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Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Ladies and gentlemen, please hold the line. The conference call will begin shortly. Thank you. Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the SGL Carbon conference call, 9-month results 2026. 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 then 0. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Claudia Kellert. Please go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, very warm welcome from SGL's side as well. Yeah, since our last call, a lot of positive things happened. So today we want to talk about these developments, our 9-month figures, and our SGL growth strategy. Even today, Andreas Klein, our CEO, and Thomas Dippold, our CFO, will lead to the presentation. Now I can hand over to Thomas Dippold, please. have reached €595 million so far in the first 9 months of the year compared to €653 million, if I round it a little bit, in the same period last year. We are almost 9% down, or in other words, roughly €60 million down, and this can be directly attributed to the discontinuation of the unprofitable carbon fiber businesses which we closed last year in the course of the year. You remember probably that Lavradio has been closed end of the second quarter in June, and then subsequently our site in the United States in Moses Lake— we talk about that later— has been idled end of August 2025, to say it correctly. And of course, these sales can't be repeated, and like for like, then we are €60 million down through this structural effect. On the other hand, if you turn it around like for like, our businesses, at least overall, we will see some deviations in both directions when we go to the business units. stay on a flat level, so to speak. Hello everybody, it's my pleasure to guide you through the development of the first 9 months this year, and I jump directly on slide number 5, where you see development of the group, our sales. But all in all, this was expected, and this is really the development which we, which we have foreseen. And this is what is in our figures. We see a continuation. As I said, this is a difference between last year. We see a strong nuclear ramp-up in graphite solution, which boosts our sales and especially the profitability. We see very challenging developments ongoing in our Process Tech business unit, and we see especially a high profitable carbon fiber business or the fiber composite business, but we will come to that in the individual business units. When we look at our EBITDA pre- tax, you see that it remains almost on the level that we've seen last year. Last year, we had €108.6 million in the first 3 quarters of the year, and now we reach €106.6 million. And as a consequence, when the profitability deviates less than the sales, that means that the margin must go up. We now reach almost 18%. sales margin on an EBITDA pre basis. This is more than 1 full percentage point higher than last year, and this clearly shows how good and how important it was to restructure these businesses and how healthy our existing ongoing strategic businesses are. The good margin development comes from, on the one hand side, from the product mix in Graphite Solutions, mainly with the increase of the nuclear business. We see also in Fiber Composites good margin effects, and this is a little bit of offset by the lower contributions from ProcessTech, which we can, yeah, compensate so far. You have to bear in mind that in sales and EBITDA, this is also affected by the one-off payment where we restructured our take-or-pay contracts with our silicon carbide customer. And you've— if you remember that in first quarter, we had about €7 million compensation payment. In the second quarter, it was €21 million. So all in all, after 6 months, it was €28 million if I round it a little bit. And now we have reached €30 million, so less than €2 million were coming in the third quarter. So this has come to an end for this year, I would say, when it comes to this one operative one-off effect. When I jump into the business units, on slide number 6 you see Graphite Solutions, our biggest business unit, growing by 10%. Now reaching €358.3 million in sales compared to €325 million last year. Where does the increase of €20— no, €33 million come from? As I said, €30 million are coming from the termination of the take-or-pay contracts as a one-off effect, but you have to bear in mind they also include some sales which would have been done in the second half of the year. So some of the things have been anticipated until the termination of the contracts. This take-or-pay contract, and they include some, some one-off payments but also some, some compensation for the sales for the whole year. This also goes through the EBITDA, and now we have roughly €72 million EBITDA pre in the first 9 months of the year compared to €58 point two last year. This is an increase of 23.5 million, which helps the margin to go up above 20 percent, and we're very happy that we see the two. as the first figure of the margin again. You know that we've seen that with the— when this silicon carbide products were really hyped in 2022 and 2023, We have seen that for the last time, and now we recover back into this region again. Where does the sale and especially the profitability boost come from? Mainly at the start of our nuclear graphite business, which we start producing on, on the contracts with X-Energy, which we informed you about. Since Q3, and we also see an increasing demand for semiconductor components mainly in China. So you know that we produce big parts of the value chain in Germany, in our Bonn site, and then ship everything over to China. This is where we machine it and then subsequently also sell it to the customer. There we see a recovery of the demand in the semiconductor business, not so much in the other areas. Yeah, that's pretty much for graphite solution. On process tech, slide number 7, there you see a continuation of the development we've also seen in the first 2 quarters of the year. Also no real improvement in the 3rd quarter. Sales have reached now €74 million compared to €102.4 million in the first 3 quarters last year. This is— yeah, I think at half year we were 30% down. Now we are 27.7% down. There's an ongoing weak market situation and very much of uncertainties in the chemical industry in the areas that we serve. We see a lot of postponements and pushouts of the projects. They are delayed all over and sometimes even new awardments that we see and those projects that really are being started don't have the profitability and the margins or have not the size that we are used to or have seen before. And this, as a consequence, when you lose in a project business sales by roughly 30%, this also affects your bottom line. And there you see that our EBITDA pre in the first 9 months of 2026 reaches €11.2 million compared to €28 million, which we have seen in the same period of time last year. This is a decline by 60%, but again, the ratios are— if you have these experts and all these engineers who can you know, construct and engineer these projects, then it's difficult to adjust the workforce in the same manner as sales decline. Our margin still reaches some very healthy 15%. We were just maybe, say, a little bit spoiled over the last 3 years where the margin reached significant higher figures than 20%. But 15%, also to be fair, in a project business is not too bad. But of course, we hope that this will recover the soonest. Last but not least, our last operative business unit, Fiber Composite. There, as we said, the restructuring is over. There you see also this technical sales effect, we have reached €147 million sales in the first 9 months of the year compared to €210 million last year. This again, the €60 million decline, which is structural because of the discontinuation of the business in the 2 idled or terminated sites last year. And this explains that. Now you can say apparently the rest of the business is not growing overall. This might be true. The sales remain then on the same level. But please have a look at the profitability, at our EBITDA pre. There you see an improvement of €10 million coming from €17.8 million last year. To now €28.7 million this year. This is an increase of 60%. Whereas the sales go down by 30%. And you see that our joint venture with Brembo, the BSCCB, contributes 10.9%. million. This is almost doubled compared to last year where we have reached €5.6 million. So we see a strong improvement also in our carbon ceramic brake business. And also our operative business in fiber composites is doing very well. Then you see then that the operative business must have also made a big big jump in the profitability, and we now reach a margin of 19.5% if you include the contribution from our BCCB business. So we're very happy with that development. This also contributes after 9 months of the year, and I also come a little bit later than what happened in, in the course of October. This all contributes, and now you see 9 months or end of 9 months figures. Our net result now reaches €31.3 million after 9 months compared to the year where we restructured 2025, where our net result was a loss of minus €51.3 million. So you see an €18 million turnaround compared to last year, and I think this is remarkable and, and quite impressive. Our free cash flow more than tripled compared to, to last year, coming from €12.5 million to now €38 million, and our net financial debt subsequently went down from roughly €100 million end of 2025 to now €78 million. €12.5 million. These are big improvements which are directly attributable to our strong cash generation, which our group conducted in the first 9 months of the year. And this also leads to a reduction of net financial debt, a very healthy leverage ratio of 0.6. And an equity ratio now again above 40% with 41%, and subsequently a return on capital employed with 10.1%. So we're super happy with the development so far. As a consequence, when we saw these figures and a very strong 3rd quarter which was beyond our initial expectations, you see that on the next slide, number 10. Yeah, on the 6th of December, after we have had our initial view on, on the 9-month figures, we informed the capital markets and you guys about our ad hoc message. About our guidance adjustment, we have said that— or informed you that we have increased our sales coming from which were initially guided at €720 to €770 million. Now that they are at the upper end of the range, we now say €770 million will be reached in our sales, and subsequently also our EBITDA pre will reach the upper— no, €130 to €140 million. Coming from €110 to €130, which we initially guided beginning of the year. So we see a big improvement in profitability and the upper end of the sales range. The reasons for that I think we also made this very clear also in the presentation. It's on the one hand side a very successful ramp-up of our nuclear graphite business, which goes to the small modular reactors for X-energy. We see very positive product mix changes in fiber composites, and last but not least, the higher earnings contributions from our joint venture BECCB, and that compensates even the shortfalls that we see in process tech. So we are very confident that we can reach this target. There was a second ad hoc message in October, which we informed you about some 3 weeks later on the 23rd of October. We were very happy to inform you about the sale of our carbon fiber site in Moses Lake in the federal state of Washington in the United States. site. had been idled one year ago in August 2025, and this site has been sold for €70 million, which comes in 3 tranches. $45 million we already received, and some other $25 million we will receive in the course of the year 2027, and the disposal gain from this transaction is $46 million. Overall, and I think the team has done a very great job to sell this site. So on the one hand side, we reduced our capital employed on a site which we have no use internally for it anymore. And we could convert it with a big gain into cash and profit, and we are very happy about that. And having said that, I hand over to Andreas, who will guide you through the development of our strategy so far. Thanks, Thomas. After this positive update on our current trading, I'm happy to update you on our SGL Growth 2030 activities. which are gaining more and more momentum. First and foremost, in the area of nuclear already mentioned by Thomas, we are successfully ramping up the value chain and our own production. For the nuclear graphite, already contributing significantly in Q3 this year, but of course a very important development looking into the future and fostering our nuclear growth ambitions. Adding to that, we secured our second X-Energy order recently, as announced in the $90 million press release. And this is a great step further and of course a very important pillar reaching our 2030 targets. On top of X-Energy, we are also expanding our nuclear customer as well as product portfolio, and this is also running well. And we expect some contribution already in 2027, 2028. in the context of our SGL Growth 2030 activities. This will still be a smaller contribution from what we expect as of now. Nevertheless, it's ahead of our plan. So the progress we make here is really good, and we are really confident that this will deliver on the Growth 2030 targets. Also, and that's the momentum in the defense area, we continue to receive various composite prototype parts requests and the development of these parts is running successfully. So we build up further capabilities. And also there's ongoing strong interest in the serial production capabilities we have, especially in our automotive-based composite business. In the area of semiconductors, we can confirm what we mentioned in our last update call, that there is increasing demand for semiconductor components requiring graphite, especially in China, and that demand has confirmed meanwhile also looking into the next year, and we can clearly say that we are benefiting and that we are very competitive in that development to take our shares but also develop additional customers. With our diversified high-performance portfolio and solutions. In the area of defense, we have meanwhile first orders for 2027 secured from what we call new defense customers. So going back to the development On top of that market development for semiconductors, the introduction of our new coating products is running well. And this is fueling the top of our growth pyramid, the innovation part, which is also a very important contributor to expanding our high-performance material portfolio. Going into the future. In the area of space, we have been successful in increasing our supply share and supply volumes of heat-resistant materials for rocket nozzles for the space industry. And that's especially affecting our insulation solutions portfolio. On top of that, our cooperation with various space startups is progressing, and that's mainly affecting the development of rocket nozzles themselves, building on our reinforced heat-resistant material solutions. So to summarize today's call, We are really happy about the update and the increase of our 2026 guidance. And at the same time, we successfully built up our SGL Growth 2030 future. Many thanks for your attention. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and 1 on their telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star then 2. Questioners on the phone are requested to disable the loudspeaker mode while asking a question. Anyone who has a question may press star and 1 at this time. The first question from Sven Sauer, Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead. Yes, hello everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I just have 2. The first one is on the higher semi demand from China. I was just wondering if you have any explanation as to why this is a higher regional demand coming from China but not from the rest of the world, especially the US. And the second question is on process technology. What do you think is required for a reacceleration of demand and higher margins. So for example, for the SiC business, of course you would need higher demand for semis and for EVs, but yeah, what exactly would the process technology segment need to see higher demand again? Yes, thanks for, for both questions. With regards to silicon carbide semiconductors, we are talking about in China. And why they are out of the situation earliest. From our perspective, it's mainly 2 reasons. The one thing is that China went into that situation earliest. So in terms of digesting the inventory levels, which was always the main reason for the slowdown, they are now out successfully faster. And also it's the growth momentum, the growth trajectory we see in China. It's the biggest growth area for that kind of SiC substrate wafer production. It has been over the last couple of years already, and this is, yeah, the second reason why, why they are out of the situation first, returning to growth mode. The second question on PT. Yeah, the driver for PT for the situation to recover is really chemical industry demand. Chemical industry situation. We need to get rid of these question marks and the chemical industry slowdown so that our chemical industry customers are confident again in pushing projects further, expanding capacities, but also going back into normal maintenance and upgrade cycles again. And this will then immediately bring back the volumes and the demand for our process technology business. Great, thanks. And just as a follow-up, I would assume to get into another maintenance cycle in the PT segment will take a while, right? I mean, we just got got out of one, one or 2 years ago, I guess. Yeah, of course there's also many other question marks, regional shifts, application developments that need to be taken into account. But in general, I would agree with your hypothesis. And for 2027, also on the base of our order book at the moment, we cannot expect any relevant recovery yet. Great, thank you. The next question from Lars van de Klift, Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you very much. Good afternoon. Lars van Cleff, Deutsche Bank. I took notice of your comments on Chinese semi and Zigbee. demand. However, it seems that your major French competitor is very optimistic with regard to SICK customers' demand and saying it helped its Advanced Materials division return 6% organic growth. Why are you not yet seeing this in the same magnitude? I mean, when I deduct the compensation payments you received year-to-date, and despite you talking about positive effects from nuclear graphite business, the division sales have— are barely up year on year. Yeah, Lars, well noted. Of course, it's always difficult for us to judge on how business of competition develops. The businesses are very different in size and also in reach. And also, and that's the reason why in our figures you cannot see it earlier, I think in August in our update call, we mentioned that positive momentum first time. And it's contributing now into our business and transferring into sales and invoices. So that effect just started as far as our business is concerned. So it's something that will bring us into Q4 developments in 2027. But we have not seen it much before the summer break or the September-October period. Okay, thanks. And then looking ahead, looking at your guidance, I mean, excellent that you were able to increase it. Now looking at the EUR 770 million, roundabout EUR 770 million, I'm doing— working with my model, it looks even conservative to me. Could around EUR 770 million also be, I don't know, EUR 780 million or something like that? That could be. We said at the upper end of the guidance, and of course we have another 2 months to go. We don't know how November and December develop, but I think on the workshop, the 6th of October, when we adjusted the guidance to say it's the upper end, this can include EUR 780 million, it also can include EUR 760 million. But we say around EUR 770 million, I think then you're on safe ground. Okay, perfect. Helpful. And then I might have overheard it or got sidetracked. Did you also comment on potential additional compensation payments you expect for Q4? Or was that it with regard to the EUR 30 million? You haven't overheard it because I didn't say it, but I can now say that there's nothing major to come in Q4. I think with what you've seen after 9 months, that's pretty much it. And also in the 3rd quarter, Lars, I think with less than EUR 2 million, this was almost neglectable, what came out here for for the 3rd quarter of 2026. Definitely agreed. And then another neglectable figure, but helpful for my housekeeping. EBITDA of the corporate unit, I mean, 9 months was around about EUR 5 to EUR 6 million negative. Is that a run rate we should also work with for Q4, or could there be a higher negative EBITDA pre- and debt division in the 4th quarter? I wouldn't say it's a neglectable figure because I also get paid in this segment. I think your assumption is is fair. Perfect. Excellent. Thank you very much. I'll go back into the line. Thank you, Lars. The next question from Uwe Hilgertner, SdK. Please go ahead. Yeah, good afternoon everybody. First of all, thank you very much for taking my questions. And yeah, big congrats to the much improved business results of SGL after 9 months. This is of course highly motivating. You can read on various sources that the demand for indium phosphide or phosphide material for semiconductors has increased quite a lot in this year. It is used for very fast optical data transfer, particularly for AR/VR AI data centers. And here my question, which I think I had asked before, one more time: do you see any demand from this application for your high-purity graphite materials? That would be my first question. Second question, also about the situation of SIC. You mentioned that the compensation payment or payments is much reduced in Q3 and will probably be zero in Q4. Does that mean that the demand has finally picked up? If I remember correctly, you were saying in one of the previous meetings that you expect a recovery in 2027. Okay, second question then I have. A question regarding the business with Xenergy. This is of course also very, very positive. You reported a second order about €90 million. Will that order be delivered in, in one shot basically, or will it be stretched over a longer period of time? And regarding the first order from beginning of this year, has this been delivered in the meantime to a large extent, or what is the timeline there? And my last question is about the business for Brembo ceramic brakes. You had quite a huge expansion which was completed last year. Has the demand developed as expected? Thank you very much. Thank you, Uwe, for the questions. I will start answering with regards to the Indian phosphide, which is clearly a new application also for the semiconductor players involved there. We are part of the development work there, and yes, it's a demand carrier for high purity, high performance graphite. Nevertheless, it's still early in its market. Development, even though the momentum is really impressive at the moment, but it's a rather small share of the market compared to established Si and SiC markets. And also the demand of graphite in producing indium phosphide is significantly smaller, and also the rates where you need to substitute used graphite are much smaller. There's a lower frequency of substitution in the production processes of our customers. So in total, the demand we see from that application for SGL is on a relevantly smaller scale, but it's a very nice momentum and we are participating in that. Die SiC compensations, I think that was part of one answer already given earlier. Yes, for this year we don't expect any further relevant compensations and And for us, these compensations were part of, yeah, working on the established contracts with our customers and guiding our partnerships and these businesses into the future. So for us, it was also preparing the ground for sustainable future growth. So in that sense, it was important to, to find these solutions together with our customers. And as I mentioned earlier, in general, we think the whole inventory management phase and with that the slowdown is coming to an end in some market segments. We can already say it obviously has come to an end, so that gives much better boundary conditions for 2027. So in total, we expect for sure, significantly lower level of these kind of contributions, if any, in 2027. But yeah, due to all the ups and downs we know from the semiconductor world, we could not say there will be no at all, but for sure the biggest part of that exercise has been completed with the 30 million settlements we have seen. field. The third question on Xenergy. For both, almost $100 million US dollar POs we have received. which are each for 4 reactors, a so-called 4-pack of our customer Xenergy. We talk about execution periods of more or less 3 years for SGL. So these almost $100 million US dollar we received per 4-pack will be distributed for us over a 3-year period each. And Uwe, your fourth question was with regards to our JV with Brembo, the so-called BACCB joint venture on the carbon ceramic brake discs. Yes, you're right. Some, some 1 to 2 years ago, we finalized our expansion on both sites in Meitingen, in our main site. near Augsburg, but also in Stizzano near Milano, where we increased the capacity by almost 2/3. And this is utilized to a large extent now with the increase of our machinery that we installed there in the meantime. You may be right, we are a little bit behind the development which we initially anticipated in, in the business case. This is fair to say. But on the other hand, it gives us the chance to participate in every new awarded project which our customers now install. And this is very important because in the old given capacity, we were at 100% capacity utilization. So it was very difficult to squeeze in additional products and demands and new projects. And you know, in this automotive Tier 1 supplier environment, you have to be ready for production and they need also security that you can really deliver in the way they also ramp up their production. We suffered a little bit with the downturn of the Western luxury cars in China. This we clearly can say that that this affected our profitability mainly last year. But I think we are on a good way in finding new markets, or the OEMs for the luxury and sports cars find new attractive markets where they can sell these cars. All in all, we are very happy with the expansion and the development. As a reminder, if you wish to register for questions, please press star and 1 on your telephone. There are no more questions. I would like to turn the conference back over to Claudia Kellert for any closing remarks. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for your participation. You will find our report, the press release, on our webpage. And if you have additional questions or need more information, please call the IR team, Laura, or myself. Thanks a lot and have a nice afternoon. Goodbye. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you.