Bayer Ag S/Adr (BAYRY) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon and good morning, everybody, and welcome to our conference call to discuss the first quarter results for 2025. To kick things off, Bill will share his insights on our overall business performance and the progress we've made on our strategic priorities thus far. Wolfgang will then provide further insights into the quarter one financials, the current geopolitical environment and our outlook for the remainder of the year. The presentations will be followed by our Q&A session, which will also include the presidents of our three divisions. As a reminder, we invite you also to join us for a crop science webinar later today. We start that at 4 p.m. Central European time or 10 a.m. Eastern time, and where we will delve further into the division strategy and outlook. Before we begin, please note the cautionary language in our safe harbor statement. And with that, over to you, Bill. Thanks, Joost. And yeah, hi, everyone. Thanks for joining our call today. We're looking forward to going through our Q1 business results with you. And we're also aware that the present geopolitical and economic uncertainty is top of mind. So Wolfgang and I will try to give you a sense of how we're approaching that as well. So let's start with our first quarter performance. First, a reminder that we speak about our sales growth in currency and portfolio adjusted terms. As a group, our sales are flat year over year, positioning us well within the minus 3% to plus 1% corridor that we guided for in 2025. Core EPS came in at 249 euros, and we're on track to reach our outlook of four euros, 50 to five euros at constant currencies. Free cash flow is at minus 1.5 billion euros. And as we've explained before, the negative figure is due to the seasonality of the crop business. It's also 1 bill...