Good day, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Vesuvius PLC Spring Trading update. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session through a phone line and instruction will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants this call is being recorded. I will now hand it to the CEO of Vesuvius PLC, Patrick André, to open the presentation. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. My name is Patrick André. I'm the CEO of Vesuvius, and I'm joined this morning in the call by Mark Collis, our Chief Financial Officer. Today, I will update you about our trading performance over the first four months of this year. Most important message is that steel markets are confirming their improvement and their positive momentum in the world outside of China, Russia, Iran, and Ukraine, with a growth of 2.5% over last year during the first quarter, accelerating to 2.9% at the end of April. The foundry markets, as far they are concerned, remain more or less stable as compared with last year, with a positive situation in India and China. Markets remaining relatively soft in the rest of the world, with no signs for the time being of significant improvement. In this commercial background, we maintain successfully our priority on pricing discipline, with positive pricing developments over the first few months of the year, both for the steel and for the foundry division, more than offsetting the evolution of our cost base. Our volumes were positively oriented in the foundry division. In the steel division, however, beginning of the year, our volumes were slightly lower than last year, mostly due to two regions. One is the fact that some important customers, where we had 100% market share in North America, closed around mid last year. The comparison, H1 over H1, is of course, slightly negative. The second reason is that we had operational issues, internal operational issues, in some of our operations, mostly in North America. To a lesser extent in India, but mostly in North America, beginning of this year, these internal operational issues have been corrected, understood, corrected, and will not impact the rest of the year. Our cost reduction program is successfully proceeding as planned. We still expect to deliver at least GBP 10 million of recurring net cash savings in 2026, and our objective of a cumulative GBP 55 million of net cash savings by 2028 remain completely on track and will probably be slightly exceeded. The integration of the Morgan Advanced Materials division, which we acquired end of last year is proceeding very smoothly and successfully. We have started to generate significant synergies as planned, and we expect, since from today, not only to achieve fully the synergies which we expected to deliver at the time of acquisition, but probably to slightly exceed those synergies. We had good work on cash management and a good focus on cash management. Our leverage remained under control. As we speak, stable as compared with the end of last year. Considering the good work ongoing, we are confident, we remain confident that the leverage will progressively decline during the second half of the year to an overall reduction this year as compared with last year. Our revenue up to date is only slightly ahead of last year on a constant currency basis due to the operational issues that I mentioned earlier. Even if we remain mindful of the Middle East conflict impact, and despite the operational issues which I mentioned, considering the positive trends, the confirmed positive trends in our market and in particular, in steel, our full- year expectation remain unchanged as compared with our previous guidance. I now propose to open the floor for questions. Please, if you could proceed. If you want to ask a question please press star one. Your first question comes to line is Stephan Klepp from BNP Paribas. Your line is open. Yeah. Hi, good morning. Can we talk about your guidance again and about the issues that you had? We talked about it this morning already, but can we talk about what really went wrong in terms of your internal value chain and the production? Will that not eat into the guidance, or can you make up for the loss of production? Is it basically eating into your buffer that you have with the guidance anyhow? Our internal operational issues in North America were mostly related to quality issues of faulty raw materials, which was not detected early enough and impacted the production. Fortunately, our quality wall operated very well, so no customer was impacted. The time to correct this faulty raw material issue to source other raw material and to restart production correctly, we lost a significant percentage of the capacity for this particular product line, which is an important one for us in North America, for several months beginning of this year. This resulted in a temporary but not recoverable loss of production capacity for some months, which prevented us from delivering all of the demand which was addressed to us. Some of our customers could postpone the delivery, and this will be recovered in the coming weeks and months. Some of our customers, because they are running full speed, had to find alternatives. The temporary loss of market share will be recovered, but some sales will not be recovered. It's a one-off impact. I hope it answer your question. This, of course, had a negative one-off trading profit impact on our results. Despite this, we maintain our full- year guidance, which simply means that we would have been, I would say, even more comfortable maintaining our guidance if these operational issues would not have happened. Okay, understood. In other words, you had an H2 bias before. Now the H2 bias for execution is a little bit stronger because of these issues, right? Yes. Also because of the confirmed positive trends in our market. You remember when we discussed a few weeks ago, a few months ago, that we were not counting on the European improvement to happen, We were continuing to happen rather towards the end of this year. We are already seeing some positive trends in the European market, and it is now confirmed that the new European quota system will be in place as from the first of July, which is, I would say, on the positive side of our previous assessment in terms of timing range. We believe the situation in Europe is improving, probably faster than what we had in mind some time ago. Perfect. Very helpful. Thank you. Your next question comes to the line of Harry Philips from Peel Hunt. Your line is open. Yeah. Good morning, everyone. Just a question on foundry and it being flat through the period, and slightly down in Europe and North America. If we could, if you could just go through the geographies in a little more detail, because general industrial sort of seems to be a little bit better, reflecting PMIs and general commentary from peers, broad peers, through this reporting season. I'm just slightly surprised to see Europe down, unless that's, I'm guessing, that had to be down to auto primarily. Is it possible to sort of give an outline as to where foundry is, maybe ex- auto, and it is just mainly as sort of auto headwinds? Thank you. It's a very good question to understand what happened. When we look on a regional basis, you have two regions which are doing quite well, which are India and China. In fact, the reason why they are doing quite well is because these two regions not only have retained a good domestic market, but in the case of foundry products, not foundry consumables, foundry products, castings, are exporting more and more to the rest of the world. What we see in the rest of the world so far, is that even if in some regions, some manufacturing activity is getting better, we see this manufacturing activity being more and more assembly with the components, including castings, being more and more imported. When you look at some of the Chinese automotive transplants, for example, there are more assembly plants than full automotive plants importing a significant part of their components, including castings from overseas. You have, at the same time, a kind of an apparent manufacturing improvement in some regions. When you look at our level of what is important for us, which is not, for example, the final automotive production, but the castings products used in the automotive, we see imports from India and China gathering momentum. What is happening in this background is that we now see, and it is typically the case in North America, some protection measures being implemented, not only vis-a-vis automotive, for example, but vis-a-vis components used to produce and to manufacture an automotive with countries requiring higher and higher level of value added being realized in the country for the automotive or any other goods being considered as being really manufactured in the country. In the framework of their discussion with the U.S., Mexico is now also introducing tariff vis-a-vis some parts used in automotive. This is the reason why in North America, in particular, we have a reasonable hope that there should be some improvements in the North American market for foundry going forward, because these type of measures going one level further are being progressively implemented. Europe, for the time being, is not doing anything. We have some first-level protection measures, but we don't have yet protection measures for the components being used in manufacturing activity. What is interesting is that the debate is starting to shift in Europe with the draft, the proposal of a new industrial act starting to tackle these issues a little bit following the North American playbook. There is a probability that over the coming years, but it will be slow in Europe as usual, Europe could start to protect also the tier 2, tier 3 suppliers to manufacturing activity, and that this could lead to an improvement in the foundry market in Europe. For the time being, Europe remains completely open to the import of castings. The same is the case for South America. I don't expect short-term, meaning the next year, significant improvement in Europe and South America. North America could be on an improving trend for foundry going forward thanks to the measures currently being introduced. This was a long answer, but I think it was a very good and important question, which we follow closely to assess the foundry market in the different regions going forward. Thank you. Just one possibly for Mark Collis. Just thinking about the bridge for the current year, particularly with those operational issues in North America. If I remember correctly, the FX headwind you anticipated was GBP 4 or GBP 5, cost savings GBP 10, but obviously some performance-related pay taking quite a lot of that away. You've got Morgan contribution. Is there any sort of major change in any of those particular parts, Mark Collis? No, nothing particularly. You're right, FX was four and it's now five, that takes us down from GBP 170 to GBP 169. We think the supply chain issues will have cost us about GBP 4 million of TP in the first half. What we've seen, obviously, is a better market backdrop generally. We think we've recovered that GBP 4 in the full year, either through price or volume. Hence we're comfortable to maintain- Yeah guides at that level. I guess the challenge for us there will be this is all obviously driving the first half weighting, because you've obviously got the supply chain issues, but you've also got the need to reinstate the variable compensation. Yeah which was, if you remember, GBP 9 million for the full- year, of which we'll end up accruing GBP four and a half in the first half. It's adding to the H1/H2 weighting. Perhaps, as sort of maybe referring back to Stephan's point, just it'd be fascinating to know, which obviously you won't give us what level of contingency you have in there. As I say, I doubt you'll provide us with that, unfortunately. Correct. Thanks a lot. Thank you. As a reminder if you wish to ask a question please press star followed by one on your telephone and wait your name to be announce. Your next question comes to the line of Tom Elgar from Deutsche Numis. Hi, guys. Firstly, can we just dig a little bit more into the North American steel market? Domestic production data we're seeing looks good. Weekly production kind of in that mid-single digit, high single-digit range from AISI. With the customer closures you talked about, can you sort of help us think about how should we be bridging this underlying kind of domestic production picture to your performance? I guess to dig into that market share dynamics question. Is there anything we need to be thinking about before kind of extrapolating that performance kind of out further out once we've annualized the customer closures? That's the first question. The North American steel production is clearly now increasing. You remember last year, it was more or less a wash with an improvement in the U.S. being more or less compensated by a decline in Mexico and Canada. It was a left pocket, right pocket game. Now it's changing. Overall, the North American steel production, Mexico plus U.S. plus Canada, consolidated, is increasing 3.5% over last year as compared with over the first four months of the year. We have a positive trend, and we expect this positive trend, clearly positive trend, to be maintained. Globally, the market is growing now in North America. We expect the outcome of the ongoing discussion for renegotiation of the USMCA to result in an even more globally protected North American market, with probably even Mexico being included in Fortress North America, if I may call it like that. We see a positive trend starting, and we are quite confident that it will be confirmed going forward for steel production. Now, how to relate that to ourselves. It's a complex relationship because we don't have the same market share as old customers. I mentioned earlier that around end of H1 last year, three important for us plants in the U.S. closed, where we had 100% market share. The steel which was being produced in those plants is now being produced by other plants in North America, where our market share was lower than 100%. Of course, if the steel is being produced in a plant where we have, I don't know, 60% market share, whereas it used to be produced in a plant where we had 100% market share, this mechanically results in a consolidated loss of market share for Vesuvius. Not that we lost market share at a given customer against somebody else, simply a customer mix issue, which on a global basis, results in an apparent loss of market share. This is by definition a one-off phenomenon, because these, for example, the H2 comparison will be much less unfavorable because those plants were closed in H2 last year. On a comparison basis, the negative impact is a one-off and will disappear over time. I don't know if I'm clear, if it answers your question. No, that's clear. Just a second question from me, just on mix. Just how has that start to year been in steel? Have you seen this move in places like North America, if that production picture is picking up slightly? In terms of product mix, you mean? Yeah, Flow Control, like margin mix itself as well, both dynamics. No, we had some, remember, some trading down of product-. Yeah last year when the market was difficult. We don't see that anymore now. I would even say that in Europe where the trading down impact was the most important last year. We are doing quite well in Flow Control in Europe. What we were expecting is happening. Now that customers are ramping up in Europe in preparation for the new quota system, which will be introduced on the 1st of July. Of course, maintaining a good operating efficiency, running as close as possible to their maximum capacity becomes more and more important. As a consequence, the quality of the Flow Control products that they are using remains more and more important for them in terms of value in use. We have the performance of our Flow Control operations in Europe beginning of the year is better than expected, I would say. We had good expectations, but it's even better than expected. This is completely in line with the improvements of the overall European steel market, which we had planned and which is now happening and which will accelerate in H2. Brilliant. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Murray from Bank of America. Your line is open. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. If I could just ask a follow-on question about the European steel tariffs, which is expected to be effective in July. Have you guys started seeing any change in customer behavior ahead of the implementation? How do you see volumes evolving after implementation in terms of speed and scale? Thank you. We have seen several customers preparing for a ramp-up of production in Europe in the months to come. You may have seen in the news that ArcelorMittal is restarting some operations in Poland, in Spain, in France, in Fos-sur-Mer. You have other examples of customers clearly anticipating the improvements of demand addressed to European-based steel producers in H2 by ramping up already now, starting to ramp up, prepare for the reopening of some of their capacity in Europe. This is clearly apparent, and we have ourselves increasing our own capacity in Europe by staffing, increasing the staffing of some of our operations so that we can run more shifts in some of our plants and to make us able to meet what we believe will be an improvement in demand in the coming months. Great. Thanks. As a reminder if you wish to ask a question please press star followed by one on your telephone and wait your name to be announce. There are no further questions on the conference line. I will hand over to management for closing remarks. Thank you very much. I would like to thank you all for attending our call this morning. We remain, as usual, with Mark and Rachel at your disposal should you have any questions. We wish you all a very good day. Goodbye.