pressure is still heavy, also due to the decrease in energy costs and raw material costs. Of course, the input sectors are also down, but the sales prices are not strong enough so that we can improve our results here. The sugar segment, the biggest challenge for us in the previous year, with reviews losses having a very negative impact on our overall performance, but we will refer to that later. Our dividend proposal for the last business year is a payout of EUR 0.70 per share, and this also reflects our financial stability, especially including the strong free cash flow generated in 2024-2025 with EUR 260 million. The outlook for 2025-2026 is, is, yeah, is also quite weak, so we expect a stable EBIT for the full year 2025-2026 compared to 2024-2025. The key numbers for revenue decreased by 7.2%, down to EUR 3.5 billion. This is especially due to the decrease in sales prices in starch and in sugar. Yeah, as a consequence, we also have a significant reduction on EBIT level down to EUR 40.5 million. This is also heavily impacted by special expenses due to the closure of the sites in Austria, in the Czech Republic in our sugar business, and other reorganization and restructuring measures. Yeah, free cash flow, as already mentioned, up by 100.5%. Also in combination with the poor EBIT, this is a strong performance here, and free cash flow amounted to EUR 259.1 million. Therefore, also our other KPIs, the equity ratio went up by 2.2% to 45.4%. Net debt decreased, down to EUR 436.4 million. This is a minus of 31.4%, and therefore also the gearing ratio went down to 35.5%. Also a significant improvement. Yeah, a quick update on our implementation of our next level strategy. We already recorded that the group strategy was decided in the supervisory board in November 2024, and right away then we started with the implementation of the strategy. Of course, we are transforming our holding into a clear, strategic holding, so there are also, with cost reduction programs, also especially in personnel costs. We are also focusing on bringing closer together our operated businesses, sugar and starch, to reduce our overhead costs. We are looking for savings in the supply chains, especially logistics. Here we see also huge potential for cost reductions and also synergies between our operative businesses in our agricultural commodity area. The cost program that we implemented is going for a reduction or cost saving of at least EUR 80 million, which should become fully effective from the business year 2027-2028. We are on track here. We already realized EUR 15 million savings. We already reduced our personnel staff by nearly 100 people. Yeah, and we are also on a good way with reducing our logistic costs and other things. Restructuring of the sugar segment is also going on, as already mentioned. We closed our sites in Austria, Leopoldsdorf, and in Czech Republic, our site Hrušovany, with immediate effect in March 2025. This means a significant reduction of our sugar production in the future. We are also in this season going significantly down with the planted acreage from nearly 95,000 hectares down to 65,000 hectares, and the sugar which will be produced will amount to around 600,000 tons. This is a significant reduction here, but of course, it will help us to be more competitive in the future with our sugar business. The decision, of course, was not an easy one, but was absolutely necessary, especially when we look at the very poor performance on the profitability side. A quick overview now on the raw materials processed in the last business year. This was around 9.9 million tons. 6.5 million tons wheat were processed, and then we re-refining of raw sugar, 0.1 million tons. We also processed 2.4 million tons grain, so here wheat, corn especially, and 0.2 million tons of potatoes and 0.7 million tons of fruit. Yeah, here it's, we can mention that, in 2024, especially the apple harvest was significantly impacted by a frost in Poland, but also Hungary, leading to a poor harvest and very high raw material prices. In starch, we had the dramatic flood damage in Austria in autumn 2024. This also led to a still stand of our factory in Pischelsdorf for more than one month, with having a negative impact on our profitability of around EUR 8 million in the starch segment. Yeah, and in sugar, of course, we had a significant increase of our planted acreage. We had around 44,000 hectares in Austria. This was a significant increase versus the year 2023, but unfortunately, we faced a very difficult production season due to the poor sugar content in the beets. Also, this is also caused by the weather problems that we had, especially the heavy rain. Yeah, and also the beet quality itself was very poor, and so we had very, very poor yields in the production campaign. Yeah, sustainability. We really wanted to show you our actual sustainability targets of the whole AGRANA group. I will mention just some of them. Yeah, so we are, of course, we are still very dedicated to our ESG roadmap, and here you can see the goals that we have set. Yeah, so sustainable sourcing of raw materials, responsible use of water. Here we want to achieve a reduction of 2% by 2030 in consumption. This is quite heavy. It sounds quite low, but it's quite difficult. The optimization of waste recovery. This means 90% waste recovery rate by 2026-2027. We also want to reduce our lost time injury rate down to 5.6 by 2026-2027. Yeah, equality is a very important target as well. We want to achieve a 30% share of women in management positions by 2030. Actually, we have 28.4%, and also governance, code of conduct awareness campaign of blue-collar workers with an implementation rate of more than 80% in companies by the end of 2026-2027. Okay, yeah, let me move on with the results by segment and the overall market environment. The first slide is very impressive. You can see the dramatic downturn of sugar prices in the last business year. Of course, we also had the increase from, let's say, 2022 to 2023, then stable prices for a while in 2023, and now in 2024, the prices collapsed. This was a combination of lower demand, a higher sugar production, especially in Europe, a downturn in the world market prices, and also a massive increase in imports coming from Ukraine, and all this together putting heavy pressure on the prices. You can see, receive the results here on the slide. This is dramatic. The prices going down to, let's say, EUR 500-EUR 550 coming from nearly EUR 900. This had an enormous impact on the profitability of the sugar business overall. Revenue by segment, we see that we had an increase of 4.1% in the fruit segment. Revenues were EUR 1.63 billion here. This is a solid development, I must say, also in the quite difficult market environment. A positive development. Starch, as I already mentioned, we went down to around EUR 1 billion revenue coming from EUR 1.15 billion. This is mainly due to the price decreases. We did not lose volumes in the market, yeah, but over across the whole portfolio, prices went down significantly, and also in the ethanol business. the sugar segment, I already reported the dramatic drop in sugar sales prices. This is also here reflected in the reduced revenue. We went down to EUR 870 million coming from nearly EUR 1.1 billion. This is a dramatic decline. Here you see the effects on EBIT level. A very, very good performance also compared to last year in the fruit segment. We had an increase of our EBIT of 65.6% up to nearly EUR 100 million. This is the best result that we ever had in the fruit segment after already quite strong operated business in 2023-2024. We here are consequently, let's say, improving our performance. We are gaining market share, and we are also going into other sales channels like food service and ice cream. Yeah, also the fruit juice concentrate business went quite well. Overall, we are happy with the business in fruit in the last business year. In starch, yeah, it's a very challenging situation. We have heavy pressure on the ethanol prices, mainly due to increasing imports coming from the United States. This is caused by lower raw material prices in America. Also, significantly lower energy costs, and therefore they can easily ship their product into the European Union, and this is putting prices under pressure. Now, also the weakening, softening of the U.S. dollar also makes the situation more difficult. Yeah, the rest of the portfolio, of course. We kept our volumes, but the price pressure is there due to lower demand and also, yeah, reflecting, let's say, the expectation of the customers due to the lower raw material prices. The raw material prices, the physical prices in sourcing, especially in corn, are not so much lower as it should be when we look at the massive prices. There is, let's say, yeah, there is a certain spread, and this makes it quite difficult for us to bring prices up for starch products, especially. Yeah, and sugar. This is, yeah, this is a normal difference. We lost, when we compared to the last business year, EUR 130 million on EBIT level. Yeah, and this overall reduced our EBIT on group level from EUR 151 million down to EUR 40.5 million. Once again, we were not able to compensate at all these dramatic losses in sugar. Here also are included net exceptional items in an amount of EUR 28.3 million. This is also, of course, mainly covering the impairments, the asset impairments, due to the closure of the sites in Austria and Czech Republic, and the temporary shutdown of our sugar refinery in Romania. The financials, once again, group revenue of EUR 3.5 billion, - 7.2%. The operating profit before exceptional items and result of equity accounted joint ventures was EUR 76.5 million, also down by 66.7%, and the EBIT even more down by 73.2%. I already mentioned all the negative impacts here. A very low EBIT margin is the consequence, net financial items. Yeah, significant improvement here. Ending up with zero results for the after tax for the whole period. This is the consolidated income statement. Exceptional items here. You can see the split. Mainly coming out of the sugar segment. I already mentioned here, the restructuring cost was the impairments for the closure of the sites and the temporary shutdown. Also, we have here restructuring expenses, mainly personnel expenses, due to the reduction of employees. Overall, EUR 36.4 million negative impact on our EBIT. Energy costs getting better, but yeah, far away from where we were in 2019, 2020. As you can see here, with overall cost of EUR 116 million or EUR 120 million. Still, we have double the cost than in those years. This is a heavy burden for the, I think, for the whole industry, for all industries in Europe. This is very difficult to pass this on to our clients. It is getting better from 367 coming from 2022-2023, but still, the costs are very high, and we need a significant reduction in the future to become again competitive, especially when we're talking about exports or also competitive against imports, for example, coming from the U.S., from the U.S. in the ethanol business. Yeah, the tax rate. The profit before tax EUR 3.7 million and the income tax expense EUR 3.8 million. This is due to profits that we have in countries where we cannot, let's say, take this into consideration with the losses that we especially also faced in Austria. Therefore, the tax rate went up to 107%, but overall, the amount is not significant. I move on to the consolidated cash flow statement. Here, I already mentioned that we had a very good performance with the net cash from operating activities with EUR 361.1 million. This is a plus of 50.3% and also free cash flow with an increase of 100.5% up to EUR 259.1 million. No major changes in the consolidated balance sheet. The total assets amounting to EUR 2.7 billion. The KPIs, equity ratio, I also already mentioned 45.4%. Up by 2.2%, net debt down by 31.4% to EUR 436.4 million and the gearing again, a significant improvement by 15.5 percentage points down to 35.5%. Dividend proposal also already mentioned EUR 0.70 per share for the 2024-2025 financial year. This is a reduction versus the year 2023-2024, where we had EUR 0.90 per share. Of course, the performance is significantly weaker, but due to the very positive generated free cash flow and the overall stable balance sheet, we decided to propose EUR 0.70 per share and a dividend yield of 6.6%, based on the closing share price of the last business year. Let me come to the financial outlook. I also mentioned we expect a stable EBIT. Yeah, still will be still under pressure. EBIT mainly due again to the expected poor profitability or, let's say, losses that we will face also in this business year in the sugar segment. As you know, sugar marketing years also affect two business years. We still have to digest, let's say, the campaign 2024, and this will go on in the first half of the business year 2024-2025. There we will still face heavy losses in our sugar business, and we are working and expecting a significant recovery, starting with the sugar beet campaign 2025. Revenue, revenues also here. We expect a further decline, especially due to lower sugar sales prices and lower sales volumes. The total investment across the three business segments, we expect approximately to an amount of EUR 120 million. This is slightly above our budgeted depreciation of about EUR 150 million. The outlook for the segments, in fruit, we again expect a slight increase in revenue. Here we are, citing, let's say, a significant reduction in EBIT, what I already mentioned, coming from a very, from a very good performance in the business year 2024-2025. We have here reflected certain risks due to the potentially imposed duties, which could, yeah, potentially affect us. Also, we still are facing, yeah, let's say, always the risk of, yeah, let's say, business difficulties, potentially also in Russia. Here, the situation still is not stable. Therefore, here we are guiding a significant reduction on EBIT level. In starch, stable revenue and a significant increase on EBIT level, and in sugar, yeah, significant reduction in revenue and a moderate improvement on EBIT level. Outlook for the first quarter of 2025-2026. Here, of course, we expect a very significant decline in EBIT versus the first quarter of 2024-2025, where we had a quite solid EBIT of EUR 32.3 million. Here will be very significantly lower, mainly. The main factor here is the weak sugar business. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention, and I hand over to Hannes Haider. Thanks. Before we go on with the Q&A session, I just wanted to remind you that our annual report 2024-2025 was published in the morning, and we would like to invite you also to visit our digital annual report on report.agrana.com. Having a quick look on our financial calendar, just a reminder that our AGM will take place on the 20th, on the 4th of July in presence. We will now go on with the Q&A session. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin with the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm if you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from Vladimira Urbankova at Erste Group Bank. Please go ahead. Hello, good morning. So I would like to start with a question which is hanging over, practically, all companies these days, and this would be the impact of U.S. tariffs on the company. Which segments do you expect to be most affected? What is your maneuvering space here? How does it change maybe the competitive situation on the market? My second question would be related to your guidance for the first quarter. You mentioned exceptional staff costs. Do you have any idea what would be the one-offs still incurred in connection with the plant closures in March 2025? Thank you. Yeah, good morning, Mrs. Urbankova. Thank you very much for the question. Let me answer the first question. Yeah, we, of course, made a deep dive into the potential impact of the potentially imposed duties coming from the U.S. Our total revenue in the U.S. is around EUR 354 million. Yeah, thereof, we have, let's say, EUR 325 million in the fruit segment. Our problem is not really, let's say, bringing goods into the U.S. or selling goods to the U.S. We are more affected by importing goods that we possess in the U.S. with our food preparations business, yeah? Therefore, goods that we are sourcing from outside the U.S., for example, a good example is, let's say, peach, which we are buying from Greece, for example, because there is no industrial peach production in the U.S. Of course, the costs for importing these goods are increasing due to the imposed duties. Here overall, we have an impact for a 12-month period for the goods that we import of $25 million. Around $16 million out of these $25 million are imposed goods from our customers. Therefore, we do not have the price risk, and we remain with around EUR 9 million. Out of these EUR 9 million, we already passed over to our clients EUR 4.5 million through negotiations. We end up with a potential risk of EUR 4 million-EUR 5 million. That is it for the moment. We see no further significant risk for the time being. What, of course, would have an additional impact here is if there will be duties imposed for goods coming from Mexico and Canada. This is not included here because there are no duties imposed right now, but I think that this would have a further impact here. Second question, the one-offs in Q1 2025-2026. We expect an amount between EUR 15 million and EUR 20 million, personnel expenses in combination, so special personnel expenses in combination with the closure of our sites in Austria and Czech Republic. Thank you. Therefore, of course, we have the very poor guidance also for the first quarter on EBIT level. The next question comes from Oliver Schwarz, Warburg Research. Please go ahead. Morning, gentlemen. Thank you very much for the very comprehensive presentation. I really appreciate it. A couple of questions from my side, please. Firstly, when it comes to your EBIT guidance for the full year, could you highlight how much of extraordinary items, the one-off items are in there? You, we just heard that first quarter will be adversely affected by EUR 15 million-EUR 20 million. Could you provide, let's say, a similar number for the full year? Secondly, I'd like to probe you on the expected savings from the ongoing efficiency program regarding implementation of new structures in your company and attached savings. How, we heard that that was a bit more than EUR 50 million last year. How much is expected this year? Just to get to, let's say, an underlying figure, how the underlying EBIT is expected to develop in the current fiscal year. That would be my first two questions. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Extraordinary items. We have no further extraordinary items planned for the fiscal year 2025-2026. This is a range of EUR 15 million-EUR 20 million. As I already mentioned, due to the restructuring, as I said, the closure of the sites in Austria and Czech Republic, we will face these EUR 15 million-EUR 20 million personnel expenses. This is for the layoff of the workers we had here. Referring to your second question, the expected savings, our target for the year 2025-2026 is that we will implement measures with a full year effect of EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million in the business year 2025-2026. These savings will not fully come into effect already in 2025-2026, but should come in full effect in the business year 2026-2027. It is quite difficult now to say, okay, what will be the full effect already in 2025-2026? It must be somewhere between EUR 15 million and EUR 40 million. We are at least implementing already measures which will bring us savings on a full year basis in 2026-2027 of up to EUR 50 million. Just to clarify, as you just stated, there are no other one-offs then related to the closure of the two sugar plants in the Czech Republic and in Austria. All the other measures to be implemented in the current fiscal year, they do not come at any cost. Is that a correct takeaway from my side? Yeah, maybe additional costs for restructuring measures, but we have nothing planned yet in our results, yeah? It will not be a significant amount because this was already taken into consideration in the business year 2024-2025. Very clear. Thank you for that. Taking from that, if I may, given that you're guiding for a constant or flat EBIT in the current fiscal year, when it comes to cash flow generation, free cash flow generation, given that a lot of the free cash flow you generated in the last fiscal year resulted from changes in working capital, I guess that's unlikely to be repeated this year. Could you give me, let's say, a feeling or even a ballpark number, what's to be expected regarding a current year's free cash flow number from your side? Of course, this is a very challenging question, you know, because we don't know what all, what will all happen this year, yeah? Maybe we will have, potentially, so there's nothing concrete here now to mention, but potentially we'll have an acquisition, something like this. When we talk with the generated cash flow from the operated business, I would expect a value between the year 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. Okay. Thank you very much for that. It is very hard to predict, yeah? I mean, we will have further improvements due to the lower production volumes in sugar, yeah? We will produce 200,000 tons sugar less. This will, of course, have an impact. We will further work on the structure of our working capital, so here reducing inventories, also working on our receivables and liabilities. Yeah, these are all measures which will go on. We have further potentials here, yeah? It is not so easy because also price effects, we will see potentially on the raw material side in the food business. It's difficult to forecast this number now, but it will be somewhere between 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. Thank you very much for that. That's it for my questions. Thank you. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star followed by one. The next question comes from Baptiste de Leudeville. [audio distortion] Kepler [audio distortion], please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, gentlemen. Thanks for the presentation. I have a few questions. On working capital, can you remind us what were the factors that drive the positive change in working capital cash inflow? Also, on energy costs, can you provide us some kind of, I would say, outlook on the development of energy prices for energy costs, please? Also, on the outlook of the starch segment, you target a significant increase in EBIT. Can you just recall what will drive this significant increase in the, for the EBIT in the starch business? Thank you. Those are all the three questions. Yeah? Thank you. So, first question, starch, as I already mentioned, yeah, in starch we had an extraordinary, let's say, expense or an impact, yeah, in the last business year, around EUR 8 million, coming from the floods disaster. We could not run our factory in Pischelsdorf, and this EUR 8 million, of course, should not come in the business year 2024-2025. Here we are also expecting a potential recovery, insurance recovery, from this EUR 8 million. There will be a significant difference in the P&L versus the prior year coming also from this effect, yeah? This would be between, yeah, let's say, EUR 10 million-EUR 13 million only coming here from this damage due to the floods disaster in 2024. The second question was the working capital, yeah? Here with structural reductions, yeah? Really working on the durations, let's say, of our liabilities and our receivables, payment terms, all these kind of stuff, yeah? Also bringing down inventories. On the other hand, we also implemented factoring. Both these measures amounted up to EUR 100 million each. Energy costs, here we expect a reduction, yeah? The reduction will, of course, come on one hand from less production volumes because we close two sites and we are not refining sugar in Romania. This will have an impact. We expect, yeah, let's say, a moderate decrease in gas prices and also in electricity. We will not have a very significant impact, but we expect some reductions here, yeah? Great. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that was the last question. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Hannes Haider for any closing remarks. Yeah, thanks. If there are no further questions, thank you for your interest and your participation in the call. We wish you a nice remaining day and goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Coruscal and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.